The Fourth State

What is the power that fiction holds?

It was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Bardelys recalled, who had claimed that meditation constituted a third state of consciousness beside waking and sleep. No doubt the Maharishi had only repeated ancient Vedic lore, but Bardelys had come all by himself to the notion that there was a fourth state — the state of following a tale.

He came to this conclusion in writing posts to his blog. He had begun the blog awkwardly enough (as anyone could tell by glancing through his blog’s archives) in a sort of editorial mode, now formal now more conversational, feeling for the right tone, but always writing with exposition in mind, trying to dig at the truth in whatever topic had come to him. Then he had read the brilliant columns in which Joyce Anstruther Maxtone-Graham had created ‘Mrs Miniver’ (written in the last years of the 1930s under the byline of ‘Jan Struther’) — and suddenly it struck him what a perfect way it was to write a blog. Create a blog character to follow and show the fellow wrestling with an issue. And so Bardelys did.

It took only two or three such posts to induce the trance he now felt at the simple suggestion of his blog-persona’s name. The dullest topic treated in his most awkward manner now sparkled with life for him. He felt a fresh sense of urgency in the blog — it became important again — seductive — true.

True enough that Bardelys even came to feel for the blog as though it were a tale he told. That was when he began to wonder at the power of tales. The tales that Bardelys had loved had held suspense, dramatic situations, danger, sex, strong characters, in a word — Romance. The blog had none of this.

And yet it held his heart now, though it had never done so before, at least not in the same way.

Was it in the telling or the following, he wondered. It felt more like the following — as if he were the audience of his own blog posts. Yet clearly he was the talesman and not the audience (unless in truth every talesman followed his own tales, or else the tales took on a life of their own), and there was no true ‘story’ in the thread of random blog posts.

The ‘tale,’ then, was so slight as a baby spider’s strand. The character was mere shadow (his own, which must add to its appeal to himself at least). There was no building from post to post striving toward climacteric.

And yet they held him.

Why?

He could only conclude that there was something in the act of following a character through his outer life and inner thoughts that induced this oddly powerful sense of double existence — of being himself, Bardelys, and the blog-persona, at the same time.

This sense of being two at once (or was it only the losing of himself, Bardelys, into the blog-persona’s shadow? He could not grasp the distinction with a fine enough touch) was the heart of this fourth state of mind, after waking, sleep, and meditation.

(Composed on pen-top Thursday 31 July 2008)

The Search Remains the Same

New treats tempt Bardelys to new explorations of software with which to keep track of himself.

Ah! JreePad! Bardelys thought, seeing a new version, with new features!

The wonderful thing was, that it had gone beyond Hank Hagedorn’s original TreePad in allowing ‘html nodes.’ These were in code, either html or a variant on the plain-text markup ‘Textile,’ and could be edited as raw text, or else viewed as formatted.

This intrigued Bardelys no end. It just might be what he was looking for. It also allowed for wikified ‘CamelCase’ word links, that would create like-named nodes on the fly. Unfortunately, it did not seem to have the capability to track back to its referents, which would have given Bardelys a way to get around tagging.

Bardelys liked Textile, ‘humane markup.’ He liked its markup of block levels. Often the plain text markup schemes required beginning and ending markup, which made search-and-replace transformations a bit trickier (it called for regular expressions, at which Bardelys was no whiz).

There was one significant drawback to JreePad and Textile, and that was on the Mac at least (and Bardelys presumed on Win32 and Linux and the Java .jar file too), JreePad implemented only some of Textile’s markup. Even the User Manual that came with JreePad showed that, and it was curious that a developer would show that his code didn’t work, and not even make some such comment as, ‘These aren’t implemented yet.’ However, one nice bit about the Textile written nodes, was that exporting them to html transformed them to xhtml, and smartened the quotations, and put in entities for em- and en-dashes. Very nice indeed.

Then, OpenOffice.org. Bardelys had been intrigued enough to check out the latest beta of the 3.0 code. He found the new way comments were handled to be a vast improvement. There was no way to tag different items, as far as he could see, and the Navigator pane still didn’t allow the user to collapse some branches of the tree while leaving others at the same level open. This meant that in a document of enough headings, the Navigator listed them all, and the list was too long to fit in the panel, making it much more onerous to move sections about. And the Master Document Navigator pane only showed the documents if the user wished to rearrange them; this was a flat, single-depth list.

OpenOffice.org had other nice features, though. User-defined dictionaries, and autocomplete functions, and automatic capitalization of sentences, as well as smart quotes. (The chief difficulty in such bells and whistles, in Bardelys’ opinion, was their seductiveness: after using them, he found he relied on them, and quickly slipped into the laziest sort of keyboardist.)

LyX, ah, LyX! Here was a puzzle, a long-term flirtation with no resolution as yet. It was nice to WYSIWYM, and see things nicely laid out. The new table of contents navigation pane could be opened or collapsed at any branch. LyX had TeX-style ‘smart quotes’ which were not curly. But LyX also allowed its files to be maintained in compressed form, saving a great deal of disk space for long files; it allowed Bardelys to make multi-part documents, with the Mother Doc referring to the Baby Docs.

Ah, but…

What was the problem with LyX? Bardelys had taken it up and toyed with it, idly, and never worked up enough interest or enthusiasm to put it to use in a real project, the only way to get through the initial awkwardness of any powerful and complex application. And so ever coy, he flirted and left her panting.

He must look on.

One thing he had determined: for his writer’s logs, that included word counts and tallies, there was nothing to match a spreadsheet and the awe-inspiring feeling of seeing the totals change ‘automagically.’ So that was that.

The blog postings, that were so numerous, could only properly be done on Scrivener, so he was trapped that way, uni-platfomationally as it were.

For the news items, and the farm journal, he would look on.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, July 30, 2008)

Milton’s Daughter in Digital Form

What is the best application to organize a talesman’s work?

Organization, thought Bardelys, was a hobgoblin.

He was looking through the Internet, searching for some means to organize his matter. This meant a tool that would:

• Organize his tales
• Make a journal of his writing
• Make a journal of his farming efforts
• Collect and organize all the random bits of information he found on the internet each day, in some form that would be easily searched and catalogued.

In addition, Bardelys considered, the application should run on all platforms, or at least MS-Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. It should deal with files of standard format that did not take up too much space. It should allow for some ‘prettiness’ — Bardelys was not normally given to liking tools for the sake of their looks above their use, but some fanciness in a file helped its readability. Indents for such divisions as blockquotes, for example, italics and bold, and headers (which should help with navigation).

Now, what had he found?

To begin with, there was http://www.openoffice.org. Its main drawbacks were no tagging ability (a minor quibble, and no deal-breaker for Bardelys), and that its navigator could only show all levels up to a given point: it couldn’t hide some level 3s, for example, while showing other level 3s. Also the navigator pane did not allow for block-level editing, in the sense that it didn’t allow its user to copy or delete a whole block. This function was available if one used a master-document, but the master-documents had their own slight problem, in that they could not edit subordinate linked documents directly; instead one had to open the linked documents in a separate process. Also the application did not have a calendar function, which Bardelys loved as a navigational tool.

Then there was http://www.celtx.com an application intended for screenwriting and movie scheduling. This was based, amazingly enough, on the Mozilla foundation’s Firefox browser; truly a tribute to what could be done with XUL and open source tools. (Bardelys shuddered to think what would have become of Netscape had Time-Warner-AOL had kept it proprietary and closed; no doubt there would have been an end to development, and security holes would have forced almost all its users to abandon it.) Celtx was too new, and yet, and yet… it had some tagging, it had calendaring built-in, thanks to its Lightning component. He meant to try it, although he was fairly sure that his uses were too far from its intended use, and it would prove in the end unsuited for him. There was another problem in its file format. Bardelys didn’t know what it was, and couldn’t find anyone who could tell him. He imagined that it was compressed, a group of files, probably in html or xml formats, and gathered in a bundled and compressed using zip or gzip compression algorithms.

Another approach altogether would be to use a collection of separate files in a single directory or folder, and sub-directories within that. They could even be text files, should Bardelys be willing to forego all markup (a slight compromise would be to use one of the plain-text markup formats, that could then be transformed into html or some other format — multimarkdown came to mind, along with xilize and text2tags). jEdit was a java-centric cross-platform text editor with plugins that handled projects in this way, and worthy of consideration.

Then there was the wiki. Oh, many forms of wikis! But TiddlyWiki and its offspring were tempting. Some had built-in calendar plugins, all had tagging. The form could be edited using a modern browser (Firefox again!) and was a self-contained bundle of html, ajax, and css. The problem with TiddlyWiki was that it was so big. The ‘empty’ template file ran a few hundred kilobytes these days, and took a while to load. And that was before Bardelys added his own information. On the other hand, each instance of TiddlyWiki was its own file and program, in a sense: Bardelys for his journals might make up a separate file for each year, or each quarter, or even each month.

Getting back to http://www.openoffice.org he might choose a Text document or a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet held its own divine terrors for Bardelys. The thing could be so powerful, it was tempting. And yet Bardelys had never gotten the hang of spreadsheets. This began decades ago, in the 1980s, when Bardelys chose word- and text-processing over spreadsheets. This was in the days of CPM, and later, DOS; Bardelys had not yet worked on a Macintosh and had no familiarity with the GUI. In those days, the spreadsheet was for numbers only, and for accountancy, really. There was no appeal there for the talesmen of the digital realm.

He knew he might cheat, of course. He might choose something like Scrivener, the wonder word-processor for OSX. It wasn’t cross-platform, but it was wonderful, and could back up its projects in multimarkdown plain-text markup, which could then be compressed further to save space for backups.

