The Root of a Good Tale

The one essential thing

Two Tales

I’ve been reading The Adventures of Amir Hamza in a new translation of a XIX version. I like this very, very much. It’s a lot of fun to read, has a great style, characters, and is teaching me about talespinning. It also shows me a kind of fantasy that is not our modern kind, and has seeded me with ideas on how to approach magic and one device in the tale I’m now telling. The greatest insights this tale has given me (beside a vision of oral storytelling much advanced) is the first full picture of the ‘trickster’ character as embodied in Amar Ayyar, Hamza’s subtle, sneaky, foster brother.

I’ve also been reading H. Rider Haggard’s Benita a rather cloying Victorian tale of Eartherean South Africa. I don’t find it much fun to read, don’t much like its style, find its characters weak, and don’t see much about talespinning that is new to me.

Now, Benita I have in a http://www.gutenberg.org edition, and so I can keep it as long as I want. The Adventures of Amir Hamza on the other hand is a copy borrowed from the library; I renewed it as many times as I can, and it is now overdue. Every day I have it is precious.

All the same, two days ago I picked up Benita rather than The Adventures of Amir Hamza. I did the same yesterday.

Why?

The One Thing

There is something about Benita. I want to know what happened. It isn’t that I care much about the characters in this case. I also have precious few doubts as to whether the ending will be happy or sad. Haggard was a commercial writer, and he has peppered his tale with prophecies (from the stock ‘wise elder of a primitive race’) that tell me the ending will not be unhappy. There is, all the same, one bit of information about the ending Haggard denies us, and that is the fate of Richard Seymour, last seen collapsing on the shore after swimming for miles from a wreck at sea. Benita, you see, loves this man, and all accept that he is dead. But Haggard didn’t show us that Seymour has died, not definitely. Benita has gone quite far away from civilization, to an ancient ruin where, her father believes, Portuguese missionaries buried great amounts of gold some centuries before. And she lives there with her father and his partner in great peril.

So I assume that:

• Seymour is alive
• Seymour will come to rescue Benita
• Seymour and Benita will survive and make it back to ‘civilization’
• Seymour and Benita will get to keep some small amount of the gold

I can’t see just when Richard Seymour will appear; my best guess is that he will appear (with some equivalent of the cavalry) just at the second curtain, when things look darkest. I had thought he would appear among the attacking Matabele, and would have made his second entrance already; this proved false. And though I’m reasonably certain, I don’t know for sure.

And I need to know for sure.

The Adventures of Amir Hamza has not hooked me in this way. I enjoy much more each anecdote and adventure along the way, and the way in which these bits are told. But on the whole I don’t see any doubt as to the ending, no questions linger — I don’t really have any interest in the ending. It’s an odd thing: I care more for the journey than for the destination.

And it is this difference that drew me back to Benita even though there was no time deadline for reading that tale at all, and a lapsed deadline for the tales of the great Amir.

What Happened? is the root of what makes a good tale.

The Question and its Answer

What Happened? is a question. It is a question the audience will come to ask themselves. The talesman must, if he will make a good tale, compel his audience to ask themselves this question. Sometimes he may express the question in the tale itself, but this is an obvious ploy; needless as well, if he has framed his tale in the right way.

What Happened? is the question the audience should ask itself at the end of the first curtain, when the ‘predicament’ has been arranged, when all the questions of who, what, where, and when have been answered, and when the talesman has established for his audience what kind of tale they are hearing.

What Happened? is also a question about the ultimate end of the tale. It may also apply to detours and byways and segments of the whole tale, as the final goal is generally composed of several intermediate steps along the way. The Adventures of Amir Hamza has such smaller steps, as Hamza goes on various missions for his Emperor, or seeks some way to see the Emperor’s daughter despite all the armies arrayed to guard her and see no men can get to her rooms in the palace. But it is the final goal, this grand, over-arching What Happened? that the Adventures lacks.

It will of course help your tale if you have a fine power of storytelling and style, if your characters are intriguing and unforgettable, if each incident is fun to tell and to hear, if you play upon the passions of your audience in every conceivable way, if you tell them of things they have never heard before, or imagined could be.

But the one needful thing to keep them coming back to the tale, is this one question of What Happened?

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, April 9, 2008)