Story Collections and Character-Narrators

Considering the talesmanship of assemblies of tales, narrators who are characters in the tale, and single tales told by more than one narrator

The Unreliable Narrators

This past weekend, I started reading Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (in the current www.gutenberg.org text). Here’s an example of talesmanship far advanced over the simple model I proposed yesterday, which I based on how I imagine the first tales were told, around the fire in the dark at day’s end. Collins pretends that his novel is a collection of papers and accounts written by several of the characters of the novel as each one writes down his recollection of the events in a different part of the overall story.

This is a variation on the “epistolary” tale, or the novel consisting of a series of letters. As The Moonstone is said to be a mystery, I presume that Collins adopts this device in order to leave us readers at tale’s end mystified, and unable to state for certain what actually happened. All we are able to say is that each of these characters wrote his recollections to the best of his abilities and prejudices. And with the first “recollector” Collins takes great pains, and several pages, establishing from the start that the character has flaws himself and is not entirely reliable, a far cry from the omniscient, masterful “narrator” that was common in the late 19th century when Collins wrote The Moonstone.

We could trace this device of the multiple narrators back to Chaucer, mentioning along the way the Decamerone, Pentamerone, and Heptamerone, with this one difference, that those works describe gatherings of people, each of whom is called upon to tell a tale to the group. The Moonstone and other epistolary novels, including Dracula by Bram Stoker, each tell one story through many narrators.

Around the Fireplace at the Caravanserai

In fact, the circumstances described in The Canterbury Tales come close to those I imagined for the first talesmen. We get a glimpse into the way people entertained one another before all entertainment was commercialized and the current effort came under way to draw a sharp line between the paid professional “artists” and the rest of us who are the paying “audience.”

At each stop along the way, or each day when the group of nobles fleeing the plague (in the Decamerone) got together, they were expected to entertain one another, and so each member of the group was called upon to tell a tale. The tales are traditional and invented, and though some of the narrators may pretend that the events are true in that they happened to the narrator or someone he knew, the truth seems to be that all the tales had been handed down along the way, some for centuries, embellished and renovated with each new generation of listeners and with each new land where the tales were told.

Seeking Instruction and Enlightenment

The Moonstone doesn’t serve very well to instruct us about the circumstances of the basic art of talesmanship. With the first true “narrator” (following the letter introduced as historical evidence, setting up the nature of the curse which will follow the stolen diamond) Collins emphasizes the fictional narrator as much as the events he is supposed to be telling. More so in fact, as Franklin explicitly begins his story over three times, and his first several pages any decent editor would surely have struck out — except that Collins wants to fix firmly in our minds that “Franklin” is not “Collins” and that we should bear in mind “Franklin” and his shortcomings and biases as much as the substance of what he claims to recollect.

Chaucer also wanted to characterize his pilgrims by the tales they chose, and the way they told them, as he wanted to entertain us by the tales themselves. Chaucer also wrote verse, whose artificiality further removes The Canterbury Tales from the natural way an oral talesman would set forth his tale.

So I’m thinking that the Decamerone might be a good source to read to gain enlightenment into how the first talesmen might have set about their business.

Caveat

One thing we have to keep in mind when considering written tales in the light of the first talesmen. An oral telling of a tale can be as much a performance, as much theater, as a tale plain and simple. And so the oral storyteller can resort to devices that can’t translate to the page and words alone.

(First posted Monday, 14 January 2008)

Opening Your Tale

or, How I Like to Start Mine

Evolutions

With any art or craft, the techniques used in the first instances tend to be utilitarian. All efforts go into creating something that is useful for the intended purpose. But in later stages, once usefulness is assured and the basics of the craft are mastered, more conscious attention goes toward ornament and refinement. The artist aims more at beauty and surprising embellishments. Eventually, if the culture declines, we find arts and crafts that display shocking idiosyncrasies and attempts at novelty and strangeness even though the craftsmen lack master of their craft’s basics.

I think that in much of the world today (in Europe, North America, parts of South America, Japan and parts of Asia), we have stumbled into this stage of decline for talesmanship. Writers have for so long ignored the basics of talesmanship that they seem not to know how to do it right. It’s so bad now that it seems that storytelling is a lost art, for most respectable critics (at least in America) seem unable to be able to judge the storytelling a tale displays, and this indicates that the basic knowledge has been lost and is no longer being taught.

