Prime the Pump

The tales a talesman hears relate to the tales that he will tell

Text and Sound

For the past few days we’ve been looking at a possible future of talesmanship, when everybody has to work more like peasants, and the leisure times of princes and lords, which the middle class has enjoyed for over a century, fades away again to await the next blossoming of human civilization (if it should ever come again). In such an age, the only tales we will be able to enjoy will be the tales told and listened to, for to read demands that we use both our eyes and our hands — and we those will be occupied with our work.

The question then comes up, how will a new era of oral storytelling differ from the text-based era we have all grown up on?

For us in the audience, the switch will be simple enough. We will just cease to pick up the books that we once read and listen instead, to live recitations or to recordings.

For the talesman, though, things will be quite different.

Hear That You May Speak

One of the best bits of advice for a talesman is to read, that he may learn how to write. But reading will only teach you to write in the same vein as you have read. Tales composed to be read are, as we’ve seen, composed quite differently than tales composed to be recited or performed and heard.

Thus, you must indulge in listening to tales in order that you come to understand better, and intuitively, how to compose your own tales to be listened to.

This involves a quirk of the mind. The tales you take in as audience teach you a sort of model of the tales you will compose as talesman. This creates a sort of pattern, if you will, a modus operandi of how to go about it. A craftsman of any sort, when he examines a piece of work in his field, does so with a second eye, which seeks to sense the manner in which the work was created. This he understands on a deeper level, a right-brain level, the level of muscle memory, of the templates of working in so far as the craftsman understands them.

So it is with the sort of craftsman that is a talesman. When a talesman hears or reads a tale, he does so as reader and audience, but also as the potential composer or re-drafter of the tale. As he reads or listens, he feels as if the true talesman of the tale were leading him by the hand through the process of the composition.

The upshot is that talesmen who would try their hand at a new form of talespinning, such as composing oral tales where they had spent all their careers in composing written tales, must listen to tales with an eye towards understanding, on a deep or intuitive level, how to compose in this new form.

What to Hear

And yet, it is not any tale that you must hear. The radio model can best be learnt by listening to the many recordings of the radio shows of the 1930s to 1950s. The recordings still exist and are available online and on CD. The audiobooks of today, however, will not teach you how to compose tales for recitation. Today’s audiobooks are merely readings from text that was composed to be read off a printed page.

What seems to me best is to hear recordings of tales that were composed to be recited. These would be recorded by ethnographic and folklore scholars. Then you could hear recordings of fairy tales, and modern tales composed after the manner of folk and fairy tales, such as those written by Italo Calvino. Finally you could listen to recordings of tales written to be read, but composed in the past, when oral talesmanship still lingered in the minds of the writers of the day. This last is not the best solution, and represents at best a half-step toward the type of tale you want to model your own tales upon. It does however have the advantage that it lets you listen to works of master talesmen.

If you cannot find recordings of these, then the next best step would be to find printed versions of the tales, and recite them yourself. Record your recitation and listen to it played back. Indeed, this might be the best way to go about it, since you will be more active in recording and reciting, and the training will stick better.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, May 10, 2008)