Mostly, Give the Audience What We Want

The International stars Clive Owen as an Interpol agent and Naomi Watts as an assistant New York District Attorney. Normally in any thriller starring young and attractive stars such as Owen and Watts, romance would bloom between them. In The International, however, director Tom Tykwer and screenwriter Eric Singer only wanted to suggest an attraction between Owen and Watts’ characters, never to be fulfilled; it was their intention to stress the job, the case, over any romantic elements.

The only problem is, that’s not what we want. What is worse, it isn’t what we expect. There is no way to structure a marketing campaign for the movie that stresses what it doesn’t include; anyway the marketers don’t want to advertise lines like ‘You know that romantic element you like in thrillers? We don’t have that in our movie.’

But when they do set up the marketing to make it look like a sexy, fast-paced conspiracy thriller, they promise what the film does not deliver. The billing alone promises us romance; we expect romance; when the filmmakers don’t deliver, we are going to be disappointed.

The way around this for Tykwer and Singer would be to cast unsexy, character actors in the two leading roles. Owen is a leading man, and Watts is a leading lady. These are the kind of actors who get the money-men to green-light a big expensive production like this. The producers did not do their job in allowing Tykwer and Singer to sabotage the audience expectations for romance.

The rule is, therefore, ‘Mostly, give the audience what we want.’

There is a qualification to this, based on the fact that part of what we want is to be surprised. But we only want to be surprised in entertaining ways.

The only way to make a twist like this contravention to our expectations work, is to build it into the structure of the movie – make it work for the movie. The most-cited example of this is in Hitchcock’s Psycho when star Janet Leigh’s character is killed at the mid-point of the plot structure. This works because shock and terror are the forms of entertainment we seek in this movie genre. We don’t believe the star’s character is going to be killed; when she is, we are horrified; we can scarcely believe what we have just witnessed; and we know that nothing henceforth in this movie will conform to our comfortable conventional expectations.

I suppose that the creators of The International might have found some way to make the lack of romance work – but I don’t see how.

— asotir

First Person Snare: Addendum

A couple of days ago, in discussing Robert A Heinlein’s novel Glory Road mention was made of the First Person Snare – the trap a talesman braves when he writes an immersive tale in the first person. The danger is that the talesman put too much of himself into his narrator, who ought to be more of an empty vessel for the reader to fill, in order that the tale be as immersive as possible. The danger is worsened when the talesman himself is a very different personality than the outward circumstances of his narrator-protagonist would dictate.

Heinlein, the 50-year old curmudgeon, wrote the tale of a 23-year old innocent, and the innocent’s words sounded suspiciously like those of a 50-year old curmudgeon.

There is this much excuse to grant Heinlein: that the tale is written by the hero long after he has gone through the adventures he faces on Glory Road; in the intervening years he has suffered disillusion and grown older, wiser, and more cynical (and curmudgeonly, perhaps).

So, logically speaking, Heinlein has his reasons.

But logic is a poor defense in talesmanship. At the time we read of these early adventures, Gordon is still an innocent 23-year old. And in order to immerse ourselves in the tale, we must accept and adopt that 23-year old persona ourselves – without reference to a later, older Gordon.

Heinlein could have side-stepped all the discord we felt when we read Gordon’s remarks along the way, had Heinlein merely added such phrases now and then as ‘Looking back on the incident…’ (And to be fair, the tale opens with the older Gordon informing us that he knows of another world, and ‘I could go back there. I could—’)

But every such remark as ‘Looking back on it…’ serves to remind us that Gordon survived this particular danger, and lived on to tell of it. This is to lessen the suspense, our fear that Gordon might fail, and fall, vying with our hope that Gordon will win through. It also makes us aware that we are not hearing of one Gordon, but of two: the older man writing the memoir, and the younger one who lived it.

In order to immerse ourselves in the tale, we must be undivided in our allegiance and identification. We can only be, in this case, the 23-year old man on the Glory Road, for he is indispensable; the older man exists only to tell us of what the younger man experienced. The older man might be our principal focus; we might still immerse ourselves in his tale; but then we would need constant reminders of the physical surroundings and circumstances of the older man; what we would be diving into would be the tale of an older man reminded of his youth, regretting it or longing to return to it; we would need to follow the older man forward through some events in the ‘present time’ in between recollections ‘back in my past.’

It can be tricky, for naturally the older man writing down his exploits for us will look on things differently than he did when he lived them. One way for Heinlein to go would have been to forego the introductory remarks, the ‘I could go back to that world—’ page. But this page brings us a great deal of suspense – most of the suspense, in fact – for the second half of the tale, after he has won through the dangerous Quest on Glory Road, and settles down with his Princess to ‘happily ever after.’ Once the Kingdom is won, the hero and his beloved have everything they could have wanted. There is no danger, no opposition, no conflict for many pages. Only one suspense takes us through these paradisical descriptions: our knowledge, gleaned from that opening page, that the Hero is destined to lose this paradise. He will leave the Kingdom and be sundered from his Princess; and we wonder, Why? What happened to ruin it?

Heinlein seems more interested, indeed, in examining the unpleasant aspects of living ‘happily ever after,’ than in the Quest and adventure itself. He seems almost to rush through the dangers; but then he rushes through the ‘life afterwards’ and then he rushes through the ‘after I lost it all’ back on Earth – and the conclusion must be that Heinlein simply was telling his tale briskly, guided by his training in the pulps.

— asotir

(Composed 12 May 2010 on keyboard)

Before and After in Heinlein’s Later Tales

Robert A Heinlein was a science-fiction writer, one of the 3 or 4 most acclaimed of the golden age. Some of his tales deal heavily in social philosophy – political, sexual, inter-personal. As he left the pulps and slicks magazine markets behind and wrote more novels for hardback publication (and as he gained in prestige and fame and grew more comfortable financially), Heinlein’s tales began to change. Large sections of the novels consisted of little more than a character lecturing other characters about love and sex, taxes, political freedoms and duties, and other social mores.

Since we’ve been reading some Heinlein lately, let’s look at the three tales and see how they work. The three are:

1. Stranger in a Strange Land (the original 220,000-word manuscript submission)
2. Double Star
3. Glory Road

Stranger in a Strange Land

This is maybe Heinlein’s most famous tale. It has been credited with helping launch the hippie movement and the sexual revolution in the USA. It gestated long in Heinlein’s mind, over a decade passing between the time when his wife Virginia first suggested the idea of ‘an Earthman raised by aliens’ until he submitted the manuscript to his publishers.

The basic story tells of Michael Valentine Smith, born on Mars but soon orphaned, the sole survivor of the first human expedition to the planet. He is raised by Martians. No one on Earth knows about this until some 20 years later when the second Martian expedition reaches the planet.

Mike is brought back to Earth, and some unique circumstances make him a very rich and powerful personage legally. As a side note, let’s look at those circumstances – they teach us something about talesmanship.

Mike is the only offspring of a human married couple. Both his mother and her husband were brilliant, she invented what would later turn out to be the essential power source for interplanetary travel.

This alone would grant Mike immense wealth. But Heinlein is not yet satisfied.

Mike’s natural father was not his mother’s husband but the captain of the ship, and the captain had no heirs, so Mike inherits both his legal parents’ estates, and his natural fathers. More: the entire crew entered into a legal relationship stipulating that all their estates would accrue to the last survivor, should some accident happen on Mars. These estates have been handled over the past 20 years by a foundation, which is now very wealthy indeed. (This gimmick echoes H G Wells’ When the Sleeper Wakes.) Mike owns a big chunk of the Moon as a result (actually he owns about a fifth of the corporation that owns the Moon). That should ensure that Mike is the richest and one of the most powerful humans on Earth. But Heinlein is still not satisfied.

A complicated chain of legal decisions (elaborated at length in the tale) sets the precedent that Mike also ‘owns’ Mars. This means, legally speaking, all natural resources on Mars, and all landing rights, visiting rights, tourist rights, etc., belong solely to one Michael Valentine Smith. This guarantees Mike not only the promise of immense future wealth, but also political power (depending on what minerals and other resources are found on Mars).

In terms of the tale, and what later develops, all that’s important is that Mike should be fabulously wealthy, enough so that he can found his church later in the story. But Heinlein has become interested in legal ramifications of discovery, explorers’ pacts, and the like. Page after page is devoted to the maneuverings this complex of inheritance brings to Mike, only to end, about half way through, with a neat and very sudden solution – the whole matter is dropped after that, like some toy Heinlein tired of (or maybe he realized that it was getting too cumbersome and he extricated his tale from it at the earliest moment he could).