But maybe I’m just too ignorant to be able to judge the refinements of modern literature.

And this is not to claim any special knowledge or mastery on my part; as far as I’m concerned I’m as ignorant as anybody and more so than most veterans. So regard this as little more than a groping after rediscovering what was once well known, but never by me.

Around the Fire

The first step in recreating lost wisdom, it seems to me, lies in recreating the circumstances out of which the wisdom was first born, and trying to forget everything we think we know, except for this original image.

For the first talesmen, I think of them as sitting by the fire in the dark. There are no artificial lights, and every man woman and child has had to work hard from sunup to survive and make ready for the next day. Some children and oldsters may be dozing, but the adults and young adults are still awake when dark closes in around the small fire. Handiwork that can be done in the flickering light carries on by those who can do it. The others entertain one another by singing, playing drums and other musical instruments as they might have, and telling jokes and tales.

So when I start my own tales, I try to keep this image in mind. I’m among the others and there’s a lull, and I think to tell a little tale.

Where do I start?

Who What Where

“This is a story about X__, who was a Y__ who lived in Z__.”

The first part of any tale is the setup where the talesman introduces his cast and their location, and tells the audience what problems the heroes of his tale are facing. The opening of the tale comes before the problem part and merely sets the stage:

• Who the story is about
• What the hero is (this is a part of who he is, but can be distinct enough to deserve its own section — in general by who I mean the individual character of the hero, and by what he is I mean his role or place in society, including to what society he belongs)
• Where the story takes place (including when it takes place)

Once the audience knows these three things, the talesman can introduce the problem his hero faces. The tale in its basics invites the audience to face the problem alongside the hero and see it to its end. The Opening in general is a sort of “settling in” where the audience finds out the character-skin they are going to be assuming in facing the upcoming problem.

Naming the Hero

I like to make the hero the subject of the opening sentence. This is the quickest way of letting the audience comprehend the nature of the skin they are going to assume.

The more common way that I see current talesmen opening their tales however is to begin with the immediate, sensory where the hero finds himself in. This has the benefit of treating the tale as a dream and the audience as dreamers who, like in many dreams, first experience their surroundings and later, as a function of those surroundings, adopt their new identity:

The sunlight was warm although a cool breeze filtered through the yellow-green ferns overhead…

By dissociating the experience from the character (as yet unnamed and undefined), the talesman in this way forces his audience to experience first, and then he will allow them to “discover” who they are in experiencing it:

Hendricks shook his head and pulled his hat lower over his eyes. The brightness in the valley was disconcerting, even tiring.

I have nothing against this way of opening a tale. I prefer the more straightforward “who first” approach mostly because I can’t imagine our talesman by the fire opening his tale in this way. Instead he would open his tale in a less-dreamlike, more rational way:

Hendricks was a chartered accountant from Somerset who’d gotten lost on a vacation in Brazil…

Note that there are three terms we can use for our hero in this opening sentence:

1. By his name
   (“Hendricks got lost on vacation in Brazil.”)
2. By his title
   (“A chartered accountant got lost on vacation in Brazil.”)
3. By epithet

“By epithet” takes more explaining than the first two because the notion of epithet is itself a very old, primitive part of storytelling that is little-used today. Most of us know it mainly from Homer whose Iliad and Odyssey employ epithets for most of the major characters. You can also find it in folk- and fairy-tales. A more recent example of this you can find in Dan Simmons’ The Terror which (after a prologue) opens with:

He was the man who had eaten his shoe.

The value of epithet is that it strikes at the heart of the character and hints at his role in the tale to come. But if we take Homer as our examplar, we have to note two other details that will distinguish Homer’s tales from most of the ones we’ll be telling:

1. Homer’s audience already were familiar with the tale of the fall of Troy and Odysseus’s return
2. Homer usually attached his epithets to the character’s name

As a result of (1) Homer could easily say, “the beauty who caused the fall of Troy,” and he could count on his audience knowing he meant shell-born Helen of Sparta, Menelaus’s wife. And when he sang “long-suffering Odysseus,” he made it clear to everyone twice over the character he meant.

