My notes on re-reading Harold Scheub's work on oral narrative structures and performance. They have shaped the way I think of the fantastic in narrative and how it functions, and by extension, how those "electric moments" when the real and the fantastic are combined in narrative.
Notes from Harold Scheub's Story: an evident and detailed understanding of how stories in the oral traditions become a focal point for harmonizing the different, distinctive experiences and histories of the members of an audience. These are performances, and the meanings of the tale, from didactic to metaphorical, occur in the performance as a reaction to the images and the aesthetic patterning of the tale to create a surface narrative from conflict to resolution. In contrast, meaning is generated by layering emotionally evocative and metaphorical imagery. Within the performance, the audience encounters what is familiar in the narrative and what can be interpreted and reinterpreted throughout the listener's life. (c.f. The child who hears the story, the young woman engaged in puberty rights, the new mother, wife or co-wife, the older woman who tells the story to audiences of mixed ages or just her peers.)
The story combines image and emotions, narrative movement, form or patterning, and the layering of imagery that results in a report. The images are pulled from the inherited cache of emotionally evocative paintings, which are paired with contemporary, more realistic images, and their interaction in the story creates a flashpoint. It is not in the suspension of disbelief that enables meaning but in the moment of tension in the pairing ("electric opposition") of the contemporary realistic images with the fantastic, ancient photos that contain the most profound dreams, hopes, fears, and nightmares of a world experience. The storyteller organizes the images and the narrative in a surface movement from conflict to resolution while at the same time patterning the emotionally evocative images into tropes that allow the audience to discover the nature of the relationship and its significance and meaning. The principle objective of fantastic imagery is a poetic reorganization of the real -- and, by contrast, to provide a new layer of importance in the real.
Fantastic images provide connections, transformations, and symbolic relations between the natural and the marvelous. Because many are inherited from a shared historical past, they will also contain fragments of history and ancient traditions that are reconstituted in a new way for contemporary understanding. Supernatural villains & helpers become manifestations of the struggle occurring to the protagonist. The fantastic elements are not an end but a means to push the story toward the symbolic. It becomes the engine of change, bringing the audience to where uncertainty exists and then back to the familiar. The tale's power does not emerge with a glimmering metaphor -- the performance of the story itself is the experience of metaphor, which is its power. Fantasy tales are a form of reasoning, a way of looking at events in the context of emotion. Combining the fantasy and the real in the stories provides a new measure of the real world. Blending the two, not just dreaming alone, is essential because, without the mooring of the natural world, the fantasy would be dull -- fantasy breaks our world into artificial pieces. As the storyteller combines the images of reality with the introduction of fantasy, reality finds itself within a fantastic context, forcing our thinking about those matters into new modes.
Fantastic images provide connections, transformations, and symbolic relations between the natural and the marvelous. Because many are inherited from a shared historical past, they will also contain fragments of history and ancient traditions that are reconstituted in a new way for contemporary understanding. Supernatural villains & helpers become manifestations of the struggle occurring to the protagonist. The fantastic elements are not an end but a means to push the story toward the symbolic. It becomes the engine of change, bringing the audience to where uncertainty exists and then back to the familiar. The tale's power does not emerge with a glimmering metaphor -- the performance of the story itself is the experience of metaphor, which is its power.
Fantasy tales are a form of reasoning, a way of looking at events in the context of emotion. Combining the fantasy and the real in the stories provides a new measure of the real world. Blending the two, not just dreaming alone, is essential because, without the mooring of the natural world, the fantasy would be dull -- fantasy breaks our world into artificial pieces. As the storyteller combines the images of reality with the introduction of fantasy, reality finds itself within a fantastic context, forcing our thinking about those matters into new modes.
Midori Snyder is the author of nine books for children and adults, published in English, French, Dutch, and Italian. She won the Mythopoeic Award for The Innamorati, a novel inspired by early Roman myth and the Italian "Commedia dell'Arte" tradition....
