A different concept of what makes a tale
Over at http://www.nakedrabbit.com Tim Maloney has been running a series of notes he wrote up while at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. They really are amusing, even hilarious — I liken them to Hunter S. Thompson in his prime. Though the films he writes about are no longer new, the notes or ‘ramblings’ or even ‘ravings’ of Mr Maloney are a great boon to all of us film fans who have never gone to the festival. This is the honest-to-God experience of 90% of festival-goers, those who just love movies and don’t have limousines to take them about, or golden press passes and red carpets. I tell you, when I read these pieces, I could smell the dogshit on the streets, baking in the midi sun.
His last piece, Cannes Diary Day 9 is online at http://nakedrabbit.com/x/?p=145 and in this one Mr Maloney went beyond his usual excellence to form a couple of ‘digressions’ on first, ‘the nature of success and how it has ignored me completely,’ and second, ‘the nature of Narrative.’
It is the latter that interests me here.
In this short essay, Mr Maloney puts forth the notion that story exists in the mind of the audience, and not, primarily, in the art of the talesman. This story-begetting is not an intellectual act nor yet an act of will on our part, but is a sort of neurological twitch — a part of being human, a part of the essence of our nature. Tim does not say this, but I gather that this would tie in with the basic pattern-recognition that allows us to spot predators that would eat us, and underlies all our logic, in a way. In short this concept of narrative says that it derives from basic traits we need to survive. Not that we need tales to survive, but that we need to recognize patterns, and shape order out of the chaos of sensory details that assaults us every second we are alive; and by the way, we have created ‘stories’ out of this same impulse.
Therefore (as Tim would have it):
Narrative contains
Cinema which can encompass
Story which can be of the type we call
CDNS [Classical Dramatic Narrative Structure]And most definitely NOT
CDNS is the perfection of
Story which is required for
Cinema
This notion goes so far beyond my own ideas of talesmanship, lamed as it is by the shadow of this ‘Classical Dramatic Narrative Structure,’ that I must offer it as an alternative to any who might take my writings too far as model.
Aristotle, then, did not come up with his famous ‘Beginning, Middle, and End’ except that this was the way his own rigorous, logical mind saw the poems and drama of his day — the only way he could see them.
The vigorous outline I recommended yesterday, in the post titled ‘The Outline,’ would not be needed at all. Diana Wynne-Jones’s way of composing is just as valid as the clockwork preparations of Upton Sinclair. Leigh Douglass Brackett’s discarded manuscripts might well have been interesting tales after all, no matter what she thought of them, no matter how deep her despair of them.
A series of events, grouped and marked off somehow, we will, perforce, shape and assemble into something like an order, a meaning, a tale. What groups or marks these events? A film begins to unreel, it projects upon a screen, the film runs out, the projection stops. The talesman begins to speak, he speaks to us, he stops. We take what we have heard, and we twitch it into order, shape.
(Composed on keyboard Friday, June 27, 2008)
1 comment:
Thanks again for reading my blather, and double thanks for referring to it here.
Geez, though, don't take it quite so hard, this new theory of mine. For one, I don't think removing the talesman and his art is a necessary step to take. Because I aver that the audience creates order out of any series of events presented this doesn't mean the storyteller is useless by any means. There will still be those who tell better than others, and we will always value those who do.
My only point is that the audience brings a lot to the equation, and the good talesman is one who understands this and can work with it; that your audience comes to a film, book, play, TV show, novel, short story, fairy tale, what-have-you with a built-in mechanism for enjoying it. And a desire to enjoy it!
The "good" story is not at all only in the minds of the audience, but rather a kind of pas-de-deux between the skills of the talesman and the desires of the audience. Think about it - this actually reinforces what you have written about the value of oral tradition and the purity of stories told when the audience is present for the developing and the telling of the story.
Although no on in the filed of film studies is talking about spectatorship in this way, I have to thank Frank Daniel, once again, for suggesting it. It was in one of his lectures where he talked about the relationship between writer and (in this case, as it was a screenwriting class) viewer. He likened it to a kind of contract or trust between them, and emphasized the responsibility the talesman has to shepherd the audience through the tale.
Post a Comment