In the Labyrinth

The Shaping of Story: Working Through Ideas

 

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. 

 

 

 

 

 

Lotte Reiniger: Silhouette Fairy Tale Films

 

I am gobsmacked by German artist Lotte Reiniger's gorgeous black papercuts that she used to make silhouette animated fantasy films and beautiful book illustrations (when money could not be found for the movie). Her work spans some 60 years (from 1919 to 1979); the early work developed in Germany, then later, after the war, she settled in London, where she continued her work on short animated films and illustrations. Among her prodigious body of work, she created the first feature-length animated film, The Adventures of Achmed (far ahead of Disney!), an animated version of Dr. Dolittle and the Talking Animals, and a series of short films from Grimm's fairy tales. In the '30s, while fleeing Nazi Germany, she made 12 films -- including the lovely version of "Papageno" from Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. 

Much of her work can still be found on the internet (oh, happy magpie that I am); there are beautiful examples of work done by contemporary film students in imitation of Reiniger's style as they learn the skill of silhouette animation. 

Katherine Ace: The Open Ended Metaphor

I am bringing an old post back because I wanted to review again the fabulous discussion on women's art, especially the work of Katherine Ace and the events that surround and shape the direction of women's lives. And re-reading it again, I still find it as fascinating and with much to offer as when we first tackled the subject. Please feel free to join this ongoing discussion in the comments below. 

 

The structure of fairy tales and traditional folklore rests on the use of repetition to pattern the images into metaphors providing an emotional experience of transformation for the audience in the oral traditions and for the reader following them in print. Storytellers use repetition to shape the story and emphasize important details in each section of the tale. It begins with an interdiction at the home of birth, a repeated request to do or not to do something, which is usually ignored by the third time. The middle section is a stripping away of identity and connection to the human world, with the protagonist becoming lost in the woods, the veld, the sky, and the sea. Swallowed up and sometimes ingested by the elements of nature and the fantastic.

Repetition helps to parallel the experience of the two separate moments: the repeated interdiction of "don't " becomes a new list in the middle of what must be done to survive. Feed the cat, oil the gate, and clean an old woman's eyes. But a price is paid, sometimes even a temporary death, as the old identity is stripped, and a new one is reformed in the fantastic world.  And the last section becomes the return home, often perilous, success dependent on how well nature has communicated the rules of survival and how well they are followed. If in accordance with nature, the protagonist returns, restored to a new identity, a new status, and a new purpose.

Each section of the narrative -- separation, initiation, return-- is patterned in a parallel fashion to the other. As in metaphor, there is a delightful tension between where it begins, where it meets with the impossible, and where it sublates the changes to become something new and unique. The dialectical journey in rites of passage, the death of the old identity, the reforming and re-emergence of a new identity, are combined into a single metaphor of transformation, revealed through images from the human world, the fantastic world, and the cache of inherited cultural archetypes in the narrative performance. 

All this is to explain, why I am so taken by the fairy tale art of Katherine Ace, who expresses her work with fairy tales in a very similar fashion -- painting the narrative with a series of visual metaphors folding in on themselves to express the unstable identities of the tales. She says this in her artist's statement: 

"The intersection of contraries fascinates me: ecstasy and agony; humor and tragedy; natural and constructed realities; experience and news. I find that I'm curious about the struggles of diversity vs. unity in human, animal and plant societies. I am captivated by complex issues that we all face, and yet experience personally, intimately. I am interested in the role of dark feelings, thoughts and states of mind in the process of transformation, l am drawn to fire beneath reserve."

And again here when she considers the evocative imagery in fairy tales that fuels her ideas as an artist:

"I am interested in complex story telling using cultural myths and histories that reach back into our collective and personal pasts. Figures and still life figures evolve as open ended metaphors for concepts and environments that are themselves also metaphors, and therefore fold - like fabric, time, or paint - back in on themselves. Like a poem, a painting is a surface. The depth is in the surface (oddly). It sort of dawns on you - like the way one remembers a dream sometimes, in fragments that float up all through the day, assembling themselves oddly, disturbingly..."

I find this description compelling -- for it is in the story tellers performance, or the writer of fairy tales to create the same tension between the surface of the tale, and the dream-like, metaphorical journeys as real and fantastic collide in the stories, and that it is the experience itself -- dreamlike and disturbing that holds our fascination with the tales. 

 The paintings from top to bottom: "The Juniper Tree," "The Frog King," "The Handless Maiden,"  "Six Swans," and "Many Furs."  (All my favorite tales!) For more information on Katherine Ace please visit her website.

