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I did promise that I would tell you a story. To be more precise, I promised to tell you the story of telling all stories.
We begin by telling a story, and then, if it is a good story, it takes on a life of its own and begins telling us.
The things which humanity creates have a way of taking on a life of their own and, ultimately, creating us.
I suppose, at first, stories were told by people who had nothing else to do, time on their hands, and, oh, yes, they could not sleep. Perhaps they told their stories around a campfire at night when it was too dangerous to hunt or gather, and when someone had to stay awake to keep the fire going and defend the group. As time goes by, which is time’s way, the stories become a heritage, and the heritage becomes a culture which cultured people must study if they are to be learned.
The best stories are all written by the same person with the curious name of Anonymous, a distant ancestor of Odysseus’ No-Man, whose most famous descendent is Everyman.
A good story is one which gets told over and over, by many people, and told from memory. A really good story can be told and retold by anyone because it tells itself, and the words and language of the story are not essential to it in any way.
A story is a natural phenomenon and not a human contrivance for the simple reason that the nature of our conscience is such that it requires sleep and while it sleeps, requires dreaming. A dream is a story which we tell ourselves while we don’t know that it is our self telling us a story. A myth is a dream of the sleeping collective consciousness.
At what point does a story become literature, an epic, a great book or the Great American Novel? The telling of stories begins as a pastime, to pass away the time and fill the idleness. Eventually, the story teller becomes a professional. The pastime becomes a full time job. A job is work and pressure and can be boring. When we have the boring job of creating something that is always interesting, well, that is quite a job to have indeed, and quite a responsibility. The story teller becomes the writer, the author, the celebrity. A blank page can be a cruel boss.
Stories start out as something motiveless, without purpose, but gradually take on some purpose. Nowadays an important purpose is money and fame, but there were other purposes before that stage was ever reached.
The word “history” has the word “story” in it. Herodotus was certainly a teller of stories in addition to being an historian of the Persian wars. There are so many different kinds of stories; war stories, creation stories, love stories, ghost stories, teaching stories and others.
What is the story of all stories? What is the song of songs. What is the Universe of all universes, if not the Metaverse? Our word “metaphysics” came simply from the fact that what Aristotle discusses in a certain book is a book which editors traditionally placed after the Physics. The word “physics” comes from the Greek word “phusis” or nature, and “meta” simply means after, or beyond.
Historians of literature tell us that the first novel was written around 1000 C.E. by the Japanese Lady Murasaki and is entitled “Tales of Genji.” I was shocked to learn that Edgar Allen Poe was the first to invent the genre of the mystery story with “The Cask of Amantillado.” Poe is such a recent author.
We need an excuse to tell a story. Children are excellent excuses for they are always begging, “Tell me a story.” We need a child to ask us the perennial question “Why is this night different from all others?” A pilgrimage or journey is a period of enforced idleness which gives fellow travelers an excuse to regale one another with stories, but Chaucer has already snatched up that gimmick. “A Thousand and One Nights” is a story telling which prolongs life. We are all under a death sentence and the pressure of a blank page, between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Well, and what do you have to say for yourself? Even final judgment days are a narrative process. Is a trial is a story? You be the judge.
Each person’s life is a story, and a good story of a life becomes a biography or an autobiography. A biography is often an autobiography written posthumously.
Telling a story is a form of seduction. The spider must arouse a fly’s curiosity. Sometimes, writing is erotic, and other times, writing is autoerotic, when we fall in love with the sound of our own voice.
I never realized that there could be anything more to a story than the story itself until David Baumgartner’s Sophomore English class in high school. Mr. Baumgartner taught us how one might psychoanalyze both the characters of the story and even the author. In his class we learned that a story might have hidden levels of meaning. This was a shocking revelation to me. It was as if someone had peeled off an outer layer of reality and showed me a hidden, different reality, an alien world invisible to the average person.
In college I laughed convulsively while reading a copy of “The Pooh Perplex” by Frederick C. Crews, in which he parodies twelve different styles of literary criticism. A serious issue is raised in the first essay regarding the “inexhaustibility” of a work of literature. Is there ever a “final word” on a work of art? Or is it rather the case that the implicit and multivalent fiction is infinite. I am reminded of the verse from Proverbs, “He has placed the image of eternity within the heart of man, yet no one can see to the beginning or end of a matter.” Is it possible to embed the infinite within the finite? Is it possible to circumscribe an apple of gold with silver fittings?
