Violence and the Art of Storytelling

Abstract

city, I photograph a teenage girl on top of a battered car. For twenty-five cents, she is handed a pickax and ten opportunities to smash holes in the car. Her peers cheer from the sidelines. There is no object, no prize to be won-only the sheer joy of destruction, perhaps, and the venting of frustration and rage. a two and one half hour drive east from here, a quiet, considerate, Regents scholarship winner, holes himself up in his school's top floor and shoots fourteen people, three of them to death. In New York City, but not here in Olean, protest the disbelieving townspeople. Today, the front page headlines of the local Post-Standard sprawl in their black, detached way: Body of Woman Found in Ditch: Stabbing Cause of Death. To the right of the headlines is Terry Cornell's graduation picture, taken from her high school yearbook. The whole account is a cool, detached piece of reportage, with canned phrases like partly clad body, and practicalities like lab tests to be made and time of death to be ascertained. Cool, canned, and practical-as gets to be the approach when the same violent story takes place so daily. But the story is not so daily for me because five years ago I taught Terry Cornell. Others will have their own particular bouquets; this article from her former teacher is subtitled, Flowers for Terry. There is every indication that more bloodshed is in the offing, that violence is the new obscenity, that violent movies and violent television and violent adult books and violent adults do indeed make violent kids. Violence links with power, change, sports, art, religion, and some very nice people, as well. We try to cope, try to understand the obscenity, legislate and crusade against it, mentally boycott it, bring it all out into the open and discuss it in classrooms. one classroom, students work on a mini-course called, Ireneology, that is, the study of peace. the gym next to where they study, cheerleaders scream, Beat, smash, kill, wipe out that team. What are we to do? you ask. My modest proposal-turn off the TV, movies, top ten radio stations, cassette recorders, overhead and slide projectors and, with a short story in hand, try projecting the human voice instead. Return, in