It’s uncommon that we would have occasion to refer to our characters by epithet. I’ve never done it. But it does intrigue me and I’d like to play with it in future.

(First posted Sunday, January 13, 2008)

The One-Handed Golf Pro

Who would’t listen to the experts?

First Diagnosis

There was once a golf pro who was suffering pains and numbness in his right hand. He went to a doctor who examined him carefully and took tests. The man went to see the doctor again when the test results were in.

“I have bad news for you, I’m afraid,” the doctor told him. “You’ve been eating too many sweets. Now you have advanced diabetes. It’s so bad that in addition to daily shots, we’re going to have to amputate that hand.”

The man was shocked. “Doctor, I can’t lose my hand — how would I play golf? And if I couldn’t play golf, how would I make my living?”

“I don’t see any other way to read these test results,” answered the doctor. “If you won’t let us remove that hand the damage will spread. You’ll lose your arm then. After that your life could be in danger.”

Second Opinion

The golf pro went to see another doctor who ran the same tests and came to the same diagnosis. “It’s diabetes,” he told the golf pro. “A very bad case. You’ll have to get that hand removed or you will lose your arm — quite possibly your life.”

The man went to another doctor and another until he consulted with every doctor in town. They all agreed that he had an advanced form of diabetes and that he must agree to amputate his right hand within a few weeks. Some told him he might lose his arm as well, others told him his arm was in no immediate danger. One told him that the arm must come off straight away, never mind about the hand. But all the doctors agreed that the golf pro’s addiction to sweets had brought on a grave case of diabetes.

“But I love sweets,” the man said. “How could eating a few candies make my hand hurt like this?”

Somebody to Trust

The golf pro was shaken. He went to get his car. The parking garage attendant took one look at him and said, “Buddy, you don’t look so good. What’s wrong?”

The golf pro explained. The attendant frowned. “Them doctors don’t know it all,” he said. “One of them told my cousin he was going to drop dead in six months — that was three years ago and he’s still going strong. I tell you what, my brother in law is a pharmacist. You go tell him about it and he’ll fix you up. He’s somebody you can trust — not like them doctors who only want to cut a guy open and run up the bill.”

The golf pro went to the pharmacist who sold him some pain pills, and regaled him with a dozen stories of times doctors had given faulty diagnoses or operated needlessly. He assured the golf pro that his symptoms could have been entirely normal — just part of life’s occasional ups and downs.

The golf pro took the pharmacist at his word. He set aside what all the doctors had told him. He took the pain pills with some joint pills and felt better overnight.

The Moral

The moral of the story is, don’t be surprised when people tell you they don’t believe in man-made global warming. Not all of them are being paid by the oil companies either. They just want to go on eating candies and being golf pros … just like always.

Oh, about the golf pro? That wasn’t the end of his story. But I’ll leave it up to you to finish.

Who was right, the pharmacist and the parking garage attendant, or all the doctors?

News Argument Anecdote

Of the three kinds of telling maybe anecdote is talesmanship’s grandfather

3 Kinds of telling

Here are three kinds of telling: News, Argument, and Anecdote. (No doubt there are others as well.) We use the news mode when we say, “It rained last night.” We use the argument mode when we say, “The ground is wet because it rained last night.” We use the anecdote mode when we say, “I couldn’t sleep last night — I kept hearing thunder. At last I got up and went out. The wind was howling and lightning flashed in the East. Then I felt drops on my face and hands. Soon it was pouring and I was soaked through. The ground was muddy and slippery and I fell twice trying to make it back inside. Oh, you should have seen it!”

Modes and Uses

Each mode has its uses. In news mode we want to convey information quickly succinctly and effectively — we want our audience to understand what happened. In argument mode we want to persuade our audience that some fact or connection is true.

In anecdote mode we want to guide our audience through an experience or connected series of events. But we can also use anecdote to convey information and we can order a tale so as to persuade or convince our audience of something. In short anecdote can serve any of the three goals.

Efficiency vs. Experience

News and Argument mode each is the most efficient for its purpose. But anecdote mode is the most vivid and memorable. And maybe it’s the father of all the other modes. It recreates experience. It mirrors our memory of how things happened to us. It may be the first and the last way we communicate in our lives.

