The Literary Mind

by Mark Turner

  SINGLE LIVES Q. 129

  without saying a word. He asks to examine the body, and when he has done so, he says cryptically that the death of the hunchback is a wonder that should be recorded for all time. The king asks for an explanation, and the barber responds with all brevity that the hunchback is alive. Then the barber expertly revives the hunch- back by extracting a piece of fish and bone from his throat. Before long, the king observes that this all makes a great story and orders that it be recorded on scrolls of parchment and saved in the royal library. He bestows honor upon everybody and raises the barber to a position of companionship and authority in his court.

  The tailor, of course, in telling his stories, has been trying to lead the king to project from stories he has been telling onto the king’s own situation. The caliph of the tailor’s narration is cultivated, civilized, temperate, merciful, and loves a good story. This could be an emblem for the king, who could conform to that model. The person telling long tales in the narration (the barber) is merely banished by the caliph; perhaps the person telling long stories to the king (the tailor) could be merely banished, too. It is not the place of the tailor to tell the king what the king ought to do, but through the projection of stories, he can put the king in mind of a way to carry out the particular story whose ending the king will now determine.

  Of course, the entire story of the hunchback, with its embedded stories of the tailor and the king, and the tailor’s story of the barber, and the barber’s many stories of his brothers, and the fifth brother’s narration of his daydream, is being told to Dinarzad by Shahrazad, with Shahriyar listening. Shahrazad’s “mental position” includes the goal of leading Shahriyar to think of ending the story of Shahriyar and Shahrazad in the way she has in mind. Her ability to use view- point to accomplish this is unsurpassed. She cannot flatly assault Shahriyar with her advice and opinions. Doing so might simply trigger in him the worst confir- mation of the horrid views he professed when he began his practice of killing wives. But she can work through elaborate indirection. All the kings and caliphs and governors and authorities in the elaborate tale of the hunchback—the very first tale she tells Shahriyar—are thoughtful, rational, and equable. They are in no hurry, they are secure, and they love stories. They all think stories are the most worthy things in the world, and they all are certain that there is nothing more worthy for a king to do than to listen to stories, preserve them, and seek out new stories. All these kings and caliphs and governors and authorities are also mar- velously well—disposed toward storytellers. Bad situations that are brought before them are transformed by their royal prudence into good for everyone involved.

  However indirectly, Shahrazad cuts increasingly close to the bone. It is clear in the story of the hunchback that the tailor is motivated to tell long stories in order to entertain the king, to put him into a good humor, and thus to save his

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  own life. If King Shahriyar can merely project this onto his own present story, he will see an extraordinarily honest admission from Shahrazad of what she is doing and how she hopes he will respond. On that reading, she is actually hoping for a lot out of him; she is hoping that he holds a reservoir of humanity and civility that can be tapped. Some of her stories are even sharper and push deeper: The barber’s sixth brother has his penis and lips cut off by an enraged chieftain whose wife is discovered “dallying” with the sixth brother, and in that story, the sex is clearly initiated by the wife. Now, the big causal event of The Tbousandand One Nigbtswas Shahriyar’s discovery of his own wife’s “dallying” with a slave. Shah- razad clearly means to acknowledge the reality of stories of the sort that led Shahriyar to his practice. Does this projection justify the rage and violence of Shahriyar, by making him the counterpart of the chieftain? No, because Shah~ razad, who makes it clear that the chieftain’s rage is understandable, also makes it clear that something better is expected of Shahriyar: the chieftain is an uncul- tivated and discreditable outlaw, while Shahriyar is a king.

  To my mind, Shahrazad’s riskiest story is the deeply embedded story of the barber’s fifth brother, Al—Ashar. Al—Ashar—he with the basket of glassware to sell—-—is a erk in the opinion of everyone, possibly even himself. He is profoundly insecure about his masculinity. To feed his vanity, he daydreams about the com- plete submission of women to him, about his aloof command and indifference to all affection, about women who are perfect and lovely and who beg, with trem- bling voice, to submit to him, women who can imagine nothing better than to fall at his feet. He imagines women who have never had a thought of any man but him and who are obviously not equipped ever to have any thought of any man but him. Al-Ashar imagines a life in which there is no chance of any sort of parity between himself and his wife, and he imagines that such a life could be desirable. In his mind and story, he represents such a life as kingly. Of course, he destroys everything, losing even the little he has. Yet when he does so, nei- ther the reader nor Shahrazad despises him. We are amused. It is a funny story. Maybe there is some hope for him. We pity him a little. We recognize howju~ venile his ambitions are.

