OUR WAY WITH WORDS - Storytellers and Poets

Playing with Words

Storytellers and poets aim to influence us emotionally, not only by the narrative itself, but by the way they present it - the tools they use They exploit their facility with words to enhance their influence. Verbal dexterity, however, can be seductive and detract from the message itself, or even worse, be used to convey an ill-founded message. Some have more to say than others, but some cloud their intellectual poverty with words, and to distinguish between these is not always easy.

Oratory is the skill of aiming to convince by the skilful presentation of words. Failing to distinguish the emotion from the fact in human communication can be tool of the tyrant, there is no doubt. In recent years we have seen in British politics an attempt to uncover the truth about the way Britain went to war in Iraq, culminating in the questioning of Tony Blair at the Chilcot Inquiry This has high-lighted the supreme need to ensure always that we have distinguished what is fact from value statements, which do not necessarily spring from insincerity, but only from, what could be, some rather shallow moral conviction . There never was a better example of the crucial need to constantly scrutinise value statements. Eventually the defence was simply that he felt his action was 'right' he had made the best judgement he could - and all the words and oratory were then directed towards supporting that belief. So we have to assume that the clever use of words, on the one hand, conveys not just what we want to hear (or not), but that we are not swayed by the presentation rather than the substance. But such an objective can be fraught with problems, for there is the paradox that the skill of the advocate is a measure of how successfully the message is presented, true or false.

Let us be more specific. It would be an insensitive reader who did not respond to the following opening couplets of two Shakespearean sonnets: The first attraction is the gentle scansion, the second the neatness, or 'tightness', of the sentiment..

O! how much doth beauty beauteous seem

By that sweet ornament that truth doth give!

Let not my love be call'd idolatry

Nor my beloved as an idol show,

Both of them could be interpreted, in fact, as contributing to the very general argument being presented here. They could refer to the communication of some abstract concept or belief, but on the other hand, they might be interpreted purely with regard to another human being. In narrative poetry, or descriptive poetry, as in Wordsworth's well- known verse

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of yellow daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

we appear to have both a simplicity of narrative and language, both aiming at nostalgic recollection. Extreme to this, however, a call to patriotism was never more blatantly stated than in James Thomson's 'Rule Britannia' .

But on a far subtler front there has appeared a substantial article in a literary revue (Review, Saturday Guardian 30.01.10) in which Charlotte Higgins quotes Elizabeth Samet, literature professor at West Point , America's elite military academy, concerning the recommended reading for students of The Iliad as a philosophical companion for battle. What, one wonders, was the intention of this rather bizarre decision? Have such semi-mythical stories really anything to offer those engaged in the horrors of modern warfare? How would it prepare the reader the better to kill another? This must represent one of the most extreme abuses of a classic art form.

Consideration of the almost phenomenal interest in modern fiction, both printed and visual - novels and soap-operas - must prompt the question of their role in our lives. Oral stories have obviously been central to cultures since language first arrived, and they were probably first concerned with attempts to make sense of the world, just as the academics at West Point must still believe. This is often the credential given to modern fiction at all levels, despite it often appearing and consumed as pure entertainment. We have all experienced the pleasure of reading a 'good' book. What makes it 'good' will depend on the reader, just as for the viewer of any art form, and not only the content. But just as some live without music or graphic art, so the written or oral story is not indispensible either. The intention of the artist, of any sort, cannot be ignored, and therefore the point at which art becomes propaganda should be of real concern to us all.

We shall now turn to one of the first thinkers - a scientist- who begun to suggest that art and the emotion could be valid subject of scientific investigation. Charles Darwin showed in his notebooks that he was aware of the value of certain scientific work to an understanding of human nature.