And one of these would have sufficed; Heinlein gives us all three. This not only complicates things needlessly in the opening third of the tale, it leads into a too-neat, too-easy solution when Heinlein decides to drop it. These speculations do however interest sf fans in and of themselves, for we enjoy speculating on ‘what ifs’ of a grand historical as well as scientific and cultural scale. In no other genre, perhaps, would Heinlein have gotten away with it. Indeed, he might not have gotten away with it in sf, had he been only a novice and not one of the big poobahs of the industry, whose name was enough to guarantee a certain number of sales. (No novice, maybe, could have sold a tale in 1961 that was about group sex and marriage, either!)

Heinlein’s interest in plausible speculations interferes with the talesmanship from page one, which opens with a fairly long discourse on the criteria best suited to choosing a crew to operate a space ship for several months on end. This leads to a crew of 4 married couples, which then sets up Mike’s parentage; the affair between Mike’s mother and natural father prefigures the group sex-marriages Mike will create in his church (but too little is made of this).

But once Mike is back on Earth, in the huge naval hospital outside Washington DC, and in danger, threatened by forces interested in controlling his wealth and potential political power, the tale gets going. This is the only part of the tale that works all-out as a tale. The events follow logically in sequence, cause gives rise to effect, interesting characters come on scene, with witty dialogue that is nicely balanced to the descriptive and action paragraphs. Suspense holds and mounts, and along with suspense, sf fans can delight in the appreciation of Mike’s very-Martian, unhuman way of looking at life and society, and the gradual revelation of his superhuman powers, something like a yogi’s mastery of himself raised to the last degree.

Mike’s powers fall into two classes. First there is his control over his own body. He can enter sleep so profound it looks more like death; slow down or speed up his sense of time; heal his wounds, cure illness in himself, grow muscles, change the shape of his bones and facial features, age or grow younger. Second he has control over external objects as well: he can make things move with his mind, he can read other people’s minds and communicate mentally with some, and he can push people and objects into nonexistence by willing it.

The initial intrigues over who will control Mike (or will they murder him?) end when Mike finds a guardian and teacher, Jubal. What follows is a series of discussions of Martian versus human philosophies, and the tale falters.

Mike then takes about a third of the book off in wandering around, trying different occupations, trying to figure out what makes humans really tick. When he finds out, he feels it is his duty to teach us Martian ways, and the tool he chooses is his church (but ‘It’s not a religion,’ he insists.) This dovetails into what is most controversial about the tale: not only is Heinlein advocating free love, nudism, and group marriage, but he does so as part of religious services. He also concocts a new fundamentalist Christian church, the Church of the New Revelation, inspired by Mormonism and the evangelical movements that swept the Southwestern United States in the 1920s and 1930s.

Stranger in a Strange Land ends up looking and feeling a lot like Candide and there is a strong feeling of social satire and Enlightenment-iconoclastic moral philosophy to the tale. If we could extract the first third (minus the 20 pages or so leading up to Mike in Walter Reed Hospital) we would have a terrific tale with all the elements for a good pulp page-turner. The rest, mixing carnival tents, tattooed ladies, church crusades and sex, fails as tale and holds our interest mainly because of the erotic appeal, the humor, the wittiness of the dialogue (even down to a section of art criticism several pages long), and curiosity in the lifestyle Mike advocates (‘Would it work? Could it work?’)

Double Star

Double Star tells the tale of out of work actor Larry Smith (billed as ‘the great Lorenzo’) who impersonates a kidnapped politician who heads a major political party in the solar system. In essence the tale reworks Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. As with Stranger the beginning scenes are filled with suspense and action, each scene is handled in concrete terms and flows logically and immediately into the following scene.

There is a small diversion when Smith learns just who it is he is to impersonate – a discussion of interplanetary politics intrudes, and we explore hypnosis and what later thinkers would call ‘anchoring’ – and there is no action at all, other than discussions, on the long flight to Mars. Heinlein doesn’t take Smith around on the ship, and nothing much happens, and the passages drag.

The Martian sequences pick up the action, but at the crucial scenes of climax – when Smith is adopted by a Martian clan, and then must handle press conferences and meetings as the politician – Heinlein seems hardly interested; the scenes are not detailed, and no snags offer us any hint of suspense or danger. The mores of the Martians are raised to make a crucial plot point – then they are dropped entirely. The tale seems to be heading into a story of Smith on Mars; he then leaves Mars and the tale shifts entirely.

What closes out the book is a summary, rather abstract and handled mostly in narrative summary, of the political campaign that will seat the next Imperial Parliament. The only scenes worthy of the name consider Smith’s personal and private meeting with the Emperor Willem IV, the only one who sees through the disguise. The Emperor thus seems to rise as a major character, but he’s dropped as soon as he approves of the impersonation.

The second half of Double Star seems confused, as though Heinlein had lost his train of the tale, and wasn’t sure any longer just what kind of tale he was undertaking. Maybe he changed his mind. When compared to The Prisoner of Zenda, the second half of Double Star is woefully weak, and hardly worth reading. (And since so much of what’s good about the opening of Double Star never pays off in the end, we can say the whole story is not worth reading as a tale proper.)

Glory Road

Glory Road tells of E C Gordon, a young man who fights in Vietnam in 1962, is wounded, discharged, and ends up on a nude beach in France, where he meets a lovely blonde who takes him on an interdimensional quest of great danger and different cultures. He survives the quest and wins the object of it, whereupon he learns the blonde is in fact the Empress (or ‘Wisdom’) of Twenty Universes.

The second half is where the tale drops into summary narrative and cultural speculation mode. Unhappy as the Empress’ Consort, Gordon returns to Earth, where he is equally unhappy with ‘normal life’ as a draftsman in Los Angeles or student at Caltech. In the end he seeks another adventurous quest. Today, we could read this as a treatise on the appeal, and potential danger, of immersive videogames; in 1963 Heinlein had in mind the newly-revived books of Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as those of Robert E Howard, Anthony Hope, and all the pulp tales of adventure.

As with Stranger, the second half of Glory Road interests not as a tale, but rather as sociological and sexual speculation. But the sex is not so potent; Gordon passes up almost every proposition the beauties of several universes offer him. An entire novel could have been told around Gordon’s dissatisfaction (or ‘acculturation’ as he calls it) with life back on Earth, and it might have been moving to a Romantic talesman. Heinlein however is a satirist and humorist more than romantic, bringing to mind Walpole’s dictum that ‘the world is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think.’

Conclusions

The sum is: an extended discussion of philosophy, sociology, and the like, ought to conform to the rules of talesmanship just like any other element: it ought to advance the story itself. But we readers don’t insist on that for discussions or any other elements, so long as they entertain us sufficiently. In that case, they are a weakness we are more than willing to suffer.

The question then arises, whether a grand opening to a tale that lets us down in the second half, is worthy of our attention. It doesn’t conclude properly speaking. It doesn’t pay off what it plants. Plot threads are woven in, then the stitches dropped, the threads abandoned. But for those moments when we are engaged in the opening scenes, we are entertained.

— asotir

(Composed 12 May 2010 on keyboard)

The Genius of DuMaurier

The empty vessel first person that is equally a character. Brilliant.

Yesterday we mentioned Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca and The Scapegoat in light of a tale told in the first person in which the narrator has no real character, but functions instead as a stand-in for us readers, who can imagine thereby ourselves truly acting and being acted upon within the tale, experiencing its adventure, danger, and romance. But these two tales go beyond the simple tale as experience.

In both these tales, DuMaurier created empty vessel narrators whose defining character was precisely that – they were what might be called ‘deficient in personality’ (there surely is a medical term for this type of personality). This means that, while both narrators are perfect empty vessels, they also function as full literary characters, i.e., they have personalities. Those personalities just happen to be empty.

They are both also never named in their tales – even better.

In both cases it is the lack of personal development in the narrator-protagonist that causes him to be drawn into the shadow of the stronger personality that looms over the locus of the tale. And thus in both cases part of the struggle of the protagonists involves resisting this influence; part of the suspense lies in the question, ‘Will that shadowy Other completely submerge our hero?’

We can enjoy these tales as either analyses of these deficient personality protagonists, or as immersive tales.

There are differences between the two tales. In Rebecca, the nameless heroine is never confused with the first Mrs deWinter; no one, she fears could ever admire her who knew the mistress of Manderley before her. And Rebecca is dead; it is her specter that haunts the stage; the challenge of the heroine is to take control over the household on her own terms, in her own name, without feeling daunted by that personality in the grand portrait. But in The Scapegoat the nameless hero is forced to assume the name of his double in the provincial French household. This is far more in keeping with the model of Double Star and The Prisoner of Zenda we discussed yesterday. In the course of discovering the glass blowing business and the relations within the château, the hero finds that Jacques is not a very nice fellow at all, and sets out to do his best to undermine and undo the plans and former actions of the man who has thrust his identity upon our English schoolmaster nonentity. And Jacques is alive, and may return at any time – indeed he does return, and the suspense then turns on whether the narrator’s plans for the business and ménage will hold up, or whether Jacques will sell the business and betray his family, as he had intended before meeting the narrator and, struck with their uncommon likeness, forced upon him the switch in identities.