I also found the collection of Sicilian Folktales collected by Laura Gonzenbach, translated into English. They are amazing and she was quite interesting.  

Plank'd and Research

One of the greatest pleasures is reading Sicilian folktales midday while drunk on a dense-full-bodied beer (16.2 percent) produced locally in Boulder. Like the beer, the stories are rowdy, naughty, mythic, and full of gullible and wise fools who make donkeys appear to shit gold, drive menial men to do self-destructive things and conspire to make foolish heroes into better men as they chase after fantastic brides. Is there any better Sunday to spend than drunk researching the new novel?

Notes, References From Janet Smarr's Italian Renaissance Tales

This is a terrific collection, short enough to read all the stories, ranging from tragic ("The Duchess of Malta") to naughty, lewd, and full of fools. These are selections taken from historical collections that span the 1300s to 1600s. Since my interest lies in the 1500s --most of these notes and references are from groups from those years. 

Luigi Da Porto(1485--1529) Sometimes, the writer's introduction to the story is more interesting than the story itself. He writes of being a young man, a soldier at arms who rode with an archer named Peregrino, a man much older than him, and who chastised the soldier for his misery in love.

"Do you always want to live melancholy because a cruel beauty with feigned demonstrations cares little for you? And though I often speak contrary to what I do because it is easier to advise than to follow it, I will tell you, my captain, not only is it unbecoming for you who are in the army to spend a long time in the prison of Love, but also so wretched are almost all ends to which Love leads that it is perilous to follow him. And in witness of this, if it should please you, I could tell you a story that happened in my city (Verona) ... in which you will hear how two noble lovers were led to a wretched and pitiful death." 

Peregrino then recounts one of the many famous versions of Romeo and Juliette. 

Giovan Francesco Straparola da Caravaggio (148-1558)  As part of his collection, he establishes a frame story for the storytelling that goes on within it -- a very Italian conceit, I think, as so many collectors and re-tellers of popular folktales and romantic stories, perhaps found it more engaging for a literate class even though it is seen a divertente (a pleasant diversion). A group of noblemen and women gather at the Venetian Palace of Ottaviano over thirteen nights during Carnivale to entertain each other with stories. (Straparola gives an extended introduction to the principals at this gathering, establishing that while the tales have their rugged and, at times, vulgar characteristics, they are elevated by the splendor of the palace surroundings and the status of the participants sharing the stories. ( p 159, the list of who is there)

Father Scarpacifico, Duped Only Once by Three Rogues, Dupes Them Back Three Times and Lives Happily Ever After With His Nina. One of the best trickster tales in the book, when a trio of rogues succeeds in tricking Scapacifico, his revenge tricks are outrageous and dangerous to the rogues. (Note to self -- What is the joke in trying to trick Scarpacifico into believing his mule is an ass? This must be a common ploy elsewhere, but how is it funny? ) He, in turn, manages to convince them that his goat understands when the priest tells it to take home the food he has purchased and tells Nina to cook a feast. He invites the rogues home for the meal, which Nina cooks (understanding the ruse.) The rogues pay a small fortune to buy the goat, and of course, it doesn't go as they thought, and their wives mock them. The priest then pretends to "kill"  Nina (a bladder of blood under her dress) and "revives" her from death by placing a pipe between her buttocks and pretending to blow her back to life. Rogues purchase the line and then manage to kill their wives. Several more deceptions occur, which kill all of the rogues. The cleverness of the trickster, the setups, the stupidity, and usually greed of the dupes all make it darkly funny. 

The King's Son, who is Born as a Pig, Marries Three Times, Eventually Puts Off His Pig Skin, and is A Handsome Young Man: pg 168 (cf Three Sisters -- Battista and Swine Herder transformed into a Boar.) It is a fascinating rite of passage tale for the prince. Three marriages, each with a flaw: the two sister-brides are not interested in love or the prince due to his hideous form as a pig (he shits the bed regularly for one thing), but they agree to the marriages for the prestige and wealth of aristocracy. The first two plot to kill him, but he can hear their thoughts, so he kills them with his tusks. The third daughter is kind and loving and indulges all his piggishness; she does not secretly harbor violent ideas in her thoughts. The Pig King tests her, and when he is sure of her faithfulness, he finally reveals his true self and removes the skin. He is pretty handsome as a human, and in short order, the bride becomes pregnant. The Queen is astonished, and the bride finally reveals her husband's secret disguise. The Queen then arranges to spy on him and see this for herself, and when she does, she removes and destroys the skin (think Monkey Girl et al.,) and the young prince is ready to take his place as a man, a husband, and a father.  The fairies play a role here, too -- putting on the spell, helping take off the attack. They show up whenever there is a need for a change in the status quo -- alternating between creating conflict and assisting when the time is right to resolve it. 

