Posts Tagged ‘stories’
“The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.”*…
Further to yesterday’s piece, a dreamy allegory from Jorge Luis Borges: his (very short) story “Ragnarök” in its entirety:
The images in dreams, wrote Coleridge, figure forth the impressions that our intellect would call causes; we do not feel horror because we are haunted by a sphinx, we dream a sphinx in order to explain the horror that we feel. If that is true, how might a mere chronicling of its forms transmit the stupor, the exultation, the alarms, the dread, and the joy that wove together that night’s dream? I shall attempt that chronicle, nonetheless; perhaps the fact that the dream consisted of but a single scene may erase or soften the essential difficulty.
The place was the College of Philosophy and Letters; the hour, nightfall. Everything (as is often the case in dreams) was slightly different; a slight magnification altered things. We chose authorities; I would speak with Pedro Henríquez Ureña, who in waking life had died many years before. Suddenly, we were dumbfounded by a great noise of demonstrators or street musicians. From the Underworld, we heard the cries of humans and animals. A voice cried: Here they come! and then: The gods! The gods! Four or five individuals emerged from out of the mob and occupied the dais of the auditorium. Everyone applauded, weeping; it was the gods, returning after a banishment of many centuries. Looming larger than life as they stood upon the dais, their heads thrown back and their chests thrust forward, they haughtily received our homage. One of them was holding a branch (which belonged, no doubt, to the simple botany of dreams); another, with a sweeping gesture, held out a hand that was a claw; one of Janus’ faces looked mistrustfully at Thoth’s curved beak. Perhaps excited by our applause, one of them, I no longer remember which, burst out in a triumphant, incredibly bitter clucking that was half gargle and half whistle. From that point on, things changed.
It all began with the suspicion (perhaps exaggerated) that the gods were unable to talk. Centuries of a feral life of flight had atrophied that part of them which was human; the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome had been implacable with these fugitives. Beetling brows, yellowed teeth, the sparse beard of a mulatto or a Chinaman, and beastlike dewlaps were testaments to the degeneration of the Olympian line. The clothes they wore were not those of a decorous and honest poverty, but rather of the criminal luxury of the Underworld’s gambling dens and houses of ill repute. A carnation bled from a buttonhole; under a tight suitcoat one could discern the outline of a knife. Suddenly, we felt that they were playing their last trump, that they were cunning, ignorant, and cruel, like aged predators, and that if we allowed ourselves to be swayed by fear or pity, they would wind up destroying us.
We drew our heavy revolvers (suddenly in the dream there were revolvers) and exultantly killed the gods.
“Ragnarök“
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we confront the return of old monsters, we might send surprising birthday greetings to another master of the short story, William Sydney Porter (better known by his pen name, O. Henry); he was born on this date in 1862. After serving three years in the Ohio Penitentiary for bank fraud and embezzlement (a licensed pharmacist, he had worked in the prison’s infirmary), he turned to what had been a pastime, writing. Over the next several years he wrote 381 short stories under the pen name by which we know him, “O. Henry,” including a story a week for over a year for the New York World Sunday Magazine.
His wit, characterization, and plot twists– as evidenced in stories like “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Ransom of Red Chief”– were adored by his readers but often panned by critics… though academic opinion has since come around: O. Henry is now considered by many to be America’s answer to Guy de Maupassant.
“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.”*…
The stories of oral societies, passed from generation to generation, are more than they seem, Patrick Nunn argues– they are scientific records…
In the 1880s, the American journalist William Gladstone Steel made several visits to a freshwater lake that filled the caldera of an extinct volcano in Oregon. For Steel, these visits were the fulfilment of a dream that began while he was just a schoolboy in Kansas. It was one day in 1870, while reading the newspaper wrapped around his school lunch, that he noticed an article about the ‘discovery’ of a spectacular body of freshwater named Crater Lake. ‘In all of my life,’ Steel would later recall, ‘I never read an article that took the intense hold on me that that one did…’ When he finally made it to the lake in 1885, he was so captivated that he determined to have the area designated as a National Park. But designation was not easily gained and required extensive documentation of the region.
To help with the reconnaissance, Steel engaged guides from the local Klamath peoples, who had occupied the area for countless generations. During their work together, Steel noted that they never once looked at the lake itself, instead ‘making all sorts of mysterious signs and staring directly at the ground’ – a sign that the Klamath regarded Crater Lake as a powerful place where a great cataclysm once happened and might happen again. For, as Klamath stories tell, buried deep beneath the lake waters is the spirit of Llao, a demon who lived within the volcano that once towered above Crater Lake. In a past age, Llao terrorised the Klamath by showering them with hot rocks and shaking the ground on which they lived. This continued until Llao was confronted by the benevolent spirit Skell who pulled the volcano down on the demon and created Crater Lake above.