Treepad, now — he had forgotten that one. Long ago, years back, in another age (truly! for came before the fascists wrote finis to the Republic of the United States), Bardelys had used Treepad to keep track of what he had found interesting on the internet. Treepad had a wonderful way of organizing. It was plain text, of course, in its Mac and Linux variants and imitators. But it was a while since Bardelys had looked … maybe some new Treepad variant had arisen…

Bardelys hunched over his keyboard and launched Firefox, and went searching once more.

Truly, hope springs forever in the limitless world of cyberspace.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, July 29, 2008)

Dreams and Tales

The talesman dreams in different ways

Bardelys looked out across the fine sunlit day and felt his loss. Mowing the false orchard two days before he had hurt his back, twisting about with the scythe as the book told; it cut broader and made fine windrows but his body was unfamiliar with this dance, or else he moved wrong; either way his lower back now pinched on his left even with each step, and he must give up work today. Another day lost, gone from a dwindling stack! It pained him. More than that, it grieved him, for grief seemed to be Bardelys’ natural state.

In the enforced idleness he felt once more the tug of dreams. They called him from two sides — from Eartherea first of all, the shifting land, the land of heart’s desire. And on the far side the dreams called him from the vast Sea of the dead, the ghosts that walked and drove around the country in cars, and went to malls and movies as though the past and its dead ways could come again out of the grave their conceiving had made.

But he knew that the ghosts were dead even if they themselves did not, and he had all his life mocked the vanity of men who said they were gods. As for sweet Eartherea, though he loved Her dearly, he knew there was nothing to trust in Her seduction unless it be the symbols and shadow of what She showed.

Dreams… He had slept cold under a blanket in the night, until he got hot and slid into vivid dreams. In these dreams he had become aware that they would make good tales. He had then set to shaping them, even as he would have shaped tales he told when he was awake.

He had known that the dream about the dwarf boy, now, had needed a scene where he heard the lad express hope for his future — and the boy’s mother shared his hope. This scene would prove stronger if Bardelys himself (for he was a friend to the boy in the dream) had found a letter from the doctors about the boy’s chances of growing taller when he got older. The letter should be for the mother, but somehow it fell into Bardelys’ hands and he had opened and read it, and had kept quiet about it. (Just why Bardelys had read the letter and kept it a secret, he couldn’t remember now, sitting in the afternoon sun, but he did remember thinking in the dream in the moment he had thought to add this bit, that it would draw admirably on the tears of the audience to hear the little boy speak with cheer about his future, while we all knew he would never get any bigger than he was then.) He also, Bardelys himself, would shed tears, and at that point in the tale, would be unable to bring himself to tell the mother — how could he break her hope that way?

He had awakened in sweat and heart-sickness, and even so he had rolled over and tried to fall asleep again to take back the dream.

Often enough in his life, Bardelys had sought to go back into dreams, even nightmares. But he took it as another mark of his calling that now he would try to rewrite his dreams as he dreamt them. It wasn’t that he became lucid in the dream, for he never became aware that he was dreaming. Rather it was as if he dreamed twin dreams at once — the dream of the dwarf boy wherein Bardelys was a friend to the family, and a second dream wherein Bardelys was writing the tale. He felt moved to tears in both.

(Composed on pen-top Monday 28 July 2008)

Idle Thoughts While the Rain Falls

On the Earth but not of it, Bardelys is taken by dreams

Bardelys sat under the dwarf apple tree and watched the cold white raindrops fall. He was pleased to see the mounds of hay and weeds darkening under the trees. He hoped the rain was soaking through the mulch into the earth below and that the worms would rise to the bait.

Bardelys had no faith in his husbandry. Although in Bardelys’ philosophy all men should be farmers just as they should be lovers and citizens and eaters and singers, he knew only too well that all mens’ talents were not equal. And Bardelys celebrated the earth and the things of Earth, and he knew (or felt) far away from her. His own home lay far away in the Lost Land, Eartherea.

Eartherea, Eartherea! How Bardelys longed for Her! He had dreamt of Her again in the Gray Hour that comes with the Gray Wolf in the Night’s last gasp. She had appeared before him in the rich gown of a Renaissance madonna, with strands of pearls in Her pale golden hair. She had smiled and nodded and left him trembling. Cesare Borgia himself would have been shaken at the apparition. Bardelys had sat on the edge of the hammock that served him for a summer bed, his breath rasping in his throat before he could lift his old clay up and draw on his field-work garb. The shirt had been still damp from yesterday’s toil.

The dawn that day had been bright, but before Bardelys had done with his first round of mowing a black-gray cloud crawled across the sky so low Bardelys could have thrown a hard green apple into it. The first of the showers held back at least long enough for him to end the dawn round of his chores.

Now the rain fell hard. The air was cold. White tears of lightning cut the clouds. The old maples showed the gleaming undersides of their leaves, like coy maidens in breathless bawdiness. And Bardelys sighed, and thought on Summer’s end, and wondered how ever could he hope to complete all that he had to do before the Earth died again into sleep.

And he thought, How much easier it all would be, if only the weeds were edible and filling, and maple boughs like potatoes!

On Eartherea they would be. But She only laughed at his foolish dreams. And the tireless Work tapped His foot and waited.

(Composed on pen-top Sunday 27 July 2008)

Calling and Calling

What is it that earns the title ‘Talesman’?

Bardelys looked at his hands.

They were stained with sap and juice from the weeds he had been pulling. His fingernails were worn to the quick, and ragged. The fingers were broad and coarse. They were the hands of any worker in the fields.

He wondered whether a man was what he did. If so, then his nature must change as he went through life. A nursling, a student, an apprentice, a lover, a scapegrace, a wanderer. Some men, Bardelys considered, took up one trade and held to it all their lives, while others went from trade to trade. A seaman, now, might hole up in a port and work at some tasks for three or four years before he took to the sea again. But a seaman was a seaman for all his life in spite of this.

What about a talesman?

Once upon a time, Bardelys had been a talesman. It was his trade by training and the great love of his life. He loved telling tales, dreaming on them and shaping them. He loved this more than he had loved any of the women who had come and gone from his life. Because he loved it, and only left it to return to it, did that mean he was a talesman now and forever, the way a seaman belonged to the sea? There was a difference, though. Everyone knew a seaman on sight. They smelled of the sea, they marked their bodies with signs of the sea, they swore sea-dogs’ oaths, their skin was dark and leathery from the brine and the sun that blazes upon the mirroring waters. A talesman, on the other hand, had no look, and if he didn’t carry with him the tools of his trade or wear any dress that bespoke him of the brotherhood, no one would know what he was.

If men didn’t take him for a talesman, and he didn’t tell tales, was Bardelys not a talesman any longer?

The strange part of the riddle, he thought as he bent down again and worked his hoe, was that he felt most like a talesman when he wasn’t telling tales. It bit him like homesickness, the feeling of his calling, and when he looked at his hands, he didn’t think they were farmer’s hands, but made for the shaping of words and magic in the hearts of an audience. He felt somehow that even though it had been so long since he had climbed onto a barrel or plank before a crowd in the marketplace, he knew better how to make a tale than he had long ago. He felt that working in the earth had given it to him, that dealing with the other men in the fields, and hearing their stories, and watching the hawks float high above the fresh-cut fields, and the sparrows darting in the evening, swooping up insects out of thin air, that the knowledge of shaping a tale had grown in him, as though these common things were part of a lifelong apprenticeship.

And yet his heart told him plainly, No. It wasn’t true at all, and the only way a man learned his trade was by working it, let him be a potter or cooper or talesman, it made no difference there. He, Bardelys, only felt he had grown in his trade because he knew no better — because he hadn’t felt the shame of trying to tell a well-shaped tale and failing, of losing his audience, boring them, hearing stony silence where the laughter should be, or a chortle where sobs and sighs should come. All he had done of late was to talk in the way of common things, and tell shortly of the day’s happenings, with a flourish here or there, such that the other toilers didn’t know how to do. And because he judged himself alongside them, his only companions for some years now, he judged himself better than he was.

Of late, Bardelys thought, taking out his stone to sharpen the hoe, and feeling the heat of the sun on his back, the dreams had come to him more strongly. He felt the old longing, to speak, to caper, to entertain. It taunted him — daunted him as well, so that though he toyed in his heart with taking it up again, and trying to shape some simple tale, or to pick up again one of the threads he had been working on for years now, unfinished fragments with only the promise of what he had wanted them to be, he never went so far as to do it. Not yet. And yet, was not the whisper growing louder, and the longing more intense?

A call came from up the valley. Bardelys turned to see the old man waving, calling him to the house. The other men were already at the valley’s head, and the sun, Bardelys noticed, had fallen already below the naked brown shoulder of the hill.

He shouldered his hoe and followed after the old man.

Maybe tomorrow he would take up one of those threads, and try to finish it while he worked the earth.

Or maybe the day after.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, July 26, 2008)

Man, Mood, and Fate

What the streams and currents of the River of a tale amount to

The three determinants of the random actions of a tale are man, mood, and fate. Another way to say this is man, world, and fate; I consider the ‘world’ of objects and setting to be implied in the word ‘man,’ because every man is born from his world and acts within it; the world shapes the man and the man shapes the world.

Another word for these three is genre.

The man (plus world) gives us our basic setting. The mood gives us the answer to the question of how the talesman considers his man, whether he takes him seriously or lightly; if the tale be comedy or tragedy, in short. ‘Fate’ is the Rider, the talesman himself, as he turns and twists and forces his story threads toward the ending he has in mind. (Not every talesman knows his end when he sets out with us on the journey, but as he completes the stages, he gets a better and better idea of where the tale seems to be headed, and where it wants to go, and against this he has to decide whether to let the tale take its ‘natural course’ — and thus probably surprise none of its readers — or whether to put the spurs in and twist the bridle, and try to aim the tale in some other direction.)

