If all the little things in a tale point the same way, the end is irresistible
Big and Small
A tale has its big parts and its small parts. The big parts are the parts that we include when we tell the tale in summary. The smaller the summary, the bigger the parts that remain in the summary. In truth the word ‘summary’ is wrong: there are no ‘summaries’ of tales. There are only the tales told in more or less detail, in longer or shorter versions. So to talk of the big and the small again, we can say that the longer the version of the tale, the smaller the parts that the talesman will tell.
Another way to look at this is to say that the small parts support the big parts. Say we tell of a journey. The setting-forth and the ending-up are the biggest parts of all:
He left home and reached Athens ten years later.
Along the way, the journey has a few large stages. These are big parts but not so big as the setting-forth or ending-up:
He left home and arrived in Crete for the summer. From Crete he sailed to Santoria, where he stayed a year. He sailed to Sparta where he was a prisoner for three years. He was freed at last and made his way by foot to Corinth. At Corinth he found his brother and helped him win a lawsuit to regain his inheritance. Bidding farewell to his brother, he took sail around the isles and came to Athens, ten years from the day he set forth.
Each of these larger parts (the time spent in Crete, in Santoria, in Sparta; his wanderings across Laconia, the legal process in Corinth, sailing to Athens) has its own smaller stages.
Big Moves
The big parts of the tale determine the overall direction of it: up or down, to a more happy or more unfortunate state. Because these parts are so big, we the audience can see them plainly, and by these parts we classify the tale: tragedy, comedy, science-fiction, and so on. The talesman wants to move us through these parts, but because we take notice of them, we can resist them when they try to tug us here or there. More, since these parts are so large, they tend to be common to many tales. By this I mean every journey will have its setting-forth and its ending-up, and every love tale will have its first encounter, and final embrace or farewell.
We know pretty plainly, for example, whether a romantic tale intends to move toward a happy or sad end. In part these ends are already set by the genre and the state of commercial publishing and tale-telling; for the rest we can get a pretty good idea of which way the talesman means to take us, from his general tone and the way he characterizes his lovers.
Small Touches
On the other hand, the smallest parts of the tale seem to bear only on the next-largest parts, to which they belong. Details about the traveler’s stay at an inn on Crete will bear mainly on his adventures upon that island; less so, and but indirectly, upon whether he will reach his end goal at Athens. Because of this apparent limitation, the smallest parts will not seem to us audience to deal with the end goal, and because we won’t be looking at them in this light, these smallest parts can hold a subtle but powerful sway on us.
By way of example, take the overall tone of the tale, and whether we the audience will expect a happy ending or a sad one. We can, we judge, see where the talesman seeks to take us, and then we resist this movement, or expecting the event, feel little moved when it comes.
But we don’t often take the smallest parts as signposts to the overall tone of the tale, because a longer tale will have its ups and downs along the way. These smallest parts can, if they are all of a piece, influence us to look for a happy end or a sad, and we won’t be aware of this influence.
There is also the general attitude of the talesman, which is most powerfully shown in these smallest touches. A commercial talesman, mindful of the desires and needs of his audience, may feel compelled to give them a happy ending that reaffirms what they want to believe about themselves and their world. But say he does not really like his audience or their world; maybe his true feelings are quite different from what he feels he must say. Then along the way, in these smallest parts, he can weave his counter-tones, his criticism and satire.
It is vital that these small touches obey two rules:
- They must be consistent and of a piece
- They must be plausible in the context of the surface and subject of the tale
The touches must all tend in the same way, be consistent and of a piece, or else they will tend to cancel one another out, and leave us the audience to be moved by only the big parts of the tale
The touches must be plausible in the surface of the tale, or else we the audience will start to notice them in and of themselves; then the small touches will not be subtle, and we will see the talesman’s aim, and feel free to reject it — in any case, any surprise the talesman means to wield by way of these small touches will be lost.
Two Examples
These thoughts (incomplete as they are) came to me through the memory of two works. Once long ago I read one of the Icelandic sagas (it may have been Njal’s Saga but I really don’t recall) and found in the translator’s introduction an observation that the characters in the saga are always in the midst of doing something else when the big turns of the tale come there way. The tale tells of when a man is killed as part of a larger vendetta, a feud between families. He is making charcoal, or cutting wood, or shearing his sheep, at the time he is killed. The translator, I think, meant that the saga-man had a keen eye to the daily work of life when he told these details. But for the talesman-sagaman, what was ‘big’ in the scene was the attack and the fact that this man was killed; this is what takes the tale on to its next stage, the reaction to the man’s death and seeking of vengeance for the killing. The fact of what he was doing at the time of his death need not be told at all. But it was.
The other example lies in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Here it is more a tonal or rhetorical manner Tolkien had. In sum he was one of the most pessimistic talesmen I have ever read; in every paragraph when Tolkien tells of something, anything, good, he must right away add something that undercuts it. Some paragraphs go on this way like a saw-blade, up and down. And they always end with a down. To give a made-up example of this:
So they ate a good meal after many days of hunger. But the cold wind blew, and it seemed the night held more danger than before.
This overall, constant, pessimism, with every observation taking on its ‘but’ of doubt, peril, or doom, builds over the tale as a whole a sense of grave doubt. We must expect a happy ending in a fairy tale of this sort, and yet, and yet … how can things end up well when all along the way every silver lining has its cloud?
(Composed on keyboard Friday, April 18, 2008)
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