The Medium and the Message

He tries to compose via dictation

I have always been interested in voice recognition software. In fact about 10 years ago I tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking that whatever version it was back then; but my 350 MHz Pentium II PC just wasn’t fast enough or powerful enough to be accurate.

Recently, however, I see that the reviews of the latest Dragon NaturallySpeaking are raves. So, since my laptop is a lot more powerful, I got version 9 of the software. I tried it, and it still wasn’t good enough. But later on, while I was playing with the laptop, I begin to suspect that having the laptop on a low power setting was probably not giving me enough juice to enable the program to recognize my speech. (Also, I must admit, I am a terrible speaker, and my voice is very soft and breathy; not the best combination for a computer to recognize and accurately dictate speech.)

So, here I am. Yesterday I installed Dragon NaturallySpeaking again, and committed myself to trying it. Yesterday was my first blog post using the voice dictation. I’m not very proud of what happened – mostly because I found it very difficult to compose my thoughts while speaking aloud and then checking how accurate voice recognition software would work. The software worked very well. The big problem, however, was my own composition.

It turns out that the way you compose something influences what you compose.

That should not have been any surprise – after all, I noticed the difference between composing in longhand and on a keyboard several months ago. So why shouldn’t it be an even greater leap, and an even more fundamental change, to compose while speaking aloud? Of course it should be.

This post also I am composing using the voice recognition software. I think I’m getting more used to it – all the same, I know it will be a big adjustment to make. But any tale you mean to be heard and listened to is probably better composed by speaking it out aloud – composing it on the keyboard or even in longhand, and then reading what you have written out aloud, still has for its ultimate basis words that have been written silently.

Well we shall just have to try this out – and you can judge me for yourself.

(Composed via dictation on Sunday 31 August 2008.)

A Mile in His Shoes

Identifying with a character without immersion

We were talking about the limited objective point of view. Now one of the questions that comes up a lot of the time when we talk about the limited objective point of view, is this: “How are my readers going to identify with my characters when they can’t even get into their heads?” The answer to this is something that is a phenomenon that happens whenever you spend a lot of time with someone.

When you spend a lot of time someone, as a matter of course, you begin to sympathize with that person. This is similar to the “Stockholm syndrome” in which a captive of kidnappers will begin to sympathize with his very kidnappers. Just spending time with someone, you begin to see the world as that person sees the world.

Moreover, when we read a story, and we follow one character exclusively, we only know what that character knows. The result of this is that we understand the reasons why this character is acting – why this character does what he does; what we do not understand is why any other character acts the way he does. So, the information that we have is the same information that our character house – I mean, the character we are following. We don’t see inside his head, nor do we know precisely what his feelings are. But, in a sense, we see the world through his eyes simply because we are, as it were, standing right next to him throughout the story – so we experience each scene pretty much the way he experiences it.

Now, as a result of this, we will tend to root for this character – and we will tend to identify with him and with all the positions he takes on any given issue. This does not mean that we need to like this person, it only means that we are being placed into a situation that’s the same situation this character finds himself in. So we can’t help but take up his point of view, even when we don’t particularly agree with it.

This seems counterintuitive, at least when you first think about it. But on the other hand, if you think about any movies we see, isn’t this pretty much the same thing? I mean, in most movies, we don’t feel what to character feels, nor do we know exactly what the character is thinking. Instead, the camera shows us what is going on around this central character, and, in a way, we see what he sees and we know what he knows.(Of course, when the character is being portrayed by an actor with whom we feel great sympathy and connection, we’re going to like and identify with the character.)

(Composed via dictation Saturday, August 30, 2008)

(I leave the text unedited as a reminder of how differently a talesman will compose his text according to the means he uses to do so.)

Why Go Limited?

Reasons why we would prefer objective limited point of view in a tale

The next question we should ask is, ‘Why would any talesman choose to tell his tale in a limited objective point of view? What can be gained from it? And why should we prefer a tale in limited objective point of view, when we can immerse ourselves wholly in the experiences of the characters, reading their minds and knowing their inner needs and hearts?’

Several answers can be offered here, but in the end – it is a matter of personal taste. Some of us prefer one style over the other, and some will like one style at one time (or in one tale) and another at another (or in another tale). Here I will give a few possible reasons only. In the end – it is up to each of us as readers, to pick the one we like best.

One reason to choose the limited objective point of view, is economy. A tale filled with the inner thoughts of characters, plus their words and deeds, must in the general run take more words to tell. The only area where limited objective will call for more words lies where the talesman tries to tell us what characters feel or think based upon a series of external clues. Sometimes it is more straightforward and economical to say simply, ‘He hated her with all his heart,’ rather than try to build us readers to reach that conclusion based upon a series of incidents, speeches, looks, and so forth. And yet, even where such a series runs for pages compared to the single line, ‘He hated her with all his heart,’ it can seem shorter, because it usually reads faster.

And here we come to our second reason, which is that actions read swiftly, but description reads slowly, even when it is describing the inner heart. I often feel when writing ‘immersive’ or deeply subjective fiction, that the words are getting mired and bogged down in the feelings of the characters. These feelings are heavy, sodden, sticky. Action and speech, on the other hand, are swift and light; it seems as though I am skimming across the episodes in the tale, glancing and skipping and gliding, and the pace of the tale seems much swifter – even when the tale runs longer, oddly enough. (A good example to take up would be the character introductions in the medieval Icelandic sagas, especially the scenes dealing with major characters’ childhoods. The usual method there was to offer three scenes in a row, all indicating the same trait in the character – humility, honesty, pride, vainglory, or some other trait that will serve as the hallmark of the character throughout the tale to come.)

Suspense is a another reason to prefer limited objective. We dealt with this in an earlier post. So long as we don’t know for certain what a character thinks or feels, we harbor a small measure of doubt. Even when we add up all the clues and decide the character is such-and-such, and we claim we have no doubt of it, all the same – we do doubt, and this last tiny shred of doubt can sometimes drive us mad for certainty – and we read on to see our predictions proved true. In other cases, our doubt might be so high that we can’t claim to ‘know’ a character at all, in the sense that he acts from contradictory impulses, is torn within, and we simply can’t feel sure which of the impulses will win out in any given circumstance. On the other hand, where a talesman out and out tells us what a character feels – let the character be as torn and conflicted as you please – we will feel on much surer ground in forecasting his actions. It is more difficult for a talesman, telling us what a character feels, to make us uncertain what the character will do. But if the talesman chooses the limited objective, and refuses to tell us what a character feels, the difficulty falls on the other side: and he will find it harder to bring us readers to feel certain; doubt will be the usual result, and doubt is what gives rise to suspense.

One more thing to prefer the limited objective derives from that sense of ‘skimming’ over the tale when it is composed of mostly action and less description: a limited objective tale will feel lighter and more energetic to us as we read it. It is not only the reader who feels as though he skips lightly across the events – the talesman himself feels likewise, and this feeling encourages him to glance from one episode to another, from one scene to another, from one place to another. When by contrast the talesman tells his tale in the first person subjective mode, he binds himself and us so deeply and thoroughly to his hero (and indeed, this binding is the point and aim of using this mode of talesmanship), with the result that we both find ourselves trapped within the more or less realistic sense of the character’s reality. Our experience of our own lives is linear, it steps from one moment to the next, and if we want to go across the continent, we will have to travel there meter by meter. If the talesman, using the first person subjective mode, achieves the illusion that we are this character, and we are living his life, then the talesman will break the moment-to-moment illusion only at peril of shattering the whole construction.

I am not saying it cannot be done, it is done, and it is done all the time. But it is a difficult thing to get over, and every such hiatus is something that ruptures, if only a small bit, the careful illusion and binding that gives the subjective point of view its greatest power. In short, it takes a master to manage it; but the novice, in limited objective point of view, will feel bold to try to make the most outrageous leaps – and he will get away with them, too.

(Composed on keyboard Friday 29 August 2008)

The Pool of Narcissus

Indicating on the sly what characters are feeling

Let’s look a bit deeper into the ‘limited objective’ point of view in talesmanship.

This is a narrative strategy where the talesman only tells us what his characters say and do, and what physical things happen in the story’s scenes. He does not tell us what anyone thinks or feels – at least not directly.

The result is that we have to guess at their feelings. We confront the characters through a middle ground of this uncertainty, which can be greater or less, and the talesman can use the relative depth of the uncertainty to create greater suspense for us.

We will hear of simple and minor characters, ‘one-string’ characters, the functionaries, and we will have no doubt about what they feel or think – more, we won’t much care, for their feelings won’t matter much to the events to come. And we will hear of more important characters, even major characters, and their motives and inner hearts will remain cloudy, murky, and obscure to us. We won’t have any way of telling just what they will do next and, because they are more-important characters, this will make a difference to the future outcome of events.

Where a hero seems torn between two paths, and we wallow in his feelings and thoughts, we are so much closer to being able to predict the outcome of his inner conflict. But when the talesman won’t permit us any glimpse within the hero, we are left on the edge of our seats with doubt as to which way he will decide.

So much for suspense.

What about ways to indicate the character’s heart? If the talesman gives us some clues, but no definite answers, as to what a character is feeling, suspense comes from this alone. Even when we feel sure, very sure, of the character’s feelings, we can’t be 100% sure, and we fret and read on to find that last 1%, that last confirmation that we were right.

More, when we must work through clues to guessing about a character’s motives and feelings, we grow all the more involved in the tale, and in the characters.

