Finesse and Force

A vital difference between old folktales and new.

Another thing that struck Bardelys about the Russian fairy tales is how gentle they were. The hapless (but moral and goodhearted) heroes and heroines of these tales never fight for their rights – they never oppose evil or tyranny with brute strength. Indeed, they never even contest their more arrogant siblings’ maltreatment of them.

Instead, the heroes of these tales succeed through cleverness and (even more often) through the assistance of some magical, semi-divine helpers. These helpers act as cosmic instruments of karma or the will of heaven. There is no sense of Christianity behind the tales that Bardelys had read so far; they might as well have been told by pagans as by pious devout devotees of the Russian Orthodox Church. (This might be quite true: the original composers of these yarns might well have lived outside Russia or before Christianity came to Russia – or even before Christianity itself was born.)

He was struck likewise by the contrast of these tales with modern day fantasy tales, which almost universally appeal to brute force (or magical force, which is equated with physical, brute strength in the symbolic language of these tales) as the one true means that the good can use to overcome the evil.

In this also, Bardelys could see the difference between tales that arise out of a population that is truly oppressed and those that arise out of a bourgeois mentality of a dominant, even ruling class. The poor – the truly poor and oppressed – must tread lightly when complaining of any ill-treatment they suffer. If they speak too openly or too loudly, they risk the knock at the door, the boot in the face, the long trip to the prison camp, or torment and death. The ruling class on the contrary is only too eager to assert its rights and carry a big stick.

Alas, he thought, not only is literacy failing, but freedom is also dwindling, so that in future what will be popular are the new representatives of these old oral folktales, with all their simplicity, their escapist happy endings, their gentleness, their cleverness, and their inability to address directly the injustice and grinding oppression the ruling class has in store for all of us.

(Composed by dictation Sunday 28 September 2008)

The Roots of Romance

He finds out where the beginning of genre fiction lies

Bardelys walked along the street, watching the river that ran between the stone wall and the road bed. Normally this was a six foot stretch of grass with a buttress of weeds at the foot of the wall. After two days of tropical rain, however, the water ran up to a foot deep down to the culvert and wormed its way beneath the street to the ditch on the other side of the road.

Bardelys stopped about midway up the road. He could hear quite distinctly the sound of a waterfall, although no such thing could be seen. This was the main point where the water drained out of the field beneath the stone wall. About ten meters to the north he could hear another, lesser waterfall.

He went back to the house shaking his head and wondering what could be done to slow down the runoff of water when the rains were this heavy. Maybe sculpting the ground beneath the hayfield in keyline patterns would do the trick, but it would mean a lot of work digging and sculpting and hauling earth.

Recently he had been reading old Russian folk tales as adapted by the British children’s author Arthur Ransome. Bardelys had been struck at how close the tales came to despair over poverty and starvation. In tale after tale, it seemed, families were in imminent peril of starving to death, and in every family they faced the prospect of killing one of their children in order for the family as a whole to survive.

Take for example the tale entitled ‘Frost.’ Here an old man loses his first wife and marries again a woman who has two children of her own. This makes three daughters in the household, and the stepmother as is usually the case decides that the daughter of the first wife must go. She tells her husband to take the child deep into the woods to a tall fir tree, where Frost will come to be the girl’s bridegroom.

Bardelys had felt a chill run up his spine when he read this tale. Even though the setting was explicitly Christian, and Christians have always condemned and forbidden the exposure of infants, this small fairy tale shows the old man leaving his daughter to freeze to death as night comes on. The tale becomes quite explicit at this point, (at least in this translation and adaptation) because the old woman sends her husband back to the fir tree in the morning out of what seems to be sheer malice and cruelty. The older man fully expects to find his daughter’s corpse frozen stiff in the frost.

Instead, as it usually does in folk and fairy tales, the daughter is alive and well and has even prospered, because Frost has actually spoken with her and been impressed by her goodness and her pluck. Therefore he has given her a rich fur coat, jewelry, and other wedding gifts.

The cruel stepmother immediately once her daughters to share in the bounty, and so she sends them off in the evening with the husband so that they too might be wedded to the demon. Naturally, these spoiled and ugly girls don’t please Frost in the slightest, and they do end up frozen stiff when the old man goes to collect them on the following morning.

Was not in this, Bardelys wondered, the roots of all Romantic literature? And was not this kind of tale the very origin of ‘escapist’ fiction?

In real life, Bardelys was certain that almost every child and infant exposed to the elements had died. He supposed that the best that could have happened to them would’ve been the very ugly fate of slavery, toil, and prostitution, and death would only have been postponed or a few painful, miserably ugly years.