The Old Woman

We know an old woman who seems to have lost her ability to tell people news. Instead she tells them stories. It seems beyond her mental powers to say, “It rained last night.” She must tell you the story of her night instead. And if you grow impatient and try to force her to leap to her conclusion (and convert her speech to news mode), she will falter and must recollect herself. Only when she has gathered the threads of her tale and found the place she had reached when you interrupted will she be able to carry on — in just the way she would have had she not been interrupted.

Memory and Talesmanship

The story of our experiences holds more than their conclusions. Conclusions are the essence of news and argument, and men may have invented these modes in order to communicate this essence in the most efficient way. But the story holds more: it also holds what it felt like (or must have felt like) to be on the scene when the events took place and we reached our conclusions about them.

These sensual experiences make the events memorable and lifelike, as though our audience relives the events. And so by experiencing the events of the tale vicariously our audience can learn from them as though they lived the events themselves.

Simple Supporters

Complications are for heroes. Most supporting players work better when they’re simple

Tension and Character Importance

Tension or suspense is what the audience feels. It is the balance between our hope that the tale will conclude happily, and our fear that it will not. This is a notion advanced by Frank Daniel, a Czech film theorist and instructor. He developed his ideas from reading about classical European drama, especially Lope de Vega and the French 19th century dramatists and critics such as Dumas fils and Sarde, the devotees of the “well-made play” or pièce bien faite. But this basic tension or balance of hope and fear was also an integral part of Stendhal’s idea of what made us fall in love. Stendhal worked out these ideas in his famous book De L’Amour — an excellent dissection of romantic love and foolishness that gave me great insight into how to make characters fall in and out of love, and the various types of love.

How the audience feels about the main characters or heroes is bound up with how we feel about the story as a whole. Often enough the desires of the heroes forms the basis of the story, and the story concerns itself with the question of whether the heroes will get their wish. So it makes sense to say that when the heroes experience internal conflicts, the audience will feel a heightened sense of suspense over the tale’s outcome. And therefore complicated heroes will increase our enjoyment in hearing a tale told to us.

The hero is of supreme importance to the tale, but the supporting character is of less importance. So supporting characters don’t have to be complicated. Sometimes it’s better when they are simple.

Middling Characters

Sometimes it’s better when supporting characters are complicated. An example would be when a hero needs, requires, assistance from a supporting character. Will he help or won’t he? Now the tension of this small step in the overall tale depends on the supporting character, and if he in turn has his reasons to want to help and other reasons not to help, this will increase our fear that he won’t help, and that the hero might fail at this step in his journey.

Such characters are not the least important characters, so I think of them as middling characters less important than the heroes but playing definite parts, with perhaps their own goals and confrontations and changes through the scenes in which they appear.

The internal conflicts of these middling characters can be just as deep as the internal conflicts of your heroes, but they must be resolved more quickly, within a single scene, perhaps. This resolution doesn’t have to be permanent, it only has to last long enough to advance your hero to the next step in his journey. In fact, a middling character can later come to regret his decision to help the hero, and aid the hero’s opponent in the next scene; or he can regret his decision to betray the hero and come to help him in the next scene.

The One-String Character

The One-String Character is another notion I learned from Frank Daniel. The metaphor is of a violin or guitar or other stringed instrument that has only one string, and so can only play one note. This character is defined by just one notion. It could be as minor as a mannerism or a saying the character repeats, or it could be more substantial, such as a dream the character has, or talent.

The One-String Character can be middling — he can even be a Sidekick. But in general, the more we audience members see of a character, the more variety we’d like to see in him. The one note the one-string character plays can get tiresome over dozens of scenes in a long tale such as a novel. So this type of character is best reserved for the most-minor characters in your cast.

But the One-String Character can be a lot of fun for the audience when we find them in such minor positions. They add to the texture or atmosphere or tone of the tale.

One-String Characters are defined externally by this one trait, and this type of characterization has fallen out of favor since literature began to remove itself from popular art. In “literary fiction” the audience feels no loss from the absence of One-String Characters, in fact they would mar the tales in the eyes of their intended audience. In the more popular-art genres however, this loss has been significant, and many’s the genre tale that would have been enlivened and improved by the addition of a few one-stringers.