A talesman can show us feelings through several methods that fall short of out-and-out telling us. These methods form a spectrum from the more-sure to the more-obscure.

The most obvious method is for the character to tell us (and other characters present) what he is feeling or thinking. This is almost the same as when the talesman tells us, but it falls just that 1% shy of full confidence, for there may be characters, and situations, when they will not tell the truth – supposing they know the truth of their feelings at all.

The next obvious method is for the talesman to describe the character’s facial expression, and have it expressive of his emotions. We have evolved to be pretty good at reading other peoples’ faces as windows into their hearts.

Next in line is the character’s posture and general mien, his ‘body language.’ We are not on the whole so expert at reading bodies as we are reading faces, and the language we use reflects this, as there are few parallels in describing body postures to facial expressions such as ‘he smiled, he frowned, he scowled.’

After this there is the roundabout and indirect method of deducing a character’s heart from what he does. This is a ‘lagging indicator’ to borrow a term from the economists: we only get an idea of a character’s feelings and thoughts after the fact; his action now tells us what he thought the moment before.

Then there is the scenery itself, and this is my main point today, for it is somewhat controversial, and seems to me underused.

A scene can be described in such a way as to make us in the audience feel a certain way, and sympathetically, this can give us the impression that the characters present must feel something like it.

This technique used to be employed often with weather, and as such has been mistakenly called a pathetic fallacy. The ‘pathetic fallacy’ in thinking refers to the anthropomorphic notion that animals, plants, stones, and weather have human feelings, and think and react in some way ‘just like us.’ This fallacious way of thinking was taken up by some literary critics and applied to scenes in literature (mostly Romantic literature, I imagine) where a storm would break when characters were torn at heart, and angry at one another, but fair sunshine would warm the world when the characters felt happy and at peace.

The critics who bludgeoned such practice as ‘pathetic fallacy’ proved they didn’t really understand the nature and methods of talesmanship. They wrote as though the talesmen involved were actually recording cause and effect in the story world as though it did, and should, reflect the real world. But in truth I will assure you, those talesmen were only using these changes in weather as a means of aligning us readers with the characters, and making us feel along with them.

But using weather in this way is rather a crude technique. It is crude because it is so obvious, and relies upon things happening to give us the desired feelings. More subtle is to shade the description of things that do not change in and of themselves, in such a way as to indicate the feelings of the characters.

In our own lives, we all have looked on the same rooms and objects, and hated them when we were angry, and enjoyed them when we were happy. The clever talesman makes use of this to show us these objects in his scenes in such a way that makes them appear hateful or pleasing, according to how he wishes to indicate his characters feel.

This is a very subtle method, and its subtlety can go over the heads of the conscious reader, as we see from the literary critics’ reactions. But I will wager that subliminally, in the right brain, more emotional or ‘gut’ aspects of the audience, we understand it better. We at least will get the idea of what the character is feeling in these scenes.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, August 28, 2008)

The Wink

The objective viewpoint is like a sideways glance or a wink

Yesterday I wrote about the objective point of view in its broadest sense – that sense of being a tale told by an author about other people or characters, whose talesman never knows what is in any character’s heart, but makes guesses or assumptions on what they think and feel, to the extent he believes he knows them. This, I noted, is a very different sort of thing from the subjective or omniscient point of view, in which the author is like a god, and sees clearly into the hearts of any of his characters as he pleases – indeed he sees into them all, being their creator, but he only tells us what lurks in the hearts of a few, as best pleases him.

Today I want to put down a few words about the more limited sense of the objective point of view. This comes when the talesman will tell us nothing of what goes on in any character’s heart. Rather he will place us as if we were unseen witnesses to the action, that walk here beside one character, then flit across the field to another, then fly to another place altogether, beside another character. From our vantage points we can see, hear, smell, touch; we can, at the author’s pleasure, know all we would if we were truly present (though the talesman guides our eyes and ears, and only lets us ‘see’ and ‘hear’ what he will) – but we cannot read hearts or minds any more than we can in our own lives.

Thus, the only way we glimpse into the characters’ hearts is through the way they carry themselves, the expressions on their miens, what they say, what they do, and how other characters react to them. And then, over the course of the tale, we may come to feel we ‘know’ these characters, in the same way we come to know acquaintances in our own lives, and we feel we can at least make a measure of their souls. But this is guesswork, and depends upon how well we feel the talesman has drawn his characters, and how confident we feel that they have revealed themselves to us.

This makes our intimacy with the characters a bit more challenging than if the talesman came right out and told us. We must guess – and this can add to our enjoyment of hearing the tale, if the talesman manages it well.

The Impressionist Painters, rather than mixing their pigments on the palette, placed the various constituents of the color they wished us to see in small separate daubs, and at a distance these conflicting patches of hues combined in our eyes into the desired blend. We ‘see’ the same color that we would see had the painter simply laid down the blended pigments in an even stroke; but beneath the threshold of our conscious awareness, there is some part of the rods and cones at the back of our eyes, and the nerves carrying the raw impulses to our brains, the colored daubs stand apart, and fight for dominance, one hue against the others. This struggle, and the (wholly unperceived) process of recombining the hues into the general blend that reaches our conscious awareness, gives to the process of ‘seeing’ that blended color a liveliness, a ‘brightness’ if you will. Our brains are worked, and we are the more alive in our perception for having worked and struggled and, in this sense, painted the image ourselves.

In just this way, the unbiased objective point of view engages us as readers. We must guess at motives and feelings; the author gives us clues, but not the final conclusion – that we must reach ourselves. The process of telling, and hearing, becomes a dance between the talesman and us in the audience, rather like a strip-tease or fan-dance, where the dancer works to make us believe we are seeing more than in fact we are, and where the dancer is re-creating her own appearance and allure out of the stuff of her audience’s desires – and just at that moment when we think we know her, and have her, she winks – and dances off the stage.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, August 27, 2008)

The Objective Narrator

The shades of the non-immersive tale

I thought, after writing of my shock at the confusion over the term ‘narrator,’ that I should carry on for a day, and examine what is all but lost today: the objective narrator.

This term is to be contrasted with the ‘subjective narrator,’ which encompasses the various POV styles used today: first person, third person, omniscient, third person serial. But the objective narrator is not simply a data recorder, but really is the narrator in his true self, the author who admits that the tale he is telling is being told by himself.

Thus we can see a range of possibilities for the objective narrator. At its most limited, and oddest, the term means that the author will not tell us in the audience what goes on within any of his characters’ hearts. He tells us what we would see, hear, smell, taste, or feel, if we were present on the scene he is describing; he shows us the characters’ actions, and from these we must infer what they are feeling.

But the broadest sense of the ‘objective narrator’ (and it is a sense that I am probably alone in using, alas) is the tale-teller as he once was of old.

Think of it this way. You go to a bar and you see an old pal you used to work with. You ask him about the old gang at the job, and he tells you tales about this one and that, the fool, the smart-guy, the mean boss, the top boss who doesn’t understand what really goes on, and so forth.

Now, your old friend doesn’t know what any one of those colleagues thinks. He does know them, however – he has worked alongside them and believes he knows how they would react in any given situation (or at least in situations analogous to the situations he has seen them involved in at work). So he might even tell you something of their feelings, without, however, identifying with them:

So Jones hears this, and right away he’s suspicious. But he’s scared of the boss just like he always was. So he has to think up some way to get around the situation and find out what the real facts are. So he comes up with a plan: he’ll go to the boss’s secretary and mention…

In just such a way were all the old tales told. This is usually called ‘omniscient,’ but in the case of the worker telling of Jones and his suspicions, the talesman doesn’t know for sure what Jones feels. At best, he spoke about the matter with Jones, and Jones told him he suspected something; an interview your old pal neglects to mention, for the sake of making the tale tell. And anyway, hearing Jones once say that he was suspicious about something, is not exactly the same as knowing what was going on in Jones’s head at the time the tale’s events unfolded.

In modern fiction, the talesman is god. He does in fact know – or can invent, and make it so – any thought or feeling in any of his cast of characters. If the author says it, it must be so; and we in the audience do not say, ‘the author didn’t understand his characters’ when their stated motives don’t make sense; we say, ‘the story was badly told, and the author created unbelievable characters.’

When the old talesmen told their tales, most, or all, of their characters were real, they had an existence, or had had an existence, as real as the talesmen themselves – or were believed to have had it, by both talesmen and audience alike. Therefore it was possible to tell a tale of Odysseus, and be reviled for lying about the King of Ithaka.

In much the same way gossip today is bandied about, and rumors of the famous are told, and though motives are ascribed to the great, the audience can disbelieve those motives, they can say, ‘That’s not the way I heard it’ or ‘I don’t believe it, you’ll have to show me some proof of that.’ But they don’t disbelieve the existence of the celebrity or political leader himself.

Tomorrow we will address the question of the more limited idea of the objective narrator. I used to write in that style, and I’ll try to recollect all the tricks I learned along the way. It was, as I recall, a fun way to tell a tale.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, August 26, 2008)

One Man's Notion

Who tells you the tale?

Here, Bardelys must be left to his own devices for a day. Asotir has seen something that so astounded him that he must speak out about it, with your indulgence.