What sounded to Steel like myth is more than just a story. It is a memory of an eruption that caused a volcano to collapse and form a giant caldera that, as many do, filled with freshwater. The eruption occurred 7,700 years ago, but the Klamath had preserved its story and even sustained associated protocols, such as not looking directly at the lake. Though they did not read nor write when Steel worked with them in the late 19th century, the Klamath people knew a story about an event that had occurred more than 7 millennia earlier, a story carried across perhaps 300 generations by word of mouth.
Many literate people today believe this kind of thing is impossible or, at best, an anomaly, because they evaluate the abilities of oral (or ‘pre-literate’) societies by the yardsticks of literate ones, where information seems far more readily accessible to anyone who seeks it. And, in doing so, they undervalue the ability of these oral societies to store, organise and communicate equivalent amounts of information. I have called this ‘the tyranny of literacy’: the idea that literacy encourages its exponents to subordinate the understandings of others who appear less ‘fortunate’. But accounts like Steel’s are beginning to help break apart this idea: oral traditions, rather than being subordinate, are capable of transmitting just as much useful information as the technologies of reading and writing…
Knowledge is where we find it: “Memories within myth,” from @PatrickNunn3 in @aeonmag.
* Stanley Kunitz
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As we respect our elders, we might spare a thought for Alfred Métraux; he died on this date in 1963. An anthropologist, ethnographer, and human rights leader, he published landmark studies of South American Indians, Haitian voodoo, and the ancient cultures of Easter Island. His work in South America was instrumental in illuminating the the brilliance of South American Indian cultures; he taught the world the reality of voodoo, and he solved the riddle of the Easter Island monoliths (the Moai).
Later in his career, Métraux worked with the UN, where he participated in the framing of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Later, as director of the Dept. of Social Sciences at UNESCO, he presided over a series of studies which resulted in a series of publications demonstrating the absence of scientific foundation for theories of racial superiority; the 1951 UNESCO Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences enshrined these findings.
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world”*…
The estimable Terry Eagleton on the equally estimable Peter Brooks‘ Seduced By Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative…
Forty years ago, Peter Brooks produced a pathbreaking study, Reading for the Plot, which was part of the so-called narrative turn in literary criticism. Narratology, as it became known, spread swiftly to other disciplines: law, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology and so on. But a problem arose when it began to seep into the general culture – or, as Brooks puts it, into ‘the orbit of political cant and corporate branding’ [and importantly, your correspondent would observe, into journalism]. Not since the work of Freud, whose concepts of neurosis, the Oedipal and the unconscious quickly became common currency, has a piece of high theory so readily entered everyday language. The narratologists had given birth to a monster: George W. Bush announced that ‘each person has got their own story that is so unique’; ‘We are all virtuoso novelists,’ the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote. What Brooks glumly calls ‘the narrative takeover of reality’ was complete…
Everyone these days is on a journey, which can lend some provisional shape to lives without much sense of direction. Humanity was also on a journey in medieval times, but it was a collective expedition with an origin, well signposted stages and a distinct destination. The Enlightenment notion of progress was more open-ended: to imagine an end to human self-perfecting was to deny our infinite potential. This creed was inherited by some 19th-century thinkers – ironically, since the dominant model of development at the time was evolution, which is random, littered with blind alleys and lengthy digressions and heads nowhere in particular.
If you can carve your own path to the grave these days, it is because grand narratives of this kind have crumbled and can no longer constrain you. Journeys are no longer communal but self-tailored, more like hitchhiking than a coach tour. They are no longer mass products but for the most part embarked on alone. The world has ceased to be story-shaped, which means that you can make your life up as you go along. You can own it, just as you can own a boutique. As the current cliché has it, everybody is different, a proposition which if true would spell the end of ethics, sociology, demography, medical science and a good deal besides.
…
One of the great clichés of modernism is that art imposes order on an anarchic reality. In Brooks’s view, narrative invests our lives with a shapeliness they would otherwise lack. But the world comes to us not as raw material to be sculpted but as already organised, in however rough-and-ready a way. There may be no grand narrative immanent in history, but that isn’t to say situations don’t have a certain structure which is independent of the ways we articulate them. That there was once a revolution in France isn’t just a tidy way of arranging the world. One of the traditional functions of fiction was to give voice to stories that were somehow inherent in reality. This conception was thrown into crisis by modernism, rather as a faith in the inevitability of human progress was challenged around the same time by the First World War. Among other things, modernism is a crisis of narrativity. Telling a story is becoming harder and harder. But there is no point in making things even more difficult for yourself by adopting the Nietzschean position that reality lacks all form until we ourselves breathe one into it.
…
For a slim volume, Seduced by Story covers an impressive array of topics: oral narrative, the function of character, the role of narration in law, storytelling’s affinity with child’s play, what narrators know and don’t know, those raconteurs who calculate the act of narrating into their stories and those who refuse to be authoritative. In the end, however, there is a touch of desperation about demanding so much of fiction and narrative while acknowledging the ease with which they are abused. It isn’t that Brooks thinks fiction can save us, as I.A. Richards believed poetry could; it’s rather that he can think of nowhere else to turn. Story and poetry are important, to be sure, but not that important. Literary types, unsurprisingly, have often overrated their power, loading them with a pressure to which they are unequal. The hope that value and insight are to be found mainly in art is a symptom of our condition, not a solution to it….