In tales it works the other way. Even the people who knew better – the very peasants were forced to give up their own children or knew neighbors who had done so – spun these tales with their happy endings. Their happy and unbelievable endings. Bardelys supposed that it could go no other way. Life was cruel enough. And there was no controlling life, or else no child would ever die. Tales were something else. Tales could be controlled, tales didn’t have to be so cruel. Tales could have happy endings.

And so the old talesmen of bitter harsh hard times could not bring themselves, could not bear to tell ‘realistic’ tales where the children froze to death. Bardelys knew that these tales were ‘escapist’ in nature. Why not escape, when life is so dreadful?

And, he thought, maybe the converse was also true: only fat people in rich happy times could afford to tell tales of ugliness and sorrow with painful, unhappy endings, in which good people suffered and died and the wicked triumphed.

‘Realism’ is a luxury that only well to do bourgeois families can afford. ‘Fantasy’ and ‘escapist literature’ is what poor and suffering people need to be able to endure the lives they lead.

(Composed by dictation Saturday 27 September 2008)

Clockwork and Character

A few words on the eternal war between plot and character in the movies.

A few years ago, Mel Gibson start in a movie entitled What Do Women Want? This was the movie that first made me feel as though the pace of the story with all its incidents and episodes had been crammed into a running time that was far too short. I got the sense of a clock that had been wound up far too tightly, so that its spring was forcing the mechanism to unwind in an overly hasty manner.

There was in short not a single pause or moment to reflect or draw breath – either for the characters or the audience.

Now, I could defend the practice of this movie by referring to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. In those times it was considered de rigueur for comedies to proceed at a frenetic, even frantic pace. The breathlessness of the pace was thought to enhance laughter in the audience, I suppose, but really underneath that lay the motive to stop the audience from thinking – because if we think about what’s going on in those movies, we will quickly realize how absurd the promise and motivations are of all concerned.

What Do Women Want? could be taken as an example of a screwball comedy, but it also wants to say something and examine the personalities of the characters involved. Also, the movie employs a central device out of fantasy and takes up valuable running time trying to explain or justify this device whereby Mel Gibson’s character is transformed into a woman. (I think this is one of my strongest objections to the movie – the idea is so fantastic, and the reason behind having this device work is so obvious, that we don’t need any more justification for it than its own result.)

The character Mel Gibson plays is certainly stressed out, but I don’t think that’s any reason to give the audience a headache.

I usually side with those who say that plot should predominate over character in the construction of stories. And here I seemed to be saying that plot has so overwhelmed the characters in the movie suffers from it. But I am also suggesting that the audience cannot be pushed too hard throughout the running time of any film.

Indeed, ever since George Lucas finished his first Star Wars trilogy, and he and Steven Spielberg teamed up to create the first of the Indiana Jones movies, there has been a dominant theory in a lot of Hollywood entertainment films – the idea that the film is not in fact a story, but works more like an amusement park ride – a roller coaster is the usual metaphor.

A roller coaster has built into the ride pauses between plunges. The cars slow down as they are dragged toward the top of the peaks and speed up as they descend. The riders get the stuffing scared out of them on the drops but they get a chance to breathe again on the ascents. So it would seem that a lot of filmmakers who profess to make their movies work like roller coasters don’t even understand how roller coasters work.

No audience can laugh full out without pausing for the entire running length of a feature length film. If we laugh too hard in the beginning, our diaphragm muscles begin to ache and get sore – it actually starts to hurt to laugh. We need a break in order to laugh again comfortably.

This is not entirely a modern day mistake, because I remember a similar reaction when I watched the Howard Hawks movie, I Was a Male War Bride.

But it does seem to be a distressingly frequent aspect of today’s Hollywood movies. Joel Silver, the famous producer, is said to have wanted an explosion every few pages in every script he was producing. Perhaps not a literal explosion, but some big action that would take place – in the case of a comedy like What Do Women Want? the ‘explosion’ would be a gag, pratfall, or some other laugh-inducing device.

The effect on me watching this movie was that I felt increasingly alienated from the – it seemed as though the movie were moving farther away from me, or I was moving farther away from it, so that I could see the clockwork spinning with all its wheels inside wheels – I wasn’t seeing characters and I wasn’t sympathizing, let alone empathizing, with any of them. This was a shame because the movie boasts a pretty good cast who were doing their best, and it’s certainly true that the movie had something to say.