I was helping Bardelys frame his thoughts yesterday, when we both looked online via Google for any ‘standard’ definitions of ‘immersive fiction’ (which turns out to be a term more often used in gaming than in fiction, which surprised both Bardelys and me), when we found a reference in Wikipedia. Of course we opened that page with some interest, where we found the following:

“A narrator is an entity within a story that tells the story to the reader. It is one of three entities responsible for story-telling of any kind. The others are the author and the reader (or audience). The author and the reader both inhabit the real world. It is the author's function to create the alternate world, people, and events within the story. It is the reader’s function to understand and interpret the story. The narrator exists within the world of the story…”
— from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrator

Longtime followers of the Asotirica blog will understand immediately our shock – our distress, even.

I don’t know if this opinion here expressed on Wikipedia is standard literary critical opinion or not. I taught myself talesmanship, by reading and telling tales in many different media. Therefore it is quite possible that my own notions are far from mainstream.

Therefore I can only stress that the opinions I offer you here are my own idiosyncratic ones, and not perhaps representative of established authority.

In my opinion, then, the ‘narrator’ of a tale is the one who tells the story to you. This is of course, and by necessity, the author. It is the author who tells us, or narrates, the tale.

At times the author may choose to hide behind the mask of one or more of the characters he has invented to populate the tale. He may have one of several reasons for this bit of subterfuge; no matter, it is his choice, and ours as audience to decide whether such a choice adds to or detracts from our enjoyment of the tale.

‘There can be only one,’ as the writer of Highlander tells us. Only the author can narrate his own tale. The only exception I can imagine is where the author serves the function more of editor than author. Say I find an old manuscript, a bundle of letters written by a man, expressing a wonderful outlook on a vanished time. So I present this manuscript, interspersing it with comments of my own. The narrator here might be the author (myself) or the author of the manuscript (the man who wrote the letters). But this case is rare.

To say, as the author of the Wikipedia article does, that the narrator is an entity within a story that tells the story to the reader is to posit a sort of autonomy to a literary character – a very odd sort of view, as though any character could interact with the reader at all, in any way. For (of course) every single thing this story-world ‘narrator’ claims to say, is in fact said by the author, who puts the words in his mouth.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, August 24, 2008)

A Dream Mask for All

Bardelys back-tracks, and must eat his words

What makes an identifiable hero?

Not simply empathetic but identifiable so that the audience might lose their sense of self and the hero become their alter ego dream-self.

Bardelys had been thinking a lot about that of late. In fiction in the land where he was born, it had become the trend to make ‘immersive fiction’ where the reader identified with the character and lived the story through him. Harry Potter was very much in this line. So Bardelys wondered if this could be possible for everyone, if one story with one character could be taken on as ‘dream-self’ for everybody in the audience.

Well, right away he decided that people like to have dream-selves that are like themselves. So what was ‘like themselves’ and what does it mean?

Superficially, it meant: men like men heroes, women like women, kids like kids, old people like old.

But then there was the deeper level of likeability, honesty, and so on – the virtues that all men like to believe they have, and which appear in stark relief when painted on another. But it was strange, because sometimes audiences liked to dream they were bad men, bad girls, criminals, etc. And yet in real life they were very mild and gentle and would never do that.

So Bardelys got round to the idea that an audience could always empathize with a hero younger than they were, since once we all had been that age, and could remember what it had been like. But it would be harder to consider oneself as older. True, kids did empathize with older kids, college youths, and adults. But what those older characters do and are like had to approach what kids are like and can understand. So for example, kids could sympathize with adult characters who want to fight, who investigate mysteries, and who want love. But kids had a hard time understanding sex. And kids had a very hard idea understanding moral compromises, the sort of things adults do all the time.

Now could men identify with a woman character? Bardelys had come to decide that this is hard, and it would be easier for women to identify with a man character, because women have been subordinated socially in Bardelys’ culture. It was hard for a man to identify with a socially subordinate character, in part because he doesn’t want to ‘go there’ and imagine a subordinate role for his dream self. But for women to identify with a male character, who is more free than they are, was easier, since a lot of women would like to be more free. This was sort of like the idea that people might find themselves able to identify with criminals, the idea that the outlaw, breaking and ignoring laws, was more free than the reader who felt that he must obey the law, couldn’t drive fast, couldn’t just take what he wanted, couldn’t act the way he wished.

In some ways the criminal character is also ‘younger’ than readers, since he represented in a way the Freudian id, the child that is only 2 years old and just does whatever he wants, and is totally motivated by primitive hunger, cold, needs, and acts on these desires without thinking.

A woman friend of Bardelys’ acquaintance had wondered why JK Rowling would write about a boy magician. But Bardelys pointed out how much more free and more powerful she had allowed Harry Potter to be versus Hermione Gringold, Rowling’s version of herself at that age. Hermione is smarter, and studies harder, and is a ‘good girl’ but it was Harry who dared to break the rules to find things out, who was pushing to investigate mysteries. Hermione is usually saying, ‘but we can’t do that!’ and Harry says, ‘We have to’ and then Hermione goes along – but she would never be doing those things on her own, and if Harry were following Hermione rather than the other way around, they would never have solved the mysteries.

So in Rowling’s mind, her girl-self is less adventurous, and it’s her boy-self that is bolder, and can be a hero.

This went along with what Carl Jung said about how we all have these different selves in us, boy-side, girl-side, beast-side, hero-side, villain-side, slave-side, master-side, criminal, policeman.

In this sense, would it be possible for any of us to identify with any character, if we are enough in tune with all our selves, and if the author is clever or smart enough or skillful enough to connect us to that other self, even the drug addict, child molesting criminal?

Bardelys had, in fact, long ago when he had been young, written a novel from a woman’s point of view. Normally he would never dare such a thing, and had never attempted it in the years since. In this one instance, however, it had struck him as altogether the correct strategy, and after writing it he decided that he had not, after all, been writing about a woman, but about his own female-self, and that he could not have written the tale with a man in that part. For in truth, the protagonist of the tale was bound by convention, and bound by society, and railed against it, howled against it, fought it tooth and nail – every way she could. Had she been a man, she might have simply ignored it and lived an outlawed life. But it was not possible for a woman of 10th-century Iceland to behave in the way a strong man could.

(And in any event Bardelys had written the tale with a true narrator, and in the ‘objective’ point of view, one so out of fashion nowadays that it wasn’t even considered a possibility in the popular books teaching the writing of fiction. It had not, therefore, been ‘immersive fiction’ that Bardelys had been contemplating.)

In the end, Bardelys had to take back his earlier conclusions. It would be possible to craft a tale that all the audience might identify with and find immersive.

But it would be devilishly difficult.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, August 23, 2008)

Four At Least, Not One

Not all of us can swim in the same stream of dreams

No, no, no!

Bardelys had to take it back. The logic (as he saw it) was overwhelming.

There was no Universal Dream that all audiences could identify with.

It was his thinking, the previous day, of the opening to The Hobbit that had at last decided him. Ever since he had mentioned it in his blog, the citation had gnawed at him. The truth of the matter was: Professor Tolkien had been telling a tale in the most old-fashioned way, to his children at bedtime, and it was in this spirit that he carried on the task when he composed his novel. The notion of ‘immersive fiction’ was far from his mind; no doubt the good Professor had never even encountered the term. (Just when did the notion of ‘immersive fiction’ arise, anyway, Bardelys wanted to know.)

It is one thing for an audience to fantasize about living in the tale and identifying with the hero. Though Bardelys suspected that this was something that children did more than adults.

It is another thing entirely for a talesman to intend his audience to live in his tale and identify with the hero.

The first is outside a talesman’s control.

The second he means to bring within his control.

It is the latter case that Bardelys had been taking up, when he wondered if there were a type of tale, and a kind of hero, that could be given so that every member of the audience could dwell in and identify with.

No.

Bardelys had to say, in the end, that gender defeated him. Women’s tales and men’s tales were fundamentally different in the cultures he knew of. Even where they were blended, or seemed to draw close (Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji came to mind) it was not truly so. Prince Genji, for all his apparent (to uncultured barbarians of another world and time) feminine traits, even so seduced many women, lusted after them, mourned them when they were dead. How then, Bardelys argued, could women identify with such a hero? Though the tale was from a woman’s pen, all the same, sex and love were in the core of the matter, and the hero was a man who looked at and loved women.

Age was another barrier hard to overcome. In particular the great watershed of sexual maturity stood in between an audience who knew what hormones could do, and who understood sexual relations and what terrors those imps could unleash upon the universe, and an audience who was as yet innocent, and naive of all the matter.

To the immature, the great passions of sexual desire must be utterly beyond ken; but to the mature, the sort of childish ‘love’ between a child’s view of grownups, must seem too harmless and unreal. In neither case could the alien audience truly enter into the tale, and become one with the hero.

Therefore, Bardelys was left with the notion that there was not One Immersive Dream, but several – or at least four:

1. A man’s tale
2. A woman’s tale
3. A boy’s tale
4. A girl’s tale

The last two might be summoned into one, except that even in the harmless, presexual world of the child, there exist expectations and longed-for identification with grown-ups like the audience. Little boys dream of princes and kings and cowboys, while little girls dream of princesses and empresses and plucky girl reporters.

Now, this did not mean that an immersive tale was restricted to its target audience, and no other. What it did mean is that an immersive tale for a man, is a good tale to a woman – but is not immersive, something she can dive into, swim with, and lose her sense of self in. It is not her dream, but a spectacle of scenes and episodes paraded before her by a skillful guide.

This spectacle of episodes is, in fact, Bardelys thought, but the old-fashioned kind of tale Professor Tolkien was telling – what all the great old talesmen told.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, August 22, 2008)

Dream Branches

Bardelys searches for those divisions in people’s dreams

Now, Bardelys thought, what might make one man’s dream beyond the reach of another?

