Driftage

Wandering tales

Flotsam

What was once a ship, or part of a ship, that floats upon the waves, drawn hither and yon by currents and swells, at length cast upon a shore for a time, perhaps for good, but perhaps to be cast out once more and float once more, with storm and wave, and cast upon a shore once more: this is called flotsam in the old talk of the English mariner. Such things come from the sea, and touch land here and there, and go to sea once more, until in the end the land takes them and they are buried there, or the sea accepts them at last, and they sink into the deep.

But what floats on the sea or is found upon the shore, cast up by the sea, from whatever source, is called driftage in general.

Both have this in common, that they do not drive their fates but are driven by the complex, and seemingly random forces of wind and wave. So if we could trace the path of a bit of driftage, it would not be the character of the driftage that rules its path, but other forces. Thus the path marks out for us the profile of those forces. At the same time, however, the driftage is not left untouched and unscathed in the course of its wanderings. It weathers, it rots, it is pecked at and nibbled at, it is smashed against rock and ground into sand. The sun robs it of its hue and many other changes come over it, until at last it finds haven in some land that will not cast it forth again. There it sits and is buried. But if it never finds land, it will be in the end dissolved in the sea, and cease to be itself.

Some things will break down but never sink, and never find land. These things will be caught up in one of the great gyres of the sea, where the currents trap driftage and never let them go, in the heart of the largest ocean basins.

The Picaro

In old Spanish, the word picaro meant ‘a rogue,’ and it is the fate of rogues to find no place of rest for long. Soon or late they are found out, and punished for their crimes; else they sniff out the rising danger, and flee for the sake of their own hides. Such men are the driftage of the world’s sea, and from tales of these men came a kind of tale, the ‘picaresque.’

A picaresque tale tells of the career of such a man. At the start these men were all rogues and picaros, but the form later told of more honest men, men who for other reasons never settled, never came to rest in any home, but wandered throughout their lives, or at least through many years, until at last they found some home, and their tale ended. Or they found a home in a grave, and their tale ended there.

Even as the tale of driftage is not writ by the driftage itself, but by wind and wave, so the tale of the picaro is writ only in part by the man himself. He comes to some town or settlement, and there finds new men, new women, new customs, and new things. To these he reacts, according to his heart, until he is either cast out from this place, or he leaves of his own will — in this the picaro differs from driftage: he has some small rule over his fate.

Odysseus was the first picaro the West told of, and though Homer framed his tale in terms of a good man seeking home after years away at war, even Homer’s Odysseus partakes of some qualities of the rogue. A rogue is also a trickster, and the trickster is an ancient and well-beloved figure in tales told the world over since the first tales were spun. The cleverness of Odysseus is also sly, his wit is also playful; what has come down to us through Homer is heavy with longing and love, as befits a tale told by or for the women left at home, but even so we can see, with a slight shift of the prism or lens through which we eye the tale, the twinkle in the wanderer’s eye, that has good fun in his lies and frauds and trickery.

The Picaresque Tale

The picaresque tale differs from other tales, in that its structure is loose. It is more a series of episodes, of smaller tales, like a cycle of tales, than a fully-formed and framed tale. Not like a spire but like a group of huts, maybe. What we the audience will take from such a tale, then, lies more in the way we see the episodes as they lie alongside one another, some in harmony and others in dispute. And when we see all these in their jumble, we glean some overall impression of either the man, or his time (and the world through which he wandered).

The Tale of a Man

Let him be rascal or saint, the wanderer in the picaresque tale is shown to us in mosaic. Each of the episodes serves as its own tessera, and in itself says little. Only when we see all the tesserae en groupe do we espy the picture as a whole of the man. This is the tale of character, of the memorial of a man, and the wanderer is the focus in this kind of picaresque tale. The talesman will then choose out the places the wanderer finds, and the people he meets there, with an eye to how his wanderer’s dealings with them will shine light upon some new facet of his character. Repetition is only allowed here with variation: it’s what is new that we want to see. So the wanderer, after visiting an evil town, will come to a good one; or he will visit a second evil town and treat its people differently, and this will show us that he has changed.

What we recall from such a tale, is the character of the wanderer.

The Tale of a Time

Sometimes the wanderer is himself a blank, for the talesman casts his eye more upon the places his wanderer visits. (For example, Swift’s tales of Gulliver.) The wanderer becomes a slender thread from which to hang a series of short sketches of society in its aspects. Or the wanderer has a standard or ‘stock’ character, and we judge the places he visits according to the way they treat him. Here the wanderer does not change from place to place, he is constant in his way, and one village enthrones him, another scourges him.

It is usually the case that such tales are satirical, and point out the faults of all the places the wanderer visits; these places can either be different aspects of one land (usually the talesman’s own) or different lands within the talesman’s world or time.

Fantasy is often used in such tales in order to shield the talesman from his nation’s censors and jailers. But the fantasy does not truly tell of Eartherea, and comes closer to allegory or parable. The talesman does not tell us of strange lands and names for their own sake, but he means for us to unlock the clef to his roman and pierce the veil.

Exploration For Its Own Sake

The picaresque tale need not be bound to the Man or the Time, of course. Exploration of either the man or the time could be simply that — a looking-about to see what is there, and the talesman can simply challenge his own imagination about either, with no clear path forward.

If this is done to explore the Time, then a true Earthereal tale could be formed around this picaresque form. Usually such fantasy tales of late have used the Quest as an organizing principle, but it need not be so.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, May 29, 2008)