The Scapegoat is thus a more interesting tale from this point of view. But it lacks much suspense, since life in the château is something of a welcome vacation to the hero, and he is not committed to anything he does there; commitment and engagement only gradually overtake him. His is a tale of a man of mild tastes and middle age – the storm and stress of youth are long behind him. Rebecca on the other hand holds a high level of storm and stress, for it is a young woman’s tale, and involves her very real hopes and fears for a fulfilling life – a life she has not yet lived. It also engages us on a much deeper, more primal level: the level of the fairy tale and Bildungsroman.

— asotir

(Composed 10 May 2010 on keyboard)

First Person Snare

In Robert A. Heinlein’s Glory Road the narrator, a 23-year-old college dropout, ex-Army, Vietnam vet, sounds suspiciously like the narrator in a lot of other first-person narratives authored by Heinlein. A lot like Heinlein himself.

This similarity sneaks into the story as it goes along. At the beginning, where the narrator, E. C. Gordon, talks about his history as a young man, family relationships, and education, the focus is so strongly on what makes Gordon different from Heinlein that it keeps Heinlein honest, if you will. We readers are never far from considering Gordon as a man born about 1940 who played high school football in the 1950s and served in Vietnam when Kennedy was President.

But then the story shifts, as Gordon is taken to another universe by a witch he calls Star, a beautiful nude blonde he meets on an islet in the Mediterranean. On alternate worlds Gordon acts as the Hero of Romance out of a hundred tales, and the focus now concerns Gordon’s reactions to these alien worlds and lifestyles as an American and Earthman. And here Gordon seems to be much better-read than the kid we learned about, and to express a more mature man’s views. In short, he starts to sound a lot more like Robert A. Heinlein.

One of the strengths of the first person narrative is its immersive quality, the ease by which we readers can identify with the narrator-protagonist, and live out his experiences vicariously. The narrator becomes an empty vessel or shell into which we project ourselves. We become the universal Hero walking Glory Road, aided by the sexy witch and an ugly, comedic sidekick. Or we become the private eye investigating murder in a corrupt Los Angeles, or the assassin of an unnamed government agency, or the second Mrs DeWinter.

For this hollow vessel to perform its function well, it has to be empty. It needs a surface only (preferably an attractive one of good physical fitness, handsome face and form, and a ready wit and intelligence) and its interior characteristics must be of aptitude and talent only, and nothing that would normally fall into the category of ‘character.’ This protagonist must be as much like ourselves as possible, except maybe slightly better – a little smarter, more educated, tougher, more intuitive, cleverer. Any aspects of his character that would shatter our identification must be avoided.

But even as the author hopes we readers will identify with his narrator-protagonist, he himself also wants to do so, and this is the snare for the author. When the author identifies too much himself with the narrator, he is apt to make the narrator likewise too much like himself. Then the narrator begins to have a specific character: the character of the author.

It is of course no fault that the narrator have a character, so long as this character is a proper literary character – in other words, so long as the character is true to himself. In this case, the character no longer serves as the hollow vessel through which we readers can vicariously live another more glamorous life, but acts instead as a traditional character out of a tale.

But when the author identifies with a narrator wholly unlike himself, and begins to assert over the narrator his own traits, we readers find the result discordant, jarring. Something isn’t right here. A 23-year old man doesn’t have the attitudes of a 50-year old man, and doesn’t remember the early 1940s, when he was a toddler, as though he were a grown and working man at the time.

This is something for anyone writing in the first person to remember. The narrating character can fall into two categories: either the empty vessel, without any meaningful inner life beyond that which the circumstances of the story provide; or the usual character who has come from a specific time and place, with a character of his own.

The only way around these choices is when the origins of the character closely mirror those of the author himself. So had Heinlein been writing aobut a 50-year old balding professional pulp writer who had dropped out of the military due to ill health, and the rest of whose background circumstances mirrored Heinlein’s own life, then he could have given us Heinlein the Unconquerable Hero as fully as he pleased.

(Composed 10 May 2010 on keyboard)

The Pleasures of Misery

I recently read a novel by Robert A. Heinlein called Double Star. It is a reworking of Anthony Hope’s classic The Prisoner of Zenda with an alternate ending. Zenda ends unhappily (in some senses) while Double Star ends happily. It is this change that prompts these reflections.

In The Prisoner of Zenda an Englishman visits the Central European kingdom of Ruritania, where his exact likeness to its King (a distant relative) enmeshes him in pretending to be the king, who has been kidnapped. In the course of the tale the Englishman woos the Princess Flavia and wins her heart; engages in sword battles with the evil Prince and would-be usurper of the throne; storms a castle and rescues the king. At tale’s end the Englishman, his deeds known only to a few co-conspirators, Flavia, and the King himself, leaves Ruritania to return to his ‘ordinary’ life in England. Behind him he leaves a throne he could well have commanded, and a beautiful Princess whose heart will be forever his, though duty has commanded her to remain and wed the King, and serve as Ruritania’s Queen.

In Double Star an American actor is hired to portray a prominent politician who has been kidnapped; in the course of this tale the actor is adopted into a clan of noble Martians; delivers speeches and runs a campaign for Prime Minister of the Solar System’s Empire; and finally must adopt the guise forever, when the politician suffers a heart attack and dies even as his party wins a majority in the Imperial Parliament. Oh yes, the actor also wins the heart of the politician’s Girl Friday, who had been wholly in love with the politician; he marries her and they have children, and the actor enjoys a long career of 25+ years as the politician.

So the two tales follow parallel paths, though in Ruritania swords are used more, and on New Batavia, the lunar seat of the Empire, it is rather speeches and words the hero employs. The paths however diverge drastically only at the end.

In Zenda the imposter succeeds in rescuing the King, and thereby ensures he must himself leave behind crown, kingdom, and Princess. This makes the ending bitter-sweet, although it confirms Rudolph Rassendyll as ‘the noblest Rasendyll of them all’ in his selfless act of giving up all that he has won. He must return to the humdrum life he left behind in London – a life that will, we are sure, be rendered all the more colorless by the fact that before he had not been in love, and now he is, forever – to Flavia who will be the wife of another, forever lost to Rudolph.

In Double Star the imposter succeeds in impersonating the politician and rewriting and delivering speeches so as to bring victory to his party. Smith is ready indeed to return to the acting life and leave the imposture behind him, only author Heinlein acts as the deus ex machina and bumps off the real politician by a heart attack or stroke, the result of drugs given him during his abduction. Thus Smith must take the brass ring, and enjoy power, fame, and the love of a good woman. (This can be seen as ironical on Heinlein’s part, for Smith never was interested in politics before, and in fact if he had any political leanings they were completely opposed to those of the Expansionist Party he will now head and whose reforms he will see enacted.)

Both of the stories deal almost explicitly with the notion that the tale is a sort of daydream or wish fulfillment on the part of the reader. The act of pretending to be the hero is doubled within the tale itself, whose hero must pretend to be a greater and more prestigious man – a man whose life comes with a very attractive love-interest built-in. We must, as readers, surrender the daydream when we finish the tale and close the book, but nothing stops the hero-imposter from continuing his dream job.

So it would seem that we’d enjoy the tale best if the protagonist wins everything he wishes. The Heinlein solution looks better than the Hope solution.

But, is it so?

There is some sort of pleasure in the misery of the Hope solution. Maybe it lies in Aristotle’s notion of the purging of emotions we experience when following a well-designed tragedy. Or maybe it lies in the feelings of greater nobility we get when we identify with the self-sacrificing Rudolph. Or maybe it has something to do with the glow of feeling that we have ourselves been bettered, even ennobled, by the reading of a light tale of adventurous derring-do.

Whatever the cause, for yours truly at least, the ending of Zenda seems much to be preferred to that of Double Star.

(Composed 10 May 2010 by keyboard)

Pluripotency

How the law of symbols applies to tales of fantasy, and is the author’s best friend

One of the seminal works at all fantasy writers ought to read is Sigmund Freud’s book on dreams. In this book one of the primary truths about dreams that Freud announces, is that dreams show us things that are two things at once – or are even more than two things at one and the same time.

Of course, artists and madmen have long been aware of such things as symbols. And long, long ago – when all tales were fantasy tales, and the realistic and rational world that we live in today had not yet been invented – the notion that some object or person could beat itself and at the same time something entirely different was a commonplace. A burning bush was God, a young herald in the army was also the god Apollo, and so forth.

