Several of [Bach’s] contemporaries testified to his ability, when given two different themes, to see at once all the different ways that they could be played together, with all the possible contrapuntal combinations. He knew immediately what could be done with a single theme: his son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, showed him a fugue he had been writing and asked if any other variations were possible; after a moment’s glance, he replied firmly, “None.”
That sort of knowledge is what we (and by we I mean not just writers but editors and critics and teachers too) should aim at in our understanding of storytelling. Given the bare notion of one particular character in relation to another (or to two others in the form of a triangle), we ought to be able to look at them and see all the implications and possibilities and outcomes. This little thicket of relationships grows into the wood through which we must trace the path of our story.
But it helps immensely to see what can grow from what. A simple example: does the female protagonist whose dim outline we can see in our mind’s eye have the silhouette of Little Red Riding Hood or Cinderella? Because Little Red Riding Hood’s phase space is quite different from Cinderella’s. And if Cinderella, then which variation? The sweet and put-upon Two-Eyes, from the story “One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes,” or the cool and sassy Mossycoat?
Then there’s the matter of the making-up part itself.
Charles Rosen again:
“Invention” was a key word for Bach, as it was for many contemporary German musicians. What was most important for a young student to learn, Bach himself insisted, was how to have “good inventions.” The word is sometimes taken to mean the initial theme, motif, or melody, but Dreyfus shows that a much larger sense must be assumed. “Invention” in a fugue covers not merely the opening motif, but also all the interesting things that can be done with it: Can it be inverted (with all the intervals that went up now going down and vice versa), augmented (played twice as slow), diminished (twice as fast), and played in stretto (where a second voice plays the theme before the first voice has finished, so that the theme is performed by two or more voices but out of phase)? Can it be played in stretto in its original and inverted forms together? Can the augmented form be played in stretto with the original one? “Good inventions” means, of course, that all of this must be done while producing a beautiful harmony, and without infringing the simple rules of counterpoint. “Invention” is what makes the fugue interesting. Dreyfus, following some eighteenth-century writers on music, distinguishes invention from decoration and disposition (or ordering): they make the work agreeable and acceptable—the fascination must come from the invention.
As I’ve been saying.
So part of the knowledge I’m arguing for is a knowledge of stories. I have been lucky: I was able to earn a living as a teacher here in Britain before the National Curriculum sifted into the land like the Red Death in the Edgar Allan Poe story. No Key Stage or Component or Unit prevented me from telling my class the stories I wanted to tell. I was able to tell and learn and get to know dozens and dozens of myths and folk tales. It was the making of me as a storyteller. (I don’t know where the next generation of children’s authors is going to come from, by the way, but I predict that they won’t come out of the ranks of the teachers. Young teachers today have too many other stupid things to do to have time or energy left at the end of the day to sit down and write, and the National Curriculum forbids them to do what I used to do, and simply tell stories for the love of it when they want to.)
We need to know stories, dozens of them. The best source, of course, is myth and folk tale. Such anthologies as those of Kevin Crossley-Holland, Alan Garner, and Neil Philip should be treated in two ways: firstly, they should be bound in gold and brought out on ceremonial occasions as national treasures; and secondly, they should be printed at the public expense in the hundreds of thousands and given away free to every young teacher.
We need to keep those old stories burnished and bright and new by telling them over and over again, and if we do we’ll find that curiously enough we never get tired of them. Tell them to children. Tell them to friends. If you haven’t got any friends, go for a long walk and tell them to the dog. Don’t read them: get them in your head and tell them. Ted Hughes is advising us now to learn poems: excellent idea. Well, we can learn stories too.
I’ve stressed the importance of the making-up part, but we need to know a good deal about the writing-down part as well.
Fritz Lang again:
You have to tell a story with the camera. Therefore, you have to know the camera and what you can make the camera do. You have to know the instruments with which you tell the story.
The instrument for those of us who tell stories in books is language. I’ve said stories aren’t made only of language, but those of us who do use it should know it as well as we can. And we should look after it. The world out there is careless with language.
Take the word they use in Britain now on the railways for people like us: they call us customers. They do this in order to stress the commercial nature of the transaction, and disguise any other. But when you pay money to a hotel, they call you a guest. When you pay money to a lawyer, he calls you a client. When I pay money to my dentist she calls me a patient. It isn’t difficult to use these words, and we all understand them; and it was never difficult to understand that when you paid to go on the railway, you were a passenger. To obliterate that word, to use a vaguer word for an ideological purpose, is to try and turn the richness of the living language into a monoculture.
We can’t stop them doing it, but we can stop ourselves. My favourite image for language itself is a great forest: it’s a living thing, and it’s bigger than we are, and we’re born into the middle of it and we gradually get to know more and more about it as we grow ourselves. It provides us with shelter and food and pleasure. (The forest is the phase space of all we can possibly say.) But parts of it are being burned down, and other parts are struggling to find light and nourishment, and the terrible thing is that now we’re conscious, the nature of the forest itself has changed.
