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)