But then, alas, the realistic and rational world was invented, and we were all condemned to live in it from cradle to grave, without any choice or say in the matter. We who have thus been condemned to a life and the world in which each and every object, person, animal and plant can be nothing besides itself, have the most difficult time in imagining what our ancestors of ages past knew as easily as breathing. So we are impoverished in our imagination, and power attempts at fantasy are laughably simple and even I might say crippled, halt and lame. Some of us cannot even imagine a world of fantasy, and we are compelled to create ‘rules’ that govern our magical objects and powers, and are harshly critical of stories in which there are no ‘rules’ governing their magical objects creatures and powers.

This worst of all limits ourselves in the very mechanics of our tales. In a fantasy tale, because every single character, object, animal and plant can be both itself and something else – anything else – as well as a third thing, at one and the same time, any plot device and story turn is possible.

Remember this, the next time you have any trouble with your fantasy story. There is no story difficulty that cannot be solved with a little recourse to magic. More than this, when you tell a fantasy tale you can tell two stories at ones – or three or more. If you want your hair out to be a prince, he can be a prince; but if you would also like to tell the story where the prince is a pauper, you can do that as well – all in the same tale. If you want the heroine to end up with George, she can do so; if you also find yourself feeling a little sorry for Edgar, she can end up with him as well, because George and Edgar can be the same person.

This comes up as a result of a note from Bardelys, who for a long time struggled with one of his tales. He couldn’t decide whether his young hero should be in the end revealed as a prince, or a nobody who helped a prince. The ‘Prince’ model is the typical, what I call ‘American Superboy’ model. In America, all our heroes must be princes, and in the fantasy tales, any son-of-a-nobody will in the end be shown to be in truth the son of a king, or or some powerful magician, or to have unusual powers of his own, or to be the Fated or Destined One of Ancient Prophecy (or multiples of these combined).

How very different was Tolkien’s model of the humble Hobbit, who in both The Hobbit, or There and Back Again and in The Lord of the Rings had his hobbits as mere helpers, and not princes themselves. (We can argue that Bilbo had common-sense shrewdness and resisted better than Dwarves Men or Elves the madness of lust for Dragon’s Gold, and that Frodo had extreme powers to resist the commands of the Ring; but I imagine that Tolkien would have insisted that these are the virtues of the common English peasant and reveal more of a reverse snobbery than any insistence that Bilbo and Frodo were extremely virtuous in any way. Tolkien’s very point was that the hobbits had more in them than the great and wise could guess on first glance.)

So Bardelys, having already built up his structure with the boy as a revealed Prince, thought better of it, and asked himself, ‘Yes, but what if he is a nobody all the way through?’ He liked this notion, and set up a parallel structure. Along the way he had to give up some things, of course, and in the end, he grudgingly returned to the Prince model.

And yet he kept looking back with longing at the notion that the boy would be a nobody through and through… And so in the end he managed it, by having the boy both a Prince and a nobody all the way through. To see how he managed it, you must read the full tale … if he ever gets around to finishing it.

(Composed by dictation Sunday 5 April 2009)

Tragedy Old and New

Freytag is done, and now I’m reading an update or adaptation of Freytag, which I’ll post in a bit. But it’s got me considering the basis of tragedy…

The original tragedy springs from pity which springs from identification or at least empathy, with the tragic hero. Aristotle was right about this, but what his notes don’t mention is that crucial to this feeling of ‘purgation’ is something else: broadly put, the blamelessness of the hero for his fate.

This gives us the two basic roots of tragedy:

1. We empathize with the hero
2. We cannot blame the hero for his downfall

Old Tragedy

In what I’ll call the ‘Old Tragedy,’ this blamelessness can come from one of two sources:

1. Fate or chance has decreed the hero’s downfall
2. The hero is caught in a double-bind, and damned if he does or doesn’t

Fate Decrees

Oedipus Tyrannos by Sophocles is the classic of all classic old tragedies, the starting-point for every consideration of tragedy, and one of the finest tragedies of all time, even though it doesn’t fit the mold of the tragic hero as today we think of it under New Tragedy rules.

Oedipus is doomed from before he is even born. His parents try to avert the evil by exposing him as a newborn, but a shepherd saves him. He is raised far away by an unsuspecting royal couple and as fate would have it returns to his native country, where his first act is to kill his own father, the country’s king, over a meaningless pissing match (pissing matches are very important to kings and nobles and war-types and CEOs in general). He goes on to save Thebes by solving the Riddle of the Sphinx, and weds Queen Jocasta (his mother, though neither of them know this) as reward, and settles in to be the nouveau-ruler of the land.

A plague strikes Thebes, and good king Oedipus does all he can to uncover the cause, why the gods are mad at Thebes, in order to cure it. (This part might be interpreted as a double-bind: Oedipus might be a little more lax in searching out the plague’s cause, as several people warn him to be; but then he will stand by and watch his city-state suffer and die, and maybe the plague will reach him, his wife-mother, or their children. Damned if he does, and if he doesn’t.)

Regardless of what Oedipus, his parents, or anybody decides to do, Oedipus is doomed to carry out the prophecy that Fate has decreed. This means that Oedipus is not responsible for killing his father, sleeping with his mother, or bringing a plague upon Thebes. Therefore, we can pity him. In one sense, the audience is caught in a double-bind here: we can neither defend nor blame the hero; we can cry out warnings from the hall, but we know Oedipus is helpless to follow our good advice. (And when the play opens, all is set and determined already: the father is murdered, the incest committed, the plague has come.)

Consider if Oedipus were a mere upstart who comes into a land, murders its king, rapes and marries its queen, lords it over its citizens. We detest him, we feel no identification for him, no empathy for him, and when we see him fall, we feel no pity. But this is melodrama of the anti-heroic kind, and not tragedy.

In this sense we can define ‘tragedy’ simply by its effects upon us in the audience.

The Double-bind Admits No Escape

Antigone is an example of the double bind. Antigone’s brother has rebelled against Thebes, but his revolution, or coup, has failed, and he has been killed in the uprising. Now Creon, the new king, decrees that as an example, none of the revolutionaries shall be given proper burial, but their bodies shall rot, and their shades left as ghosts or ghouls, forbidden the vales of paradise. But Antigone loved her brother. She determines to bury him in defiance of the law. Her fiancé, Creon’s own son, is also torn, but supports her. And Creon himself, knowing the eyes of the citizens are upon him, decides that the law must be obeyed, even if it means executing his own daughter-in-law and dooming himself to his own son’s hatred. Antigone is walled up with a little drink and food, and left there to die.

The double bind for Antigone springs from two different directives. Demands of blood call for her to care for her brother’s corpse. Demands of good citizenship call for her to spit upon her brother’s corpse and leave it to rot.

Which demand should she follow?

The double-bind tragedy arises out of social changes. The circumstances attend a time when Old Laws are being replaced by New Laws, but people still feel the pull of the Old Laws. They are then caught in between the old laws and the new. Is Antigone a citizen of the state, or her brother’s kinswoman? In the tale of Orestes, a similar change is implied, as Orestes is caught between the demands of his father’s ghost, that wants blood paid to its murderess, and the demands of his mother’s self, who murdered Agamemnon. Is Orestes his father’s son, or his mother’s? Which is he to follow, the patriarchal cult of the new state and its military laws, or the old matriarchal earth-cult the new state has displaced, with its magic and mysteries? In the Nibelungenlied a similar double bind catches Kreimhild. Her brothers murdered her first husband Siegfried, and she went along with that. Now she is married to Atli, who plans to destroy her brothers. Is she her brothers’ sister or her husband’s wife?

The double bind leaves the hero blameless, because he is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. But it’s also significant that among the double-bind plots I know, the hero (almost) always chooses to obey the Old Law and falls, therefore, as part of the passing of the old ways.

(The Oresteia is the other case: Orestes follows the new patriarchal system, kills his mother, and is tormented by the avenging, ancient, furies. But in the finale of the trilogy, Orestes is given peace, as Athena, I think, embraces the new system of laws. Thus the trilogy is not truly a tragic one.)

New Tragedy

Somewhere in Aristotle’s train, the idea of the ‘tragic hero’ arose. This is the hero who (as Aristotle stated) was ‘neither all good nor all bad.’ This gave rise to the notion of hamartia or the ‘tragic flaw’ – that one weakness in an otherwise-noble soul, that would lead to his downfall.

Here the ‘otherwise-noble’ part of the formula helps us to identify and empathize with the hero; and the ‘one weakness’ makes it at least logical that he will fall, without having to resort to Fate or devils. This accords with a view of the world as essentially rational, and not governed by spooks or God.

