“Hush, hush, keep it down now, voices carry!”
My little sister says my musical tastes are stuck in the 1980s. That’s mostly fair. This refrain comes by way of ‘Til Tuesday’s 1985 title track. In the video, lead singer Aimee Mann sits next to her boyfriend. They’re in a movie theater. It might as well be a church. Or a school board meeting. Or a forum in the U.S. House of Representatives. Or an American classroom. She wants to talk, but he says, “Hush, hush, keep it down now …”
Why don’t we tell stories in these spaces? What is the purpose of the silence? What’s going on here? What’s the story?
I’m reminded of Foucault’s “docile body.” Punished, disciplined, and/or well-trained, we are compelled to regimentation, control, and silence, like soldiers marching or monks praying. The training, the “subtle coercion,” as Foucault calls it, is so embedded that we accept it. We comply.
Imagine, for example, that you’re in class. Are the desks arranged in neat rows, straight lines? When you sit at your desk (assigned? chosen randomly at the beginning of the term?), do you turn left or right to your neighbor, say “hi,” turn back to your computer, and silence yourself, or do you keep talking? Are there desks at all, replaced by round tables, like kitchen dinette sets? At a kitchen table, storytelling may be possible (less so in the more formal “dining room”). After all, kitchens, once the sites of extensive manual labor, have been modernized, dishwasher-ized, the space opened up to adjacent dens and expanded to become “eat-in kitchens. They’re public-private spaces where friends and families gather to eat, talk, work, study—unless everyone’s armed with a cellphone. The stories die. We’re alone in our story-capsules, silent but for a chuckle at an Instagram picture or a Facebook post. We sing along to songs no one else can hear, nodding our heads. In church (or school or work or forums) we can read a story or listen to a story, though, if only we stay quiet. We can even write a story, quietly.
But stories remain universal, as Barthes says. Have they become so universal that we no longer tell them, even in spaces where it is possible to tell them? In narratology (aka the study of narratives), “spatial frames” denote“the immediate surroundings of actual events … [and] the shifting scenes of action” (LHN). In Disney’s version of the Cinderella fairytale, the protagonist sweeps and cleans her stepmother’s home, down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor. Of course, she sings. But her song is bounded by the domestic setting, its spatial frame. We’re back in the kitchen, women’s domain, and in Cinderella’s case, symbolic of her servitude (there are no automatic dishwashers in Cinderella the story, never mind that I never feel that my own automatic dishwasher saves me any time or labor at all).
But in this space, Cinderella sings. Why can’t I stand up in church-school-work-forum and tell a story? If I did, they’d say, “Look at that crazy woman!” Someone would turn around in their seat and say, “Hush, hush, keep it down now.”
So I keep thinking, quietly. Stories have spatial and temporal qualities. That is, they take place somewhere; they occur in some time period (past, present, or future), over time or through time (space-time, what the Russian thinker Bakhtin called the chronotope, and what I think of as space+time). Furthermore, it takes time to read-listen-watch them; and while reading-listening-watching, we are somewhere-sometime and so is the narrator. I imagine Moby Dick’s “call me Ishmael” speaking to us, live-broadcast, from the prow of whaling vessel in the 19thcentury, salty wind in his face, but in the “real” world, he is a disembodied voice speaking from the text, from the book in my hand; he is contained in that space like the genie in the bottle. We, the readers, those being read to, meanwhile, hold that book/Kindle/iPad in hand as we lounge in a favorite chair, or focus our eyes and ears focus on a screen that displays/transmits the story. We are all out of place and time, it seems to me. Displaced, we become narratees, those being narrated to, those receiving the story. A good audience. And that thought brings me back to Foucault’s docile bodies.
If I am to be silent in these public spaces, I am indeed docile. I am participating in a broader narrative that prefers me (us) to be silent and not tell stories. As rhetorician Robert Rowland argues in “The Narrative Perspective,” to analyze any narrative, we must identify its form (characters, place, plot, theme), its function(s) (effects on the audience), and, finally, its effectiveness in form and function. Let’s assume all the musing in this blog is a narrative of sorts, except that I’ve lost the story, or I’m so far in it, I don’t know that I’m an extra in a movie I’ll never see in its entirety but remember in bits and pieces. There’s a rule: extras almost never have any lines. They’re just “extra” to the main story. They’re slightly out of view, out of focus. I’m so far off the main line of the camera view that I cannot see the main characters. I cannot figure out the plot, much less the theme.
So I stand up, and speak, and dare anyone to say, “Hush, hush.”
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