The Well-Trod Path

There may be many ways to name a tale, but is there one ‘best way’?

Only One of Many

Yesterday, in ‘A Path Apart,’ I wrote of my friend Tim Maloney (online at http://www.nakedrabbit.com) and his novel way of considering what a tale is and how a tale comes into being.

To sum it up (as well as I ken it), Tim thinks that tale-creation actually happens in the minds of the audience, as a sort of neurological habit, or reflex, or twitch. It is, indeed, part of the way men have of apprehending their lives and experiences. An habitual method of categorizing, organizing, clumping and lumping together all the disparate, even random, events we experience. We try to ‘make sense’ of the world, and always have. So we take a series of events and put them together into a beginning, middle, and end. Or rather, as Tim would say, ‘beginning, middle, and end’ only comprise one way of organizing the events, but that all the ways of organizing events create the tale of those events.

We have several reasons for wanting to do this, and we can count several ways in which this manner of treating the world helps us. (There are also ways in which this manner of treating the world hurts us, as for example when we feel the need to explain events through the agency of some manlike God, and build authoritarian rule based upon our understanding of this God we have invented just to ‘make the story work’ of all the events we have experienced.)

By the light of this theory, the Classical Dramatic Narrative Structure, as first set forth by Aristotle, and ever since elaborated and expounded upon by a host of thinkers and talesmen, is not the only, or ‘best’ way of considering the Tale. It is only one variety of Tale, and there are many more — an infinite number of varieties, as many as there are members of all the audiences to all the tales and events that ever came to be.

But, the ‘Best’?

I was born in the West. I grew up (for the most part) on Western fiction, tales told in the tradition of Aristotle’s ‘Beginning, Middle, and End,’ or the Classical Dramatic Narrative Structure. Thus I have learned this kind of tale best, and am most accustomed to this kind of tale, and I like this kind of tale (I also like tales that don’t fit the kind, but most of those tales I find in different cultural traditions, and represent a sort of literary tourism).

So even though I might accept Tim’s concept in theory, I remain bound by my own tastes, acquired over a lifetime. And so does my audience.

Herewith, the model of a talesman out of this tradition, composing his tale:

He will begin with some ideas — a character, setting, relationship, or some such thing. He will dwell upon these ideas, and around them he will begin to discern fogs coalescing into the shape of possible tales. In a sense, at this point, the talesman is doing in reverse what an audience does when it ‘makes’ a tale out of the events that it takes as a whole. Here the talesman is seeing a character, or an isolated event, or a setting, and he is meditating upon it while the answer to the unspoken question, What tale does this belong to? slowly forms in his imagination.

This period of gestation is crucial to our concern here.

During this time, everything is potential, everything is true, and every kind and manner of tale exists around these ideas — both tales of different linking events, and different kinds of tales, most of which, if Tim’s idea be true, are not of the Classical Dramatic Narrative Structure, but a few of which are.

Now, because our talesman is born of the West and its tradition of the CDNS, and the belief that only the CDNS makes for a ‘good’ tale, or indeed a ‘proper’ tale, as he begins to winnow through these potential tales, he will cast aside all those many that do not belong to the West’s CDNS tradition, and hold on only to those that do. He will further sift through the potential CDNS candidates, feeling for which seems best to him, to be the strongest in emotional power, to move him the most, to fit in best with the CDNS.

Having settled upon one such model, our talesman will go on to knead and shape it further. In this part of the process he will also be guided by the model of the CDNS, he will try to make this tale fit the CDNS as he understands it.

In this way the talesman not only obeys the dictates of the CDNS, he also furthers its dominance. For when we in the audience hear his tale, we will find one more example of the CDNS for our entertainment, and all the power artistry and talent of the talesman will have been put to use to make this CDNS tale as entertaining and as moving as he can. This will further a tacit, not even consciously grasped, belief in us, that this is the best and only kind of tale, the ‘true and proper meaning of a tale.’

The children in the audience will hear this tale, and will enjoy it, and they will grow up on this and many other tales, all out of this tradition. So the model perpetuates itself.

So when Diana Wynne-Jones puts her hand to reshaping her tales, after feeling her way through them with as little foreplanning as possible, she will guide her thoughts according to this model of tale, when she asks herself what parts fit and what parts don’t fit, and how to make the tale better, a ‘complete and coherent whole.’

So when Leigh Brackett shelved some of her tales, begun with an opening image and no more of a plan than that, she may have been guided by the awareness that ‘this isn’t a proper tale.’ And more: she may have known, ‘no editor will buy this.’

For editors too are born into this common tradition, and regard themselves as keepers of the flame, while not even realizing, most of them, that the CDNS is not the only way a tale can be built.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, June 28, 2008)