First there is age.

Bardelys considered that most men would find it easiest to identify with those characters most like themselves. This means in all areas, of course, including culture, nation, mother-tongue, class, race, religion. But of course, if this rule were pushed to the end, no man could identify with any hero save that it were a man who answered to the same name and lived at the same address. Some extension must be possible to make tales work at all as vehicles of audience identification.

But there are branches, and there are branches: some small and easily traversed, some great and hard to cross.

Age is a great branch to cross, but Bardelys thought it likely that men could identify with a hero younger than themselves, because they once had been that age, and could recall what it was like. But it would be a greater leap of imagination to identify with a hero older than oneself, for a man in his prime has never been old, and a child has never been grown-up.

The greatest leap in age must be puberty, Bardelys thought. It is impossible for a child to know what sexual desire is. At most, children can accept ‘love’ that is based upon ‘beauty’ and ‘goodness,’ for these are the words that their parents use toward the children themselves. So long as the love between man and woman is left abstract and somewhat unfocused, the child can readily identify with it. But he can’t really understand sexual desire, and the rage of hormones. (For that matter, not many of those in the throes of hormonal passion can ‘understand’ it themselves … but at least they can identify with characters who are driven mad by the sex urge, and they can identify with their fellow-deviants. But not a single child can grasp just what is going on when a fetishist feels the awful compulsion of his urges.)

So it seemed to Bardelys that children could identify with grown-up heroes so long as those heroes acted and felt in infantile ways. So long as their heroes moved as more-or-less children in grown-up bodies, children could identify with them. But this tactic would make the identification grownups felt toward these heroes weaker.

Gender is another great branch. Women and girls, when they were the ‘weaker sex’ in European culture, could, Bardelys supposed, identify with male heroes, especially when those heroes acted more or less as children, which is to say, not as ‘men’ in the fully-hormonal sense. But how many men could identify with women or girls – most of all if those women or girls were considered in their culture to be weaker or lesser than men? ‘Women’s stuff,’ the men will mutter, and pass on, and read or hear no more.

There is a trick to slip past the gender branch, Bardelys thought, but it would work only in a small reach of the world of tales. Any tale that would allow its hero to be of no specified sex, would do. This includes the beast epos tales, and fantasy works dealing with characters other than human. Thus, even though Rénard the Fox is male, girls and women can look upon him as neither male nor female. And the opening line to the famous work of Professor Tolkien,

Once upon a time, in a hole in a hill, there lived a hobbit.

Of course, Bilbo Baggins is decidedly male, a confirmed bachelor. And Mr Toad and Badger and Ratty are also males. But the translation into ‘creature’ places these characters into a sort of middle ground where, Bardelys thought, (provided there was no explicit romance with female ‘creatures’ which must force the malish ‘creatures’ into more masculine roles) they were neither male nor female.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, August 21, 2008)

One Myth One Dream or More?

How many dreamers can one tale entrance?

One myth, Bardelys felt, lay behind all others. This was the theory Joseph Campbell had advanced in his groundbreaking 1947 study The Hero With 1000 Faces. Campbell had studied the cults and religions of many lands and had without doubt read Sir James Fraser’s The Golden Bough as a young man. In the course of all these studies, Campbell had recognized patterns and motifs that came up again and again. Like Lord Raglan before him, Campbell had assembled these story bits in order to make a kind of template of an underlying mythic tale – the tale of a hero’s journey – that was shared among many disparate cultures around the globe. Campbell called this the ‘monomyth.’

Bardelys had studied in Hollywood during a time when Joseph Campbell’s theory was looked on as a sure-fire formula for success, thanks largely to George Lucas and Star Wars. It was a notion, he had always thought, better honored in the breach.

Now, though, sifting his thoughts for some shape to give to a symbolic true tale, he wondered if Campbell’s monomyth wouldn’t do after all.

It had its temptations. It would be so easy to blend Lord Raglan’s 22 points of the solar hero with Campbell’s monomyth, and between the two achieve enough room for variants so that the formula might escape too much predictability. And the tales that grew from that nexus would be glamorous for most of Bardelys’ audience.

But first, Bardelys felt he had to satisfy himself that it was possible to set down one single template that could satisfy all. Could that be done, he wondered, without making it so general and vague as to be, in the end, useless? A thing like, for instance,

An empathetic protagonist wants something, strives to get it, and succeeds, (unless he fails).

That would surely describe all but one out of a thousand symbolic true tales. But it doesn’t help a talesman shape a new tale or fix one that isn’t working – and it fits a million fake tales as well.

A symbolic true tale must deal in universal desires or fears. It must transcend time and place and technology. It must be the same for young and old and for male and female. And that, Bardelys felt, was nigh on impossible.

(Composed on pen-top Wednesday 20 August 2008)

Close to Home Tales

Two ways to relate a reader to a tale

Bardelys was still pondering the question of the true tale. This is a tale that will involve the audience thoroughly; it is the kind of tale that arises spontaneously at the very birth of talesmanship; it is the kind of tale that men have always known, outside of periods of cultural degradation, such as the present in the West, when tales are told based on ‘genres’ and only reflect other tales, and not life or experience or human needs or desires.

Now his first thought was, that at the birth of tales, men told of the events of their day, their life, their clan. Every incident and character in these tales was something with a direct (or indirect by but one remove) relationship to the talesman’s audience.

He told them of himself, and his audience knew him. He told them of his wife, and they knew her. He told them of his grandfather, and though his children were too young to have known the grandfather, they knew the talesman, and so knew this character was the talesman’s grandfather, and that the talesman had known him.

Or he told them tales of the animal epos — about the lion and the gazelle and the hyena. And the audience knew lions and gazelles and hyenas in the fields outside the village thorn walls.

Or he told them tales of Mother Rain and Father Thunder, and the audience could well believe in these creatures, for they had felt and tasted rain, and heard thunder.

Or he told them tales of the first man and woman in the world, and how they had lived under the earth for many years, seeing nothing in the dark, before they had come up onto the surface and beheld the sun. And his audience thought of these first humans as people much like themselves and (in the absence of timelines and number systems and a sense of the enormity of Time) they could well believe these events had happened not so very long ago (even when the talesman had begun the tale with ‘A very long time ago…’).

Now, all these are of the kind of tale that the audience accepts as true because they relate to the events and characters and places directly — as local places and familiar people.

But Bardelys thought there was an additional kind of true tale that went hand-in-hand with these ‘true because familiar’ tales. And that was a tale that the audience accepted as symbolically close to them.

This is the tale of dreams.

Dreams, after all, are frequently absurd. And their characters are at times impossible, and often strangers. And yet we all accept the dreams, in part because we find ourselves playing parts inside them, but also in part because, if the Symbolists and Freudians and Jungians say true, what happens in these absurd and impossible and weird dreams, represents our deepest longings, and our uttermost fears.

Now (Bardelys went on to reason) if a talesman told an absurd, impossible, weird tale, he might yet connect his audience to it if he followed the dreams in these two matters:

1. Feature in the tale a hero much like the audience fancies themselves.
2. Deal in the tale with the deepest desires and overcome the utmost fears the audience has.

Bardelys could already see this line of thought leading him toward the fakest of the fake tales.

How to tell them apart, then, was the next question he must answer.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, August 19, 2008)

Told Felt Sensed

An old Master shows the way…

Bardelys felt bad for Stephenie Meyer.

For the past few days, he had been mourning her first novel, Twilight. He had so wanted to enjoy it, all the more since it was first in a series of (so far) four novels. If only Twilight had been wonderful fun, Bardelys would have had another three volumes to look forward to reading.

Alas.

Not that he should exactly feel bad for Meyer, who was doing very well with sales of the four books, and would, he felt sure, get at least Twilight made into a movie, which would mean some real money for her.

No, he felt bad that she had botched the tale so badly.

By one of those coincidences that are more synchronicity than accident, however, the same week Bardelys had lost hope for Twilight he had watched a marvelous 1935 MGM movie called Trouble for Two. This was a light, Ruritanian fantasy adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts (the first in the ‘Suicide Club’ story cycle, reprinted together in Stevenson’s The New Arabian Nights and available online from http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page as narab10.txt). And Bardelys had so enjoyed the script, and the performances, that he had been encouraged to search out and download this very gutenberg.net edition, and read it…

Now, it was a tale of contrasts, to go from Twilight to Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts. But from the start, Bardelys had to admit it was unfair to compare novice Meyer with Stevenson, writing at the top of his form, a veteran, master talesman.

In some ways, the two were of a kind. Cream Tarts was just as ‘fake’ as Twilight which forced Bardelys to conclude that fake tales were no invention of his own time. And yet, Stevenson did not make any pretense of depth of feeling or presentation of anything important; the very title he had chosen pointed up the silliness of his own tale, and showed Bardelys that Stevenson had intended the tale as a light, insubstantial snack, like the very cream tart that the young man ‘crushed’ nine into his mouth, in order to finish his last night’s silliness to dine with the Prince Florizel of Bohemia.

But there was something in the tale that went beyond this, and taught Bardelys something new.

At the climax of the tale of the Tarts, the Prince steps out of a building in the heart of London near the river, well after midnight, on his way to meet the man who is going to murder him. This the Prince has agreed to, even staked his honor and pledged his word upon. He knows he goes to his death, and that he had played an utterly foolish part to get himself into this predicament, from which there can be no honorable evasion.

Now, what happens next?

