The pleasure of tales, and the promise and peril of Romance
I will try now a little experiment, using the voice-recognition software to compose this blog post off the top of my head – without any idea of what the hell I’m going to say.
As the reader follows the threads of a story, he probably grows more and more engaged in the characters and in their various desires, frustrations, and conflicts. Fiction offers us a way to live vicariously through the lives of imaginary characters. This creates the possibility of the spectrum of approaches from the more Romantic to the more Realistic. I tend to categorize readers into these two camps – those who prefer Romance and those who prefer Realism.
Realism, I think, depends largely upon details and close observation of character, nuance, and setting. It also asks of its readers that they also relish these very details, and know something about the material. The better we know both the setting and the kind of people who populate the story, the more we can appreciate how well or poorly the talesmen has drawn them. Realistic stories about faraway lands and strange, exotic characters can offer us innumerable details, but how can we tell whether these details are true or accurate? The closest we can come is to recognize certain aspects of psychology and domestic life that are similar to the ones that we know in our own daily lives. This creates its own pleasure – the pleasure of recognizing in aliens commonalities with our own people, our own family, and ourselves. It also allows us to view our own lives (and these characters who are so like ourselves) through new eyes and with new perspectives because we see them in strange dress with different-sounding names carrying on with slightly different customs at whose base we recognize universal traits and actions and behaviors of all mankind.
Romance, on the other hand, offers us a journey away from ourselves, and away from our own lives. There are two joys in Romance:
- The joy of leaving ourselves.
- And the joy of coming back.
The joy of leaving ourselves touches close on the joy of listening to all tales. Every tale, be it ever so Realistic, deals with someone else and someone else’s life. Even if the character lives in our own town on the next street, all the same he is not us. And the life he leads, and the situations he gets involved in, are not our own.
When the tale is, on the contrary, Romantic, the journey away from ourselves is all the greater and (for those of us who enjoy such things) all the more fun. We journey to exotic lands, we live alongside strange beings and we participate in bizarre customs. All our worries, cares, and anxieties are left behind. In exchange, we take up a new worries, cares, and anxieties – but these are all to some extent ‘safe.’ We know, after all, that it’s only a story. Even though all the characters may die, and evil prevail and good languish and perish, when the tale is done we will be safe and ourselves again (at least, as safe as we were when we began to hear the tale).
The joy of coming back, involves I think two things: the first is whatever sense of amusement, entertainment, and delight that we experienced when we heard the tale. All this we bring back with us, and it lightens our load in facing whatever troubles, toils, and gloom that plague our daily lives. (If, on the other hand, our lives are full of enjoyment and suffer no pain, we can nevertheless enjoy the refreshment of having taken a break into story land.)
The second joy of coming back derives from whatever wisdom we have gained in the process of hearing the tale. Not all tales of course have morals, or impart to us any wisdom at all. But every tale encloses like a shell encloses a nut – because every tale embodies and encapsulates its author’s wisdom. Every author has some wisdom. Every talesmen has something to tell us. Every human being has learned some lesson in life, both authors and audiences – but they are never the same lesson. Every person has something to teach us.
In an odd way, when the talesmen spins a yarn about strange lands and mysterious beings, he approaches in a roundabout way his deepest truths and most intimate wisdom. He will tell us things without realizing it. He will tell us things that he doesn’t know that he knows. The world of fantasy is connected in subterranean ways to the world of dreams. And the world of dreams is connected to her innermost desires, longings, needs, fears, and earliest experiences of life. Out of dreams emerges the wisdom of the body, that is always learning even as ‘we’ are learning, only in very different ways. All these lessons will be revealed as the talesmen tells a tale of complete and utter imagination, without the slightest connection to ‘real life’ and without himself realizing just what it is exactly that he’s doing.
In just the same way, we when we hear or read a tale of this kind, experience it as a kind of dream ourselves. The process of reading a fantasy tale creates a mirror to the process of writing one. The writer allows himself to ‘speak in tongues’ and from this babble emerges the language of his deepest heart. The reader then ‘dreams’ the tale when he reads it and this dream writes its own wisdom back on to his heart.
This process operates below the conscious level. That gives it enormous power – and creates great danger at the same time. Evil dreams, when we eat them off another’s plate, can write evil in our own souls. Therefore, be warned! Listen, and be warned!
(Composed by dictation Thursday 11 September 2008.)