As Wallace Stevens puts it in the poem “Narrative of the Jar”:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The presence of the jar—of art, of consciousness—changes the nature of the wilderness. In the poet’s words, “It took dominion everywhere.” We can’t pretend to be innocent in the face of language, any more than in the face of knowledge of any sort: we are conscious, and so we are responsible. Whether we like it or not, the forest of language is not wild virgin forest any more; it’s being managed, and some of it is being managed badly.
And we’re responsible, we the story people, the poetry people, the book people. In our parts of the forest, we are in charge. There’s no one else who’ll clear out the dead undergrowth of cliché, or provide a habitat for a rich variety of living words and expressions, and make sure no single plant or creature drives out all the others in a monoculture where everyone is a customer and no one can be anything else, if we don’t.
Anyway, I’m going to end with a confession, as I promised, but it’s not the sort that would interest the News of the World, I’m afraid.
I go into schools occasionally to talk to children about my work. And when I do, I try to bear in mind that my mission is to inform and educate and enlighten. But in truth that’s a secondary motive. My primary motive is the one I mentioned earlier, namely Scheherazade’s: I want to stop them from killing me. And I use her method.
So I tell them a story about telling stories. And as with any other story, this one has to begin at the right point and take in some interesting views and last about fifty minutes. It has to be shaped, in other words. Consequently, there are things I don’t tell them about, such as the brutal nature of the toil, and t
he boredom that occupies much of the time, and the savage melancholy that comes after the end of a book, and the financial calculations that sometimes determine whether you can write this book or that one, and so on. What I tell them, in short, isn’t fully true in a law-court sense. It’s a story. Other writers, I’m sure, will know just what I mean.
And in telling you this story tonight I’ve done something similar. So now I’m going to come clean and tell the law-court truth. This narrator is going to become reliable. Those little girls on the train: well, they did almost everything I said they did. They did write a story, and the first one did say, “Are we allowed to write that she can do magic?”
But the second little girl didn’t say, “Let’s write it in red.” What she actually said was, “Let’s write it in blue.” They didn’t have a red pencil.
However, when I was thinking about it afterwards, I did a bit of editing. Blue makes the point, but red makes it better; red is a better story. And now this story—red, blue, black and white—has come to the end, and I hope we all live happily ever after.
THIS TALK WAS DELIVERED AS THE PATRICK HARDY LECTURE AT A MEETING OF THE CHILDREN’S BOOK CIRCLE ON 3 NOVEMBER 1997 AT THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING UNION IN LONDON, AND LATER APPEARED IN SIGNAL NO. 85, JANUARY 1998.
The News of the World no longer exists. How nice to realise that even the most offensive things will eventually require a footnote to explain what they were.
Epics
BIG STORIES ABOUT BIG THINGS
On the style, purpose, value and figures of epic literature
Above all, an epic is big. It’s about big things—death, courage, honour, war, shame, vengeance. It’s about large and public matters—the fate of a nation, the return of a king, the success of an army, the origin of a people. Its protagonists are larger than human beings, and perhaps simpler too: they are heroes. The preservation of an epic is a matter not of private dilettantism, but of national importance. It is less precious than literature, but more valuable.
An epic is independent of the identity of its author. Oh, someone eventually transcribes the often-told tale, sometimes in a highly wrought style, sometimes as a masterpiece of poetry, sometimes in a rough and clumsy version full of repetitions or jumbled with contradictions or riddled with gaps; and sometimes there’s a name attached to it, and sometimes that name is like Homer, meaningless, because who composed the Iliad? Homer. Who was Homer? He who composed the Iliad. Perhaps. And sometimes there’s no name at all: Gilgamesh does not even have a Homer.
These days, the author is everything: the book tours, the media profiles, the online interviews, the literary festivals, the signing sessions, the panel discussions promoted by cultural organisations—they could all take place just as happily in the absence of the literary work altogether, because the author as celebrity is all that matters. But with a great tale of the epic kind, all we need to do is accept the work of the scribe with gratitude, and edit the scattered remains as well as we can; and the absence of an author and all the attendant personal appearances and lifestyle features and PR ballyhoo is wonderfully clarifying, like the wind from the desert that smells of nothing.
Perhaps the epic is in some ways the very opposite of the novel, which began on the page and which really came into its own in the era of printing, as a domestic romance that was enjoyed most happily in solitude and in silence. The oldest epics have something of the declamatory about them: they are more suitably experienced through the ear, perhaps, and in company, than through the eye and in private. Like the theatre, the epic is an arena for the hero. Great heroes are uncomfortable in the novel, whose point of view is too close, too familiar, whose lens has exactly the right focal length to pick up the little flaws, the “spots of commonness,” in George Eliot’s famous phrase. No man is a hero to his novelist. An epic hero has flaws, to be sure, but they are not on a domestic scale. To see heroes in the frame that best fits the greatness of their nature and their actions, we need to be at some distance from them.