Bardelys was disappointed at what Stevenson does. Straight away, almost as soon as the Prince’s shoes touch the sidewalk, out come three men from a cab, muscle the prince within, and save his life.

Stevenson, the great talesman, highlighted the sudden shift in his hero’s fortunes, the twist or reversal, as his main aim for the tale at this point. Therefore he went to it as swiftly as he could, to make it as surprising to his audience as possible.

Poe, on the other hand, or Hugo (or any of the great Romantic authors) would have held the saviors back, and made the Prince walk down the street, toward the next block where he had been told he would meet his murderer, with further instructions. Every step would be accounted for, as the Prince feels terror, remorse, fear, regret, casts a thousand imprecations upon his own folly, but undertakes to meet his fate bravely and honorably — for he is no coward. That is to say, the Romantics would highlight the hero’s emotions, his feelings, and examine the moral and sentimental basis of them. Only at the end of the street, opposite the very corner where the Prince had been told his murderer would be awaiting him, would Poe or Hugo have rushed on-scene the cab with the three men to save him.

A modern talesman, what would he do? Well, let us say his interest is built upon the example of the movies (the dominant form of talesmanship today). So he would have highlighted the physical sensations the Prince undergoes. The crunch of his shoes upon the pavement, the chill damp in the late night London fog, the silence of the square, and his own physical manifestations of fear, sweat, trembling, heart beat. And then, the murderer would have appeared: more suspense … and in a fit of uncontrollable self-preservation, the Prince would fight back against his murderer, in a violent struggle — a pitched battle — while the other cab comes rushing on — and at last the salvation from the three assistants, not, however, before the Prince (being a hero after all) had assured himself the upper hand and eventual victory in the battle.

So we have three branches, or ways to approach a tale at this juncture: as a tale (with an emphasis on the ups and downs and twists and turns of the narrative) or as an examination of feelings (with an emphasis on the sentimental and moral path of the hero, and an indication of the philosophical notions underpinning them, perhaps) or as a physical experience.

To treat it as a tale, as Stevenson did, leaves us in the audience at a slight remove from the event. To treat it as an examination of feelings or as a physical experience immerses us in the tale and hopes that we will identify with Prince Florizel as a dream-self. But to stress his sentimental and moral reactions is to treat him and us as moral beings, while to stress his physical predicament is to treat him and us as animals.

Yes, that might be the sorriest remark of all, Bardelys thought, sighing. Today’s tales consider us as mere animals, and do not address our other parts.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, August 18, 2008)

Broken Vows

No tale should start as one kind and end as another

Bardelys was morose today. Not only was he still reeling from the moment of silence he had struck the other day, when he feared he had lost all tales and song and joy in life forever, and not only was he still trying to tease out some way to reconnect himself with the true tales that would always be available (and failing in the attempt), but — what was the last stroke — he had foundered in the last reaches of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.

Peste was what he wished to mutter. A fine old oath, that. Peste! Peste! Peste!

He had only himself to blame. You see, he had wanted to like the book too much. He had trusted in its popularity to be a badge, a sort of reliable promise of quality. Alas, it was not to be.

The start of the book had not been auspicious. But that was to judge the finer points of talesmanship, and Meyer is no veteran, he told himself. So he allowed for the mediocre opening, and remained confident that the tale itself, once it got going, would be a corker.

There were warning signs along the way for him, that should have told him to lower his hopes. But then, the tale had gotten onto firm ground.

Meyer was pretty good at showing how incipient love turns on the many ‘coincidences’ of running into the one you will love, again and again. And she was quite good, excellent indeed, when it came to the first date of the lovers, and the secrets and trysting, and the longing that teens and only teens can know.

All that was to her credit, and Bardelys honored her for it. He was thankful too of being reminded of youthful ardor, for he was an old man, and it was too many years since he had felt those flames of hormonal passion. (Was he then, he wondered, so old that he had forgotten what it was like to be young? Ah, that is to be old indeed!)

But then — then —

Then it all went to hell.

The tender, borderline erotic tale of young doomed love took a sharp turn into comic-book territory, and became a thriller, as generic and as tired as the latest ‘action’ movie whose title Bardelys would forget before the following day, interchangeable with all the other ‘action’ movies that glutted the market.

He was sure, indeed, that Meyer had not set out to write that part. She had been led into it, by fools. Fools who were either her first readers, or her editors, but none of them, Bardelys knew, understood true tales or talesmanship, even.

My First Love is not the same kind of tale as Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane is stalked by Brainiac!!!

Supernatural Desires is not the same kind of tale as X-Men Fight the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants!!!

In a way, Bardelys thought, as he put the book down — probably for good — Meyer had broken her oath to her audience. The shift in story-kind had come in the second half of the book. And there was no hint of ‘action thriller’ in the first chapter.

The first chapter of a novel, like the first 10 minutes of a movie, is an introduction in more ways than one. It not only tells us the who what & where, but it also tells us what kind. What kind of tale it shall be, that is.

Bardelys had trusted in Meyer’s first-chapter promise, that this would be a teen love story with supernatural elements. She had intimated nothing about super-heroes and super-villains battling across the continental United States.

Lay aside the matter of the implicit vow, Bardelys thought; what sort of reader would enjoy the teen love tale? Say they were enjoying that first date, the secrets withheld from Dad. Wouldn’t they want more of that? Who says they would suddenly say, ‘Enough of this, let’s have some action now!’

Or say Meyer’s book was picked up by fans of generic thriller action tales; would any of them endure the first 2/3 of the book, about teen love and getting friends in a new high school, to find at last the part where the action kicks in?

In part this failure of the book related to Bardelys’ search for true tales and his realization that much of tales in the contemporary world were fake.

The parts that Bardelys had liked in Twilight struck him as ‘true.’ But the ‘action thriller’ generic scenes that followed struck him as fake through and through. It was as if, he mused, Meyer had reached a bit of an impasse. She had not been telling her tale too well, for lack of conflict, and the tale had begun to founder; only the scenes and emotions were good, but scenes and emotions are not enough to make a tale.

Then, Bardelys was willing to bet, some editor or reader had told her she ‘needed conflict’ and this was all she could come up with, snatched from the usual garbage of the movies and pop culture.

Whatever the reason why she had taken the tale down that path, it was the wrong choice, and she had broken her vows to Bardelys and all her audience, and he would have no more of it.

He supposed that if the generic ‘action’ thriller parts were original, or exciting, or good, he might have forged ahead. So he had to emend his ideas. If a talesman breaks his vows, but offers gold to make up for it, his audience will (after a bit of grumbling) accept it, and go on to the end with him. But even there, some among them, Bardelys was sure, would still grumble and groan, and say, ‘The first part was better than the end, why couldn’t he just give us more about that?’

And they would be right.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, August 17, 2008)

Roots

Where are true tales found?

Bardelys had felt the moment of fear and silence, when he thought that all tales were gone for him. Then he had recovered a bit, and come to the belief that only the false tales were gone; in that moment of silent clarity, he had learned that the tales of the present age had gone so far as to cleave apart from true talesmanship. But the true tales had not died, they could not die.

This left him wondering how to find them.

It was not only a matter of being a reader that concerned him; he also wanted to know as a talesman. Now that he had despaired of modern tales, he knew he could never again write one. He must instead tell only the kind of tale he thought of as a true tale without really understanding (as yet) what the term could mean.

Of course, the simple answer lay before him.

If tales had begun, at the dawn of man, with only true tales, and then in the growing sophistication and commercialization of all art, had gone too far, or down the wrong path, then the simple answer was to read the oldest tales he could find, and try to sniff out where the difference lay between them and contemporary tales.

But it was not to be so easy.

For Bardelys was convinced that the true tale was not merely a simple tale, such as the first mysteries, or folk tales from centuries past, or oral tales told by less-commercial, more-liberated societies of today. No, it went beyond that.

He had a suspicion that at the root of the true tale lay some deep and immediate connection between the matter of the tale, the talesman, and the audience.

Bardelys had reached this conclusion in the following way:

First he thought that dreams were tales, and true. Each of us tells ourselves tales when we dream in sleep. What makes these tales so compelling and strong is that we feel that they are real and actually happening to us. It is a quality of the dreamer, who both tells the tale and hears it, immerses himself in it, and instantly, moment by moment, adjusts the tale to suit his current needs, fears, desires.

It was this connection that Bardelys suspected lay at the root of the true tale.

The false tales of his day, our day also, are false because they deal with events, people, things that are far from our daily lives.

So, Bardelys thought, a true tale would begin in its root with where he was, his life situation, his space and time.

Thus it might be a tale an uncle would tell him, that took place beginning in his own house, with people that he knew, branching out from there.

And yet, he shook his head. Hadn’t he already concluded that dreams were by their nature true? And yet none of his dreams dealt with events around him (at least, only a very rare few of them did). Most of his dreams were of the past, with strange tweaks and twists, mixing in bits of movies and books, dreams, fantasies.

But they were true.

Or were all dreams true?

If they were, then it was wholly the connection, the sense of realness, that made them true.

The only other thing to say of dreams was that they were ‘about’ where he was in a symbolic sense, dealing intimately with his own longing and fear. It was a closeness to his life situation in a mental sense, rather than an external or physical one.

He knew there was more to it than that, and he made up his mind to discover it.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, August 16, 2008)

The Song Will Not be Still

Only a false song will ever die

Bardelys wondered what had happened to him.