So the talesman takes his Man, and considers him against the background of his Setting, the time and place in which he lives. The notion of ‘genre’ implies that some time-and-place settings are visited by more talesmen more often than others; these frequentations score, if you will, ‘grooves’ in the platter of eternity. Both talesmen and we in the audience grow familiar with these settings, having visited them often in other tales, and the sum of these tales creates a mythos of the setting.

Next, the talesman adjusts his Mood anent his man. Will he take him in all seriousness, will he joke around, will he think to invert the usual ways of looking at this man his time & place? The fresher a genre (or the fresher this new turning to it) is, the more traditional the Mood; but when a genre has been often visited recently in the past, both talesmen and audiences tire of it, and won’t be satisfied with any traditional or usual approach unless it is conducted with rare élan and brio.

Finally, the talesman uses Fate, which is in the end his own controlling hand, to ensure that the twists and turns of the tale are most entertaining according to how the talesman considers his audience will find them.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, July 25, 2008)

Course of the River

The thread through the tale’s spine

“There are a thousand places to put the camera … and there is only one.”

(paraphrase attributed to Ernst Lubitch)

I generally start a tale with two points in mind. I may have more but I almost always have the start and the end.

In between lie a thousand paths.

Every scene holds its choices for every character. We can think of these as binary to make things simple, so every scene gives us two possible outcomes — call it ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ If our hero acts randomly we thus have branching from every scene two possible outcomes, and each added scene will double the total possible paths the tale can follow.

And yet we hold that end-point in mind.

Somehow I must ride my hero home to the end I want.

The hero acts not in random choices, so the paths dwindle in number. But his choices are not confined to simply ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ And other characters have their choices to make. The choices of other characters will turn out to be more random than those the hero makes. Here’s the general rule: the more ill-formed a character is, the greater range his choices can include. This means as a practical matter that more minor characters have more freedom of choice in a tale.

Beyond the choices characters make there lie the vagaries of non-charactters. These include animals not defined well enough to count as characters as well as inanimate objects that we see as not wholly ruled by physical law (by this I mean that the tale doesn’t tell us enough so that we can forecast the effect of the physical laws that rule these objects), and such larger forces as weather and fatality.

Mix half a dozen characters in a room. Add conflict among them and within each man so that a slight shift will move him to act differently. Stir in some beasts and objects, weather and fate.

Anything can happen!

I find more ‘play’ if you will, in the middle scenes of my tales than those at the start. As I near the end I know I must ‘ride’ my characters objects and fate more strictly in order to reach the end I want. Sometimes my characters will move differently than I wish — sometimes they define themselves in ways that defy the ends I saw when I set out with them on the journey of their tale. It happens rarely though — I deem this a failure on my part to grasp firmly enough the three core parts to a tale in utero: the start the end and the world in which I find my tale.

This world comprises three matters — mood, man, and fate.

I will write more on these three and their kinship tomorrow.

(Composed on pentop Thursday 24 July 2008)

The Line the Word and the Thing Itself

The more abstract the talesman’s tools, the more play exists for us in the audience to reshape the tale in our own minds

Yesterday in ‘I Yam What I Yam’ I wrote about the joy of the first Max Fleischer studio Popeye cartoons. One thing I love about them is the linework, which is flexible and almost 3-dimensional in its effects.

Maybe it’s not so clear where the connection lies between pen and ink drawings on animation cells, and telling stories. It involves the level of abstraction and what that means for us as we hear or read or watch a tale.

Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics has a very nice section on how cartoonists can create drawings that are more or less ‘realistic’ (or looked at the other way, more or less ‘abstract’) and I highly recommend you check out what he has to say.

The gist of McCloud’s argument is that more-abstract or ‘cartoony’ figures allow more of us to identify with the characters represented. The more ‘realistic’ figures, on the other hand, are so specific that we understand them as ‘other’ than us, not archetypes, not ink-blots that allow us to fill them with our own dreams and longings.

In just this way, telling tales using words alone can be thought of as the most abstract way to represent events to an audience. How many times have we read a story or book, then gone to see the movie adaptation of it, and thought the actors cast in the roles don’t fit the way we ‘saw’ the characters at all? We each of us create some sort of image of the characters as we hear or read the tales, and these images are more or less well formed, depending on how imaginative we are and how visual our brains can be.

It lies in the talesman’s power to make his characters more or less amenable to this process of visualization by his audience. He can describe a character more or less specifically, he can focus on one or two visual traits and leave the others alone, not even mentioning them. Or he can leave a character as a name alone, or even a mere functionary noun such as ‘the coachman’ or ‘the bartender.’ There is also the character of the character. We tend to build composite sketches in our imaginations of various ‘types’ of people, whether loud and outgoing, flirtatious, bold, shy, nosy, grasping, generous, or what have you. These archetypal ‘Everyman’ characters are built up within societies over time, and in seeing standard portrayals of Jealousy, Greed, Power, Asceticism, we come to draw our own versions of these stock social characters. I’m sure that different cultures have different ways to represent these stock characters, and that the stock ‘company’ of one culture will differ from that of another culture. At the same time, there should be overlaps and parallels. An ascetic will likely be seen as thin and gaunt, with large deep eyes, in most of the world. A man of the world, jolly and hearty, is likely to be drawn as stocky or overweight, with laugh-lines about his eyes.

One interesting sidelight to this topic is where McCloud discusses Hergé’s famous ‘Tintin’ cartoon. Hergé (and his stable of background artists, inkers, and assistants) drew the characters in quite the abstract or ‘cartoony’ style, but was very specific and much more realistic in drawing ships, machinery, buildings, and backgrounds. What might seem at a remove as being a divided and unharmonious approach was rendered smoothly due to consistency in line; the backgrounds are not ‘photo-realistic’ by any means, and are only drawn with brush and pen and ink, and filled with flat expanses of color, like the cartoony characters.

This approach, McCloud believed, allowed us to accept the world as ‘real’ but left the characters as more or less cyphers, blanks into which we could fill ourselves, our dreams. Tintin himself, after all, has a face no more developed than Charlie Brown of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts strip.

The equivalent in prose might be a world with detailed specific descriptions of background and devices and customs, but whose characters are vague, un-concrete sketches, identified by name and occupation alone, so that we have only their personalities to guide us in imagining what they might look like.

In yesterday’s post, I noted:

More realism = less fun!

I’ll extend that here in regard to all tales:

Less concreteness = more Romance!

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, July 23, 2008)

I Yam What I Yam

Max Fleischer’s first years animating Elzie Segar’s Popeye

I just watched the first 2 disks of the Popeye cartoon collection. These are all B&W and made between 1933 and 1935 and they are great.

Volume. There is a ‘volume’ in the linework of the main characters that is spellbinding to me. Somehow the way that Bluto Popeye and Olive are drawn, they seem to be 3 dimensions. I think it relates to the thickness of the outlines, and the beautiful character design, use of blacks and gray tones in their outfits, as well as lots of wrinkle-lines around eyes for example.

(In a tribute on Jack Mercer, Popeye’s voice from 1935-1980 or so, they show clips from a 3d cgi Popeye adventure, Mercer’s last outing as the sailor. The ‘poppin’ fresh’ versions were utterly horrible... The grayscale line and wash drawings beat heck out of the cgi. I was amazed to see that Futurama had to invent processes to make cgi animation look like traditional line animation, I had thought that would be the simplest way, just get the computer to do all the in-betweening. It seems there’s a lot more to it than I had imagined.)

Voice Talent. Mae (My?) Questel was both Olive and Betty Boop? She had an amazing voice and an amazing control over it. I love hearing her Olive. I never appreciated her so much when I was a kid. In fact I didn’t pay much attention to Olive. The commentaries are really helping me to see and re-see what is in these cartoons.

Silent, then Radio? Fleischer production method amazed me: The toons are done MOS. Then when the toons were finished, all the sound people — voice actors, effects wizards, and musicians, got together in one room and they did the soundtrack all live, all together, all at once. There was something like the ‘follow the bouncing ball’ done for the pre-written dialogue, then Questel and the other voice actors were encouraged to ad-lib various mumbles. The weirdness of hearing these ‘spoken out loud thoughts’ as they described it, adds to the charm.

Operetta. I never liked the Disney insistence on music, but when I see something like ‘Barnicle Bill’ (which is said to be an almost shot-for-shot remake of a Betty Boop toon the Fleischers had done on the same song) I revise my opinion. ‘Barnicle Bill’ is my favorite indeed of all these toons so far. Using popular songs and writing new lyrics, and having the characters sing pivotal dialogues, transforms the toon. Similarly ‘You’ve Got to be a Football Hero,’ another toon based on a currently popular song, uplifts and transforms everything. Music makes for fantasy which somehow helps me to enter into the nonsense.

New York. Many of the commentators mention that the Fleischers, based in new york, created an urban world for Popeye, that was tougher, and more interesting, than the more bucolic world Walt Disney and other west coast animators were doing.

Funny animals. In the earliest of these toons, Popeye, Olive and Bluto are the only humans, the rest of the world populated by animals. This is weirdly interesting and I kind of miss it when they went to all-people extras. But that’s probably because there were more surreal, gratuitous sight gags in those early toons.

More realism = less fun!

Grayscale. I love the grayscale. Of course when I was a kid and watched all these, endlessly — Popeye was always one of my favorites, probably because I loved a good punch-out brawl, and these were the greatest — my TV was B&W and I had no way of seeing the difference between anything shot in color and that shot in B&W except, of course, that color often translates poorly when it’s only a question of values and not hues, and what was shot in B&W, toons and live action alike, got the values right.

Man these were wonderful.

The Many Masks of Mary Sue

Who (or What) is your own Mary Sue?

So it is not uncommon for talesmen to project themselves into their tales, or see themselves in their characters. And when they do so in a way that is obvious and trite, and embarrasses us in the audience, we call what they have made a ‘Mary Sue.’

