We watched an old classic again a few days back. Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, that was made in 1950. To me, this is the best illustration of Truth, because at the end of it, we are made strikingly aware of the subjectivity of any of our versions of the truth.The main story tells of the rape of a woman and the death of a man, presumably by a wandering bandit, and is presented entirely in a series of flashbacks from the perspectives of each of four different narrators.
The ‘holding’ of the story is done through a group of people seeking shelter from a heavy rain storm at Kyoto's crumbling Rashomon gate, as they discuss the recent crime. One of them, a woodcutter, says he was a witness to the crimes.
In each of the four versions of the story, those of the woman, the man, the bandit and the woodcutter, even though the characters and many of the details; there is much that is very different.
In the bandit’s story, he accepts responsibility for the murder but not for the rape, saying that it was an act of mutual consent. The woman's story is that the bandit attacked her, but suggests that she may have been the killer. The dead man's tale, presented through a medium, involves rape and suicide. The witness who says he saw it all, presents a story that weaves in elements from each of the other three, but that does not corroborate any one of the other three stories, leaving the viewer doubting his claim to have seen it all.
As a viewer, trying to make sense of ‘what really happened’ is impossible. You realize that Kurosawa has not made a whodunit; he focuses on something far more disturbingly profound - the inability of any one person to know the truth, no matter how clearly we think we see things. Perspective makes all truth subjective.
Some writers have been drawn to the idea of ‘perspective’ and the shaping of the story. One of my favorites is Donna Jo Napoli, who re-tells fairy tales from other angles. “Beast” has the actual Beast from the well-known Beauty and The Beast as narrator, and the background to his change of form. So too with “ Spinners” the Rumplestiltskin story that moves backwards and forwards in time. Curious about the witch in Hansel and Gretel? “The Magic Circle” paints a different possibility.
C.S. Lewis’ “Till We Have Faces” was the first book I found that dealt with alternative versions, and it was fascinating to read of how Psyche’s sisters saw her story being played out, and how it affected their own lives. My search for more in this genre led me to Howard Jacobsen’s “The Very model of A Man”– in outer form the story of the Biblical character Cain (yes, he who murdered his brother Abel), but a scintillating work on the power of words and language.
There is more. Yukio Mishima sought to enter the mind of the wife of the Maquis de Sade in “Madame Sade” and Kahlil Gibran did this with people who loved and followed Jesus, as well as those who feared and mistrusted him in “Jesus, The Son of Man”.
In Gregory Maguire's “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” and “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister” his task is that of questioning stereotypical roles through reinventing and recontextualizing the well-known Wizard of Oz and Cinderella stories.
Women’s voices are often given space through alternative tellings.
“Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys is a moving and beautiful account of the life of Antoinette Cosway, the fictional character who becomes the madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Brontë's older book, Jane Eyre.
In the "Penelopiad", Margaret Atwood retells the familiar story of the Odyssey through the eyes of his long suffering wife Penelope. Under the patient wife waiting and waiting for her husband to return, Atwood, in a clever take on an ancient classical Greek-tragedy form using poetry and song and a chorus of Penelope's slave girls, reveals a biting cynicism about Penelope’s thoughts and attitude that gives a timeless feel to this re-telling.
Alessandro Portelli of the University of Rome La Sapienza, a pioneer in engaged oral history points out that, “Many of the most important stories are true but not accurate.” In memory, he reminds us, facts are reshaped to serve the present.
In many counties there are heated debates about the way history is being taught. The fights are generally about ‘whose version of history’. Maybe we need to become more open to an understanding that no version – however attached we are to it - is ever The Version, and alternative perspectives give us a broader understanding of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
May we learn to make space for tellings that differ from our own.
Marguerite Theophil
As things seem
….. Actually, after all,
things are not quite as real or permanent,
terrible, important or logical as they seem.
~ Joseph Campbell
