Friday's Father

Difficult piece for me to comment on. Rafe Martin suggests (in his essay on in Who Says? Pivotal Essays in Contemporary Storytelling) that to view stories critically, we need to set aside personal preferences of taste. I agree with him. But if we are disengaged from something because we don't like its content, then it can be difficult to see how it operates.

Nevertheless, I shall try.
I think that the first thing that is interesting is using the folktales and myths to interrogate a personal narrative, rather than elements of personal narrative to highlight the resonance of a folktale. (I've seen the latter done more frequently, and tend to prefer it - unsurprising given my interest in the mythic).

Cathy has commented on the small references and how they are used as description within the personal narrative world - I liked the walnut -spinning wheel one particularly as it is a reference from a less common and well known tale type.
I also note that the parallels between Hans and Gwenda's relationships with the father are accentuated because they both climb trees. But it seemed more of a neat trick than any kind of deep resonance. There were no moments during the performance for me where I felt that "oh yes" click of things fitting together which is one of the things I tend to look for when stories were woven together - maybe partly the fact it was audio only, but it was something I expected to feel a lot more.

It was interesting that we moved from folktale, to myth, to biblical story in terms of the non personal narratives that were actually told at any kind of length (although the Israelites were only referenced, and the African story is somewhat different to Babel). Follows the Ladder of the Moon type pattern - although we come back full circle to the folktale with Meat Loves Salt.

The questions of forgiveness raised by Hans and the Hedgehog, and of destructiveness raised by Saturn had greater resonance with the events of the stories for me than Meat Loves Salt (there is something about the father that rejects one of several children for a specific event that is energetically different to the father that is incapable of engaging at all). Additionally Meat Loves Salt allows a resolution which is clearly the narrative that Gwenda wanted to tell about her relationship with her father - so it helps her achieve her ends - but perhaps at the price of artistic truth?

I also felt that the folktales, myth etc which were clearly working to tighten structure and make sure the narrative kept moving couldn't combat the main pattern of the delivery style, which included charming description and created speech suggesting character, but which didn't necessarily always seem relevant. I appreciate that this may be something Gwenda's audiences enjoy - her eye for local colour (but if so the mikes were too low to pick up the appreciative buzz that that tends to create). I found that each personal narrative, missed out on my maxim of relevance and quantity levels, and thus I was just desperate to get back to a folktale for movement to occur.

Also, like Kathryn Windham's narratives it has all the problematic issues of what you do about touching some of the dark secrets of America's past and using them in a story which has for essential arc something that is seperate to those issues, in this case "A daughter reconciles with her father". Two examples of those questions that Cathy and I discussed would include the very probably genuine kinship with Sam (at a greater or lesser level of generational remove) and the question of why alcohol can poision a family. The Meat Loves Salt ending focuses our attention on the positives - and I object to that, though I can see it is probably successful in its aims.

One final thing is that I find that there are some early elements of metanarrative towards the beginning and they return again in Meat Loves Salt, but in between they fade. Perhaps because the more serious elements of personal narrative need to stand without it? I wasn't sure what that was intended to achieve, but from a place where I was disengaged from the main storyline, it left me just puzzled, rather than certain what it meant.