Sometimes the Mary Sue falls awfully close to the tree, and is a virtual self-portrait; this is the usual case for fictionalized autobiographies and memoirs in which the author tends to paint himself with a brush that is over-flattering. Other times the Mary Sue is nothing like the author at all, at least not as we see him. Instead, the author draws himself as he would wish himself to be, or even as his inner soul draws itself.

For example, when I wrote in the post on ‘Mrs Miniver’ that —

Any of you who are bloggers should read and study the ‘Miniver’ columns, and prepare to be enlightened as to a whole other approach to your avocation

— it occurred to me to try my hand at my own ‘Mrs Miniver’ and reshape some blog posts in narrative form. But what name, and what personage?

The answer came in an image of an old, weary but wise talesman. A man much older than myself, from another time, an oral talesman who spins his yarns in an old marketplace not far from the wharves where ships sail in from faraway coasts and climes.

This struck me as quite odd. The image just popped into my head, and wasn’t plotted out by any means.

Why an old man? Why that old man?

As an idealized image of the traditional talesman, the figure, I suppose, appealed to me as representing the wisdom I pretend to carry in this blog (though of course that is far from the truth!), and the marketplace by the docks in the old sea-town is right out of Romance.

Why old, though?

And in pondering this, I recalled that I have often felt the appeal of great age. Even in my teens, I would doodle out old men’s heads. At the time I reckoned this was simply because the old, craggy head was easier to draw. The flesh was gaunt and tight, the underlying structure of the skull showed through, and this made the whole easier to draw. What’s easily done is often done.

But it went beyond that. I also wrote of ancient characters in my tales. They were not the heroes, but they exercised a special appeal to me.

It seems that in my heart of hearts I am and have ever been old.

And so when I thought of my own Mrs Miniver, he must be old. It is how I see myself.

You might ask yourself the same question. Let your mind go soft, relax, empty all thought, and let some image come into focus. Do this several times, in different moods and times of day. Ask for your own story avatar to come to you — not the bad Mary Sue, but the best, your Mrs Miniver. See who appears, how often he changes, and if any patterns develop.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, July 21, 2008)

Once Upon a Mary Sue

A Mary Sue that looks back is not one that dreams on

Mary Sue is a term that originated in fan fiction based upon established characters and series, in which a young talesman created his own proxy to enter the fictional universe at second hand, and be as wonderful as he wanted, with no flaws, little character, and the ability to charm all and save the day.

But if we look at the ‘Mary Sue’ in its broadest terms as any character that is the talesman’s storyland agent, then we can say that ‘Mrs Miniver,’ the character created in a series of London Times columns by Joyce Anstruther (AKA ‘Jan Struther’) is just as much a Mary Sue. There seems to be a great distinction, however.

The fan fiction Mary Sue allows the talesman to enter the dream world of the stories he has loved. Anstruther in contrast created her Mrs Miniver as a storyland equivalent for her own life. This device allowed her to write about her family, friends, and situations with licence to adjust, exaggerate, clarify, and veil, all in order the better to make her points and dramatise her situations. Yet all who read the ‘Mrs Miniver’ columns, collected in book form in Mrs Miniver, find it quite hard to see the fictional Miniver as anything other than Mrs Maxtone Graham, née Anstruther, herself. (It must have been trying for her children to be famous as well.)

Anstruther looked at Miniver contemporaneously, or at but a few weeks’ remove at most. Another form of Mary Sue is the fictionalized autobiography. Some of these memoirs are of the highest art.

Of course Mary Sue is no compliment, and usually refers to a weak character, a cliché, an awkward, laughable attempt by a youngster who dares to show the world his daydreams. The Mary Sue is so enchanting that all the ‘canon’ characters of the fictional world fall in love with her, name him to be their leader and king, are instantly won over by her every argument, and end by owing him their very lives.

There are fictionalized autobiographies that feature such heroes, and these we may quite properly call ‘Mary Sues.’ These are the Once Upon a Mary Sues.

There is for example Herman Wouk’s Youngblood Hawke, courageous, manly young aspiring novelist, soon to be world famous and the literary lion of his age.

We may approach with some trepidation, in fact, all novels that tell the tale of the brave, misunderstood novelist, the undiscovered genius. I cringe when I even see that this is the burden of a novel.

Far better for the novelist to choose to remove his hero at least a little from his own life’s situation. Let him make his hero a musical composer, a painter, an architect, any other profession rather than ‘author.’

Every layer, every veil, that the talesman can draw in between his storyland incarnation and his own situation, will force him to consider the character at a bit more of a remove, and he will then begin to see the character as a character indeed — someone other than himself. Every layer and veil that he can interpose between what we the audience know of the talesman’s own situation and his character’s, moreover, will put us that much further ‘off the scent’ and leave more of us without suspecting the sad truth that talesman = hero.

When we even sniff out the suspicion that such might be the case, right away we start to see the tale not as a tale in its own right, but as an extension and wish-fulfillment of its talesman. Then we start to cast our eye as much upon the talesman as the tale, and this leaves us with one foot in the tale, and one foot in the real world, forever asking, ‘Does this author really see himself in this way? Did this happen to the author in this way? Isn’t he just apologizing for himself, justifying himself, and making himself out to be better than in fact he is?’

By no coincidence at all, last night I saw again the full cut of Tornatorre’s Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (or plain Cinema Paradiso in the North American release), and found the autobiographical Mary Sue. This is a wonderful movie — the first 1/3 of it is, anyway — and yet there is much apologia pro vita sua in it (or at least, it strikes me as such; for I know nothing of Tornatorre’s life).

The hero, now a famous movie director (beware of movies that feature movie directors as heroes no less than novels that feature novelists as heroes!) has not been back to his home village in Sicily in more than 30 years. At last he does return, which prompts him to revisit his past in flashbacks that take up 2/3 of the movie’s running time. In the course of these flashbacks we see that the reason why the hero abandoned his childhood sweetheart, and never went back to the village, were not of his doing at all, but were the result of the wise but devious machinations of the wise old Alfredo, the first projectionist of the local movie-house, the Cinema Paradiso.

In short, the whole movie amounts to the filmmaker defending himself, and externalizing blame for abandoning his roots, telling us ‘It wasn’t my fault, I’m not to blame!’ And then, looking ‘forward’ after looking ‘back,’ the director’s onscreen avatar gets to make love to his childhood sweetheart after all.

Whenever the talesman seeks to walk himself in Eartherea, and his audience suspects it, he will find the path is fraught with pitfalls, and this is true whether he is looking forward, daydreaming himself into fantasyland, or he is looking backward, and remaking his past to suit himself.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, July 20, 2008)

The Other Mary Sue

When we the audience ‘dive into’ a tale, who are we when we do so?

The term ‘Mary Sue’ derives from Paula Smith’s ‘A Trekkie’s Tale,’ which appeared in the Star Trek fanzine Menagerie 2 in 1974. The lead of this tale was one Mary Sue, ‘the youngest lieutenant in star fleet at 15-1/2’ gifted with impossible talents, who is beloved by the main Trek characters, and saves the day. (I report this on fragmentary descriptions I found at the Wikipedia entry for ‘Mary Sue’ at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue.)

Smith is said to have been satirizing the tendency of (teenaged) fans of Star Trek whose fan fictions employed idealized (impossibly idealized) versions of their authors, as a wish-fulfillment, a way the writers could imagine themselves joining the crew on the starship Enterprise and getting Spock bewildered and Kirk impassioned, saving the day, and even dying glorious, noble, self-sacrificing deaths in doing so. Somewhere along the way this concept was taken up, so that it is quite popular in the fanfiction world. It is even applied to ‘canon’ characters and characters in original tales, to mean any character that is a flat, idealized proxy of the author.

Now it is no stretch to see our very definition of Romance and Earthereal tales as requiring the lead character be a Mary Sue, for ‘the Other Self’ is a representative of the author or audience with the bad parts stricken, and the good parts enhanced, with special talents, knowledge, skills, who all too naturally wins his goal and saves the day.

In original tales, or ‘canon’ characters for tales drawn from a common well (Lancelot du Lac, for example), the ‘Mary Sue-ness’ of these author proxies is harder to prove. Many modern fantasies have taken ‘representative’ modern men and women (more likely boys and girls) and swept them into Eartherea to serve some vital, cosmos-saving feat (for example, Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Tapestry of Fionavar in which five students from the University of Toronto are swept by an arch-mage into Fionavar, the archetype of all worlds, to serve a vital destiny. Kay was a Canadian who was pursuing a law degree at the University of Toronto when he conceived the basis of the tale.)

These tales, with their ‘modern every-boy and -girls’ swept up into Eartherea, are often written by talesmen who are decidedly not like the characters, but are instead middle-aged men and women who base the characters on children they know — perhaps the very children for whom they weave the tale. Alice in Wonderland comes to mind, as does the Narnia tales of C.S. Lewis.

So we can look at two types of ‘Mary Sue-ism’ — one in which the author casts himself into Eartherea to battle dragons and win fair lady, the other in which the author casts his specific and immediate audience into Eartherea. In the latter kind, the ‘every-boy’ tends not to be the prophesied King, but rather a helper and witness serving a vital but perhaps small role. So we see the children who go into Narnia only help and assist, and Alice is but a tourist in Wonderland. Tolkien’s hobbits may be seen as something of the sort, as Bilbo only helps settle the fate of five kingdoms, and is not the heir to any; at tale’s end he goes back home, enriched, wiser, but still just a hobbit who lives in a hole at Bag End.

