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. 

 

 

 

 

 

Interlude in the Research: Call in the Clowns, Satyrs, Fools, and Nymphs.

 

Amid all this heavy lifting of my research notes, I re-read my essay, "A Chorus of Clowns and Masked Comic Theater" " written for Realms of Fantasy on the history of clowns, from antiquity to the Marx Brothers. It's funny, and I enjoyed re-reading it as it provides a comprehensive view of the different forms of improvisational theater. It is an excellent moment to add here as it describes the masks in action, wild, ribald, pranking, shouting, and generally enjoying themselves to our benefit.

From the essay:

"In the middle of winter, when it is so gray I can't take it anymore, I rent as many Marx Brothers movies as possible. Something about the zany interaction of these "clowns" creates havoc in a department store, a racetrack, or the stateroom of an ocean liner that brightens the day's dullness. Then there is that crackling, fast dialogue, most of it famously improvised, and the elaborate musical numbers, ridiculous dances, and absurd moments of slapstick. Perhaps because I know they are four brothers, I sense a kinship in their characters. Although each one wears a different costume and "mask," there is a synchronicity in their performance — for while each one constructs his own comedic business, they do not act alone but in a chorus of clowns.

"Watching them, I sense much older traditions layered beneath the surface of their film performances. It is easy to imagine Groucho with satyr's hooves or Harpo in the round,–mouth mask of an ancient Fool. Inspired by the antics of the Marx Brothers, I decided to review the roots of clowning in the early Southern European history of theater clowns — not the circus clowns — but those masked characters who rose out of early pagan cults and then developed into secular, irreverent tricksters and mirrors of human behavior...."

"...The chorus of clowns rips apart polite society and in that act, exposes our true feelings. In this joyful disorder, we remember primal emotions: we lust, we become envious, we are starved for affection and fame, and we long for an illusive, trouble–free happiness. We would rather sleep than work; we are clever and undeniably foolish at times. We are complicated and conflicted; no single character can carry the weight of many inconsistencies. We need a chorus of clowns to speak for us. Despite their secular natures, the clowns are still mythic to me. Humor is an old response to fear of the unknown and contempt for the familiar. For 3,000 years, somewhere, a chorus of clowns has misbehaved, and in their audacity, called down gods, heroes, and legends for a face-to-face meeting with humanity, offering laughter as a form of reverence."

Tintoretto and The Origin of the Milky Way

 

This is a really gorgeous painting by Jacopo Tintoretto depicting the "Origin of the Milky Way, 1575-1580." Jupiter (Zeus) seeks to give immortality to his son, Hercules, conceived during an illicit affair with a mortal woman Alcmene. He knows that only the breast milk of a goddess can accomplish such a thing and as luck would have it Juno (Hera) is lactating. Jupiter discovers Juno sleeping and attempts to latch the baby to her breast -- thinking she might not notice (really? ) When she wakes and pulls her breast away from the feeding infant, her milk sprays into the heavens and produces the stars. (Click on the image to see a larger version)

Here is a wonderful and incredibly informative little podcast about The Origin of the Milky Way from Karen Allen of the National Gallery in England exploring the wealth of creation myths alluded to in the painting (including the origin of lillies) and lovely details about Tintoretto's artistic storytelling. It's fabulous.

The Novels of Mythic and Perilous Travel Across Borders

"Traveling is brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”  --Cesare Pavese

Here are two of my favorite novels that I have reviewed over the last ten years that, in many ways, embody the sensibilities of Pavese's brilliant observation:

 

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera is a unique and haunting work. Makina is given a note from her mother to take to an older brother who has disappeared into the North. Along the way, Makina encounters ambiguous helpers: a thug who mysteriously owes her mother, the trading of favors with a coyote, the strangers who pull her along the road, the rivers and mountain passes, and then the cities themselves, full of mazes, flags, and shops until she arrives at a place to discover her brother, changed utterly.  

 

 

 

Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo, opens with spare, compelling prose, like a darkly lived fairy tale, hinting at the ghostly journey to come in an altered landscape. In late August, Juan travels to Comala, a hot and dry town; a popular myth is that "when people die and go to hell, they return for a blanket." Juan is greeted by Eduviges Dyada, an old friend of his mother's, and quickly learns that Pedro Páramo, the father he is seeking, is long dead. But the conversation takes an odd turn, as Eduviges tells Juan that his mother had told her just that day to expect him. When Juan tells her his mother is dead, Eduviges shrugs and responds, "So that was why her voice was so weak."

 

 

 

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.  

The Spine of a Novel That Tends to the Eternal

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”  --Cesare Pavese

The above is one of my favorite quotes as it seems to suggest to me not only the physical journey but the deeper emotional well of any good narrative of self-discovery. It's the foundation or backbone on which so many wonderful novels I have read over the years seem to rest. I am drawn to them because such a structure is how I tend to think when constructing the shape of a story or novel; our separation from the familiar, our trust in strangers, the off-balance, the journeying, the transformations and the leaning into all things eternal.

Here is a short list of my favorite novels that I have reviewed over the years that I feel in many ways embody the sensibilities of Pavese's brilliant observation:

 

 

Pedro Paramo by Mexican author Juan Rulfo' opens with spare, compelling prose, like a darkly lived fairy tale, hinting at the ghostly journey to come in an altered landscape. In late August, Juan traveled to Comala, a hot and dry town. The popular myth has it that "when people die and go to hell, they return for a blanket." Juan is greeted by Eduviges Dyada, an old friend of his mother's, and quickly learns that Pedro Páramo, the father he is seeking, is long dead. But the conversation takes an odd turn, as Eduviges tells Juan that his mother had told her just that day to expect him. When Juan tells his mother is dead, Eduviges merely shrugs and responds, "So that was why her voice was so weak." Read more > >

 

 

 

 

 Thaliad by Marly Youmans, both novelist and poet, composes her story in free verse reminiscent of heroic epics (a sort of Homer meets Gerald Manley Hopkins). Thaliad recounts the aftermath of a fiery apocalypse and the perilous journey of a band of children led by a girl whose prophetic visions are guiding them. They seek a mystical a sanctuary on the edge of a lake where, even as children, they must confront the challenges of re-creating a world illuminated by hope and love. In this stunning narrative the eternal is always close at hand in both violent and transfigurative  powers.  Read more >>

 

 

 

 

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obrecht is an astonishing novel, set in what was once Yugoslavia over the course of WWI, WWII, and the recent wars that resulted in its dissection into new territories. War forms an continuous backdrop throughout the novel, often as a distant but deeply felt anxiety and sometimes exploding on the community. Travelling is a hazard as boundaries shift with the conflicts and "our city," or "our fields" abruptly become someone else's property. Identities shift too as the long married wife whose origin, faith, or language suddenly mark her as an enemy to the new state. Nadia, the novel's protagonist, is a young pediatrician who sets out on a perilous journey, crossing newly minted borders to understand the reasons for her beloved grandfather's strange disappearance and his death alone in a remote village. Read more > >

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?