(From 30 years ago: November 28, 1978, with added comment from now)
An unrelated note. I just finished Keats’ ‘Eve of St. Agnes’ and was struck that its plot has all the form of a medieval ballad, except for that happy ending. More than 99% of those ballads were tragedies; and it got me wondering just why this might be so. It seems to me that the primary impulse to write in this case springs from that appreciation of the tragedy (since many of these old folktales had true ones as their basis). Other features point the way: these tales are not of mean old misers dying of some illness after a long life of making existence miserable for all about them; but of the young, the beautiful, the rich, the talented, noble, the powerful.
Furthermore it seems that the fears thus evoked are much the same as those which inspire philosophical systems: fear of change, of death, of the absurdity of being born mortal into a world of innumerable externals ruled by chance, only to age, second, wither and die, leaving nothing but a decomposing effluent behind. And it seems that the primary impulse behind the very creation of these works of art is vocalization of the shared fears, made the greater, yet at the same time exorcised in such infamous examples.
We make the fear organized, beautiful, by artifice making it artificial; and though we die in these stories yet we also live on after hearing/reading them. Why is not triumph also enshrined, then? Because triumph is sheltered from vocalization through the learned mechanisms to defend against envy; because we take little delight in speaking of someone else’s victories; and because we do not share in such triumphs when we hear them recited, but in fact feel jealous of and resent them. (This is not always the case: as for the case of a shared triumph, especially one whose issue was in great doubt. A great victory over a hated foe in war, e.g., in which the General’s and soldiers’ victories become ours because we share the same national or tribal cause. Yet note here that it is the very note of doubt or dread which is the key ingredient making the thing work: there is no eucatastrophe without a very real belief/fear that doom had been waiting at the end.)
This primary psychological impulse behind the very creation of art is what I seek – knowing it, we learn why certain forms are hallowed and more powerful; and perhaps learn other roads to the same end hitherto unseen. Why do animals have voices? Why do they use them? – to vocalize certain feelings and thus somehow lessen them. I notice taking out groceries, but many of the people will remark, ‘Oh, it is cold in that store!’ Or, ‘Raining again, wouldn’t you know on the weekend!’ Or, ‘Winter’s here,’ or ‘You don’t mind coming out on a lovely day like this, do you?’ And I wondered why they say these things. They cannot think that we will heat the store; rationally they should have come to expect a cold store after visiting it several times. Yet they will say it! It is a mere animal vocalization, not intended as real communication (yet the existence of a listener is important) but merely to invent somehow their feelings of being cold (etc.). It is the same in saying, ‘Ouch!’ to pain, or cursing when things go wrong. The growls, grunts, bleats and shrieks of dumb animals are at the root of all literature.
[Note 2008:
I can now see other functions of these utterances. Within a community or tribe, such as humanity and its ancestors lived in for so many millions of years, every member of the tribe sought to influence communal decision-making and bend it a little bit in the favor of the individual making the utterance. A vocal complaint such as, ‘It’s cold!’ is at least in part an effort to find agreement with others so that some action is taken to warm up the environment. Saying something like, ‘you don’t mind coming out on a nice day like this, do you?’ serves to find some common ground of humanity between the speaker and the one spoken to, and this could have one of several aims: it might be that agreement to the statement that it is a nice day will reinforce those feelings within the speaker’s own mind, allowing him to enjoy the day even more. Or it might be that such a statement is only an opening salvo to establish some sort of rapport between the two parties, in order to get something from the person addressed later on. But I suspect mostly that these sayings came out of some feeling of embarrassment, from someone in the middle class to someone else and the middle class who was fulfilling a subservient role; it seems somehow shameful to have a servant or slave, and so addressing the person in the subservient role as a fellow human being takes some of the sting out of it, and is an effort to deny that there is a master-servant relationship between them.]
