Our Cross

This semester I'm participating in the "common reading experience" (CRE) at my university.  For the CRE, a literary work is chosen, and all incoming freshmen read the work.  Students experience the work in one or more classes, classes where the instructors find some relevance in the work to what they want to accomplish.  This year, the book is The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.

Reading O'Brien's book again--I have read it many times--I am struck by how often writers comment on the act of story-telling itself. 

So far in my reading, Tim O'Brien has said three important things about telling stories: 

1--Stories are eternal.

2--Stories are often an unburdening, a confession.

3--There needs to be a sense of urgency, a reason for telling the story beyond the confession.

First, O'Brien talks about being forty-three years old and having a need to tell the story of what happened to him long ago in Vietnam.  He writes: 

"Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a life time ago, and yet the remembering makes it now.  And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever."

He also comments about what makes a story eternal: 

"That's what stories are for.  Stories are for joining the past to the future.  Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are.  Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." 

I like this idea, that stories join the past and the future.  I've named this entry "Our Cross" because O'Brien's novel has a main character named Jimmy Cross (J.C., the same initials as Christ, who died on the cross).  And a cross is symbolic of so many things, including time.  Past and future intersect, and that point of intersection is the present.  When we write our stories, we are at that point of intersection. 

My second point is about story-telling as a "confession."  The cross is also a symbol of a burden that must be born.  O'Brien writes of how his memories of Vietnam have burdened him too long.  He must write them down.  O'Brien writes: 

"There is one story I've never told before.  Not to anyone.  Not to my parents, not to my brother or sister, not even to my wife.  To go into it, I've always thought, would only cause embarrassment for all of us, a sudden need to be elsewhere, which is the natural response to a confession."

There we have it--the need to confess something.  O'Brien says that he has had to live with the story so long, "feeling the shame, trying to push it away," and he hopes that by telling his his story, he will be able to "relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams."

The third point about story-telling is that there should be an urgent, pressing need.  (I mentioned this in an earlier entry in reference to Mircea Eliade).  Beyond the personal need to unburden himself, O'Brien also wishes to leave a document behind, a document of what it was like to fight in Vietnam.  (This is reminiscent of Vonnegut's reason for wanting to write Slaughterhouse-Five, to document the fire-bombing of Dresden during World War II.)  However, as powerful a force as this reason is, it is too general, too vague to get the job done by itself.  It cannot sustain the sense of urgency needed to tell the story.  Something more immediate, more personal, needs to be at stake. 

For Vonnegut, it is to tell his children never to shoot guns.  For O'Brien, the personal reasons are legion, but I will point to one.  After he got his draft notice, O'Brien met an old man named Elroy Berdahl.  Berdahl helped O'Brien during this time, without being intrusive and without thought of how to benefit from O'Brien's troubles.  O'Brien thought himself close to a crack-up over whether to go to Vietnam or not.  O'Brien writes:  "This story represents a small gesture of gratitude twenty years overdue."  I think in this case, the old man acts as a kind of muse for Tim O'Brien.

I'm reminded of what got me though my first novel--it was a promise I had made to my mother many years before that I would write a book for her, not just any book, but a book about my recognition of her pain.  Even after my mother died, she acted as a kind of muse for me, a guiding force and a reason to tell the story.

I love books which talk about the act of story-telling.  I learn from them about my own process and my own reasons for telling stories.  I learn from them why some of my stories work, and why some of them die before they're ever born.