It was not, he now learned, that the poetry had gone out of life. The moment of stillness that had so frightened him the day before — a stillness that had no parallel in his life, a small death, a hole in the fabric of all — was not, after all, the death of song. It couldn’t be that.

For there was song and poetry all around. You only had to look at the clouds in the sky, or the moon in mist at night, or listen to the crickets humming through the hot darkness, to know that the mysterious something that breathed the breezes out of Eartherea was still there, and would never go away.

But then what had he felt was lost?

It was tales, yes, it was poetry. But it was a different kind of poetry.

The tales we know in our modern world, Bardelys reflected, are a far cry from the tales the first talesmen told. They are far even from the tales of the prophets and myth-makers, the dreamy-eyed singers of Eartherea.

The tales we know are fake.

They have ancestors, and those ancestors have ancestors, and those ancestors have … and if you chase them far enough up their family tree, you will come in the end to true tales, and true song. But the tales we know today are so far removed from that truth that they have lost the threads. Or in more genealogical terms, their bloodline has thinned so, and diluted so, that it is blood only in homeopathic quantities, which is to say it is now all sugar-water and food coloring, and none of blood at all. A few molecules only, perhaps, drift lost in the moles of liquor.

And we who hear those tales, Bardelys realized, do not even know what we have lost. Instead, we have learned the trick of operating in a different key, if you will, of shifting our minds so as to leap with the talesmen into the deep fakery of these seeming-tales. We know the genres, and so we jump right into them without a thought of reality — the kind of reality that the first writer of a mystery, or fantasy, or heroic yarn, had to conjure with mightily.

And now if we today were to take up a tale told in the original vein of the first mystery, the first fantasy, the first tale of adventure or of love, we would find it laughably weak, trite, simple, a tale fit only for children.

Yes, we have grown up, thought Bardelys. We have grown aged and infirm into senility, to the point where we no longer have any idea of how potent it must be, to hear a tale that hooks right into our own lives, that could happen to our neighbor, our child, ourselves.

And it began to gnaw at Bardelys and haunt him:

Was there any way to make and hear a true original tale for him, ever again?

— Or was he lost in his own senility?

(Composed on keyboard Friday, August 15, 2008)

He Hears No Song

What a hollow thing life is, deprived of magic

Bardelys was afraid.

He could feel it in the pit of his stomach, an ache, a hollow, a sore vacuum that would not dissipate.

It had struck him that day, late in the morning, with the sun shining, the air warm and fresh, and life easy, mild, and benevolent, that he heard no song.

It was a sort of premonition, a vision, an experience of years compressed into a moment.

What would life be like, without a tale to tell or hear?

Life is a grim business. We forget that, we who have lived like princes in our kingdoms of oil and high technology and all the brute strength that our oil-slave did for us, and from which it freed us. But Bardelys knew it was coming, the days without oil, when the ever-willing slave would leave, and the leisure hours would be no more, and in their place toil, and labor, and want. They would come back to haunt us, the taskmasters and grim brutal reality that our grandfathers knew. Our children shall know them, alas. We hoped to leave them a better life, we leave instead a husk of a world from which we have sucked the last of the juice, and squandered it wastefully.

Bardelys too would know those times. Almost all who live will know them.

And without tales to tell and hear, what shelter will we have from that grim and bitter life?

The truth is, that tales will always be there for us. They always have been. Simple tales need no oil, no massive mechanisms of transportation, no high technology.

But for an instant, Bardelys had lost the thread of song that he now realized was always at hand. The thread had snapped, and it felt as though it could never be joined together again. He had lost it and it was gone and he would never hear song again, never know poetry again, never hear another tale. He would lose all vision and echo of Eartherea, and the grim scrabbling after survival, not living but mere survival, would be all that remained to him. It might be all anyone would have.

Ugly, fearful prospect!

And so he knew, at last, that whatever gloss he might put upon it, and whatever higher moral aim he might weld upon his tales to come, the truth of the matter was that tales were for him a shield and shelter from the grim realities of animal existence.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, August 14, 2008)

This One Card

Beware thought if you read, over-reasoning if you write

Bardelys was happily reading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight (though he had to confess a certain loss of tension as the amour progressed without so much as a spat between the love-birds) when, all of a sudden, he struck a wall.

Meyer had over-explained herself. Or rather — she had over-thought her world-building, and thought herself too clever.

Here (trying hard not to spoil things for possible future readers) is how Bardelys saw it:

Twilight is set in the Pacific Northwest in contemporary time (which is the 1990s). Actually it takes place in Eartherea — but it seems important to Meyer that her vision of Eartherea resemble Earth and our own Pacific northwest in the 1990s as much as possible. And into this dreary, cloudy, rainy contemporary landscape she brings vampires, such as she reimagines them.

Her particular 'family' of vampires eschews (for commendable moral principles) to prey upon humans. Instead, they hunt wild beasts. All well and good, until…

But why should they hunt when they can herd?

There are after all people in Africa who are well known for their cattle herds, which they raise for their milk and blood. The blood (as well as the milk) they drink raw and fresh from the living beasts.

What stops Meyer's vampires from being cattle ranchers?

At a stroke, Bardelys felt his enthusiasm for the tale deflate. It was a minor point, but it did not stop from nipping at his thoughts. Each time it did, he found himself kicked back out of the dreamscape of Eartherea. With this one card removed, the whole house of cards goes splat.

He wondered now how Meyer might have done it and held onto both the hunting and the trust of readers such as Bardelys. He suspected there must be a way. But the only way he saw ran counter to Meyer's apparent preference — she would have to let go of her sharply-focused vision of the semblance of Earth, and instead adopt a dreamy, lyrical, poetical vision — a vision such as Lord Dunsany had.

Vampires out of Fairyland would disdain common animal husbandry out of sheer principle.

And if only Meyer had mentioned that once upon a time, her monsters had raised beasts but found the practice dull, it might have won back even so prosaic a frump as Bardelys now must admit he had become.

In the end, he thought, maybe Twilight had not collapsed like a house of cards — not, at least, to the unfrumpy young girls who were its intended audience.

(Composed on pen-top Wednesday 13 August 2008)

Ariadn’s Thread

How the immersive point-of-view character makes for longer tales

In the ancient legend of Theseus and his adventures on Crete, the young hero had braved the Labyrinth, to slay the Minotaur and end King Minos’ reign. In this exploit he was helped by the King’s own daughter, Princess Ariadne, who had fallen in love with the hero. She gave him a skein of her thread, and he was able to use the thread to find his way back out of the Labyrinth when he had slain the monster.

But a thread had to be followed in a line, from one end to the other. You can’t skip ahead when you follow a thread…

Bardelys had been thinking about the immersive point-of-view character. This might be done in the third person or the first, but the dangers of the technique were greater when a talesman chose the first person immersive point-of-view character.

In some respects, Bardelys thought, the first person narrator was prone to this anyway: the first person point of view was almost ‘immersive’ by definition.

But not really.

First person narratives had been told as long as tales were told, Bardelys suspected. But the idea that the audience should become one with the characters in a tale was recent. In fact, he considered the immersive narrative to be an outgrowth of the tale-as-experience school, and a mark of a declining art form. Whenever art ceases to comment on and interpret or record the experiences of life, and whenever it lost its moral message, and devolved into mere entertainment, mere ‘experience,’ that art was declining in power, and its practitioners were partaking of a decadent society.

Decadence has its uses, Bardelys reflected. Nothing wrong with decadence.

But surely, he thought, when a whole culture was in decline (as could be seen and measured in its art), then surely it wasn’t a good sign for the culture or its future.

Be that as it may, his main thought now lay in something quite a bit more technical.

Because, as Bardelys saw it, once a talesman starts in on the immersive point of view character, first- or third-person, he will find its greatest strength in a recreation of experienced reality. This means that each scene is strongest when it is told moment by moment. And then, when a scene ends, how do you snap the line?

How do you skip ahead down Ariadne’s Thread?

Usually this was done by a summary paragraph or two, a sort of ‘fast-forwarding’ through the line. But even this threatened to break the spell of enchantment that the immersion into the character’s thoughts, feelings, his very soul, could wreak. This enchantment lay at the bottom of what an audience wanted from an immersive, experiential tale.

So Bardelys set about conjuring up some antidotes to the spell, ways to maintain it while breaking its rules.

First he thought about the structural breaks. Chapter breaks, part breaks, even so-called ‘thought breaks’ where lines are skipped or a trio of asterisks occupy a blank space, indicating a gap in space or time. Such structural breaks are so well established that the readers will only blink, and carry on.

But structural breaks were a bit of a cheat. They were not available to the oral or radio talesman, for example, and in film or television scripts they would, in fact, break the spell. So structural breaks would work, but surely there was some other way?

The experiential tale was a sort of dream, Bardelys thought. And dreams jumped around plenty; some dreams did nothing but jump around. Maybe the key lay here.

Well, how did dreams get away with it? Part of their secret lay in the nature of dreams. They represent the workings of the mind (or the brain, Bardelys added) which was both talesman and audience. That mind went where it wanted to go, and jumped when it wanted, and where it wanted. But there were surely ways a sly talesman could direct his audience’s wishes from behind the scenes?

In film, for example, when we see a closeup of a character looking offscreen and reacting, we want to see what that character sees. A cut to a different space, which we presume represents the point of view of the staring character, gives us just what we wanted.

In more general terms, when another time and place is mentioned, this gives the talesman an excuse to take us there.

And when some question is raised, its answer is desired, even if it takes us far away to another time.

