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)