The ‘tragic flaw’ must be further defined as the sort of flaw they say you should admit in a job interview as a weakness – that is, something that is essentially good, only you carry it too far. It should be a flaw that we in the audience can identify with, or sympathize with, or excuse at least – or else how can we empathize with the hero? (And if we don’t empathize with him, we will not pity his downfall, we will not experience the purging of our souls in tears and grief and sadness, and we will walk out unmoved from a play that was not, after all, a tragedy – or was a failed one.)

Myself, I find the ‘tragic flaw’ somewhat weaker (as exculpatory device) than the hand of cruel Fate – and both weaker than the double bind. For the tragic flaw makes the hero responsible wholly from his downfall, and moreover renders that downfall avoidable; whereas Fate leaves him wholly blameless, but smells of a cruel irrational world; and only the double-bind allows us to see that the hero can choose, and has chosen, but his downfall is nevertheless implicit in his very situation – there really was no way out. The double bind also, in invoking the conflict between the Old Way and the New, gives rise to philosophical dispute. We can argue about whether the Old Way was better, and what might have befallen the hero had he clung to the New Way instead. But note that in preferring the Old Way, most of the tellers of these tales (the Gothic Age was rife with them) were at heart conservatives mourning the passing of a fallen era.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, March 28, 2009)

Words from Bardelys

Modifications and a warning from the talesman himself.

Yesterday’s chapter instalment of The Magic Key had a line that bothered me the more I thought on it. Hans is said to remember the remark he made to his Father, that ‘Six wins all tricks.’

No such line exists in the manuscript as Bardelys had given it to us. The closest to this line comes in an exchange between Hans and Father in the little attic room, early on the Dreadful Night:

Father: ‘One and seven make eight, and eight is late.’

Hans: ‘Eight is great, you mean.’

I asked Bardelys about this, and he confessed that he has been reading these posts and criticisms of mine, and it has inspired him to give another look over the old tale. That is when he found he made a mistake in these lines, he said.

For various reasons, Bardelys told me, he wished his tale to begin on Summer’s Eve (which is the eve of Hans’s birthday), and that this should be a night of a New Moon. At the same time, Bardelys had given much thought to how old his young hero ought to be, and settled on 18 as a fitting age.

And yet Bardelys had also found himself bound that Hans should have been born on a certain year.

When Bardelys consulted a calendar, he found that the only year that suited all his requirements was 1773 – and yet this broke his wish to make his hero 18. Instead, Hans would only have been 15 on Summer’s Day 1773.

Bardelys was faced with a choice: alter the calendar (after all, who would know? who would care?) or change Hans to 15. Bardelys chose to make his hero younger.

This then invalidated the exchange quoted above. Instead, Bardelys tells us, the exchange with Father really went as follows:

Father: ‘One and five make six, and six is hard to fix.’

Hans: ‘Six will win all tricks, you mean.’

Bardelys also has made other changes, he tells me. But he withholds them as yet.

On another note, I have presented today a Foreword to Part Two of The Magic Key which I negelected to include in the posts in its proper place. Bardelys tells me this Foreword will be included in the event that he publishes each part of the tale as a separate volume, slim though such volumes should be. In the event of an omnibus single volume, on the other hand, Forewords to each part would be suppressed.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, November 17, 2008)

Critique of Part Two, Chapter Six

Three things strike me about this chapter:

1. Bardelys continues his practice of short chapters
2. The danger returns with magic
3. Bardelys shifts his hero’s character back around

Chapter Length. Bardelys has made a pattern of using short chapters. It will be interesting to see if he will keep this up or if he will vary the length of his chapters. In general it strikes me that over the past several chapters, he breaks whenever he comes to any significant ‘bump’ in the narrative.

Magic. Magic has come back into the tale, the closer we are to the Forest. This then might have been at the back of Bardelys’s mind when he made his Groening-stead chapters so un-magical: the closer the tale takes us to the Black Forest, the stronger the magic becomes. Only Edgar, Mother Groening’s half-mad brother, has smelled at all of magic back in the friendly house, and he seems to have been touched by the Forest, and might even be in league with it.

Once again Bardelys is trying here to overcome his earlier mistake of identifying the Forest, and wicken, as ‘wild but not evil.’ He makes a specific reference to this remark of Hans’s Father, and has Hans mentally correct his dead Father’s judgment. This is about as good a way as there is of undoing a mistake of this kind: talk about it openly. ‘I know I told you so-and-so, but in fact that was wrong, and the truth of the matter is this-and-that.’ An additional benefit may be wrought out of this technique or strategy: since the talesman has changed his story once, we readers cannot be sure that he will not change it again. Which is it, is the Schwarzwald only wild, or is it malevolent? It might even be the case that Bardelys himself is of two minds on this question, and means to leave this at the heart of his theme. Wilderness, the un-human, can certainly be dangerous to men, but is it a conscious, willful threat, or an ignorant, even ‘innocent’ one?

We will have to follow this thematic question closely as the tale carries on, and see whether the talesman definitely decides it one way or the other.

Character. Hans recalls his banter with Father and his own words, ‘Six wins all tricks.’ This is more like the shifty coal-biter than the more-innocent and innocuous stay-at-home character type. It further suggests that Hans will fall into the archetype of the Trickster, a type that makes sense for a youth who has not shown any great physical prowess. Hans is not big for his age, he is not overly strong – at least Bardelys has not made mention of any such thing, and the omission seems deliberate: Hans never acts as though he is a strong lad, except for the one point when he breaks out of the wicken-army camp by bumping up against one of a knot of soldiers – and even then Bardelys stresses not the strength and size of his hero, but his knowledge of how to attack an opponent in the childish game he knows.

Knowledge is the Trickster’s forte.

Thus we have now been offered three different character types for the hero:

1. Coal-biter
2. Stay-at-home
3. Trickster

Maybe Bardelys is unable to make up his mind here. (Although it is true that the Trickster often wears many hats, and can appear to play the part of other archetypes when it suits his purpose.)

The final image of this chapter is the most gruesome yet in the tale. Bardelys drew a veil over the deaths of Hans’s family, and left them offstage; we only heard with Hans his Mother’s dying scream, but we saw none of the corpses, nor how the dreadful trees disposed of them. Young Bertie Groening, on the other hand, is left (literally) twisting in the wind.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, November 16, 2008)

Critique of Part Two, Chapter Five

Fear returns; how to redefine terms

In this chapter, Bardelys focuses on Otto, the ‘gangly farmhand’ and his seeming threat to Hans. The man seems mad – at least that’s the conclusion Hans reaches at the chapter-break. Otto insists that Hans must go into the Black Forest. His reasons are murky at best, something about being ‘the Forester now.’ A fit or frenzy overtakes Otto, and Hans fears they must come to blows. However the farmhand lapses into weird mutterings, and Hans is left on his guard, unable to sleep, trapped on the haystack in utter blackness beside a madman, while the grinding sounds of the wild-growing trees grow louder and louder in his ears…

This kind of fear is quite different from that of the traditional folk or fairy tale. In those tales, even monsters were reasonable beasts. Take a monster such as the Gian in the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. This Giant wants to catch Jack and eat him because men (particularly Englishmen, according to the rhyme the Giant chants) are one of the things he eats. Though beastly and horrible it may be for man to eat man, the Giant looks upon Jack as a man might look upon a fat mouse in his house.

The muttering and fit of Otto partakes of madness. There may be reason enough behind what he wants of Hans, but the way Otto expresses it is classic madness: the gaping, pale eyes, the insistence without reason, the sudden mounting into frenzy, the lapse into muttering ‘sounds that were not proper words’ all are traits of the madman.

Now I wonder how familiar common folk were with madmen say 500 years ago. Schizophrenia must have existed then, but ‘Tom O’Bedlam’ was not surely someone the average person knew. I might say that today there are few enough of us who actually know people who are out of control in the way Otto the farmhand is – but we have seen them depicted in fiction and television and above all in horror movies so often, it is as if we had known such folk. Enough to make them a kind of cliché to any follower of the horror tale.

The creature Gollum, in Professor Tolkien’s The Hobbit, by contrast, is at first more like the Giant in Jack’s tale. It is a sneaking wretch, anthropoid but not, seemingly, human (or Hobbit), not quite a troll either. It is quite capable of throttling and eating just about any living thing that might fall into its clutches. But Gollum is not mad.