The question technique led Bardelys on to the broader topic of suspense. Any sort of suspense is a kind of question, whose answer is the resolution of the suspense. So there must be something in suspense techniques that will let the talesman jump us over time and space.

It might also be wise of any talesman, Bardelys thought, when he began his tale, to jump around on purpose, a good deal. This might get the audience accustomed to the jumps. Any beginning serves to answer several questions the audience might have of a tale, and one of those questions is, ‘What kind of a tale is this?’ — and its answer lies both in the matter of the tale and the manner in which it will be told.

Bardelys went so far as to propose to any student talesman the following challenge:

Take up any of the final 3 Harry Potter novels by J K Rowling, and rewrite them so they are no more than half their published length. (The final volume should be trimmed to one-third its published length.)

Bardelys considered the only way to shorten these tales considerably, and still preserve their characters, mysteries, clues, and action, would be to break Ariadne’s Thread constantly, and keep skipping the action forward.

Now, there lay a challenge that should train a talesman to most excellent effect!

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday 12 August 2008)

Eye in a Box

The immersive point-of-view character can at times cripple a tale

Bardelys was reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, but though it was pulling him along (which might be the highest compliment any tale can boast) he wasn’t enjoying it as much as its many fans must have. After all, the series of teen romance against the very-gothic Pacific Northwest tales was said to be almost as popular as J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

Well, Bardelys had to admit that he wasn’t exactly Meyer’s target audience. He wasn’t a girl, and he was a few years past his teens.

One thing had struck him, though. He was a bit critical about the heroine and her attitude. And he realized that Meyer might have explored Bella’s reactions and character a great deal more, except … she couldn’t.

She couldn’t, because Bella was the point of view character in an immersive, first-person narrative. From such a restricted point of view, Meyer could show us what Bella saw herself, but she couldn’t look back on Bella herself. At most she could have Bella consider her own motives — but that was still looking from inside Bella’s head.

No eye can see itself.

It doesn’t always have to be that way, Bardelys thought. There was Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, as well as Nabokov’s Lolita. Both these tales were told as though the protagonist spoke, and both made us look at much at the protagonist as at anything he saw around him.

The difference, Bardelys wondered — where did the difference lie?

Well, there was this: the heroes of Faulkner and Nabokov’s tales were both extreme and different from us in the audience. They were so different from us that it would be quite difficult to identify with them. They weren’t just different — they were repulsive as well. We wouldn’t want to identify with either of them.

As a result, when we read those tales, we are always at one remove from their supposed narrators. We stand apart and seem to hear their ramblings, and we judge them, and we doubt they are telling the full story, and we suspect that they don’t even know the full story. And Faulkner and Nabokov give us skillful glimpses at other alternative events or ways to see things.

These are not ‘immersive’ in any way. The grotesqueness of the heroes forbid us from delving deep. But Meyer wants us to sink deep into Bella’s way of seeing things. This creates a strong box all around the narrative, restricting what we can see or think.

Bardelys imagined that he was only able to step aside from that spell because he was not the target audience; the spell was weak upon a 50-year-old man, and he was thus strong enough to break the chains and wonder how the tale might have been if Meyer had chosen a different narrative strategy.

She might have done it so easily, Bardelys thought. She might have made it an epistolary novel, made up of emails Bella sends her mother. This would have required that Bella tell her mother a lot more than Meyer’s Bella does in the published book, of course. Or Meyer might have told the tale from Bella’s friend’s Jessica’s point of view.

With these strategies, much of the text could be preserved word for word — 95% in emails, and 90% for scenes where Bella pours her heart out to Jessica. But if the text was preserved, the experience Bardelys and other readers would have would have been very different. Just this simple layer of remove would have set us considering Bella from the outside. We would have observed what she looks like, and we would have had, if Jessica had been our point-of-view character, an external, less subjective way of looking at Bella’s physical appearance, and how she looks and changes as she falls in love, and in danger.

Third person subjective point of view would change the text somewhat more, but it would have had the advantage of allowing slight shifts outward, glimpses of a somewhat more objective (at least an external) sight of Bella. It would have permitted a true Narrator, disparaged and disguised, to offer us a hint of analysis into Bella’s heart and character.

This is one of the chief faults of the immersive point-of-view narrative: it makes for insipid leads. Sometimes the heroine’s insipidness is the point (Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is the prime example), but more often the insipidness is an unfortunate by-product of the absolute identification between audience and hero.

Often enough, in the tales that Bardelys had read, this sort of tale was wish-fulfillment, and the hero was an idealized, romanticized image of the self we readers wish we might be. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series of tales, with the super-heroic John Carter, was an example. John Carter’s character (if Bardelys could even consider his character without a smile) was beside the point; more important was his strength, swordsmanship, bravery, and cleverness. John Carter was insipid in a different way than the nameless narrator of Rebecca. He was ‘insipid’ in the sense that he was flat as a character, pasteboard, simple in the extreme. He loved, he hated, he fought, he won. His motives were the most primitive known to man.

Bella of Meyer’s Twilight series, on the other hand, is not quite a wish-fulfillment.

No: Bardelys wondered if he had to take that back. Consider Bella from the vantage point of a typical teenage girl, or at least a teenage girl who reads romantic novels. What would be her wish to be fulfilled? What would be her ideal Other Self?

Well, Bella considered herself plain, but all the boys she meets want to date her, and fall in love with her. So she is Ugly Duckling Girl, and what more typical wish could a teen girl have to fulfill? Then, she falls in love with the most ‘beautiful’ boy in her class, the darkly intriguing Edward. And, wish promptly fulfilled, he falls in love with her. They even have a disagreement, before the first book is half done, as to which of the two loves the other more.

The danger that her love represents, Bardelys deemed, was the very stuff of gothic romance, traceable back to Jane Eyre — the darkly handsome, but wild and even dangerous, masterful lover Edward, was a direct descendent of Mr (Edward) Rochester.

Wishes fulfilled partake of dreams, and Eartherean tales (such as the Twilight series includes) glide through the moonscape of dreams. In dreams the dreamer does less than things happen to him. So too with Bella, Bardelys realized: coincidences (which in Eartherea are the work of Fate or Higher Powers) throw Bella and Edward together to simmer their attraction, and then Edward starts to take matters in his own hands, watching over Bella and appearing fortuitously whenever she falls in danger.

But when a hero does less than is done to him, he falls in peril of insipidness, too.

Maybe, Bardelys had to concede, Bella was a wish-fulfillment to Meyer’s intended audience. He simply hadn’t understood this until he reasoned it out, while writing of it in his blog, because he was so unlike the intended audience, and that wish was so far from his.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, August 11, 2008)

Two Tales in One

Allegory is tricky … and hard, too

Bardelys had to confess he wasn’t the smartest reader in the audience. This he had to admit to himself when he had watched a Japanese move, Battle Royale, and gave it relatively low marks, mostly for its gaping logical holes. The fact was, the subtitles on the DVD that Bardelys watched were not great, and it was perfectly possible that the explanations he lacked were present in the Japanese original. But some of these plot holes were inherent in the basic premise on which the story was built, and that couldn’t be a matter of the subtitles.

The tale of Battle Royale involves a time in the near future, when Japanese society is in chaos. Unemployment is 15%, and what’s worse, the kids are revolting. Really revolting, and the parents just can’t do a thing with them. So the diet passes the Battle Royale legislation, and every year, one class of high school kids is sent to an evacuated island, and forced to fight one another to the death. The last survivor is the ‘winner’ and gets to live. ‘But how,’ Bardelys wondered, ‘would that make the unemployed not want work? And how would that get kids to behave?’ It wasn’t as though the kids all watched the current Battle Royale game and thought to themselves, Holy crap! I better sit quiet or I’ll be sent to Battle Royale! In fact, the kids in this year’s game looked non-plussed when their teacher started telling them about it, as though they had never heard of the game.

So Bardelys was feeling quite smug about this, and better than the guys who made the movie.

Then he watched Battle Royale 2: Requiem.

BR2 was even more implausible. But it was also a lot more obvious — so obvious, indeed, that even a dummy like Bardelys understood what it was all about!

In short (not to spoil any enjoyment of the movies, which are good — watch them!) both the original BR and BR2 are allegories. We are intended to enjoy them as solid actioners, but also to see through the surface into the deeper heart, the message, the broader tales.

Allegories are a strange breed of tale.

They hold, each of them, two tales in one.

The surface tale, which is ordinary and concrete as tales should be.

The underlying tale, which only uses the surface characters, events, and objects as shadows of its true subjects.

Now, there are certain built-in differences between these two tales.

Each tale has its own needs. What to do, then, when the talesman finds those needs in conflict?

A perfect, or ideal, allegory, will be a perfectly plausible, enjoyable tale on its surface as well as being a perfect tale of symbols under the skin. There will be no need to compromise the one for the benefit of the other; both will exist in perfect harmony.

This is the work of a master, a genius, and it is the rarest thing in the world.

Most allegorists deem their deeper tale as more important, and when they find they must make some compromise, they make it in the surface tale. This is what the filmmakers who made the Battle Royale films did. This is the source of those lapses and plot- and premise-holes that had nagged at Bardelys, when he hadn’t understood the film to be an allegory, and concerned himself only with the obvious surface elements.

It was understandable. The deeper message of the films took Bardelys’ breath away, and he was amazed by its boldness, its guts. There was no way on Earth, Bardelys thought, that any Hollywood studio would make a movie with this kind of message!