Another issue is the search for similarities and influences among contemporary works and events. Did Pascal and Jonathan Swift in any way influence one another? Is the “Wizard of Oz” a disguised Populist allegory?
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz "a sophisticated commentary on the political and economic debates of the Populist Era," discovered a surprising number of new analogies. The Deadly Poppy Field, where the Cowardly Lion fell asleep and could not move forward, was the anti-imperialism that threatened to make Bryan forget the main issue of silver (note the Oriental connotation of poppies and opium). Once in the Emerald Palace, Dorothy had to pass through seven halls and climb three flights of stairs; seven and three make seventy-three, which stands for the Crime of '73, the congressional act that eliminated the coinage of silver and that proved to all Populists the collusion between congress and bankers. The Wicked Witch of the East was Grover Cleveland; of the West, William McKinley. The enslavement of the yellow Winkies was "a not very well disguised reference to McKinley's decision to deny immediate independence to the Philippines" after the Spanish-American War. The Wizard himself was Mark Hanna, McKinley's campaign manager, although Rockoff noted that "this is one of the few points at which the allegory does not work straightforwardly." About half of Rockoff's article consisted of an economic analysis that justified Bryan and Baum's silver stance.
Hugh Rockoff, "The 'Wizard of Oz' as a Monetary Allegory," Journal of Political Economy 98 (1990): 739, 751.
I then discovered Leo Strauss “Persecution and the Art of Writing.” Strauss theorizes that there is a functional political or pedogogic reason for having several layers of meaning: an outer over obvious explicit layer, and then an inner implicit connoted layer of meaning. The pedogogic and moral motive for such writing is the notion that only those with sufficient intellectual stature will be able to find their way to the esoteric meaning and, because of their intellect, will ipso facto possess the moral integrity to properly use and not misuse, such meaning. The political motive for writing in such a style is to express something to a chosen few in a subtle and obscure fasion which might be dangerous to proclaim openly from the rooftops. I am reminded of the New Testament verse which says, "That which you have heard whispered in the ear shout from the rooftops." I am also reminded of the touching story from India of a student who receives a mantra from his Guru, whispered in the ear during initiation, with the stern warning that he must never tell the mantra to another soul, or, if he does, then that mantra will be useless as a means to liberation but will grant liberation for all the others who chant it. Being a very altruistic person, the student was discovered the next day shouting his mantra to the crowds from every rooftop, obsessed with the belief that doing so would grant liberation to those thronging multitudes.
The novelist must, in the words of W.H. Auden,
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just
Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.
How Christ-like the novel is, taking the sins of mankind upon it's broad shoulders and attempting to lead us, one by one, to a state of grace.
I once came across a web page that had a trivia quiz: given the opening line of a novel, tell the title and author.
When I decided to try to write this, my first book, "Too Small For Supernova," I gave much thought to the importance of famous opening lines.
I chose the simple three word sentence "I cannot sleep," which, at the moment that I actually commenced writing, was a simple fact, for it was 3 a.m. and I suddenly awoke and could not go back to sleep. But that three word sentence can have another meaning, namely, that I must not sleep. And sleep may be a euphemism for death, or it may connote inaction or silence.
Consider that most famous opening line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way?" This is such a fabulous opening line, but one might conceivably write volumes about what it really means, or whether it is true, and if it is true, how one might demonstrate its truth.
In the first paragraph of my book, I mention, as an example of an opening line, the first line of Plato's Republic, "I went down yesterday to Piraeus." Tradition has it that Plato rewrote the first page of the Republic fifty times. The first word in Greek, "katabenein" (I went down), is claimed by some to be most significant, denoting the beginning of a great descent. Indeed, the final Book of the Republic is a mythical descent into the underworld to watch souls choose the next life into which they shall be reborn, while the Three Fates spin the fabric of the causal nexus of each life.