In the final line in the chapter, Bardelys equates this madness that has overtaken Otto with wicken. This is good: where a talesman does choose to create his own terms for creatures and aspects of his magic world, he must avail himself of every chance he finds to ‘charge’ these terms with the emotions he wishes us to associate with them. This is especially true in the beginning stages of the tale. ‘Wicken’ has been wild and magical, inhuman, vaguely threatening – and yet in its most extensive use thus far, the term is made into something similar to ‘Nature’ as a whole. This takes place in the scene when Hans and Father play chess in the small attic room. Hans wonders if ‘wicken’ is the same thing as ‘evil,’ and Father tells him No. Father goes farther, and tries to explain that the wicken-things in the Black Forest have something like their own rules, and are not to be feared by any man who knows his place in the natural order. Thus we might have begun to think of ‘wicken-things’ as something like big bears, extremely dangerous if threatened or attacked, but if we just avoid them, they won’t harm us.

This explanation takes the fangs out of the term, and Bardelys was mistaken to do that so early on: it affects how we will think of ‘wicken’ from then on. I suppose that since this was the last scene in which Father would appear before he dies, Bardelys wanted to plant this notion of wicken – probably Hans will come around to realizing the wisdom of such a position much later in the tale.

The problem is that having then explained to us that ‘wicken’ is not so terrible after all, Bardelys can’t just call the Sooty Prince, or the White Lady, ‘wicken-things’ and expect it to send shivers up and down our spines. He has placed ‘wicken’ into a ‘dangerous but not overly so’ box, and if now he wants us to think of ‘wicken’ as belonging to the box of those things ‘malevolent and dangerous,’ he is going to have to go twice as far as he would have if he had started us off with that view.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday 15 November 2008)

Critique of Part 2, Chapter 4

Comments on short chapters and long

This chapter finishes the journey Hans makes to see what is left of his home. No sooner does he find that his remembrance of the dreadful night is truth, than he is attacked and the chapter ends. It ends somewhat abruptly and unsatisfactorily, but evidently Bardelys considers this sort of short chapter with a jagged ending to be a good way to force us to read on through the chapter breaks.

This makes me consider the whole question of short chapters vs. long ones.

Short chapters are like hors d’oeuvres, small and tasty, designed to whet the appetite rather than satisfy it. I suppose the theory is that we will just go on reading and reading and ignore the chapter breaks altogether.

Long chapters, on the other hand, mark significant progress in the logical development of the tale. For the purpose of this discussion, I will consider this the main distinction between short and long chapters: a short chapter takes us only half a step down the tale’s road, or less; a long chapter takes a full step.

Bardelys has given us one such step here: Hans leaves the Groening-stead and along with the farmhand Otto, he goes back to where his home used to stand. There he sees that his home is no more. The realization will presumably force Hans (and Otto, who is looking more and more like a major character at this point) to take up a new course of action – go back to Groening-stead and tell them what they saw, or fall prey to the things that lurk among the trees, or go into the Schwarzwald itself in search of Bertie Groening, or encounter more wicken-creatures like Yellow Socks or the White Lady. Or something else will occur to them. In all events, the course of the action Hans has been taking has now hit a wall: there is no going home for him! Where shall he then go, and what shall he do? The answers to these questions form the next step in his journey through the tale, and will take a new chapter if it is long.

But Bardelys has divided the journey back to the Forester’s House between two chapters, though it is less than one day’s march even for the hobbling Hans. Somehow the two chapters don’t seem to equal a ‘full’ chapter, a ‘decent-sized’ chapter.

But a talesman surely doesn’t want to tire his audience out waiting for a chapter to end. Getting many small, ‘bite-sized’ chapters allows us to put down the book every four or five pages – we know we can always read on, and a new break will be offered to us shortly.

(Composed on keyboard Friday 14 November 2008)

Critique of Part Two Chapter Three

Alone again – almost

This chapter is something of a delaying stretch. Hans is left to himself at the farm, and begins to understand how much he has changed in two days. He makes up his mind to go back home and see for himself the truth, for he has begun to doubt his memory. He lies to Mother Groening to comfort him, and in this we can see how he has softened from the coal-biter brat he was with his own Mother. (Or maybe Bardelys has begun to shift back to the conception of Hans as a stay-at-home rather than a true coal-biter.)

He starts back, but is accompanied by Otto, the dubious farmhand. And he can’t shake him, and his physical weakness, the sprained ankle, betrays him. In the end he is forced to accept the farmhand's company on the rest of the way back.

Overhanging all this is something of a mystery. Bertie Groening set out the day before to visit the Foresters’ house and let them know Hans was well. He should have been back last night, or this forenoon at the earliest, it seems. Mother Groening seems worried over him. This small bit of darkness, which Bardelys doesn't dwell on enough, I think, casts a bit of a pall over the future.

We already know that Hans is right when he feels that ‘all the bad was true, and all his hopes were false.’ Or at least we hope that is so, because we want the magic and the danger to arise to give us an entertaining tale. Bertie’s failure to return seems to bolster our hopes in the evil that will greet Hans when he finds his home again.

And yet, for the little of moment that happens in this chapter, it runs on awfully long. Bardelys has let his feet drag in the mire again.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, November 13, 2008)

Critique of Part Two, Chapter Two

Building a mood

Hans spends his first day at Groening-stead, but it is an odd one. After breakfast, he sleeps all day, and begins a nightlong vigil. Already his experiences have placed him far from his fellow-men.

Here we find some traces of Magic reappearing in Bardelys’s tale. The chapter has little enough overt action, and yet builds a strangeness about Hans and his experience, like a veil that swings between him and the common, everyday actions of the men and women of the farm. Even though Hans seems to sink back for a time into childhood, and even begins to accept that the events of the Dreadful Night were in truth no more than his nightmare, we can see that going back to what he was is no longer any choice for him. He can try, but the effort will fail – we can see it, even if Hans himself still can’t.

A new character is introduced, Wendel, Mother Groening’s brother. From his remarks, we can believe he is not quite sane, or that he too has glimpsed the evil acts of the wicken-things in the Black Forest. He seems to know only too well what Hans has spoken about, and his final words regarding the ground fog echo the warning Hans got from his Granny.

It seems Hans feels a bit relieved when the household goes to bed, leaving him alone. He can’t sleep, as though he is now becoming a creature of the night himself. He goes outside, breathes in the cool dark air, and encounters again Otto, who seems to be waiting for him.

It is on this moment of the encounter that the chapter ends, begging us to read on and discover what business Otto has with Hans.

The effect of the periods of sleep and waking, the hypnotic firelight, and the mix of dreams and mundane activities, create a mood that is somewhat dreamlike in itself, and seems to me better-drawn than the actual nightmare when the trees tore down the house. It leaves us, along with Hans himself, separated from the common men and women of Groening-stead, somewhat adrift, and expectant. It is as though we felt the farmstead might suffer an attack any moment of the weird wicken-things – as though we would welcome such an attack.

And indeed, who wouldn’t? We are reading a dark fairytale, after all, and mundane activities must begin to bore us, unless they appear under the lens of such atmosphere and strange mood as we find here. Like the audiences watching Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds, we are complicit in the evil, for we long for the excitement and terror and weirdness of the rising wicken-creatures.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday 12 November 2008)

Critique of Part Two, Chapter 1

Questions on part-breaks and character introductions

Bardelys has begun a new Part to his tale, The Magic Key. This, the second part, he calls ‘Darkness over Dimmerthal.’ So let’s look at this chapter with the broader question of part-breaks in mind. Since Bardelys has also introduced several new characters, we can ask about character introductions in general as well.

The Parts of a Book

A ‘Book’ is a specific way of presenting a Tale. Over the centuries various divisions of a book have been used. There are the ‘books’ of a ‘volume’ and the ‘parts’ of a ‘book’ as well as ‘chapters’ and ‘sections’ of chapters and ‘subsections’ of ‘sections.’ Of course these are all artificial and arbitrary, and often (as in the case of the original ‘books’ which were the division of Homer’s epic poems into separate scrolls) done for technical reasons having more to do with the means of reproduction rather than any organic or logical grouping of the scenes and movements of the tale itself. It remains true, however, that most editors and publishers and authors will try to make the divisions of their books coincide with organic and logical divisions of the tales printed therein. And we can also say that almost all the great and conscientious editors, publishers, and authors do so.

With that in mind, let’s look at where Bardelys has broken his tale here.

The first strictly organic distinction between parts one and two involves location. Hans in part one lives at home. His home life is destroyed, he runs for his life, and is rescued. Part two has him going to the homestead of the Groening family, and so it seems as though part two will show us how Hans lives with the Groenings. The title of the part, ‘Darkness over Dimmerthal,’ also indicates that the part is organized around the setting of its scenes, which will broaden our perspective and show us more of the Dimmerthal valley, and not just the Groening family and folk.