The use and abuse of narrative: “What’s Your Story?” from @EagletonTerry in @LRB. Both the book and the article are eminently worth reading in full.
And see (also from Eagleton): “Conspiracies are the price of freedom“: Conspiracy theories are the insecure person’s defense against a confusing world with too many competing narratives. Conspiracy theories allow believers to claim a position of relative strength: They alone know what is going on. This hidden truth is always sinister, not because conspiracy theorists need more to fear, but because they need an explanation for the fear in which they already live. (via @TheBrowser)
* Philip Pullman
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As we ponder plots, we might note that today is National Rationalization Day.
“The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen”*…
… and used. Consider, for example, this affecting example of literary collage from Jez Burrows…
The valley was enclosed by rugged peaks, security fencing and annihilative firepower—a state secret. Nothing for miles around. They sat opposite one another they sat in the shade of a tree.
“Repeat the words after me: A fish is an animal.”
“A fish is an animal.”
“A cow is an animal.”
“A cow is an animal.”
“We go to the zoo to see the animals.”
“We go to the zoo to see the animals.” She nodded in affirmation.
“Very good.”
“Very good.” She looked up with an absent smile and burst out laughing. Its mouth snapped into a tight, straight line and there was a fraught silence. Her body tensed up.
“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to insult you!” She leaned forward to take its hand and a cross-current of electricity seemed to flow between them. She felt guilty now, and a little uneasy. She looked at it warily, this naive, simple creature, with its straightforward and friendly eyes so eager to believe appearances—a shimmering evanescent bubble of cycloid scales and yellow fur agleam in the sun. Circuitry that Karen could not begin to comprehend. Since Parker’s research did not pan out too well, now she was the linchpin of the experiment. Her voice wobbled dangerously, but she brought it under control.
“I’m really sorry if I hurt your feelings.”
To her astonishment, it smiled and emitted a sound like laughter. She felt an inward sense of relief.
“I want an apple.”
“When you ask for something you should say, ‘Please.’”
“Please give me an apple.” It rolled the word around its mouth. She smiled distantly.
“I’ll think about it, amigo.”
Collins COBUILD Primary Learner’s Dictionary
Collins English Dictionary
Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary
My First Dictionary
New Oxford American Dictionary
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
More very short stories composed of example sentences from dictionaries: “Dictionary Stories” from @jezburrows.
Apposite: Austin Kleon‘s newspaper blackout poetry. For example…
(Image at top: source)
* Charles Simic
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As we juxtapose, we might send carefully constructed birthday greetings to Gertrude Stein; she was born on this date in 1874. An American ex-pat in Paris, Stein was an author, poet, and memoirist (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). But she is probably best remembered as the host of a Paris salon where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art– including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Henri Matisse– regularly met.
Hemingway described her role as both a host and a mentor to a generation of artists in in A Moveable Feast. The Mother of Us All was the title of a Virgil Thomson opera for which Stein wrote the libretto. While the subject of the opera, Susan B. Anthony, certainly deserves the epithet, so, many have observed, did its author.
“What you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore”*…
Detail from Senecio by Paul Klee. 1922
Some find it comforting to think of life as a story. Others find that absurd. Galen Strawson weighs in…
‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.’ And: ‘In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives.’ Or a fellow American psychologist, Dan P McAdams: ‘We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell.’ And here’s the American moral philosopher J David Velleman: ‘We invent ourselves… but we really are the characters we invent.’ And, for good measure, another American philosopher, Daniel Dennett: ‘we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behaviour… and we always put the best “faces” on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the centre of that autobiography is one’s self.’
So say the narrativists. We story ourselves and we are our stories. There’s a remarkably robust consensus about this claim, not only in the humanities but also in psychotherapy. It’s standardly linked with the idea that self-narration is a good thing, necessary for a full human life.
I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves…
Read on for a challenging perspective: “I am not a story,” from @gstrawson in @aeonmag.
* Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
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As we rethink retrospection, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Samille Diane Friesen– better known by her stage name, Dyan Cannon. She was born on this date in 1937. An actress of accomplishment (she scored a Saturn Award, a Golden Globe Award, three Academy Award nominations, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame), her career began in B movies, but took off after a turn in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, for which she received her first Academy Award nomination.
Before her career took off, Cannon was married to Cary Grant for three years and gave birth to his only child, daughter Jennifer. Reluctant to discuss the marriage since their 1968 divorce, Cannon turned down lucrative publishing deals following Grant’s death in 1986. Finally, in 2011, she published a memoir. Dear Cary, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
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