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)