We can also note that there is something broken, deficient, or awry in any tale that strikes any of its readers as including a Mary Sue (except for the very first, ‘A Trekkie’s Tale,’ where the effect was said to be deliberate, and is a parody). For just as soon as we say, ‘That’s the author putting himself into the tale!’ we have lost the illusion of the tale, we draw back out of Eartherea, shatter the spell, and look at ‘the man behind the curtain.’

Any false note will break the spell, if it be false and shrill enough. Alas, the knowledge that there is such a thing as a ‘Mary Sue’ encourages jaded readers to squint at many a tale’s lead and wonder, ‘Mary Sue? Or no?’ — whereas those as yet innocent of what a Mary Sue is, would not ask the question, and would be so much less likely to even consider it. They might well, on the other hand, note the cliché of the ‘youngest lieutenant in Star Fleet,’ a bewitchingly-fetching 15-1/2 year-old, who sweeps Kirk off his feet, out-logics Spock, and saves the day. But it is less the ‘Mary Sue-ness’ that does it, than the cliché.

Sometimes, the Other that strikes our fancy has no character traits in common with us — or even any that we admire. Sometimes we enjoy becoming bad, evil, willful, rebellious, in ways that we never allow ourselves to be in our real lives. Though this kind of lead may be no less a cliché, it is not generally considered an author’s proxy, though there is the rebel!MarySue who acts out on all the author’s willful rebelliousness, throws tantrums, breaks things, and is ultimately revealed to be hiding a dark tragedy in his past, having been traumatized (or at least unappreciated) at a younger age.

But Reader, be not over-harsh on Mary Sue and all her authors. We all dream on Eartherea with the hope to pass beyond the Fields We Know someday, and every hero in the immersive ‘fictive dream’ is but our own representative, through whose deeds we touch and taste the berries of immortality.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, July 19, 2008)

‘Mrs Miniver’

A column, a blog, a woman, a classic

In 1937 Joyce Anstruther, (writing as ‘Jan Struther’ so as not to be confused with her mother and grandmother) began a column for the London Times newspaper. It was to be a column about everyday woman’s things, her concerns and her life, so as to bring more women readers to the Times.

Such a column is rather like a blog; we can say that newspaper columns are the fathers of blogs. But Anstruther’s approach was different.

Rather than writing essays (as she had done for Punch the Spectator, and New Statesman), Anstruther created a fictional character, ‘Mrs Miniver’ based more or less upon her own life and situation. Here is the beginning of the first of those columns as collected in book form in Mrs Miniver:

IT was lovely, thought Mrs. Miniver, nodding good-bye to the flower-woman and carrying her big sheaf of chrysanthemums down the street with a kind of ceremonious joy, as though it were a cornucopia; it was lovely, this settling down again, this tidying away of the summer into its box, this taking up of the thread of one's life where the holidays (irrelevant interlude) had made one drop it. Not that she didn't enjoy the holidays: but she always felt — and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness — a little relieved when they were over. Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she should find herself unable to get back. The spell might break, the atmosphere be impossible to recapture.

(From the online edition of the book, which you may, and should, find at: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/struther/miniver/miniver.html or among the collection of her works at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/struther/struther.html — I urge you to read these works, and compare Anstruther’s Mrs Miniver columns with her more traditional essays in the collection Try Anything Twice. For more about Anstruther’s own life, her Wikipedia entry is online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Struther and her grand-daughter Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s biography, The Real Mrs Miniver — Jan Struther’s Story published in London in 2001.)

When Anstruther framed her thoughts around the fictional Mrs Miniver, and caught essays in fragments of narration, she invited us to an intimacy that seems closer to the third-person creation than would have been possible to a first-person author. Because she invites us to approach Mrs Miniver obliquely, from the side as it were, we feel as though we spy upon her in her most unguarded, and therefore most truthful moments. The author ‘Jan Struther’ speaks to us ex cathedra when she offers her observations and pronouncements, which can be a bit off-putting: who is this Struther woman anyway, and why should we take her word for anything? we are apt to wonder. But a fictional character, in something that looks like a story — we take the bait and swallow it at a gulp.

A story is a wonderful thing. It beats the essay all hollow. And these half-stories Anstruther created are marvels of short form, conciseness, rare observation, and elliptical beauty.

The least of them is wonderful, and the best of them are small miracles.

Any of you who are bloggers should read and study the ‘Miniver’ columns, and prepare to be enlightened as to a whole other approach to your avocation.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, July 18, 2008)

The Other(s)

The other of the other is still other

Yesterday I found the term ‘hard fantasy’ which seems to have no original meaning, as all the discussions on it centered around trying to root out possible meanings for it.

As a genre matures (or goes forward through more adherents and further times and cultures) it washes, like the tides, in and out, with smaller movements like waves, washing in and out, and cross-currents adding complexities. The genre spawns sub-genres which in turn splinter and rejoin. Something like this has brought on the term ‘hard fantasy’ — some new trends have been espied in the literary landscape, and a few authors have been seen as betraying similar tendencies, which some thoughtful critic has termed ‘hard fantasy.’

One attempt to define the term has resulted in an oxymoron: ‘hard fantasy is realistic.’ Magic that is unscientific, but science. A world that is created according to all the physical laws that govern our own.

Eartherea has no roads, no high-ways, no pavement, and very few trails. Even those trails are like the faint footpaths and deer-trails in the deep woods: at one point or other they are sure to peter out, and when we try to follow them, we will be left imagining the way forward, until we find ourselves out of trail, lost in the wood.

Eartherea is the Other. The Other Self with the Other Sex on the Other World pursuing the Other Career.

But, other than what?

That is what is crucial here. The first trends in modern fantasy formed in reaction against ‘modern life’ in its industrialism, even as Romanticism arose in reaction against the first waves of the Industrial Revolution.

Those first fantasists saw Eartherea as Other than Industrialism and modernity.

But the writers who are credited as the first of our new term, ‘hard fantasy,’ were forming worlds in reaction against the Eartherea that their forefathers in fantasy had created.

Their Eartherea is Other than the Other of the real world, and as such (in somewhat poor imaginative prowess, I fear) is more like the real world.

Only, not quite.

Anyone can find his own personal Eartherea, and in defining Eartherea as the Other, we see that is is built out of a negative. And yet even as some aspects of Reality are denied to envision an Other world, other aspects of Reality are held onto; few indeed have been the attempts to dream an Eartherea that has no link to our common Earth at all.

Thus, we who sing of Earthereal realms, reject some of what we find around us, and hang onto other parts.

For those writers of the ‘hard fantasy’ clique, what was objectionable in the world, that they rejected, included the visions of Eartherea that other talesmen and dreamers had conjured up.

But all are welcome in the compass-less, map-less, road-less, unexplored wilds of the Other World.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, July 17, 2008)

The Land of the Lost

How to map the borders of Eartherea?

Today I found on http://del.icio.us/writing a link to a fantasy-author’s post on ‘hard fantasy’ as a sub-genre. There are, it turns out, a good half-dozen or more blog posts considering this term, none of which exactly agree as to its meaning, all of which seemingly take up the term, wonder aloud as to ‘what might it mean?’ and attempt to muddle through to a definition.

In other words, the term has its own strange and fantastical life, a life that has no roots in any coherent body of tales.

It is not as though there were a movement of talesmen who proclaimed, ‘We sing of hard fantasy!’ — not in the way that there was such a group of science fiction authors who sniffed, ‘We delineate hard sf!’

Rather it seems that ‘hard fantasy’ is more a critic’s term, applied to several talesmen who were simply writing and telling tales as they liked them in the fields of Eartherea, and whose works later came to fall under this term. Something like ‘film noir’ if you will — a kind of movie, none of whose practitioners had heard of the term, none of whom knew that ‘film noir’ was what they were making, and a term over which film critics will come to blows — ‘This is not film noir!’ ‘Oh, yes it is!’

My aim here is not to define ‘hard fantasy’ by any means. I’ll leave that for pedants to pick over. All I will say is, that those who write ‘hard fantasy’ are, like the proponents of ‘hard science fiction,’ at heart ashamed of what they do, and that is a pity, that any man should blush at what he loves, and try to pass off his love as something she is not.

As for ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ fantasy, let alone ‘high’ and ‘low’ fantasy, we can only say that Eartherea is a continent vaster than Asia would appear to ants building on Portugal’s shore. Vladivostock is far away, and artificial distinctions between ‘hard’ and ‘high’ and all the rest (and between ‘fantasy’ and ‘science fiction’ for that matter) are as meaningless on the ground as the border that is said to divide ‘Europe’ from Asia.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, July 16, 2008)

Dance of the Puppet Characters

It’s never good when the audience senses the hand of the talesman at work

Last night I saw The Americanization of Emily an early 1960s movie directed by Arthur Hiller, written by Paddy Chayefsky, and starring James Garner and Julie Andrews. Set in London in late spring 1944, the movie is a satire on military establishments and an antiwar polemic.

I’d seen the movie on television 30 years ago, and remembered liking it, being impressed by its audacity and its way of thumbing its nose at the brass. This time, though, I liked it a little less.

In particular, the characters seemed to me to move through a dance the author had choreographed. They did things that didn’t seem justified, just so (it seemed to me) they could get into the situations the author wanted them in.

I found it hard to accept that the two lovers even got together in the first place; that their passion was unusual for both of them was somewhat easier for me to swallow. The worst was the ending, in which the hero, a smooth-talking con man of the sort that former ‘Maverick’ star Garner played so well, gets totally bamboozled by sweetheart Andrews. The logic of the speeches in that last scene are enough to turn the heads of even the most inveterate screwball-comedy watcher. And it’s all for the sake of the final shot under the end credits, and the rich irony dripping therefrom.

It is always a grave danger to leave your audience thinking, ‘Why are they doing this? It’s just because the writer wants them to do it.’