Johnny Fahey and The King of Crows

Many years ago in a moment of inspiration, I wrote a little short story called "King of Crows." It is still one of my personal favorites as it has threaded throughout a song or a tune humming beneath the narrative. I am almost never without a song running in my head, singing to the dishes, or driving in traffic, or even when writing I will hear the song that evokes the feelings of the moment I am describing. "King of Crows" is a small tale of love found and lost, of the transformative power of song. And I'll admit, the moment the fiddler Johnny Fahey appeared in my imagination, I loved him.  An itinerant musician, traveling the Southwest, he stops to rest in a box canyon, only to discover it is home to the King of Crows and his court. And there is one who catches his eye...(Read the full story here.)

 Excerpt from "King of Crows." 

The crows parted at Johnny’s approach, some turning astonished faces at his unexpected presence, but never stopping in their cries. It wasn’t until Johnny stood before the girl with the white skin and the black hair that the violent arguments subsided into grumbles and then at last into an uneasy silence. The girl stared at him with curiosity, her head tilted to one side as the glittering eyes fastened on his face. A smile crooked the edges her mouth, and the arched brows drew together in a challenge.

“Who are you?” she asked, voice sharp as a scythe.

“No one as grand as you,” he answered softly.

She lifted her chin proudly, the sweep of black hair flowing over the curve of her back. Opals sparkled in her earlobes like tiny stars, and around her waist she wore a belt of turquoise and fresh water pearls.

“What are you?” she demanded, shoulders hunched and face thrust forward.

“A musician,” he said, arms resting at his sides.

The cloaks of the crows fluttered in the rising wind with a dry chaffing noise.

“Play for us,” she ordered.

“Rilka, we’ve no time for this!” a man barked. Johnny Fahey turned to the man, hearing immediately the authority in this voice. A singular voice after so much discord. The man was old, the plumage of his cloak speckled at the breast and dull and ragged along the hem. But circling his forehead was a narrow crown of silver, set with turquoise. There was still power in his carriage, the heavy body leaning over his hips, his shoulders arched back. In one hand he held a scepter made from a fresh stalk of corn that gleamed as bright as newly minted gold. Johnny had no doubt but this was the King of Crows. He looked back at the girl called Rilka, and the music in his heart stumbled as he realized that the girl with moon-white skin and black hair was the King’s daughter. No chance for you, the sad chords played, no chance this haughty creature could be charmed by the fiddle’s song.

“I want to hear it, Father,” the girl demanded, “if only to hear something other than their bickering,” and she tossed her head toward the line of men who stood glowering at the quiet figure of Johnny Fahey.

The King rolled his eyes to the blue bowl sky.

“Spoiled bitch,” came a nasty whisper followed by snickering.

“Play then!” the King roared, turning on the restless court to silence them.

Rilka lowered her face, the shadow of her hair on her cheek not quite hiding the angry blush. Johnny winced seeing how the insult cut her pride to the quick. But he took out his fiddle and tucked it under his chin. He rested the bow over the strings and waited a moment more to hear what the wind would bring him. A tune came from listening, knowing what was already playing in the hearts of those gathered. He thought he could well guess at the tunes a crow might wish — something wild, with the harsh rasps of the double-stops. Then Rilka lifted her face, and he saw in the dark eyes an unexpected hint of longing, of gentleness.

"The soft whisper of her sigh touched him, and without intending to, he lowered his fiddle again and began to sing slowly in a clear tenor voice.

I met a fairy woman
At the river’s eddy.
And I asked her
Would anything unlock love?
She said to me in whispered words,
When it enters the heart
It will never be released.

There followed a silence, filled only with the rise and hollow of the wind in the grass. Johnny Fahey heard the slow beat of his filled heart. Abruptly he put the fiddle beneath his chin again and played a reel as fast as his song had been slow. He might gain her, the notes sang, but how could he keep her? He might lose her now, but she would be forever in his thoughts. Amber rosin smoked over the strings and the white hairs of his bow broke like the strands of a clinging web. He drove the tune, as if to empty the sight of her face from his heart, and yet as he finished the last notes he looked up and her glittering eyes snared him.