  This is a daring story to be telling to a king who is ajerk, profoundly inse- cure about his masculinity, and who, to satisfy his obsession for control over women, has instituted an ingenious and apparently successful zero—defects pro- gram, at the cost of ever having anything like affection, companionship, or par- ity. It is more daring still: The woman Al-Ashar spurns with his foot in his indifference is his wjfie and the daughter of the vizier, which is of course exactly Shahrazad’s double role. It is just possible that the reader who is engrossed in the story could miss for a moment this connection, but surely Shahriyar could not. Al-Ashar is portrayed as an absolute idiot for his action. The only possible mitigation in Al—Ashar’s case is the fact that the woman he spurns doesn’t an1ount

  SINGLE LIVES Q. 131

  to much anyway, but this fact only brings forcibly into the foreground how incomparably superior Shahrazad is in every way. Shahrazad might even be pre- senting the woman in Al—Ashar’s daydream to Shahriyar as a portrait of what Shahriyar imagined to be his ideal woman, as a way of helping him see that he really wouldn’t want her after all. From every viewpoint in the nested chain of parent narrative spaces above that of Al—Ashar, beginning with the barber, Al—Ashar is regarded as an idiot within the story he is imagining. And even Al—Ashar, along with everyone else, regards himself as an idiot within the com- pleted story of his selling glassware at the crossroads.

  By nesting these viewpoints so that the story of Al—Ashar stands at an elabo- rate distance from her own situation, Shahrazad is giving King Shahriyar some time to begin to work around to her mental viewpoint. Of equal importance, she is making it possible for Shahriyar to accept, if he chooses to do so, that she is just telling stories to her sister Dinarzad, and not challenging his authority at all. She is not necessarily requiring him to believe that she does not know what she is doing. She is instead providing him with a way out of the story he has set up for himself, if he wants one, and a set of compelling motives for taking that way out. She is trying to make it possible for him to desist from his practice and to take a wife. He needs an excuse for doing so, he needs persuasion, and he needs some models. But she has to provide these in a way that can pass for mere enter- tainment. Her elaborate manipulation of viewpoint allows her to perform this sleight of hand. It gives her a cover from which she is permitted to suggest to him an altogether different path toward the future of his own story. She does this through parable, prompting him to project from the stories he is hearing onto the story of his own life.

  The stories she tells will be many. Some will portray civilized life at a court. Some will tell of terrible genies bottled up with nothing but their own torment, who, once the cork is popped, spew out in a black rage, intending to kill for revenge, but who finally get talked out of it by ingenious people who seem to have nothing with which to oppose the genie’s power but their shrewdness a
nd their gift for stories. Many of Shahrazad’s stories will acknowledge the phenom- enon of deep psychic injury. Men and women will be portrayed unblinkingly as capable of honor or perfidy, driven by virtues and lusts. This is an adult narra- tive: Death destroys everything. Nonetheless, what Death destroys is Delight— which presupposes that life can have some delight.

  Shahrazad’s manipulation of viewpoints is pyrotechnic and literary in the extreme, but it is simply a sophisticated use of indispensable and fundamental capacities of the everyday mind. We take spatial viewpoints on spatial stories. We project the story of someone’s viewing a story from a spatial viewpoint onto the story of someone’s viewing a story from a temporal viewpoint. We project in general the story of someone’s viewing a story in space and time onto the story

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  of someone’s viewing a story from a mental position. From that mental position, we may view the story as conditional, hypothetical, nonactual, and so on. We may view it from the “viewpoint” of a particular role. We may view it, in imagi- nation, from someone else’s mental “viewpoint.” We could not operate in our environment, physical or social, without extremely sophisticated imaginative abilities of viewpoint and focus on stories in imagination. The narrator of The Thousand and One Nights is merely asking us to use a capacity we already have, just as Shahrazad is asking Shahriyar to use a capacity he already has.

  We may become engrossed, in Erving Goffman’s phrase, and forget that this is a story, and get angry, and claim that Shahriyar does not deserve to be rehabilitated, that it is perfectly horrible that Shahrazad should have to go through this humiliationjust because some pig is on the throne, and that the story of her life merely reconfirms all the old patterns of patriarchy. Of course. But the story makes some of those claims itself. Shahriyar never comes off well in The Thou- sandana’ One Nights. He is your run—of—the—mill insecure male who has onlyjust enough intelligence to be able to see, when it is laid out masterfully before him, that he has it good and would be a fool to keep his old psychology. Shahrazad, by contrast, is an absolute genius. She is convincingly portrayed as starting from a position of no institutional power at all and bringing about what no one else of any institutional authority could possibly have done. It is Shahrazad that we admire and remember.

  She accomplishes all this through parable: the conjunction of story and pro- jection. She may have other ways for helping Shahriyar change his mind, but it is parable that we hear about and parable that she invites us to apply to our own life stories.

  ROLES, CHARACTERS. AND LIVES

  To be quite accurate, I ought to give a different name to each of the “me’s” who were to think about Albertine in time to come; I ought still more to give a different name to each of the Albertines who appeared before me, never the same. . . .

  Martel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

  For any story, we can develop a great variety of mental spaces. For the extremely simple story of the first time a baby shakes the rattle, for example, we can imagine the mental spaces of the story as viewed spatially from above, behind, ahead, or either side; as viewed temporally by his mother on his sixteenth birth- day, as viewed from his mother’s psychological viewpoint as opposed to the baby’s

  SINGLE LIVES Q. 133

  psychological viewpoint; and so on indefinitely. One way to develop constancy over this great variation is, as we have seen, through identity connectors. Although all these different mental spaces of the baby shaking the rattle might look quite different, we unify them as simply different viewpoint spaces all connected by identity connectors to the same single small spatial story. The baby in any view- point mental space is connected identically to the baby in any other.