For an audience, this sort of feeling breaks the essential trust we have in the world, and it only can work when the talesman or the actors break the fourth wall in some sort of self-referential parody of the forms. In Emily no such parody is apparent, and the fourth wall is never broken.

Crisp photography, sheer star power of the leads and supporting cast, the delight of seeing Judy Carne in a small role early in her career, brilliant, if somewhat theatrical dialogue, and a breezy pace overcome many flaws, and on the whole I still like Emily. But the flaws were troubling.

(Composed Tuesday, July 15, 2008)

Rand al-Thor vs. Frodo Baggins

The power and the glory

This is a tale of two tendencies, tendencies among tales, but also tendencies among the wishes nestled deep within the hearts of readers — especially little boy readers. (There is a like tale to tell about the wishes deep in the hearts of little girl readers, but the ‘spheres of influence’ involved differ.)

Superboy

On the one side, you have the Superboy, here represented by Robert Jordan’s Rand al-Thor, the hero of his Wheel of Time series of epic fantasy tales. In the first of these tales, The Eye of the World, we follow three boys from a small town on an unfamiliar, though Earth-like, world, perhaps long ago, perhaps far in the future; since all histories rise and fall like the turning of the great cosmic Wheel which Jordan says governs the Universe, past present and future are irrelevant.

Among these three lads, we are told, there is a prophecy. One of them is destined for greatness. One of them is the reincarnation of the Dragon, a mythical hero, the Hero of Humanity, who has come and gone innumerable times through the ages, always opposed by the great Enemy of Humanity, who likewise has come and gone. The last time this Hero appeared, he did so under the nickname of the Dragon, and it is this rebirth that has been so long rumored, anticipated, and feared.

The agents of Death and Evil, working for the great Enemy, are abroad, looking for the boy said to be the Dragon Reborn. The first such agent we see is a Black Rider on a black horse, whose presence brings a chill, and whose essence is sensed as evil and threatening by all even from afar.

The first of the three boys we meet is Rand, son of Thor, or Rand al-Thor. The Black Rider is stalking Rand. Soon enough it will lead its ghastly followers into Rand’s home, murder his father before Rand’s eyes, and cause Rand to run for his life. Along the way he will pick up his two best friends, who happen to be the other two boys of the prophecy. (There are actually, as I recall, other boys in other villages and cities the prophecy might indicate, all born on a certain summer, with other considerations. But these three are the tale’s main focus, and we are given no doubt that the Dragon Reborn will prove to be one of them.)

Through the 10,000 pages (I overstate…a little) of the tale, we follow the three boys on their adventures, chased and seeking, led at first by a mysterious priestess, a member of a special order of women with great powers, and her swordsman lover/slave/guardian. The boys part ways, but mostly we follow Rand al-Thor, and sure enough, at the Eye of the World, Rand shows that he has powers greater than any ordinary human, and he (seems to) exterminate the Evil One. This victory is an illusion, however, and we will follow Rand and his two friends (both of whom also have special fates and talents) and a cast of dozens, through ten other novels and a prequel. (Jordan died, unhappily, not long ago, leaving the final volume unfinished.)

Rand al-Thor has amazing powers. He is the most powerful man alive who is able to tap into the Source, the power that runs and sustains the cosmos. He becomes one of the top swordsmen of his age. Acknowledged as the Dragon Reborn, he is heir to the allegiance of all monarchs and priestesses, the titular leader of Humanity against the Evil One, who has broken his ancient bonds, and is once more exerting his malevolent powers upon the world, bent upon its destruction.

Everyboy

On the other side from Rand al-Thor, you have Frodo Baggins, the protagonist of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic tale, The Lord of the Rings. He too is sought after by the Evil One, and he too is chased by Black Riders (I have little doubt that Jordan wrote his way into The Eye of the World as a Tolkien pastiche, as he had written Conan pastiches in the 1980s, which is why I use Rand as the exemplar of the Superboy. But over the course of the dozen volumes of The Wheel of Time Jordan wrote his way apart from Tolkien.)

The tale of The Lord of the Rings is probably too well-known to bear summarizing. Enough to point out some salient differences between Tolkien’s tale and Jordan’s — and between Tolkien’s tale and almost all the other Hobbit pastiches that have been written over the past 30 years.

For the differences are fundamental. Frodo is not the great man to come and rule and save — that part is played by Aragorn son of Arathorn. Frodo has no special powers beyond an innate decency and stubborn goodness of spirit said to be a perverse part of the Hobbit kind. Where Rand carries within himself access to great power — and can be said to be himself a great power — Frodo has none; rather he carries a ring, the Ring of Power, which has come into his hands through accident — the sort of accident a benevolent God seems often to effect. And in the end, it is Frodo’s weakness that is his strength; but his victory is not one any boy would boast about, nor does Frodo. For he failed, in the end, to overcome the malignant influence of the Ring, which fell into dissolution only because Frodo was set upon by Gollum, a sort of inverse image of Frodo, who only by his own frenzied leaping to possess the Ring falls with it into the Cracks of Doom.

The Lord of the Rings was an immense success worldwide, and has spawned many imitators. Almost all of these pastiches and homages and copies have changed the essential relationship Frodo bears to Power in the tale; they all tell of Frodo as Superboy, the One Foretold, the Future King, even as Jordan did with Rand al-Thor (and Rand’s two friends, though neither turns out to be so great as the Dragon Reborn, are also figures of legend and destiny, and in any other tale would be superheroes themselves. Both qualify as Superboy figures).

These Tales are about Ourselves

Bruno Betelheim would tell us that in fairy tales, little boys see themselves as princes, even though the characters begin as beggar boys. They all grow up to marry the King’s daughter, the highly sought-after Princess, and come into kingship of their own. Betelheim would say that this is all psychological, that it mirrors the urge of the young boy to find and found and become Master and Father of his own house some day; furthermore, when the young boys read how the abandoned or lost princes or beggar boys end as Kings and rulers, this gives solace to the boys who read, that one day they too will win a princess of their own, with a kingdom to go with her.

This may well be true, and it may be that the boys inside the talesmen who wrote all the Tolkien pastiches are speaking their own hearts, writing as boys to other boys, and telling of these very hopes and truths.

Thus we would say that Tolkien wrote perhaps not humbly, but as a grown up man, speaking to children (for he originally wrote The Hobbit out of bedtime tales he had told his own children, and The Lord of the Rings he wrote more or less for money, as The Hobbit reborn) and thinking of them as children. His hobbits are strictly patterned after children, small and ever-hungry. But Jordan wrote from his boyish heart, as a boy to fellow boys (and girls) who see themselves not as children but as grownups already.

But in keeping with yesterday’s post on fascism in the United States military and its relation to popular fantasy tales (‘Willie and Joe vs. Conan’), we must look upon these tales of Superboy with some skepticism.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, July 14, 2008)

Willie and Joe vs. Conan

This is about America and how her common man has become a barbarian, and proud of it

Once upon a time, the American soldier was first and foremost a citizen. A private citizen who had his farm and his family or his job or his business to manage, but when his country was threatened, he dutifully, if somewhat reluctantly, took up arms for his government.

He was not a lifer, not a soldier by trade. He took orders from those career soldiers, and he knew that the generals often knew less than the privates, and almost always less than the sergeants. He knew that the army was a model of mess-ups and confusion and bad organization. SNAFU was a term invented for and by the United States military.

And when he got out of the service, when the war was over and he’d done his time, he went back home and took up his farm, his job, his business, and he raised his family again. And he remembered what a cock-up the whole military was. When talk of war arose again, he remembered how wretched it was, ugly and small and demeaning, and he voted to keep out of war unless it was necessary, absolutely necessary, to fight again. He didn’t want to fight again, he hadn’t wanted to fight the first time, and he damn well didn’t want his sons to fight this time, not unless there was no help for it.

Then his government got the fool idea that war was good for business. (Actually, I rather think that it was business that got the idea that war was good for business — these were the businesses that had made a killing on the war, and they had guaranteed profits to be made from their contacts and their insiders in the upper layers of the Purchasing departments of the military, a sure thing, not like the danger and risk of competition in the free and open market.)

That was when the United States of America decided it was the right thing to do, to fight perpetual war eternally, from now until doomsday, against all comers, and if there weren’t any enemies, we’d just have to invent some, and scare the public into voting to make the war industries richer than they already were.

The country started fighting unnecessary wars. Hell, we had to do it, we had to shoot somebody and blow up some bombs and crash some planes, or else how were we going to buy new ammo and bombs and planes from the arms industry? We fought those needless wars far from our own shores, in places most Americans couldn’t even find on a map, with strange names, strange customs and languages, places and cultures we didn’t understand. We were told it was the right thing to do. And we trusted the politicians and the generals who told us these things.

We were rich enough to pay for it, and still have a good life at home, those of us who didn’t have to go over there and die so that the arms industries could boost their quarterly dividends.

But there was a problem with this arrangement, and that was, that the American citizen found he was even more reluctant to go to war and die or get his arm blown off, if the war wasn’t necessary. And none of these wars was necessary. What was worse, the soldiers who were already over there fighting in these wars found out that the people we were ‘fighting for’ didn’t want us to be over there, didn’t want us to be fighting for us, they just wanted us to go home. They wanted peace too.

That was Vietnam, and the draft split the country in two. The old gents who weren’t in any danger of getting their arms blown off, voted to force the young gents, who couldn’t even vote, to go bet their arms blown off. Except for the rich young gents, and the young gents who were connected — they could get out of it by one trick or another.

After Vietnam, and the deserved loss the United States Government won there, the draft was abolished. The draft was abolished, but nobody could call off the Perpetual War, and nobody could tell the various Presidents that they had to obey the law, because by then the President was above the law, unless he decided to abide by it out of the goodness of his heart or some quirk in his nature.