But the surface action movie (though it had an intriguing premise) was nothing nearly so special. If Bardelys had been telling the tale, he too would have left the surface tale wanting in some plausibility to support the under-tale.

There might even be a theoretical argument, Bardelys thought, in favor of weakening the surface tale, so as to leave the audience questioning it … so that they would be prompted to ‘look beneath’ and maybe even see the more important tale that lay beneath.

Bardelys was ashamed of himself that he had missed it.

He would never rest easy in feeling smug about another talesman’s work again.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday 10 August 2008)

Tell and Tell Again

How lies told over turn into truth

Bardelys was reading a popular book: Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer. It was hugely successful, the first of a (so far) four-book series, that was set in Washington State, USA, Eartherea.

Bardelys found nothing special in its opening pages, and thought that Meyer was a bit clumsy and unsure in handling exposition. It seemed to him she was taking far too long in getting the story going. A mark, perhaps, of the novice talesman, but almost surely a mark of an author who wasn’t quite sure how to transform her illusion of Earth’s Pacific Northwest America into Eartherea.

Bardelys admired her aim, the way she wished to settle her teenaged readers into familiar-sounding ground, only to find it transformed out from under them into the nightmare Romantic world of Eartherea. If only Meyer had handled the thing with a surer hand!

But it got Bardelys thinking. If the tale were familiar, and it had been retold some times over, the way Robin Hood, and King Arthur, and El Cid had been, then Meyer could’ve gotten to the point right away. There was an elegance possible only in tales twice told. The telling-over smoothed the edges, rounded the corners, eliminated what was not needed and strengthened the spine. This was what Wilhelm Grimm had done so well in his many editions of the Folk and Fairy Tales he and his brother had collected. But old tales had something that went beyond the smoothing of successive talesmen. It was almost as if, in the retelling, the old tales became not merely familiar, but somehow true.

We readers, in sharing a common set of tales, grow familiar with them, and if the tales are old enough, Bardelys reflected, we will have heard them ever since we can remember, and our parents and parents’ parents will also have heard them from the cradle. We will all share these tales, and what difference, Bardelys wondered, would there be — what difference could there be — between old, old tales, and history?

Much history is folk tale and folk truth. Many old tales become part of the history of the lands where they are said to have taken place.

Twilight, if told again and again, would in the end be able to be told simply and in straightforward fashion. There would be no need, as Bardelys saw it, of Meyer’s gingerly tread up to her matter, the careful setting up of a ‘real’ illusion that would give way to the ‘Romantic’ Eartherean reality. Instead, she would meet halfway an audience that knew what the tale held in advance, and (even if they didn’t know as yet) would accept whatever happened — because, in this strange way that lies told over often enough, long enough, become truth, so too this tale of young love among magical creatures would be ‘the way it really was.’

And ‘the way it really was’ never needs an explanation. You just tell it, and even if someone in the audience asks, ‘But how could that be?’ your answer is only a shrug, and the throwaway line (all that is needed, ever, if any talesman ever has enough confidence in his tale), Because that’s the way it happened.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, 9 August 2008)

Tell and Tell Again

Not Good Enough

But is ‘good enough’ good enough?

All the same, thought Bardelys, continuing the thread he had taken up yesterday, even though the story was more important than the rendering of it, or the style with which it was told, that wasn’t to say that the rendering was not to be considered at all. Crap rendering would repulse the audience so they’d stop following the tale before its heart could hook them in. And bad rendering would make the audience feel as though the story they had just heard was less than it was. Finally, for some reason, audiences tied the style and rendering to the talesman or artist directly — but thought of the story as something else, more loosely connected to the talesman, or not connected at all. They will take the story for granted. Especially a great story told by a master, will seem so perfect, so inevitable, that the audience wouldn’t be able to conceive of it being told in any other way. The talesmen who stood in the audience would know, and (to the extent of their own mastery over talesmanship) they would applaud the creation, structure, and organization of the tale they’d heard. Not so with the laymen in the crowd; they hadn’t ever been taught what talesmanship is, they’d never been trained in the art. But the laymen would consider they knew a well-turned phrase, and certainly knew an ill-turned one. In this they were all experts.

Looking back on Steve Ditko’s career, Bardelys compared his layouts and rendering for Charlton mystery/fantasy short tales in the late 1950s and the middle 1970s. In both periods, Charlton paid bottom-level page rates, and deserved no great time or effort from their artists. But Ditko in the late 1950s worked diligently and delivered masterful jobs, both in terms of layouts and storytelling, and in terms of rendering. In the 1970s Ditko was an even more accomplished storyteller. But his rendering was slipshod, even bad. Even ghastly. There was one story Bardelys could recall, set in Argentina, that had to rank as the worst job he had ever seen from Ditko’s pencil and pen.

What was even more appalling (or odd) was that Ditko’s black-and-white inking techniques were starting to bleed over into his color jobs. Ditko had wrestled with technique and form all his career; he was one of the most intelligent and thoughtful comic book artists ever. Ditko used a different technique depending on the final form of the work as it would be published. He had drawn with increasing simplicity through the 1950s into the 1960s, growing more and more aware of and reliant upon the colors to carry the image across. Some of his earliest work had not displayed this confidence; he had cluttered his compositions and over-rendered textures and faces. The resulting welter of lines muddied and interfered with the cheap, crude coloring methods that the comics used in the period. Ten years later, Ditko drew more simply, and the vibrant colors carried as much weight as the linework.

When he began to work in black and white, for Warren Publications Creepy and Eerie, for fanzines and independent publications like Wood’s Witzend, Ditko had to design and draw without the colorist. He tried wash work, he tried ben-day or zip tone overlays, and eventually settled on hand-drawn cross-hatching, dots of ink (black or white) and similar textures.

But his work for Charlton continued to be in color (in the garish, botched colors that Charlton’s presses turned out, the shame of the industry), and yet here was Ditko using the same cross-hatching and stippling techniques, as though he wasn’t aware of it.

The result was far from happy.

There was another shift in the technical side of the industry that came in the 1970s that Ditko took a long time to get used to.

Comics were drawn in a larger size than they were printed. Mechanical techniques were used to shrink the images down to the final printed size. This indeed had been part of Ditko’s earliest learning experience. Part of the reason why his early work was so detailed was undoubtedly because he was making it look gorgeous in the original. Reduced and printed on cheap pulp paper, the blacks smeared, the fine lines were lost, the finest lines merged into one another. Ditko, like every new comic artist, had to retrain his eye so that he could ‘see’ what the page would look like when shrunk to half its size, and reduced in resolution through the cruddy printing technology.

In the middle 1970s, the industry changed the degree of size reduction. Where before pages had been shrunk to half their original size, now they were shrunk to two-thirds of their original size.

As a result, artists had to change the way they ‘saw’ their originals. More detail was called for now. And it seemed that Ditko took a long time getting used to this change.

Bardelys, who loved Ditko dearly as only a Ditko fan could understand, was grieved when he saw his master’s ugly work. He was shocked when he saw that Charlton story set in Argentina; he remembered, when he had first seen it, going back to the first story page to make sure that it bore the credit ‘inked by Steve Ditko.’ Even so, he pored over the panels, in a vain effort to see another hand there. He invented excuses to himself: Ditko had been ailing; it was a rush job, given Ditko at the last moment; Ditko had only had a weekend to lay it out, pencil it, ink it; or else it was only the inking that had been rushed, the pages had come from the letterer late, deadline was the next day, and Ditko had only had one night to ink all 5 or 6 pages. Ditko had been under a disadvantage there: his pencils were light, no more than breakdowns, because (as Ditko once wrote in the 1980s in a letter to Ron Frantz) he didn’t want to rough the bristol board surface with any more erasures of the underlying pencils than need be. Thus, when the lettered roughs came back, and Ditko faced that one-night deadline, he had been forced to draw as much as ink at the same time, with every line fatal and forever, and no time left to white out and redo anything.

All this Bardelys told himself, excusing his hero. He loved Ditko, he idolized him even when he pitied him and called him wrong. But to think of Steve Ditko as a hack, handing in a crappy, ugly, ineffective, laughably shoddy piece of work — Bardelys recoiled from the prospect, he couldn’t bear it, and invented these fantasies so as not to condemn the great man.

Take then, that tale of the Argentine as example. A shock tale, a horror tale, a tale of terror. There may or may not be a philosophy hidden under it, but foremost, it was a tale told to frighten children who read it, for children of a certain age dearly love to be frightened. The rendering of such a tale is important, and becomes a part of the talesmanship, more so, much more so, than in a tale that is longer, that develops a greater arrangement of structural and architectural masses and forms, that may express its characters and moods through many example anecdotes. In a short tale such as this, the drawings themselves must give us to shudder, they must make our skin creep and tingle. The master of the great house, whose doom is the comeuppance decreed by just and cruel fate, must be despicable not just in what we see him do in diagrams — he must be hateful to look upon in his posture and his face and expression.

It lay well in Ditko’s power to do all this. It was nothing he had not done a hundred, a thousand times before. Whatever the reason why he had failed to do so, the lesson, as Bardelys took it, was clear.

The rendering is not nothing. In some tales it is the equal of the story itself.

There must be a balance, Bardelys reflected, between the talesmanship and the styling, of every tale. This balance will vary from tale to tale, and depend upon the qualities and aim of each tale itself in its aesthetic aim, its length, its audience, and so on.

Sometimes, therefore, Bardelys was driven reluctantly to conclude, ‘good enough’ just wasn’t good enough.

(Composed on keyboard Friday 8 August 2008)