Complicated Heroes

The simple way to make interesting heroes is to give them two opposing traits

Stock Heroes

A hero who has a single trait, which he shows in everything he does, is a stock character — a stock hero. When this hero is not the main character, (a “hero” and not a “hero” if you will) we in the audience will accept this without problem, because we will accept minor and supporting characters who show us only one face. These characters exist to fulfill one use in the tale; they are like tools and so long as they do their jobs we will find no problems with them. But when this hero is the main character, the technical “hero” or protagonist of the tale, our main question is “Will he succeed in his mission?” We are concerned with how he does, whether he will gain his goal or not.

In this case, the stock hero can only provide us with suspense as to the outcome in measuring his own talents and abilities against those external obstacles that stand between him and his goal. These external obstacles will always be there, regardless of how simple or complicated the hero is.

But if the hero has internal conflicts in addition to his external conflicts, our doubt and fear for his success have so much greater chances to intrigue us.

Inner Complications

An inner complication is simply something within the character’s makeup that goes against something else within his makeup.

A single complication is enough for genre or popular tales. “Literary” tales generally like many complications, the more the better.

Cross-grain and Contrary

A single complication can be either cross-grain or contrary. I call a complication cross-grain when the two traits or desires work against each other, but not directly against each other. Sometimes they conflict, sometimes they don’t. A contrary complication on the other hand involves a pair of traits or desires that are mutually exclusive and must always oppose each other — such as loving and hating another person. Or loving the taste and craving a substance that harms the character’s health.

The cross-grain complication is quirky and interesting, since it sometimes works one way, and sometimes another. Sometimes the two traits oppose each other, sometimes they don’t.

The contrary complication is more dramatic, or we could say melodramatic. It is stronger than the cross-grain complication and more suited to simpler, stronger tales. Tales of life-or-death conflicts are better served by contrary complications, small tales of love in humble circumstances (for example) are better served by contrary complications. Romantic tales (in the 19th century sense of the term Romantic that is) such as Wagnerian opera and epic sagas of national importance work better with contrary complications for their heroes. Humorous tales, anecdotes, and tales dealing with mundane life work better with cross-grain complications.

Balance

Our goal as good talesmen should be to balance the effect of the two conflicting desires or traits, so that our audience will suffer the pangs of real doubts as to the outcome of the struggle. So that the hero himself won’t be able to tell, sometimes, which impulse will be stronger, whether he will fight or run away (to give an example). The hero won’t be able to foretell this, nor will the talesman telling the tale, and thus the audience won’t be able to tell it either.

Now, that’s suspense!

Dream Tale Magic

Tales and Dreams do the same things. Are Talesmen hypnotists?

The Use of Dreams

A recent article in the magazine Psychology Today (you can find it online at http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20071029-000003.html) told about Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo, who has advanced a new theory as to why we dream. According to Revonsuo, the main purpose of dreams is to rehearse situations, notably dangerous situations, so we can practice how to escape or overcome them.

More research about dreams indicates that dreams help us remember things. While we dream, recent learning seems to get “fixed” in our memory.

The Use of Tales

This is part of the magic of tales as well. In our earliest societies, before men learned to write (and before we lost our memories) men handed down tales of the history of their race, tribe, village, and family. Usually these tales recreated the past as the life-stories of heroes, gods, and demigods. Lore was also embedded in fables and tales of the youth of past heroes, gods, and legendary figures.

And tales recounting meetings with monsters and enemies and other dangers in the world also serve to let the audience rehearse in advance what they could do and what they should to in those situations.

Enchanters

Poetry evolved as a mnemonic device. The word “enchanter” comes from the Latin cantare meaning “to sing.” But the rhythms and other mnemonic aspects of poetry such as rhyme, assonance, and stock epithets also induce a sort of trance in the audience. This trance helps the audience consider the events of the tale as though they were happening before them, as though the audience partook of those events.

Hypnotists induce trances in their subjects that resemble guided dreams.

What This Means For Talesmen

Bearing these basics of (possible) uses of tales in mind helps the talesman to focus his tale with the audience in mind.