So the American military became ‘all volunteer.’ ‘All volunteer’ means ‘professional,’ and after that there were no more citizen soldiers. They were all professionals. But they were still soldiers.

I have seen news reports from the 1990s, before President George W. Bush declared World War III, the ‘Global War on Terror,’ or in other words ‘USA vs. Everybody Who Won’t Do As We Please.’ In those old reports, there were tales of kids who went to join the military. They did it for college tuition payments, for good pensions, for guaranteed pay. They joined up to get a job, in other words. But when they got back from basic training, in the brief leave they had before getting their first assignments, they found something strange had happened.

They had changed. They weren’t the same any more. They looked on their old pals with new eyes. Their old friends were ‘civilians’ and they, the new recruits, were ‘military.’

They looked down on these ‘civilians.’ ‘Civilians’ were an inferior race, as it were.

And it was with great sadness that these young men spoke. They felt their loss. They grieved that their old friends were shiftless, lazy, undisciplined losers. But they didn’t look down on themselves, these new recruits. Boot camp and their DIs had broken their souls and given them new souls — the souls of warriors.

Recently I saw another report. This was from an Air Force veteran, who went with his son to the Air Force Academy in Colorado. He was appalled at what he found there. The place had changed since he had gone there. For one thing, it was now a religious institution, run by evangelical Christians who had taken over. For another, the recruits at the academy didn’t think of themselves as soldiers anymore. Now they were ‘warriors’ — Christian Warriors.

It broke his heart, but the old veteran took his son home, and was relieved when his son told him he didn’t want to go to the Air Force Academy and follow in his old man’s footsteps any longer.

Something else happened in America in this period. It began at the height of the Vietnam war and grew stronger in the 1970s and 1980s.

It was Robert E. Howard’s chief literary creation, Conan the Barbarian.

Conan was a warrior. No doubt about that! He lived for battle. He was a lover and a drinker and a gamester, but most of all he was a fighter. He captured the hearts of America’s young men. We all wanted to be barbarians. We all wanted to be warriors, big men who swung big … battle-axes.

Robert E. Howard was by most accounts a scrawny kid, whose father terrorized him, who had an unnatural attachment to his mother, who felt he was somehow less than a man, and whose fantasies made Conan come alive as one of the most vivid, remarkable literary creations of the 20th century. Conan was the man that Howard wished he could be.

The warrior was what all us scrawny, lazy, suburban coal-biters wanted to be. The warrior, indeed, is what civilians who have never fought a battle fantasize soldiers are. The warrior’s glorious victories and triumphs is what chicken-hearted hawk civilians fetishize. The warrior is to them a magical, godlike being. The cowards who ‘had other priorities’ (in Vice President Cheney’s words) and evaded by legal tricks the Vietnam war draft, never learned how messed-up the service can be, or how clueless generals can get, or how SNAFU’d the whole damned Army is. And so they glorify ‘the generals’ and ‘our troops’ without even understanding the hell that war is, the hell that the cowards are sending the servicemen and -women into.

Bill Mauldin’s famous creations, Willie and Joe, the typical GIs of World War 2, never thought of themselves as ‘warriors.’ They barely thought of themselves as soldiers, except under duress, for the duration, and let the armistice come sooner rather than later!

If Willie and Joe ever came up against Conan, they’d have rifles, and he’d have a battle-axe and his sword and dagger. It wouldn’t be a fair fight. He’d slaughter them.

Because Willie and Joe wouldn’t try to kill the half-naked guy in a loin cloth, screaming in strange tongues. They’d feel sorry for the lunatic — for just long enough for him to get within arm’s reach, and hack off both their heads.

The young men of 60 years ago sympathized with Willie and Joe. The young men of 20 years ago — and today — dream they are Conan.

We who tell tales of Eartherea, the Other Land where Dreams are Real, where Cimmeria is a place you can sail to in the misty north, we bear some responsibility for the dreams and fantasies and fetishes of young men who read our tales. We deal in dreams, but young men may be forgiven if they in their youth take those dreams for anything approximating reality.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, July 13, 2008)

What I Seek and Can Not Find

The pattern of my longing

Of late thoughts of doom have taken me, as I watch the American Empire crumble, and slowly pull Western Civilization down with it.

This has left me feeling that art and tales are far away, not so vital after all.

And yet there comes on me, from time to time (and more in the past day or so) the haunting desire to return to Hans in the Schwarzwald, or join the Boy Who Never Grew Up in Fireland, or fall beneath the spell of the Temptress of Creepland (these being the last tales I worked on).

Why is this? Is it the urge to escape the difficult task of life, the hopeless toil to overcome the death that rises to take us all? Is it an addiction of mine, which having been starved, must return to plague me? Is it a healthy way to deal with the mess in some symbolic way?

I don’t know. But the thought has prompted me to put here, the pattern of my longing — the shape of the primordial Tale that shapes most of the tales I tell. If you are a fellow talesman, you might think on what the pattern of your longing is, as glimmers through your tales. If you are a fellow audience member, you might wonder about your own favorite kind of tale, and whether your best-loved authors have told merely that tale you like the best.

The Tale

It begins quietly, but with a roll of distant thunder. There are small, normal, ordinary people in a homey place. They are comfortable enough there, but one among them, and maybe more than one, harbors a secret, unacknowledged longing to explore what lies Out There in the Dark.

There comes a turmoil and trouble, the home nest is upset and made into madness, and the one who would leave, does leave; it may even be true that he must leave for one reason or another.

This is a critical, delicious moment: the first step down the Road, with Home at his back. There is a thrill of danger and excitement. No one else of his small home place has gone this way except in legendary tales out of the dim past.

He takes up the Road, and at first is happy there, and enjoys the strange vistas Out There. And yet Something Evil haunts and tracks him, and there is danger both before and behind.

Before long he finds himself out in waste and wild, cold, shivering, hungry, and lost. He does not know where to go or how to escape the darkness and threat that weave ever thicker around him.

He goes on — he ‘soldiers on’ as the old phrase has it, slogging on without hope, without much expectation of anything but pain. There are brief flashes of comfort and kindness along the way, but along with them he finds danger, pain, and loss. He loses goods and friends and loved ones and knows they will never return.

At last he reaches the end. He can do no more. He cannot go farther. He is at a loss.

And yet somehow he does go on — one last stage in the journey.

And then, upheaval — disaster — war — strife — massive death.

And survival. The one we have followed (the one who longed in secret to see what lay Out There) still lives. The evil has passed — at least it is in abeyance, under control, neutralized for the time being.

He goes back home. There he is glad to see it again, but the place is somewhat strange to him. It is smaller, weaker, quainter. And he finds himself a stranger there. He knows he cannot stay there, and that in truth he now has no home, no hearth, no place.

Now he faces, at tale’s end, one more Road, but he is weary, and now an inveterate traveller. It is with a much different frame of mind that he faces the blank, vast, dim Future.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, July 12, 2008)

The Man Behind the Curtain

When does the Narrator’s Voice intrude?

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
— The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939)

Last night I happened to catch the final 20 minutes of Homicidal, William Castle’s 1961 ‘homage’ to Hitchcock’s Psycho. The ending was very close to Psycho except for a curious gimmick that producer/director Castle inserted just at the moment when the frightened heroine was about to enter the Old Dark House and confront the homicidal killer who was … the old lady? the old lady’s nice, gentle son? the knife-wielding blonde?

At this moment, as the camera pushed in toward the black door to the old house, a white clock dial was superimposed on the screen, and began a countdown of 45 seconds, while the Narrator’s Voice (Castle himself) announced the commence of the ‘Fright Break.’ During these 45 seconds, until the clock counted to its end, anyone too frightened to watch the ending — the shocking, horrifying ending — of the film, could leave. (Castle arranged with as many theater owners as he could additional props to support this ‘Fright Break’ — yellow footprints to lead up the aisle of the theater to the cardboard ‘Coward’s Corner’ where the hapless over-anxious patrons could wait the end of the movie, and be jeered by all the others ‘brave’ enough to watch until the end. Castle was well known for stunts like this to pitch his low-rent movies.)

The Narrator’s Voice addressed us directly, in words I paraphrase from memory:

This is the Fright Break… for the next 45 seconds, those of you who are too frightened to see the shocking, horrifying conclusion to this motion picture, have a chance to leave now… Do you hear that beat? That is the beat of a human heart. How does it compare with your own heart? Is your heart beating too fast? … Only 15 seconds left … you’re a brave audience… Very well, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

It got a laugh out of me when I saw it. ‘How cheesy!’ I thought. But as the seconds counted down, and the second hand swept across the dial, I admit I did feel a slight increase in tension and anticipation. I was alone in the living room and the sun had not yet set, so it was still bright outdoors. And so I imagine that if I had been in a darkened theater at the end of watching the entire movie, surrounded by others also feeling the tension mount, I would have felt a more palpable chill.

In general, the ‘voice’ of the Narrator in films (leaving out the Voice of God such as was once common in documentary films) is confined to the expressiveness of the camera. And yet we usually accept even the most flamboyant moves a camera might make as a ‘dream we are having’ rather than some observation forced upon us by the Narrator of the film’s tale. This makes any attempt to introduce the Narrator openly (such as Castle here speaking to us from off-screen) a very tricky ploy.

Usually the device must be present from the start of the movie, or we won’t accept it. I don’t know whether Castle spoke to the audience at the onset of Homicidal or not, but if he didn’t, and the ‘Fright Break’ was its first and only instance, it would be a hell of a shock, and most unwelcome.

When we read a tale, or hear one recited, we have the Narrator always with us, but the talesman can work to mute his own voice, and help us to forget it, and fall instead into the trance of the story. This is indeed how most commercial fiction is written and published in America today. There the only place for the overt Narrator’s Voice is in the First Person point-of-view tale where, like the Memoir, the Narrator is the Protagonist.

