100 lines
5.1 KiB
Markdown
100 lines
5.1 KiB
Markdown
---
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created_at: '2016-06-15T15:15:28.000Z'
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title: Roald Dahl – the storyteller as benevolent sadist (2010)
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url: http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/67962/
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author: samclemens
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points: 118
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story_text:
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 46
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1466003728
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_samclemens
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- story_11909801
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objectID: '11909801'
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year: 2010
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---
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Many of Roald Dahl’s book covers today come stamped with an
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official-looking logo proclaiming him “The World’s No. 1 Storyteller.”
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The declaration is, like Dahl’s fiction itself, simultaneously thrilling
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and absurd and puzzling and oddly disturbing. How, one has to wonder,
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was the ranking determined? Was there some kind of single-elimination
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global storytelling showdown, in which the creator of Willy Wonka,
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presumably as an eighth-seeded underdog, managed to out-yarn a bracket
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of, say, Jack London, Salman Rushdie, Isak Dinesen, Victor Hugo, Lewis
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Carroll, Mark Twain, and—in what must have been a squeaker of a
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final—the mighty Dickens? And even if we do accept that result, isn’t
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the title somehow slightly patronizing? After all, we don’t celebrate
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Faulkner or Conrad or Shakespeare primarily as “storytellers.” It would
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be like calling a master chef “The World’s No. 1 Pan-Fryer”—a great
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compliment, but also one that immediately raises questions about his
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ability to bake, braise, roast, grill, stew, poach, and flambé.
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Dahl was, indeed, a great storyteller: Anyone who doubts that can pull
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aside a random child on the street and start reading her James and the
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Giant Peach or Fantastic Mr. Fox. If an adult comes up to object, you
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can start reading him one of the short stories: maybe “Taste” (in which
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a dinner-party bet among wine connoisseurs spirals out of control) or
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“The Sound Machine” (in which a man can hear plants screaming). If a
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policeman intervenes, read him “Lamb to the Slaughter,” in which a woman
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kills her husband with a frozen lamb chop, then cooks and feeds it to
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the detectives who come to investigate. You could probably go on like
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that forever.
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Dahl’s own favorite of his yarns was The BFG, a children’s book in which
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the eponymous hero, the Big Friendly Giant, walks around city streets at
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night blowing dreams through a long tube into kids’ bedroom windows. The
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giant keeps thousands of dreams stored in neatly labeled glass jars in
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his cave—with the good ones (what he calls “phizzwizards”) carefully
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segregated from the bad (“trogglehumpers”). “I IS ONLY AN EIGHT YEAR OLD
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LITTLE BOY,” runs one of the good dreams, “BUT I IS GROWING A SPLENDID
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BUSHY BEARD AND ALL THE OTHER BOYS IS JALOUS.” (The BFG is a self-taught
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writer: He learned to read from a borrowed copy of Nicholas Nickleby,
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whose author he identifies as “Dahl’s Chickens.”) One of the giant’s
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best dreams reads like a mission statement for Dahl’s career:
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I HAS RITTEN A BOOK AND IT IS SO EXCITING NOBODY CAN PUT IT DOWN. AS
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SOON AS YOU HAS RED THE FIRST LINE YOU IS SO HOOKED ON IT YOU CANNOT
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STOP UNTIL THE LAST PAGE. IN ALL THE CITIES PEEPLE IS WALKING IN THE
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STREETS BUMPING INTO EACH OTHER BECAUSE THEIR FACES IS BURIED IN MY BOOK
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AND DENTISTS IS READING IT AND TRYING TO FILL TEETHS AT THE SAME TIME
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BUT NOBODY MINDS BECAUSE THEY IS ALL READING IT TOO IN THE DENTIST’S
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CHAIR.
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The dream goes on like this: Drivers crash, pilots fly off course, and
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brain surgeons get distracted during surgery. It’s a paean to the primal
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magic of storytelling, but also an admission that that same magic—when
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it’s really strong—can start to feel sinister, like semi-benevolent mind
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control. Dahl inhabited this paradox more insistently than anyone. He
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wanted to seduce the entire world with narrative, regardless of the
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cost—to himself, to his family, to his publishers, to his reputation
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among children’s librarians (they hated him), and even to his own
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literary art.
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It’s been twenty years since Roald Dahl died, and in honor of that
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morbid anniversary (and maybe, just possibly, in an effort to boost book
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sales) September has been named “Roald Dahl Month”—a holiday publishers
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are celebrating by issuing, among other books, the first-ever authorized
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Dahl biography, Donald Sturrock’s Storyteller. The book is, like Dahl,
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both lovable and annoying: The writing is often repetitious, the tone
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occasionally hagiographic, and it leaps around in chronology. But no
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matter. Dahl’s life story, it turns out, is less a normal human
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biography than a series of grisly and fabulous yarns that stretch back
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30 or so generations. He was a direct descendant of the Scottish hero
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William Wallace, whose family got hunted out of Britain in 1305, after
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Wallace was hanged and beheaded. They ended up in Norway, where,
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centuries later, Dahl’s great-great-grandfather, a Norwegian pastor,
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escaped a church fire by stacking Bibles against a wall, climbing them,
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and throwing himself out a stained-glass window. Dahl’s father, as a
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child, had to have his arm amputated after a mishap with a drunk doctor.
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His uncle introduced himself to his aunt by rescuing her from a fire
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that killed 100 people.
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