  Role connectors are another way of developing constancy over a great vari- ety of mental spaces. When we recognize the baby who shakes the rattle as an instance of the role animate agent, and the shaking as the kind of motion that animate agents cause, we are using the roles to create constancy over variation: the story of the baby shaking the rattle becomes connected to every other story in which an animate agent causes the motion of an object.

  Any small spatial story comes with roles: The story of the woman throwing the stone to smash the window has roles for tlJro'wer (a more specific role than ani- mate agent) and missile and target. To recognize a story requires recognizing its roles.

  Cbaractercan be formed by backward inference from such a role, according to the folk theory of “The Nature of Things,” otherwise known as “Being Leads to Doing.” In this folk theory, glass sljatters because it is brittle and fragile. Water pours because it is liquid. Someone forgives because she is forgivin g. A dog guards the house because it is watrlgfiil. A fool acts like a fool because he is foolislj. In general, doing follows from being; being leads to doing; something behaves in a certain way because its being leads it to behave in that way.

  Someone who is typically in the role of adversary can, by the Nature of Things, be thought of as “adversarial.” He acquires a character: adversarial We develop an expectation that he will be “true to his character”: his character will guide his action; his being will lead to his doing. We become primed to see him inhabit similar roles in other stories. “That’s ju.st like him,” we say. Our sense of someone’s general character guides our expectations of which roles he will play in which stories. For example, we know what Sherlock Holmes is likely to do in any story in which he exists. The influence of character upon assignment to role is so strong that the mere appearance of a person with a certain character in a story can induce the creation of the role: As soon as Sherlock Holmes enters the scene, we expect the story to develop a role for a'etertive or puzzle solver even if the story has not previously had one.

  Clsaracteris a pattern of connections we expect to operate across stories about a particular individual with that character or across stories about a group of indi— viduals with that character. People of a particular character are expected to inhabit similar roles in different stories. We can develop a categorization of kinds of character—generous, selfish, brave, submissive, and so on. There are famous explicit surveys of character, such as Theophrastus’s Cbararters and La Bruyere’s Les Cararteres. Theophrastus gives us quick sketches of the boor, the liar, the

  134 .6 THE LITERARY MIND

  grouch, the sponge, and so on, while La Bruyére presents intricate and refined analyses of highly specific aspects of character.

  Once character is established as a general pattern of connections across potential story spaces, it can serve as a generator of those spaces. As Jerome Bruner has observed, “Perhaps the greatest feat in the history of narrative art was the leap from the folktale to the psychological novel that places the engine of action in the characters rather than in the plot.” Kenneth Burke made a lifelong study of the ways in which any general aspect of a story space——character, action, goal, setting, and means—could serve as the basis for building up the rest of the space. Character can generate story.

  Focus, viewpoint, role, and character are concepts useful in constructing con- stancy across variation. They all assume that mental spaces can be connected. We have single lives, but whenever we see ourselves as having a focus or a viewpoint, inhabiting a role, or possessing a character that runs across roles in stories, we see ourselves as transcending our singularities. Our focus and our viewpoint become not singular or isolated; they connect to a central story and all its other focus and viewpoint spaces. A role in one story is not isolated but connects to the same role in other stories. A complex of roles, such as “the eternal triangle,” connects to the same complex in other stories. Character is a concept that guides us in assigning an actor to the same or similar roles across multiple story spaces.

  Focus, viewpoint, role, and character in narrative imagining give us ways of constructing our own meaning, which is to say, ways of understanding who we are, what it means to be us, to have a particular life. The inability to locate one’s own focus,
viewpoint, role, and character with respect to conventional stories of leading a life is thought to be pathological and deeply distressing. It is a princi- pal reason for recommending psychotherapy to people not obviously insane.

  There is a touchstone text for the view that knowing how to inhabit stories is the essential requirement of mature life. Peter Pan is the leader of the lost boys in Neverland. The lost boys will always be boys, and always lost, as long as they don’t know stories. They can’t grow up because they cannot understand how to inhabit roles in stories, how to belong to categories of characters running across story spaces, how to have lives. Peter Pan persuades Wendy to go with him to Neverland exactly by telling her that the lost boys don’t know any stories:

  “You see I don’t know any stories. None of the lost boys know any stories.”

  “How perfectly awful,” Wendy said.

  “Do you know,” Peter asked, “why swallows build in the eaves of houses? It is to listen to the stories. 0 Wendy, your mother was telling you such a lovely story.”

  SINGLE LIVES Q. 135

  “VVhich story was it?”

  “About the prince who couldn’t find the lady who wore the glass slipper.”

  “Peter,” said Wendy excitedly, “that was Cinderella, and he found her, and they lived happily ever after.”

  Peter was so glad that he rose from the floor, where they had been sitting, and hurried to the window. “VVhere are you going?” she cried with misgiving.

  “To tell the other boys.”

  “Don’t go, Peter,” she entreated, “I know such lots of stories.”