Talesmen Inside Tales

Only the best will do

I’m reading The Innkeeper’s Song by Peter S. Beagle. Mr Beagle chose to tell this tale from many points of view, as though we heard testimony on various parts of the tale from different witnesses and actors; after the Prologue, Mr Beagle pretends he himself exists no more as far as the tale goes. More, within these bits of tales the witnesses tell how other characters told them tales. This gives us three kinds of talesmen a tale can have, with more or less authority.

3 Kinds of Talesmen

At the top there is Mr Beagle himself, the Author of the tale with his name on the cover and title page. He is the true talesman but he takes on the masks of several characters to hide behind. After the Prologue, each chapter is the tale of a different character, all in first person using ‘I,’ and most in past tense, though one character uses present tense for what he tells us took place in the same past time as the things the others tell of.

These chapter-by-chapter talesmen or witnesses make up the second kind of talesman in The Innkeeper’s Song. They know less than Beagle, only what they have seen and done, and only so far as they can fathom it. They speak in what Mr Beagle claims is their true voices (put into modern English).

Third are the characters who tell the witnesses tales within the scenes the witnesses tell us. These last talesman are least, and can claim the least authority: on the whole Mr Beagle has his witnesses tell us the truth (as far as they know it) but the characters who tell tales inside the tales the witnesses tell are not to be trusted. Mr Beagle lets us know that these folk will hold back bits of the truth, and lie, and try to trick their audience when it suits them.

Talesmen Good and Bad

Wilkie Collins used this same trick in The Moonstone. There too each part is told (but said to be written down and not told aloud as Mr Beagle would have it) by a different character who speaks to what he has seen and done, in light of his own ken.

The talesmen-witnesses in Mr Collins’ tale are good talesmen and bad. The bad talesmen show one trait that makes them bad talesmen above all: they put too much of themselves into what they tell, and they thrust their own faces in between us and the things they tell. This fault the talesmen-witnesses in Mr Beagle’s tale also have.

Both Mr Beagle and Mr Collins would no doubt excuse and defend this, and claim that these talesmen are not talesmen only, but also characters in the whole tale, and that when they tell too much of themselves they show us their hearts. So it is a kind of characterization, Mr Beagle and Mr Collins might claim. All the same the talesmen-witnesses are bad talesmen.

Think if you will if Count Tolstoy had begun a chapter of War and Peace in this way:

Ugh — I ate too much dinner last night, and slept hardly at all. My bowels were loose, and my thoughts turned on that peasant girl I saw two days ago by the stream. With shame I confess I thought on her with lust. Oh my God, what can a weak sinner do to save himself from evil? — Anyway, at the time of which I write, Prince Andrei was worried…

This would help scholars of the great writer, no doubt, learn more about him. But that version of War and Peace would never have made Tolstoy’s name known throughout Europe.

A Simple Rule

What can we can we take away from these tales is a simple rule:

If a talesman will pretend that a character tells his tale, the talesman should make sure that that character is just as good a talesman as the talesman is himself.

Better than the talesman of course no character can be through whom the talesman speaks. But it might be that when he takes on a mask, the talesman gains inspiration he might have lacked if he spoke as himself. All the better, then.

But he should make damn sure that his character-talesmen shall not tell us bad tales, unless the talesman himself seeks to tell bad tales. If that is in truth his goal, he may as well tell bad tales in his own voice, they will be less tiresome and more entertaining in that case. At least Tolstoy’s asides (or Mr Beagle’s if he made such remarks in his own voice) would tell us something true, or at least more true, about a living man in real life one time upon this Earth; and that would tell us more about who the talesman is, and why he chose this tale to tell us, and how he came to tell it in this way.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday 20 February 2008)