Epic heroes, in fact, seem to be at some distance from themselves. This realisation lies behind the crazy and yet tantalisingly rich idea of Julian Jaynes, whose book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Allen Lane, 1976) puts forward the bizarre suggestion that human beings only became conscious in the modern sense during the past four thousand years; that until then, they heard the promptings of conscience, or temptation, or inspiration, as the voices of gods, coming apparently from elsewhere, with no sense that their own minds were responsible. He instances Achilles in the Iliad, experiencing his own reluctance to strike Agamemnon as the goddess Athena seizing his golden hair and pulling him back.
Similarly Jane Smiley, in talking of the Icelandic sagas, points out that:
…they seem far removed from modern literary subjectivity, and yet, the gossip and the comments of other characters supply a practical and readily understandable psychological context. Characters speak up, they say what they want and what their intentions are. Other characters disagree with them and judge them. The saga writer sometimes remarks upon public opinion concerning them. The result is that the sagas are psychologically complex and yet economical in their analysis.
(JANE SMILEY, INTRODUCTION TO THE SAGAS OF ICELANDERS, VIKING, 2000).
The human interactions in epic stories are out in the open, where all can see them, with the fresh air blowing through them; there is nothing enclosed, nothing stale, nothing stuffy.
Finally, the epic vision is a tragic one. Jasper Griffin, discussing a translation of Gilgamesh in The New York Review of Books, remarked, “There is no happy ending, even for mighty heroes who are close to the gods…This is the true epic vision…An older wisdom, and a truer poetry, sees that the highest nobility and the deepest truth are inseparable, in the end, from failure—however heroic—from defeat, and from death” (NYRB, 9 March, 2006).
So Beowulf dies in the moment of his triumph against the dragon, and King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table go down to defeat in their final battle, and as Hjalti says in Sagas and Myths of the Norsemen in this collection, “It is not possible to bend fate, nor can one stand against nature.” Odysseus, safely returned home at last after his twenty years of battle and wandering, will not stay in his cleansed and peaceful palace for good; a time will come when he’ll want to move on yet again, though he knows that, as Tennyson has him say, “Death closes all.” And even Sindbad, that peerless traveller in the realms of wonder, has to succumb in the end, when “there came to him the Spoiler of worldly mansions, the Dark Steward of the graveyard; the Shadow which dissolves the bonds of friendship and ends alike all joys and all sorrows.”
The epic is not a place where anyone lives happily ever after; it obeys a mightier realism than that.
FIRST PUBLISHED AS AN INTRODUCTION TO A BOX SET OF TWENTY EPICS BY PENGUIN BOOKS, 2006.
Folk Tales of Britain
STREAMS OF STORIES DOWN THROUGH THE YEARS
On Katharine M. Briggs’s great three-volume collection of British folk tales, and the tradition of oral storytelling in the British Isles
Folk Tales of Britain is one of the great books of the country. Every nation needs its own collection of folk tales, and this is the fullest and the most authoritative we have. To open it anywhere is to sink a shaft into the memory of a people and all that they know, from sheep-shit to sputniks, from wicked uncles to clever tailors, from a Professor of Signs to a secret agent in Wales. Katharine M. Briggs, who gathered these marvels together, should have a statue in every town square in Britain, but alas: we in Britain are no longer sure of who we are or what we should remember, and her name is too little known. Perhaps this edition of her great work will remind us.
Katharine Briggs was born in 1898 into a mine-owning family whose wealth meant that she never had to earn a living, and was free to devote herself to learning. She studied at Oxford, gaining a BA in 1922, and being award
ed a doctorate for a thesis on folklore in seventeenth-century literature. Folklore was a lifelong interest: her father, an amateur artist and folklorist, had sparked her enthusiasm for it by telling tales to her and her sisters. They had a passionate interest in amateur dramatics too, and writing and producing plays became a lifelong activity. In later life Katharine Briggs devoted her scholarly attention entirely to folklore, going on to become President of the Folklore Society, which honours her memory with an annual prize. She died in 1980.
Her knowledge of the subject was profound, and of the sort that seems to be carried as lightly as a sack of thistledown. Her book on The Fairies in Tradition and Literature has the air of personal acquaintance as well as deep scholarship, and her Dictionary of Fairies is the last word on the subject. She also wrote two novels for children, Hobberdy Dick and Kate Crackernuts, which take their subjects from folklore but locate the events in a realistic historical background, and above all relish the telling of a story.
And story is what we’re given in full measure in this book. The collection in these volumes is grouped roughly into five sections, but within those fairly loose and accommodating divisions, the stories are arranged according to the system used by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney in their great anthology The Rattle Bag: in alphabetical order of title. This is a very good system, because it ensures a democratic arbitrariness. You never know what’ll come next.
It also means you can open the books at random, as if performing the sortes Virgilianae, the old custom of bibliomancy, and read whatever you come to. That’s the method I myself prefer; there is no doubt, for example, that reading the final section consisting of Jocular Tales from beginning to end quite soon induces a mood that is far from jocular. On the other hand, a random search produces the story of “Old John and Young John,” a sturdy old yarn that has done duty in ancient Rome, in Germany, in China, in Ireland, and no doubt in many other countries besides, and in the context of “high” literature as well as “low” folk tale. And that in turn reminds us that every tale has a rich and complex history, and some tales have travelled very far from wherever their land of origin was.
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