Another possible logical distinction we might want to draw between parts one and two involves the basic logical movements of this or any tale. It could be that Bardelys considers (consciously or intuitively) that the end of part one coincides with his First Curtain, when the conflict is set and fully engaged-in by both parties. Or it could be that Bardelys looks on the end of part one as the end of the Summoning – maybe he looks on this whole Dreadful Night as the Inciting Incident that upends the world Hans lives in (it certainly does that) but that Hans may still withdraw from the lists and not take on his enemies to the full. Maybe Bardelys thinks his young hero still has some growing-up to do, or some hardening of his heart, or needs to commit further to this war.

(Bardelys has sketched out the further outlines of his tale to me enough so that I could make a case for either alternative.)

Character Introductions

Bardelys in this short chapter gives us several new faces to learn. Some of these may be more important than others. There are:

1. Farmer Groening, the patriarch
2. Mother Groening, his wife
3. Bertie Groening their young son
4. A fat, jolly fellow-farmer
5. Anton, the foreman of the farmhands
6. Otto, a slightly suspect farmhand, maybe a simpleton, maybe more dangerous, and maybe allied with the enemy

From the way Bardelys has treated these introductions, I would guess that Farmer Groening, Mother Groening, Bertie Groening, and Otto will all prove to be major characters. Anton the foreman is probably minor. The fat, jolly farmer may or may not be significant; it’s hard to tell. Oddly enough, the fact that Bardelys does not tell us what this man’s name is has me leaning toward betting that he will be a major character – but I can’t say why I lean that way, for normally the anonymous characters are minor all the way.

Otto has the best introduction. Bardelys shows us what he looks like and what he does before he lets us know what his name is. We wonder about him, along with Hans. And Otto seems ambiguous, and someone to watch out for. He may turn out to be a minor villain, but it seems that he has an important role to play at least in this Dimmerthal part of the tale.

Second to Otto stands Mother Groening’s introduction. She appears as a replacement for the Mother Hans has lost, right down to the smell of her apron. She offers Hans love, and it is only in her presence that he can feel vulnerable and weak. Thus it seems her part here will be to tempt Hans away from the Hero’s path, and encourage his desire to shrink back into childish dependency. We know, if we know anything about stories (and about stories of adventure most of all) that this is a bad thing! The Hero who shrinks from the Call flirts with disaster, and risks losing the entire struggle!

Farmer Groening (and Otto, oddly enough) are offered as replacements for the lost Father. Farmer Groening seems to stand in for the Father who was going to drag Hans against his will into the Black Forest. (And thus maybe Bardelys means the ‘fat, jolly’ farmer to be the other half of the missing Father, the more indulgent father-figure, and a complement to Mother Groening in excusing Hans from joining battle.) Otto might be a Father-replacement only because of the rather odd remark that Hans makes, in comparing the relative ages of Otto and Father. Only Otto is compared to Father at all, and since in all other ways the two are quite unlike, we must wonder. If Bardelys knows his business, this chance remark indicates more such comparisons to come.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday 11 November 2008)

Review of The Magic Key part 1: The Dread Night

A doubt arises over the advisability of a talesman using his own terms

We have now read and criticised Part One of The Magic Key. Before going on to Part Two (which Bardelys tells me is in much rougher shape than Part One, and he’ll be glad of a bit of extra time to start serialising it) I thought it would be a good idea to look back on Part One with a special eye towards two aspects of the tale, the hero’s characterization and the terminology of Faëry.

Stay-at-home or coal-biter?

Bardelys has offered us Hans with aspects of both the stay-at-home and the coal-biter. The difference is two-fold. First, the stay-at-home doesn’t leave his comfy paternal nest for reasons of fear – he’s scared of the big bad World and clings to Mother’s apron-strings. But the coal-biter stays at home mostly out of laziness. The stay-at-home will usually be a ‘good lad’ and do what Mother and Father (if Father is around) tell him. The coal-biter snaps and snarls, talks big, talks tough, is arrogant, and won’t do anything he’s told.

These are the archetypes of the characters, and as you see, they are quite at odds with each other.

Second, the pattern of the typical stay-at-home hero’s story has him leaving home, at last, when the home itself collapses. Father goes bankrupt, the family loses the house, Father dies and Mother is forced off the property, Father and Mother agree that they can’t make ends meet and need to get rid of the kids (think of Hansel and Gretel here). But the coal-biter leaves home because his arrogant behavior has gotten him into trouble locally.

(Since the coal-biter is not well-known as a story pattern, I’ll lay out a modern version: one day, while playing football with the local guys on the high school field, the coal-biter quarrels, as he does with everyone he meets, with the kid playing quarterback on the opposing team. On the next play the coal-biter trips the lineman blocking him, and sacks the quarterback, driving him into the ground so hard he breaks the kid’s neck and kills him. Hauled before the local court on charges, the coal-biter sneers without any repentance, but his father pleads for him, and the judge offers the coal-biter the choice of going to juvenile prison, or enlisting in the army. The coal-biter shrugs and with a contemptuous joke says he’ll take the army because it’s one prison or another. In the army he distinguishes himself for bravery and insane, reckless courage, but is denied the appropriate medals and honors because he is so insubordinate … he goes on to be dishonorably discharged, becomes a mercenary, and ends badly.)

The first that we see of Hans fits the coal-biter in character and behavior. But the next night we see he is afraid of bad dreams, and on the next morning he is afraid of going into the woods. This fits the stay-at-home, not the coal-biter. Finally, he leaves home when his home collapses (literally) and his family is killed. So what starts off as coal-biter ends as stay-at-home, leaving us a bit confused.

It is possible of course to blend the archetypes, which makes Hans a more complex character. But Bardelys has given us what is mainly an archetypal tale, at least in the way he presents it to us. It strikes me as strange, and wrong, to have ‘once upon a time’ lead into a psychological study in realism – the two just don’t fit together.

The Terms of the Tale’s World

I have criticised Bardelys through chapters 7–9 for the lack of Magic, and how the tale seems to have ‘down-shifted’ into a mere adventure tale rather than a tale of the Fantastic. I compared it unfavorably to Professor Tolkien’s The Hobbit in this regard. But I noted, too, that in The Hobbit, Tolkien’s Elves were decidedly unmagical. We regard them as magical simply because, well, they’re elves, aren’t they?

That set me wondering whether Bardelys might not have given these chapters of his a lot more magical feeling, had he named his Charcoal Burners with a traditional name of creatures out of fairyland. What if he had said the wretched poor charcoal burners had been transformed, in the eyes of his young hero, into ‘ghouls’ or ‘demons’ or ‘vampires’ or ‘trolls’? Then every single line that refers to them could be fraught, if not with magic per se, at least with the expectation and anticipation of magic in the minds of us in the audience. ‘They look like Charcoal Burners, but really, they’re demons!’ Hans could tell Farmer Groening, and we might even shiver. But we react quite differently when we hear him say, ‘but really, they’re wicken-things!’ For Bardelys has not yet, at this point in the tale, sufficiently ‘charged’ his invented term of wicken with the same awful supernatural portents.

Thus we see in this instance the advantages for the talesman in using his own terminology for his fantastical creations, and the disadvantages. When we hear or read of ‘ghouls’ or ‘vampires’ or ‘trolls’ we shudder, if we find the terms fresh, but we roll our eyes if we are inveterate readers in the genre, and we think, ‘Oh not the trolls again!’ or we yawn and think, ‘Yeah, I know all about vampires and all their tribes … which kind of vampire is it this time?’ But all the same, we do know that trolls and vampires are not of this Earth. As for ‘wicken’ (or any other newly-coined talesman’s term) we just wonder what the heck it is, and until we get settled into the tale, we have to pause a moment and wonder whether we missed some earlier scene in which the term was set forth and defined.

(Composed on keyboard Monday 10 November 2008)

Critique of Chapter Nine

Is this even a fantasy tale?

One more chapter, no more magic.

This is getting ridiculous. Or tiresome.

Compare this tale to how Professor Tolkien arranged The Hobbit. From the very first paragraph he introduces us to a ‘hobbit,’ a small creature with its own homely magic of disappearing in a lane whenever a Big Folk clumsy oaf like you or me blunders along. (This talent Tolkien promptly forgets, although later in the tale it is formalized when Bilbo finds the Ring.)

Another page and Tolkien gives us a wizard (Gandalf) who quarrels with Bilbo and then puts a spell upon his door. Then along come a dozen dwarfs to invite themselves to a feast at Bilbo’s expense. Even though the dwarfs seem to have no magical powers or talismans, they are themselves creatures of folklore, and whenever we find them in a tale, we know we are wandering through fairyland. The dwarfs propose robbing a dragon of its gold. Dragons of course are even more magical creatures than dwarfs.

