Some Said

There are ways to make tales that the Audience will finish, in part or whole.

Where Tales Take Shape

I wrote (‘Where Tales Take Shape’) that the best way to form and articulate a tale is in your head. Dreaming and living and day-dreaming the tale, over and over, will improve the talesman’s mental skill and strength until he can command the whole tale in his mind, shifting characters, objects, events throughout the tale.

In the way of doing this, the talesman will find alternate paths the characters might choose, and alternate outcomes to conflicts. And he finds it hard to make up his mind and pick one over all the others. Of course, it is the job of the talesman (at this phase) to make up his mind. But it has happened in the past, when many talesmen told the same tales, or cycles of tales, that they sometimes disagreed over which path was best. Alternate versions of the tales appear along the way. It is interesting, in the archaeology of such tale-cycles, to read the different versions, and hold both in your mind.

I find it interesting, anyway, and so I went about seeking for some way to bring this kind of alternate version into my own tales.

Byways

This is of course the heart of interactive fiction, which I wrote (‘The Tale that Tells Itself’) would not prove appealing to readers of prose fiction, but would do well to movie-fans (at least in the form of interactive video games that take on increasingly elaborate narrative schemes).

So do I now take back what I wrote there? In a way.

The way I like to hint at alternate versions of tales does not mess with the final end of them. I only like to smear or blur byways along the way. These are alternate paths that part from the main road of the tale only briefly, and all return to the main road, so that there is no final difference in how the whole tale takes its shape. There is only a chance for each reader to choose his own byway, or (if he be a bold reader, and a talesman in his own right) to hold more than one byway in his head as equally valid — in which case the tale does interesting things (or the reader does interesting things by way of the tale) that no straightforward tale could manage.

Example of Heathcliff

To make all this a bit more clear, I give you two examples. The first involves Wuthering Heights and concerns itself with the age-old question, ‘How did Heathcliff win his fortune?’

The tale of Wuthering Heights is a love story by Emily Brontë. Heathcliff is a poor boy of unknown (and what is worse, racially-mixed) parentage raised in the rich Earnshaw household where Cathy is the spoiled, half-wild daughter. These two fall in love, but Cathy’s kin will never accept Heathcliff as a suitor, poor as he is. Cathy ends by marrying a more socially-acceptable neighbor. Heathcliff curses them, and disappears. Years later he comes back, boy no longer but a masterful man, with a fortune which he uses to gain his revenge.

The source of Heathcliff’s fortune is never explained, and has given rise to much idle speculation. The point though is simply that he is now rich, and has at his disposal the means to buy the Earnshaw estate and wreak his vengeance upon his love and those of her new family.

“Some said Heathcliff went abroad, to the Indies, and gained his fortune in the trade of sugar, rum whiskey, and slaves. Others said he took a new name and enlisted in the army, and in lands abroad won his share of loot from the conquered peoples. And some said he stayed in London, and became a prince of that city’s underworld. And yet others whispered that his wealth came from even more disreputable sources.

“However it came to be, the fact remained: Heathcliff was a wealthy man, and had enough fortune to build any sort of happy, respectable, and healthy life. But rather than that, he came back to the place where he had been spurned and abased, to make them pay.”

That is the brief form of the trick. And I think it must be brief, brief enough so that before the talesman finishes the first of his proposed byways, the reader will yet recall the ‘some said’ that frames it; going on to the second and third byways in so few words that the reader can hold them all in his head equally.

What this does (beyond giving the reader a chance to pick one as his favorite, if he cannot or will not hold them all as one) is to form a sort of Impressionistic mélange of variants. Each colors the others. They can be much alike in their purport, as in my example here. Or they can be opposite, as in my example of Mr Rochester’s wife.

Example of Mr Rochester’s Wife

Jane Eyre was written by Emily’s sister Charlotte (though I’ve no doubt all three Brontë sisters helped in the plotting and articulation of both novels). In it, young, well-bred but penniless Jane serves as governess to the bastard child of brooding, wealth Mr Rochester, and the two form bonds of affection. (Jane is more timid and demure than the wild Catherine Earnshaw.) Upon the brink of their marriage, Jane is told that Mr Rochester is not, after all, free to wed, that he has been married, and that his wife still lives. Rochester admits it, and shows Jane his wife — a raving mad thing.

Here too there is a mystery along the way that is never fully told: the tale of Rochester’s first marriage, and how his wife went mad:

“Some said that she was born of debased blood, and the seeds of madness were in her from her childhood. But others claimed that though proud and spirited, the first Mrs Rochester was of pure and noble blood, and it was Rochester’s own cruelty and abuses that drove her to become the thing Jane had been shown.”

Here the two alternate byways are very different as to what they claim, and it leaves the reader in some doubt as to a crucial point in the tale — that of Mr Rochester’s character. The reader can of course choose one over the other depending on the other passages in which Rochester has acted; she can choose one over the other depending on her hopes for Jane’s future happiness.

But I think when put in this way, the byways cannot blend, and the reader cannot wholly put one down — in the words of court proceedings, ‘you can’t unring a bell.’ The reader has read both choices, and though she may decide that Rochester was blameless and the woman tainted of old, or she may say that Rochester was at fault, she will all the same remember the alternative, and harbor some lingering doubt as to her conclusion. Best of all (at least up till the end of the main tale) is if she holds both possibilities more or less equally, as this will heighten her suspense. She will fear more for Jane lest Rochester win her back and prove the villain, she will hope more for Jane that Rochester be shown to be a good man at heart, and that he and Jane will be joined as one.

But here, Jane and her Mr Rochester do end up together. And if the reader yet holds both possibilities as to Rochester’s character, she will leave off the novel with a hint of dread as to Jane’s future chance of happiness with a man who may yet prove to be cruel and malignant.

This doubt might be the talesman’s point, which is another use to put the ‘Some Said’ trick. But it would not please the reader (not the bourgeois or the peasant reader at any rate) not, in the end, to know for sure how the ‘ever after’ will turn out.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, April 4, 2008)