When you watch movies (especially big budget action movies) be on the lookout for this ‘overwound clockwork’ phenomenon.

Ultimately I believe that this failing is a failing of the scripts involved. The writers of these films (along with the producers giving the writers notes) and not trying to include too many episodes, characters, and devices into the film script and then, faced with limits on running times, they try to pack everything in when they edit the movie. This invariably means that moments of quietude, reflection, reaction, and relief are the ones that are cut, because they are not strictly essential to understanding the plot, and the producers are reluctant to do away with any frame depicting one of the expensive, spectacular stunts or explosions (or potential gags).

This is a limitation of theater and movies and not, in theory at least, a limitation on novels, which can run as long as you want because the reader digests a story in a novel over the course of many sittings rather than a single sitting in which he digests a play or movie. And yet in practice even the novel has limits – every story has an ideal length (or rather I suppose a range of lengths) which it supports. If a story is told in too few words it will seem thin and of less consequence than it deserves. And if a story is told in too many words it will seem padded or even boring, all bluster and roar, and of greater consequence than it deserves.

(Composed by dictation Friday 26 September 2008)

Numbers Will Kill You

When accuracy falls just a little bit, aggravation soars

I’ve been dictating to Dragon NaturallySpeaking in a different room, and the accuracy has suffered. This has altered how I speak, so that I don’t speak normally – something that also hurts accuracy, but when my trust in the software falls, I don’t want to have to scan back over large swaths of text to find and fix errors.

It seemed that there’s a mistake in every line. Then I realized that if the accuracy of the program falls as ‘low’ as 90%, it will make one mistake every sentence.

Every sentence needs fixing.

And that is an accuracy boasting 90%.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, September 25, 2008)

Willow and Oak

Looking for peace in troubled times

(from a conversation) –

‘I saw Bon Voyage tonight, a comedy set in 1940 when France fell to Germany. It was very well constructed, one of those scripts where there are a dozen characters all bouncing off one another like pachinko balls. The construction is what’s nice. But it took the side of the resistance, and was against the collaborators. I’m not sure that’s the Tao way.’

‘Why does Tao way matter here? One of the characters is into Taoism? Or are you talking about something else?’

‘Well, there are a couple of famous metaphors in Taoism, I think from Tao Te Ching, but maybe from Chuang-tze. In general Taoists were contrasted to Confucius and his followers. Confucius stressed that every intelligent man should seek to influence the state and join the ruler as advisor, be a local mayor or whatever they called them, join the general administration. Lao-tze, in a famous, and probably apocryphal, story, met with Confucius and derided this approach: The Taoist way was to retreat from the turmoil of the world, tend your own garden and let everyone else tend his.

‘The two famous metaphors are:

1. ‘Be the willow, not the oak tree.’ In winter when heavy snows fall, the willow bends low, and when the snows melt, the willow springs back up. But the oak tree, which seems so much stronger than the soft willow, will crack and break under the heavy snow, and in spring when the snow melts the oak branches will still be broken.
2. ‘Water vs. Stone’ Stone of course is harder than water. But over time a tiny stream will cut a channel in the hardest stone. Water is yielding, and stone unyielding, but water still manages to erode and overcome stone.’

These two metaphors exemplify the Taoist social and political courses of action. If your country is conquered, as France was, then the ‘oak tree’ and ‘stone’ types would advocate continued battle, underground resistance, blowing things up, assassinating German officials and French collaborators. The ‘willow’ and ‘water’ types would simply ignore the conquerors as much as possible, as they had ignored their own French leaders. In time, the German Empire would crumble, and the peasants and farmer-philosophers would go on as they always had.

So nothing in the movie mentioned Taoism, but it was holding up the French politicians who formed the Pétain collaborationist government as weak, traitors, double-dealing, spineless and unprincipled; and de gaulle and the French resistance fighters were seen as moral, heroic, doing the right thing, in fighting back.

And I was looking at this from my pacifist Taoist point of view, and questioning both the film’s conventional ideology and my own point of view.

Those French Taoists (if there were any such) would have been standing by as French jews were sent off to be killed. By not fighting, are they not helping the evil?

I don’t know, in other words, just trying to sort out my own philosophy.

I think there is a smart, philosophical Taoist way to withdraw, and a more venal, corrupt politician way of collaborating. The French minister (‘Beaufort’) who stands for the collaborationists is compared to a movie actress, with whom he is sleeping, both spinning all sorts of self-serving lies just to get a piece of the pie and hold onto it, whether it’s from a leftist French government or the German imperialists. Such an approach is very different from, say, the French version of the Taoist, a country priest who advocates non-violence, but who will help any jews hide out from being captured whenever he can.