The wizard goes along with the band, and they encounter all sorts of magical creatures along the way. Without checking, I would venture to say that there is not a single chapter in the book that has no magic. Indeed, and properly I would say, the magical incidence (or ‘intensity’ or ‘density’ if you will) increases as the book goes on. Bilbo and the dwarfs encounter more and more strange creatures, and the only Man they meet turns out to be a wolf-shifter who can talk to his magical animals. Only at the very end, do Men appear, and they are no more than Men as we find them, except that their leader has a bow and an arrow that are lucky at the very least (and in fairyland luck is a kind of magic) and magical at best, for it brings down the dragon. And how does Bard the bowman know where to aim? A crow tells him, a crow that has overheard Bilbo and the dwarfs talking.

It is true (and a weakness of the tale) that Tolkien’s elves are not very elvish, and hardly seem more magical than Men. No more his dwarfs. And yet as noted, merely by virtue of being called ‘elf’ and ‘dwarf’ the creatures are of Faëry and out of the folklore of our bedtime tales, and enchanted enough to satisfy most children.

Modern talesmen, steeped in reason and the mundane existence of cars and smog and tubes and computers and television, seem on the whole to have lost their sense of wonder. They grasp for it, as we see by the mere fact that Bardelys and his fellows even attempt to tell tales of fantasy at all. And yet it is like a foreign tongue to them that they speak but haltingly, it chafes at them, and their normal tendency is to revert to banal mundane matters, and at best tell us tales of boyish adventure.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday 9 November 2008)

Critique of Chapter Eight

No magic at all…

Chapters Seven and Eight of The Magic Key: The Dread Night by Bardelys are really one episode: caught by the soldiers, Hans tries to escape. He manages to make his way out of the camp and runs some way up the valley, only to sprain his ankle, whereupon he hides in a haystack; the soldiers track him there and burn down the haystack.

The chapter ends with a cliff-hanger as Hans goes out into their clutches.

There is not a whit of magic to be sniffed out here. No fairy godmother rescues Hans, and the soldiers don’t seem to use any magic to track him. (They might use magic, but we don’t see any hint of it. This to my mind equals no magic at all.)

So we have here a standard bit of boy’s own adventure fiction, direct descendent to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island episode where Jim Hawkins falls into the apple barrel and overhears the mutineers.

Where Bardelys seems to have gone wrong is in the level of detail, or granularity, with which he tells this tale.

Let us consider this movement through the tale, as if we in the audience, along with the hero, were traversing an unknown land. I can say that there are three broad paths we could follow:

1. flying
2. riding
3. slogging

The Brothers Grimm, and most traditional talesmen, chose to fly. They soared high above the events of their tales, swooping down for the occasional episode or scene of heightened suspense or emotion, winging higher to cover transitions of great distance or time.

The nineteenth-century master novelists rode down the King’s highways, or took us in coaches, stopping along the way to observe some especially scenic outlook, racing onwards now and then, and enjoying a nice meal at a roadside inn.

Modern talesmen slog through the bogs and mires cross-country, and make us feel every midge-bite, smell every outburst of marsh-gas, and struggle through the mud of every single moment.

Bardelys, though he began his tale in imitation of the traditional flying talesmen, has slipped, as though by default, into the modern manner of slogging with young Hans over every step of his flight, asking us to share every tortured breath, the feel of the new-mown hay stubble upon bare feet, the chill of the night fogs, and the fear of discovery.

If as seems likely, Hans begins the next chapter in the hands of the soldiers, he will find himself in precisely the same position he was in at the head of Chapter Seven, and these two chapters will have been wasted.

On the other hand, these flights have been an attempt by the author to make us share in the fortunes of the hero, to feel grief (not enough of that), anger, desire, fear alongside Hans. Maybe he has deemed this necessary to enforce identification (sympathy + empathy) with Hans; and maybe now, or at some point soon to come in the tale, he will consider that it has been enough of this, that we do now identify with Hans (or we never will) and thus Bardelys can go back to riding or, we hope, even flying.

We shall see.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday 8 November 2008)

Critique of Chapter 7

Does every chapter need magic? And how extensive or deep must the magic go?

Chapter Seven is mainly an action chapter: Hans, after sneaking into the Charcoal Burners’ camp, spies on Yellow Socks and Corbluncz (where does Bardelys dream up such awkward names? Names are not his strong point), is caught by the soldiers, and escapes with his life. But he sprains his ankle and hears them closing in on him in the fog-shrouded darkness…

I was about to write that there was no magic here. But there is, a little: we see for the first time some of the effectiveness of Clutchfast, the White Lady’s magical falconer’s glove. When Yellow Socks dons the glove and takes hold of Corbluncz by the collar, the Sooty Prince is made helpless, and seems to be in great pain. Yellow Socks boasts that the glove gives him, or indeed any wearer of the magical talisman, utter control over Corbluncz.

A remark here about the logic of magic. I read a great deal on fantasy-writers’ blogs about the need for a ‘logic’ or ‘rules’ of the magic in fantasy books. These rules seem to call in general for limits on the magic, as well as disadvantages in magic to counterbalance some of its advantages. Rather like the great powers of Superman must be diminished by the Achilles’ Heel of Kryptonite in its various colored forms.

It is a theory that I dislike. Its aims are surely good ones, and yet what makes magic, magic is that it does not follow rules the way science must. A flying carpet obeys your command to fly, and there is no need to expostulate on the correct weaving to be made of such a carpet, nor of any weakening of the person flying the carpet to limit its range.

Of course, here in the shadow of the Schwarzwald, Bardelys is playing games in the yard of the Brothers Grimm, and may thus escape some of the rigors that writers of High Fantasy fall prey to. Bardelys may simply invoke the fairy tale of childhood, and be judged by a different standard.

And yet it seems to me that when talesmen argue for limits and rules on magic, they betray a basic ignorance of fantasy itself. They seem to be so bound in the modern, scientific world, that they can’t escape Reason and Natural Law. And thus their work must dwindle into a sort of science-fiction lite, even as the grand traditions of science-fantasy have been shrunk to fit the small confines of ‘hard sf.’ Magic is dream-work, whether simply daydreaming, psychology (or pathology), or symbolism. To constrict it is to kill it.

And if you kill the magic you end with simple adventure, as we seem to have in this chapter.

The question then rises, How much magic need be present in any one chapter or portion or scene of a magical tale? And how deep and extensive should that magic be?

Your answer to these questions (as they pertain to Chapter Seven here) will depend on whether the action and adventure of Hans’s struggles against the ugly squat soldiers suffice for your entertainment.

(Composed on keyboard Friday 7 November 2008)

Critique of Chapter Six

Our Hero encounters danger, and welcomes it

Bardelys finally gives us his young hero’s reaction to losing his parents, sister, and home. It doesn’t seem adequate.

This though is a tricky subject. Too much time spent on ‘Oh dear! Oh my!’ will make our young Hans seem a weepy-eyed wimp. Too little will make us wonder at his stony-heartedness, and ask ‘What’s the matter with him?’ Bardelys has chosen to minimize the time – presumably in favor of action; now that he has (at last) begun the tale, he seems to want to carry us along with it. As I say, it seems too little to me. I don’t have a sense that Hans is too broken-hearted to lose everything he has. But on the other hand, maybe this is what Bardelys has in mind? We saw on the first two or three pages that Bardelys was critical of his hero, showing him to be lazy, arrogant, greedy, and self-centered. So maybe Bardelys merely wants us to add ‘uncaring’ to this list.

The glow of Yellow Socks’s lantern leads us to the great camp where the transformed Charcoal Burners (in greater numbers than Hans saw from his window when the nightmare began) have set up a great tent around which the common fighting-men stand or lie as wardens, burning fires to keep watch.

Hans enters the camp. It seems too easy, but the note that one of the dirty fighting-men might have called after him gives us a note of some worry. Have they followed Hans to the great tent? Are they spying on him even now?

He manages to worm his way under the flap of the tent, where he gets his first glimpse of the leader of the soldiers. I presume this is the Sooty Prince that the White Lady mentioned to Yellow Socks. And sure enough, Yellow Socks is in the tent, in the middle of some dispute with the man in the throne.

The ending of this chapter is one of those ‘bumps’ that break chapters in the middle of a scene. There is a small revelation – that it is indeed Yellow Socks. And there is the promise of more argument between the lad and the little ugly man in the throne, which just might answer some of the questions we have about this whole business – who these creatures are, what they want, why they have invaded the fields of men from the wicken-haunts of the Black Forest.

I like this chapter ending. I think I would find it very difficult to put the book down here. I am forced to (as are you) since Bardelys is only feeding me one chapter a day. But if I found it in a book, I would have to read at least the first page or two of the following chapter.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday 6 November 2008)