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)