Three Clans of Tales

The three broad kinds of tales, and how Sensuous Tales are set apart

Where Tales Go

There are three broad lines a tale can take. It can:

1. amuse us with its story
2. impress us with its characters
3. delight us with the feelings it inspires

My own belief is that the first tales fell in the first class, and held out the story itself for its value. What counts is what takes place in the tale, what is done and how it falls out. This is why it’s so hard to split the word ‘story’ from this root of the nature of tales. So when I say we like to hear a tale because we like a good story, it sounds like a tautology.

The second class of tales, that hold up a character for honor, also is quite old. It is as old as the first funeral, the first memorial to a beloved father or mother, or a great leader, warrior, hunter, or holy man. In such tales the anecdotes and incidents of the life need not lead anywhere in and of themselves; they don’t have to build a tale whose whole has a shape and thrills us; they but show us the best face of the man whose life the tale honors and remembers, and the talesman can give them in any order, but most will set them out by how much they exalt the hero, or in order of time beginning with his childhood, then his youth, then the great deeds of his adult life.

The third class of tales, that appeal to some emotional reaction in their audience, is, I think, degenerate, and comes late in the game, maybe as late as civilization itself. But there is one type of these tales that must be as old as the others, and may be taken as the grandfather of all the tales that fit into this class. That is the tale told to raise a laugh — the joke.

Sensuous Talesmanship

I don’t mean that tales for story’s sake can’t praise their heroes, or that tales that honor the dead can’t seek to draw tears from their audience when they speak of the great one’s loss. A tale that is meant to appeal to the senses should neither lack characters or the thread of incidents that adds up to its story or ‘what took place.’ I only want to look here at the main or primary aim of the talesman.

When the main aim of the talesman is an appeal to what his audience feels, I call it Sensuous Talesmanship and if it can work up this effect in us so as to overwhelm our senses, take us far from the world we live in, and if we delight in this sort of sensation, then the talesman can almost shed story and characters once for all. The joke, now: there are many jokes that make little sense, their characters are mere stick figures. But we won’t care if it makes us laugh. A poem can move us by its music alone.

What then are the main kinds of sensuous tales? I don’t think I can list them all here, there are sure to be some I leave off. But here is my first try:

• funny tales
• tales of fear
• tales of horror
• tales of wonder
• tales of satisfaction
  (say of wealth or ease or other wish-fulfillment)
• tearful tales
• erotic tales
• adventure tales
• tales of revenge
• tales that inspire hatred
• tales of worship
• tales of love
• tales of holiness and awe
• tales of mystery
  (here I mean not puzzles to be solved but the mysterious in general, a feeling of the great Unknowns of the universe which the tale does not even try to fathom)

We could go on and just list every emotion man can feel, but not all of them are fit for tales, even such rudimentary tales as these sensuous tales can be. In the first place, we don’t like to feel every emotion or sensation we are capable of feeling, and if we don’t like the feeling, we won’t go out of our way to hear a tale that aims to provoke the feeling in us. In the second place, there are some sensations that may be too fleeting to hold up a tale, or that escape the talesman’s art — for instance, the taste of a particular food.

The Dreaming Tale

As I have said, the sensuous tale is a degenerate class. I imagine that it was born (leaving the joke aside) when talesmen began to think that the sensuous effects that pleased their audience in tales of the first two classes, might sustain them on their own — might be even more provocative if split off from the (more or less true) aspects of history or eulogies.

The sensuous tale is a dream that a talesman gives us. Dreams serve us in private ways not yet known at heart; but they come to each one of us in the shape and form we need and please us as we like. The dream another weaves for us can but approximate the needs and pleasures of our hidden hearts, and so the sensuous tale can either fall into

• ones that show the particular need and pleasure of the talesman himself
• ones that shape general needs and pleasures that many men will share.

There is a stark contrast between these two types, and we can always tell when a sensuous talesman is wrestling with his own demons of delight, and when he merely plays the bawd to our general lust. The first type falls among the most honest and naked of all tales, and its talesmen bare to us what seems indecent, clothed only in the tattered lace of the masks of fiction and its devices. But the second type, in any degenerate age (and I think any age that has known a long era of peace and prosperity will sink into degeneracy) will be the most popular, win the widest audience, and bring its talesmen the most wealth.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday 1 March 2008)