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)