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)