The Skin and Blood of Art: Atwood and Lorca

 

 

 

I am in a frenzy, following up from a the previous post on the art of Katherine Ace. We were writing about the surface of art in painting and oral narrative performance of well known fairy tales contrasted with the subtext of evocative imagery -- the tension between the encounters of the real and the fantastic -- experienced emotionally in the work. Story, like paintings, move across a calm surface from beginning to end, in an enclosed world of art. But within those boundaries, we are challenged by the emotions, more often deeply felt rather than understood, that are churned up by the metaphorical images.

As a writer, who began in academia studying oral narrative performance and stories, I was captivated first by the emotionally charged subtexts (and which of course I was required by the dictates of the class to eventually articulate into rationalized systems of information. The "this signifies that" format.) And yet, I felt more like the Xhosa story teller who when asked to explain the meaning of an image in the story she had just finished performing, responded, "To answer that, I will have to tell you the story again." And when I was writing my masters thesis (the first one) on African Oral Narratives,  I wound up writing a novel instead, preferring to feel and to show rather than to explain and to tell. And I had to wait twenty years until I could finally acquire a Masters Degree in the exact opposite corner of my psyche, Modern Literary Theory. But I have never strayed far from that first education, and the hardest part for me in writing any story, is the need to first feel the turbulence beneath the surface, to feel it rise hump-backed from the deep, filling me with excitement and seasickness all at once.

Mo Crow offered this yesterday to the conversation from Margaret Atwood's "The Page" (Murder in the Dark Coach, 1983):

"5. The question about the page is; what is beneath it? It seems to have two dimensions, you can pick it up and turn it over and the back is the same as the front. Nothing , you say, disappointed.
But you're looking in the wrong place, you were looking on the back instead of beneath. Beneath the page is another story. Beneath the page is everything that has ever happened, most of which you would rather not hear about.
The page is not a pool but a skin, a skin is there to hold in and it can feel you touching it. Did you really think it would just lie there and do nothing?
Touch the page at your peril: it is you who are blank and innocent, not the page. Nevertheless you want to know, nothing will stop you. You touch the page, it's as if you've drawn a knife across it, the page has been hurt now, a sinuous wound opens up, a thin incision. Darkness wells through."

And there it was, under the skin, fleshed to the bone of writing. And it sent me rushing for my copy of Federico Garcia Lorca's luminous and poetic Deep Song and Other Prose, and I couldn't decide between the essay on the duendes or on deep song, so here are moments from both offerings:

In "Deep Song," Lorca is contrasting what he considers the superficial flamenco songs of his day with the more ancient, mysterious, and mystical "deep song" that lingers in the Gypsy "siguiriya," which he describes thus:

"The Gypsy siguiriya begins with a terrible scream that divides the landscape into ideal hemispheres. It is the scream of dead generations, a poignant elegy for the lost centuries, the pathetic evocation of love under other moons and other winds...the melodic phrase begins to pry open the mystery of the tones and remove the precious stone of the sob, a resonant tear in the river of the voice. No Andalusian can help but shudder on hearing that scream."

And this from the essay "Play and Theory of Duendes" which defies direct translation but in his essay is described as a force more powerful than the angel who gives lights, and the muse who gives form. It is a force that surges up from the earth, through the soles, into the body, and it strips away anything that is not authentic emotion. Here is the description he gives of a performance of famous Andalusian singer, Pastora Pavón Cruz, known also as La Niña de los Peines:

"As though crazy, torn like a medieval weeper, La Niña de los Peines got to her feet, tossed off a big glass of firewater and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, without breath or color, but with duende. She was able to kill all the scaffolding of the song and leave the way for a furious, enslaving duende, friend of sand winds, who made the listeners rip their clothes...La Niña de los Peines had to tear her voice because she knew she had an exquisite audience, one which demanded not forms but the marrow of forms, pure music with a body so lean it could stay in the air. She had to rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her duende might come and deign to fight hand and hand with her. And how she sang! Her voice was no longer playing, it was a jet of blood worthy of her pain and her sincerity, and it opened like a ten-fingered hand around the nailed but stormy feet of a Christ by Juan de Juni. "

And so I move from skin, to bone, to blood. Each time I sit down to write, it is a dare to touch the page, to open the incision; to send away the muse and the angel and invite my duende to force me to write from the soles up.

Art: "The Jungle" by Cuban Surrealist Wilfred Lam.