There is in Chuang-tze a constant note of mockery and laughter at those earnest Confucians who try to change the world. It’s a little cynical, but it might be the wisest course. After all, if everybody just tended his garden, there wouldn’t be any wars.

The problems arise when not everybody tends his gardens, and war does come. What then?

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, September 25, 2008)

The Lonesome Pine Who Is Normal

Can a Lonesome Pine end up being a normal man?

Today I want to consider a Lonesome Pine who is perfectly normal in all other respects, and ask the question `Can such a fellow be normal?'

I think it's perfectly possible for a person who is completely socialized and well-adjusted' to want to write stories, and to start telling stories without an audience. Indeed, I think most writers begin this way (not that most writers can be considered to bewell-adjusted').

The question then arises, whether this person, having written some stories that he likes, would not seek out an audience. Wouldn't he (being normal after all) want to gain some approval from an audience? Wouldn't he want to share his good story with an audience?

It's possible that such a person would not have access to an audience – at least for a short period of time. Or he might find that all the people around him don't share his taste in stories, and so he doesn't think that they'd be interested in the stories that he tells. This person might still be perfectly `normal' in all our usual sense of the word, only finds himself thrust into a different culture or society.

Let us take for example a man whose business causes him to travel to a distant country. There he conducts his trade and grows fluent in the native tongue. All the same he feels nostalgic for his own country and his own tongue. He begins to set down (solely for his own amusement and pleasure) a series of stories about his childhood and hometown and the people he knew there. He quite understandably expects that the people amongst whom he is presently living would not share his interest or appreciation in news stories of people they've never known, a culture they've never experienced, and a language that they don't speak. It might even fall out that this exile or emigrant must spend the rest of his life in this foreign country and never return home again, and so he continues to tell his stories, writing them down carefully and lovingly and showing them to no one.

How many of such men would be able to continue this practice? How many would never copy their stories over and send them back home to the people he knows there, to share them?

Now let us say that there exists a perfectly normal human being who invents fictions for his own amusement, and writes them down as stories for himself. He enjoys these stories and he enjoys telling them. To himself, however, he admits and recognizes that the stories aren't a very good and are not publishable in any respect. He keeps these stories to himself for that reason.

In the old times, such a man would undoubtedly be called a dreamer and a fantasist and a wool-gatherer. Could such a man qualify as normal? Perhaps not entirely normal – not 100% at least – but he might qualify as existing on the bubble' at the fringes and outer edges of what the society considers normal. That is to say, in all other respects of his life he conforms admirably to acceptable normal behavior. Only in this one aspect of his life does he differ from anyone else. And then we could say that this one small idiosyncrasy is not enough to brand him asabnormal.' Every man is permitted his small quirks and follies, after all.

On the other hand that scenario doesn't seem very likely to me. It is possible but improbable. Far more likely is the scenario of the wild-eyed loner, the strange, unsociable, abnormal `lone wolf' who feeds his own fantasies and bizarre tastes, shamefully, telling himself weird unwholesome stories.

The process of telling unusual tales as a hobby or avocation is well known in history. I suppose if we look back in time before the current commercial world developed, before all literary ambitions were subsumed into the vortex of commercial publishing, we would find that the idea that someone would want to `tell tales' and spin yarns for publication and profit might strike everyone as a little bit nutty.

And yet I can't somehow get beyond the idea that everyone who tells tales would want an audience to hear them. Nor can I get beyond the idea that everyone who wants to tell tales began as a member of the audience listening to someone else tell tales, and it was only out of his own enjoyment of hearing tales told that he conceived the idea of telling his own or repeating those tales he had heard earlier.

(Composed by dictation Tuesday 23 September 2008)

Isolation and Social Discourse

How it is that the isolated writer will become more and more extreme

The Lonesome Pine is a term that I'm using to describe writers who do not write for publication or for any other reader than themselves. These writers are a breed apart from all the rest of us, even though I think almost all writers begin this way, and it's only later that they begin to get a glimmer of hope, aspiration, or intention to be published and widely known.

`Abandon all hope...'

There are some writers probably never have any idea that any other human soul will ever read or hear what they have written. The image that comes to my mind is of a person whose mind doesn't work the way most of our minds work: he might be called insane or mentally unbalanced. He might be schizophrenic. Or he might be compulsive. In any case, his writing tends to be more therapeutic than anything else – it serves as a sort of pressure valve to vent the excess thoughts and concerns that he carries with him at all times.

