Jackson at Sunrise: Professor wears his storyteller's hat

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

He donned his hat as story teller when he kicked off the 1996-97 "UB at Sunrise" Sept. 12 with a discussion of the personal narrative.

Or to be precise, the way we construct our narratives in hindsight to describe an unchanging universe that doesn't really exist. Our stories, Jackson told an audience of more than 120, serve many informational, emotional, political and entertainment needs. And what we say happened serves every one of us in many ways, some of which escape our conscious awareness.

Jackson recalled, for example, how, as a graduate student, he drove British poet Steven Spender from the Indianapolis airport to Indiana University, where he was to present a reading. Enamored of the Spanish Civil War, in which Spender had fought, Jackson told the poet that one of his professors had seen combat in Spain as well and had called it "the last good war."

"I'm sure it was," Spender replied laconically. A pause; then, "I'll tell you about Spain."

Instead of the expected tale of privation, heroism, fear, and courage, Spender told Jackson a most unnerving story. One evening, Spender's commanders, deeply interested in raising money among a bathos-loving British public, suggested to the young soldier that one thing that would move this public to contribute to the war effort would be "the death of a young poet in combat."

Subsequently, Spender was informed that to this end he would "go intocombat tomorrow and not return." No doubt awash in other-worldly weirdness, Spender packed up and escaped into the night and returned to England, his corpus, if not his idealism, intact.

Jackson discussed the poet's narrative style and the reasons he may have elected to convey this particular information to a kid he'd never seen before and would never see again. He discussed the occult meaning that lay beyond its simple factual telling and how he himself has since used the story for sundry purposes.

"Stories about us are living things," Jackson said, "waxing and waning in context and emphasis from one day to the next, depending on many things, including the audience." He suggested that this particular story served both Spender and his audience not just as a cynical anecdote about one throw-away poet, but as a comment on the nature of all wars, where boys, the fodder of choice, were plenty and cheap and ultimately betrayed by all of us.

In a section of his talk he called "What Words Do," Jackson discussed how children are good witnesses until they reach the age of narrative ability, at which time they begin to edit what they saw in order to "make sense" of the data and present a cohesive tale. Like adults, they begin to speak in the passive voice when trying to avoid responsibility. Plates are said to have just "fallen off the table," clothes "got dirty," someone just "got killed" by a pistol we happen to be holding. In this way, he said, words and the narratives they form are used to make the past manageable and bearable.

Jackson delved into the political function of the family story-how the same story told in the same way can either embrace or exclude the listener and how the target audience comes to sense which is going on.

Jackson also looked at how family stories are manipulated for political ends, citing Al Gore's teary tale at the Democratic convention about his sister's death from lung cancer as a reason for his newborn opposition to the tobacco lobby.

"He neglected to add," said Jackson, "that for many years after her death the family continued to make a fortune by leasing their land to the tobacco companies to grow tobacco."

Current examples of the manipulative political narrative abound, Jackson said, and politicians love them because if a story makes sense in its own terms, it "seems" to make sense in its application.

He pointed to George Bush's chest-thumping tale of Iraqi soldiers dumping Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators (later attributed to a public relations firm working for the Kuwaiti government) and to the infamous World War I narratives of "Huns" bayoneting Belgian babies, which were told on thousands of posters and in news stories used to generate public support for the war.

"Such stories are very useful because you can't really tell if a story's true," Jackson said. "You can only tell if it's a good story."