Edward Jones won a Pulitzer for his book which opens with a great first line, “You never get over having been a child.” Opening and ending lines may sometimes assume enormous significance in writings whose structure is intended by the author to connote or symbolize something of significance to the reader. Vallery wrote an essay about one line from Pascal's Pensees (Meditations) which he describes as "a perfect poem." My French is poor, and I am writing all this from memory, but the line is "Le silence eternelle et de espaces enfinite, m'fraie" ("The eternal silence and the infinite spaces, frighten me.") Vallery claims that the form of the sentece imitates the very thing which it tries to convey: namely, there are two infinite entities, the silence and the space, and the "I" or self ("m'fraie) is alienated, outside of these two immensities. It is not simply the infinitude which frightens, but also the alienation.
At St. John's College, in Annapolis, with its four year "Great Books" program, all students were required to spend several months in their Sophomore year studying Bach's "St. Matthew's Passion." We learned that the lowest note in the entire piece was on the word "Todd" (, "death," my German is not so good either.) Also, there is a chorus which sings "Donner und Blitzen" (thunder and lightening), at the moment of the crucifixion, when the veil of the temple is rent in twain, and there is a terrific hiatus or pause in the midst of the singing, obviously symbolic of the tearing of the curtain. These are yet other examples of form imitating content. Aristotle, in his Poetics, I think, states that it is our human delight in imitating which lies at the heart of the artistic endeavor.
In the beginning of Homer's Iliad, there is the famous "Catalog of Ships" wherein Homer enumerates the ships lined up on the beach outside of the city of Troy. It is significant that there are an ODD number of ships, rather than an EVEN number, since only ODD numbers may have a mid-most member, with an equal number of members balanced on either side. The mid-most ship is that of Odysseus. The ship moored at the extreme farthest from Troy is that of swift-footed Achilles. The ship moored closed to Troy is that of Ajax, an enormous but slow hulking figure who is nicknamed "The Wall." Ajax is so enormous that the enemy seems simply to bouce off his chest. But his enormous size makes him slow, and hence, his ship must be closest to Troy, so that the enemy will encounter Ajax first. Achilles is the swiftest of all the Achaeans, and can run up to meet the advancing enemy before anyone else. Odysseus, who is situated mid-most, is an ideal mean or balance between two extremes. Odysseus very anatomy bespeaks his balanced nature. His legs are very short, so he stands shorter than all other warriors, yet his torso is very long so that, when seated in counsel, he towers above all the rest, and his words (for he is wily) overwhelm like a snowstorm in the deep of winter. At the end of Plato's Republic, in the underworld, when all the souls draw lots to see who will choose first amongst the lives in which to be reborn, it is Odysseus who draws the last lot. Yet, each soul chooses something opposite from its former life. A cruel tyrant chooses the life of a swan. A slave chooses to be reborn as a tyrant, only to discover that he is fated to eat his own children. Plato says that it makes no difference whether one chooses first or last, for each shall choose the life which they have been in karmic fashion conditioned to choose by their previous experiences. Odysseus, who chooses last, finds a life neglected by all the others, the life of a middle class citizen in a free democratic society.
It is so simple to be happy, but it is so difficult to be simple.
The happiest people rarely question happiness, partly for lack of motive and partly for lack of ability.
Lincoln once said "Most people are about as happy as they have a mind to be." Lincoln has been described as a depressive personality.
King Solomon said, "Better is the end of things than the beginning, and the day of one's death than the day of one's birth. The heart of the wise man is in the house of mourning, but the heart of the fool is in the house of mirth."
Solomon was also famous for solving a riddle posed to him by the Queen of Sheba, "What is that one thing I may say to you such that, if you are happy, you shall become sad, but if you are sad, you shall become happy." Solomon correctly answered "This too shall pass."
If by means of words the secrets of the heart are brought to light, pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief is carried off, sympathy conveyed, counsel imparted, experience recorded, and wisdom perpetuated,-if by great authors the many are drawn up into unity, national character is fixed, a people speaks, the past and the future, the East and the West are brought into communication with each other,-if such men are, in a word, the spokesmen and prophets of the human family,-it will not answer to make light of Literature or to neglect its study.
John Henry Newman, The Idea of A University (pp. 255-256) , ed. Martin J. Sviglic. New York: Rinehart and Company, 1960
The world is transformed with words, one person at a time.
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