I think a lot of people go through this sort of experience at one time or another in their lives. I associate it mostly with adolescence and the ache of teenage years, also we love affairs, and intense love for someone with whom the writer cannot communicate, someone the writer dares not approach. For one reason or another, the writer believes that his feelings are too precious and too potent to be revealed to anyone. He feels cut off from other human society, or else he would be writing and speaking and expressing all his emotions to other people.

Adolescence and amorous heartache are temporary conditions, so most of us when we endure these phases do not do so for very long. Any flirtation that we might have with this state of being a Lonesome Pine, therefore, is brief, and we probably forget what it was like after a few years have passed.

But if we consider the difference between the infatuated loner and the person who is also infatuated but who has friends, then I think we begin to understand (or at least approach understanding) of the writer who writes for many years of his life all along without any hope or intention that anyone else will read what he has written.

This is where the connection with madness comes in.

When you're able to `vent' to other people (and the more the merrier), you are also forced to listen to them giving you advice, and commenting on your own complaints. Through this process you gain some deal notion of how other people see you and see your situation – and the way other people see your situation is never as extreme or hopeless or glorious or tragic or doomed as you yourself believe.

This process is related to the more general process of `socialization.' Anyone who is part of a community will come over time to reflect that community in all of its values, as well as its idiosyncratic modes of behavior, speech, and attitude. At the same time, every individual member of that community affects the general outlook of the community. This is a kind of dialogue. The people at the extremes and fringes of the community try to pull it towards themselves, while the people in the center try to resist this centrifugal motion and bring everyone closer to their common central ground.

The world of literature is a sort of community in itself – or maybe we should call it a collection of communities. For every genre and subcategory of literature makes its own community that might have very little commerce with other communities and genres. So-called `hard science fiction' devotees probably don't read many Regency romances, and vice versa.

The process of `socialization' in any given literary community results in certain styles coming to predominate, and the typical clichés of the genre. Styles come and go, and there is a lot of interactivity going on not only between the writers and readers but also amongst the writers themselves. This will vary according to how intensely the fans of the genre feel and how active the fans are into creating an ecosystem around this genre.

New writers for the genre will mostly come out of its own fans — people who know the history of the genre and like the genre for what it is and would like to keep it the way it is, albeit with some changes that usually reflect general social changes in the greater world as well as new generations coming onto the scene. All these new writers have a vested interest in the life and vitality and gradual, incremental evolution of the genre. As a body, the fans and writers within the genre's community will seek to maintain a coherence of form and content.

Another factor in the `socialization' of the writer in general has to do with simple mechanics. Publishing as an industrial concern gains greater efficiencies when it achieves and abides by standardization. This involves factors like the available consistency and a makeup of paper stock, page size, color of ink, binding processes to be used in books, and all the equipment that is used in manufacturing, distributing, and marketing the product — the books.

There is another factor in this socialization' that is probably more particularly a part of literature. This is a high number offussbudgets' that inevitably cling to words, grammar, dictionaries, and all things fusty and academic. These are the people who insist that everything be spelled the same way, and that all punctuation adhere to certain laws. These are also the people who seem to regard the definitions of words not as things that people have arbitrarily decided they mean, and can change at any time, but rather as items handed down from the All-High.

Against all this stands the Lonesome Pine. Since this writer never intends to be published or even to seek publication of his work, he never enters into a dialogue with the greater community of literature, or with any of the smaller communities of the genre. He never deals with a copy editor. In addition, there are other factors that have driven him into the state that we call the Lonesome Pine. He is probably not very adept at dealing with people in social situations. He probably resists all efforts of those around him (with whom he absolutely must deal) to bring him, as it were, `into the fold' and be like everybody else.

Therefore, the Lonesome Pine will probably relish spelling things differently and using a grammar system of all his own. Instead of trying to make his self printed and self-bound volumes look like any other commercial book, he will take delight in making it look very different. He will use colored paper — and many different colors — and he will use paper of different sizes. He will change fonts often. He will include illustration, and these too will be different as different as he can make them. He will not be bound by any literary conventions and since his work will never be touched by any editor's blue pencil, his stories will go all over the place, and he might even end up with different protagonists than the ones he began with.

All of these are the outer considerations of the work and life of the Lonesome Pine. The inner life remains out of bounds and beyond our imagining — or rather I should say, that the Lonesome Pine varies from individual to individual too widely for anyone to be able to describe one portrait and say with any confidence that it stands in for the class as a whole.

(Composed by dictation Monday 22 September 2008)