Heart Hand and Head

The three schools of talesmanship

There are three schools of tales, three ways a talesman can see the world, and the tales he tells will fall in one of these schools. He can appeal to our wishes and emotions or in a word our hearts. He can appeal to our sense of the way we think things are in practice, or in a word our hands. He can appeal to our wit, or our heads.

These are the three schools of talesmanship.

Hearts

The tales that call to our hearts are like our dreams. They are full of wishes granted us. They tell of the world not as we think it is but as we think it ought to be, as we wish it could be, as we dream that it was in past times, or that is is in faroff lands, or that it will be in times to come. This is myth, Romance, adventure, pornography, idealism, heroism, legend.

We like to hear such tales because we like to dream that we live in that world, that our dreams have come ture and that this world of dreams is our ‘real’ world. We enjoy all those wishies coming true. It is a relief from the toil and misery of our daily life, in which none of our wishes seem to come true.

These tales appeal most to those of us who dream the most. We who look at their lives and rather than picking up their tools and getting on with it, ask ‘Wouldn’t it be great if only…’ and ‘Why can’t life be more like…’

Hands

The tales that call to our hands or our practical sense of the world look at the way we think things really are. They seek to describe, in details finer than the ones we normally see the world, the way people act in the world. These tales speak of life as we think it ‘really is’ and stress the ‘truth.’ They are often modeled closely upon real events and experiences. They seek to plumb the deep parts of the souls of their characters.

These tales appeal to men of the world who look down on wishes and dreams and mere time-wasters. We who come to full grip with our world and our lives tend to like these tales best. For the time of these tales, we see with sharper eyes events and the souls of men.

This is Realism, Naturalism, ‘true sagas,’ true stories, romans à clef, and ‘gritty tales.’

Heads

The tales that call to our heads teach us lessons about the world. On their face they may look like Romance or they may look like Realism, but by the tale’s end the talesman wants us to understand that the tale has proved or demonstrated some basic rule or law or principle about ourselves or our world. These are Allegories, Lessons, Prophecies, Lore, and Fables with Morals.

Tales of the Heart and Hand we enjoy in and of themselves, and we believe in what the tales relate while we live under their spell. A world swims into view and we dive inside it and live there for a time. It may be a world of wonders, or it may be our own world seen more sharply. But tales of the Head, on the other hand, we look on from afar, not in and of themselves, but as a puzzle or model. The people and deeds in these tales are not what counts, what counts is what the people and deeds mean — what they signify.

We like tales of the Head in the first place for the work they give to our wit in trying to unriddle them and see the rules and principles behind the masks of charactes and events. And we like these tales in the second place for the wisdom this unriddling imparts to us. Tales of the Head teach us not only the lessons and morals at hand. They also teach us a way of looking at the world around us, and of seeing the people and events we live with as if they too were principles made flesh. Thus the tales of the Head are the favorite type of tales told by the teachers of Religion, who would have us see real flesh and lood as nothing but examples of piety or sin.

In the Marketplace

In the great bulk of talesmanship today, the marketplace of amusment, tales of the Heart and the Hand fill almost all the stalls. Tales of the Head are out of favor even in the classroom, and mostly used in the teaching of Religion or in political debate.

Some kinds of tales fit better to the Heart, some kinds fit the Hand better. And so there are kidns of tales that will please us more if they are one and not the other.

At a broad stroke I would say that since the middle of the 19th century (in the West at least, but not all of the West) all the tales we call today as ‘genre,’ are at bottom tales of the Heart, and all the tales we call ‘literature’ or ‘literary fiction’ or ‘mainstream fiction’ are tales of the Hand. The French Realists took the critical prize from the Romantics, and they have only rarely given any part of it back.

I think this is the way it had to be. Once men began to look at Nature as a mechanism we cuold describe explain and predict by numbers alone, we had less patience for nymphs and angels and ghosts and the supernatural. And the end of this is that today, even the tales of the Heart must give a nod to the Hand and paint themselves with ‘realistic’ touches both of practical life and of the psychology of their character.

Some genres almost lost Romance altogether, and as a result all but killed themselves. For example take what is called ‘hard science-fiction’ which turned into a curious specimen of tales that told in real terms what never was. So these talesmen killed the dreams of those who liked to read science fiction, and left paltry, pallid, weak and even boring tales that were read by dwindling readerships.

When we take up a tale, we should know which of these three schools it falls into, and we will be disappointed if it falls into another. The talesman who tricks us in this way plays a dangerous game, and is not likely to win our love.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday, February 27, 2008)