This is why, if any talesman should be so bold as to want to speak directly to his audience, he must tread lightly, lest he offend their ear through unfamiliar (by now) usage. Here are a few guidelines to manage it:

• Introduce the Narrator’s Voice in the start of the tale
• After the start, soften and mute the Narrator’s Voice
• Bring it back for transitional passages
• Bring it back for the openings to chapters or parts
• Bring it back at the end for the Envoi

These are the points I think are the only ‘discreet’ places to include the Narrator’s Voice — you need not use it at all these spots. But I do think that if you want to use this voice at all, you must introduce it at the start, and not let too much time, or too many pages, go by before you use it again.

There are also varying degrees of ‘volume’ the Narrator’s Voice can be sounded at. At its loudest, it approaches Victor Hugo giving us a long chapter explaining the historical significance of Waterloo in Les Miserables. At its softest, it can subtly direct our minds from one character to another, or ‘head-hop’ in gentle manner.

Just beware of wise guys in the audience who, like my, will chortle when you announce the start of the ‘Fright Break.’

(Composed on keyboard Friday, July 11, 2008)

The Master’s Voice

On the tale that has no actors

In ‘One, Two, Many, None’ we looked at what changed in talesmanship when different voices are added to the tale. The basis of this was the development of Greek drama, which began with only a chorus singing a song about some legendary/historical event, then added a single Actor to the chorus, then a second Actor, and a third. Each of these innovations changed the very nature of the way we in the audience experienced the tales. And, as each voice was added, the original voice of the Chorus dwindled.

In the text tale, or the spoken narrative, we can say that the Narrator (the talesman himself, usually) is the equivalent of the drama’s Chorus. So we can see how, as tales (short stories, novels, novellas, radio plays, movies and television as well as plays) developed the voices of the characters, the voice of the Narrator dwindled, until today it is considered the proper way of telling a tale to suppress the Narrator altogether — or at least as far as the author can manage.

So, let’s take a step back, to the beginning (or near to the beginning). What is a tale like, that has no voices for its characters, only the voice of the narrator? How is such a tale different in its effect on us in the audience, how is it different in kind, from the tales we are used to?

Well, we do still tell some tales in this fashion. Children’s tales and fairy tales often have no voices for their characters.

(To be clear here: when I say a character has ‘no voice’ I mean that there is no dialogue directly attributed to him. Nothing that would show up, for example, in quotation marks — nothing that we wouldn’t ‘hear’ as though it came from his lips.)

The first thing that stands out is that, even as the Narrator’s voice dwindles when the characters gain their voices, so that the Narrator tells us only functional, mechanical things, so in a tale where there is only the Narrator’s voice, he stands out, perforce, as a personality. He cannot hide behind events. He is openly acknowledged.

He is telling us something, and he has his reasons.

He may indeed have some relationship to the events he speaks about.

He may celebrate the events he tells, or mourn them.

And he will have some personal relationship to the characters — that is, he will praise and laud some and scorn others. He has a stake in the whole thing, an agenda. This may be true of all talesmen, but here, because the Narrator stands out so stark, we in the audience must wonder and question what his agenda might be.

It is an old tradition, that the Poet sing his tales in High Style, one befitting his noble subject, and a style he would not use in common parlance. Other talesmen have matched their styles to whatever the matter was in the tale at hand, and some talesmen use the same style in all their tales.

And yet a man’s Voice is more than his style. Style is but one part of the voice of the narrator. The rest holds all his personality, values, goals, and humor.

But it all pales when the characters in the tales begin to speak, and drown their narrators out.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, July 10, 2008)

Root and Leaf

How the idea of a tale relates to our enjoyment of the tale we are hearing now

I have always believed that each tale should connect to the general and basic notion of Tale both for the talesman and audience alike. Think if you will of a tree. Take a leaf and press it in the pages of a book and it may preserve its beauty but it will be dead all the same. Leave it joined to its branch stock and root and the leaf will be pliant and soft, alive.

This is true both for talesman and audience alike. The talesman must hold the link in mind and his audience must be able to perceive the link glimmering through the words of the tale as we hear watch or read it.

I have always remembered this lesson from seeing some reproductions of etchings Pablo Picasso made. The series was called something like ‘37 States of an Etching’ and represented a nude (or were there two nudes?) on a bed. The first state was representative and realistic — we can make out the girl, the bed, and enough perspective to imagine an illusion of the third dimension. The 37th etching was the final state, showing full-blown the Cubist recreation of the scene as Picasso then stylized it. At the 37th State (long before that, in fact), I could no longer make out girl or bed or space. And yet, as I followed the series, I found that I might glimpse the underlying forms in states that I would not have made out had I seen them by themselves. I could connect the abstract forms in the etchings to the ‘reality’ underlying them and better appreciate what Picasso had done to re-imagine them. But without his help here, I would have been lost.

The link between subject and etching, and that between this-tale and root-tale, are words apart. And yet, if we relate this-tale and the idea of Tale itself, the two kinds of links are much the same. Remember my friend Tim Maloney at http://www.nakedrabbit.com? He put forth the notion that a ‘tale’ is the idea that the audience gets when given a series of events. Each of us will take the series and in our minds conceive of it as a whole of some kind. This we will call the ‘story’ of the events. And yet, though this may be true in theory, in practice, each of us will in the course of our youth come to build a model of the shape and limits of what we imagine a ‘story’ is. We will invent some of this based on all the tales we’ve heard, and we will learn the rest from our teachers. There comes to each of our lands a common and accepted notion of what a story is.

Against this model, we will hold up this-tale we have before us, asking, ‘Is this a real story, or nonsense?’ And even if we perforce twist and distort what we hear into a ‘story’ as we understand ‘story’ — we will yet find ourselves driven to ask whether it is a good story. By good, of course, we will mean how well it matches our learned notion of what a story ought to be.

This matching is much the same as when we compare in our minds what we see of the nudes on the bed (or at least what we imagine those nudes would look like if we had been there), and what we see in the artist’s etching.

In this sense, then, the talesman must keep in mind the notion of ‘story’ his audience holds, and if he strays far from it, he ought to take an ounce of pity on his poor, bewildered audience, and help them to fathom the living connections between his leaf of a tale, and the root notion of ‘story’ he understands his audience holds.

(Composed on pentop Wednesday 9 July 2008)

One, Two, Many, None

Number systems and the evolution of the tale

Yesterday, in ‘The Deuteragonist Kills the Narrator’ we talked about the origins of the ancient Greek drama — how at first there was only the chorus, then one actor spoke in between the verses the chorus sang, and then a second actor was added, at which point true drama was born.

Then there was the third actor. The first actor was the protagonist, the second the deuteragonist, and the third the tritagonist. One important distinction here is that actor does not here equal character as the deuteragonist would assume various roles — but there was at that point in the development of the drama only two actors allowed on stage at any moment.

After the third actor, there was no ‘quadragonist’ so far as I know. There might be a curious reason for this, a reason rooted in the way our brains count.

In most languages, there are only two numbers of importance. There is singular and there is plural. But in some, very old languages, there were three numbers: singular for one, dual for two, and plural covered three or more.

The fact that whole languages did this, indicates that there is something in the way man’s brain considers numbers, that differentiates between two, which has a binary or polar opposition, and every number greater than two. These cultures could only count that high, too: one, two … many was how they counted.

When there are two actors in a scene, it has a qualitative difference from a scene with only one actor … and also a qualitative difference from a scene with three actors or more.

‘Two’s company, three’s a crowd,’ to quote an old English saying.

What is also interesting about the development of the —agonists in Greek drama, is that Homer had scenes with several speakers. The first big scene in the Iliad shows a conference of the Achaian kings, discussing the plague Apollo has visited upon their camp, because King Agamemnon won’t give up the god’s chief priest’s daughter, who is his bed-slave and war prize. Several of the kings rise and speak, urging Agamemnon to see reason; at last Achilles rails against the King, and Agamemnon is enraged, and says he will give up his girl, if Achilles will hand over the girl Achilles claimed, to Agamemnon in compensation. At this point Achilles boast and sulks at once, about how he’s the one doing all the fighting, that Agamemnon doesn’t win any battles, and nobody appreciates Achilles and all he does.

The Iliad precedes the deuteragonist in the drama by centuries. This is another clue that the drama was not born out of the narrative poem such as Homer sang.

Now, to consider all this in light of the text tale or oral tale.

It’s possible to consider the first tales as either having direct dialogue or not. For example, many are the folk tale, the bar-room tale, and the office gossip, that do include dialogue:

I told the boss I wouldn’t work on Sundays anymore. He tells me I’d better, or else I’d be hurting come the next performance review. ‘Well,’ I tell him, ‘if that’s your attitude, I guess I know where I stand.’

Or it could go:

I told the boss I wouldn’t work on Sundays anymore. He told me I’d better, or else he’d mark me down on the performance review. Well, if that was his attitude, then I guess I know where I stand.

There is a tremendous difference in the quality of the tale when the dialogue is quoted directly. Direct dialogue comes to us in a different ‘voice’ than the narrator’s flat, even tones. A sort of sonic color is added. From monotone to dualtone (there must be musical terms for these things, but I am illiterate musically, alas).

When a second voice is added, the thing really comes alive. Now there is point and counterpoint within the dream state — for we have to consider the narrator’s voice to exist in some middle ground in between the tale’s world and the world where narrator and we in the audience stand and breathe.

And when the third voice is added, there is a crowd, polyphonies, great complexity, even cacophony. Beyond three, as we know from our ancestors, there is no qualitative difference: at three there is a crowd, and at a hundred the crowd is denser, louder, but nonetheless remains a crowd.

Now, the qualitative difference of the One voice, the narrator’s, is something to explore further on another day.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, July 8, 2008)