Another seductive story

Last time I talked about the seduction of the unknown story. I started thinking about this when I saw Peter Brook’s film of “The Mahabharata”. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a three hour condensation of the nine hour experience he staged at the “Bouffes du Nord” in Paris in the 1980s.

By the way, if you ever get a chance, see a show at that theater! It’s my favorite venue - just alive with energy and ghosts! Check it out at:

http://www.bouffesdunord.com/letheatre.cfm

At first thought, a three hour film from a nine hour play may seem a tad... Well... long. But, if you are familiar with the source material, it’s the merest drop in the tiniest bucket. This ancient Sanskrit epic weighs in at 2 million words - ten times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Comparatively speaking, it would be like doing a 30-minute sitcom called, “Odysseus in Troy-Land.”

The title can be translated as “the great tale of the Bharata dynasty.” It’s an incredibly complex moral, philosophical, religious exploration via the storyline of two groups of quasi-divine brothers fighting over a shared kingdom. In the middle of the things, just before the great battle to end all battles, Arjuna, one of the main characters, asks the man-God Krishna one of those “What’s It All About, Alfie?” questions. The reply is the Bhagavad-Gita! So the Western analogy would be that just before sacking windy Troy good old Odysseus and Socrates would sit down and talk through “Plato’s Republic”!

As you might imagine, it was “Munson-Heaven” to be exposed to all this. To not know how the Trojan War ends! Oh, my! In fact, one of the first books I remember reading was a “child’s version” of the Iliad. I was in the back seat of the family car while my Dad finished a sales call. As the light failed, I squirmed around in the back seat trying to find a little more visibility to discover who would win – the god-like Achilles or Hector, breaker of horses. So watching the Brook film, I wondered which faction would win the apocalyptic battle. The Kauravas or the Pandavas? Is there anything better than that?

After the film, I watched the “Making of…” feature on the DVD. The screenwriter, Jean Claude Carriere, talked about how one of the attractions of the project (despite its challenges) was it meant encountering a great story that no one had ever heard of…. at least not in the West…

And I got to thinking….

There is this enormous attraction in throwing off one’s cultural “core assumptions” about what a good story is, how long it should take, and how it should be structured. To just shoot that internal “Western story editor” who keeps saying, “Can’t we cut here? How can anybody sit still for that long? And can we lose all the philosophical stuff and stick to the action?” It’s the silencing of that nagging voice that there is a “right way” to tell stories that I find so exhilarating. And that’s also why I love the Noh drama so much, because its way of telling a story is so different (in its focus on heightened emotion) from the “connect the major beats” approach that Aristotle gave us after attending the 5th Century BC Opening of “Oedipus Rex.” So there is a sense of opening to a different way of exploring things, of building an intersection between Western thought and something different, that I find so compelling.

And yet…

No sooner do I think all this than a big bucketful of negative emotions flood my mind about cultural imperialism, “Orientalism,” and cherry-picking other cultures like the World was just one great big LL Bean catalog!

And like Arjuna says to Krishna before the battle, “My mind is filled with illusions. My bow slips from my hand. I will sit here and wait for death.”

So I’m curious…

Have you discovered any great stories from another culture that liberated your thinking?

If so, did you then feel stricken with guilt?

Tell me! I’d like to know!

In the meantime, I’ll be wondering what a modern version of Arjuna’s dilemma might be. If I come up with anything, I’ll share them in the next post!