Dear Friends,
Many thanks to those of you who supported and participated in Story Euphoria. Your contributions to the project made it worthwhile.
Unfortunately, it's now my regrettable duty to put the Story Euphoria project on hold. Due to demands from the most dominating commitments in my life (i.e., school, work, etc.) I don't have the time required to keep Story Euphoria alive--for the present time. There are still so many stories and storytelling topics I wanted to share with you--many suggested by friends of Story Euphoria. We'll see what we can do to bring those to light this summer, when I hope to resume work on Story Euphoria.
In the meantime, thanks again to all who encouraged this project, and also to those who may just now be discovering Story Euphoria for the first time: I hope the foundations here laid will stir in your mind and your heart a greater appreciation for the power and art of stories.
Regards from Story Euphoria,
Amanda Haldy
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Story Euphoria 14: Prufrock
It’s easy to focus on the literary forms most conventionally associated with storytelling, like novels and short stories, but poetry has its own brand of storytelling power. This week’s podcast features The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. This poem was first introduced to me many years ago by my English teacher, Mr. Stewart of Monticello, and over the years I have delighted in discovering something new every time I revisit it. In a mere 131 lines of delicious, rolling verse, Eliot manages to coax from scattered images and half-formed arguments the entirety of the title character’s life. Download and listen.
If you would like to read this and other poems by T.S. Eliot, you can follow along with the text I used at Project Gutenberg, check out a volume from your local library, or buy a copy for your home library:
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Material for a Dream by Josep Anton Garcia Rami.
and Better Than Me by Celeste Astara.
Song and Story
There is nothing like a song for cutting straight to the heart, for establishing mood without any ado and igniting the senses. Of all the art forms, music is perhaps the least reliant on intellectual processing—unlike stories, which are expressed through a layer of language that the brain must interpret and whose interpretation must be learned.
The very first installment of Story Euphoria explored the idea of story as a mighty unifier, a channel causing readers and listeners to identify with others. Song, too, is something we identify with, become one with as it transports us. And, being written in a universal language that all who hear can understand, a song we listen to together causes us to identify together, building a bridge of identity. People bond while listening to music.
Interestingly, from what clues we have today, it appears that the oldest stories—like the myths discussed last week—were also songs. Inanna’s Descent, for example, was likely chanted during religious rites. Modern songs also tell us stories, sometimes using nothing more than shifts in pitch and rhythm or the choice of instrumentation (as in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf). Other musical stories can be more obviously interpreted in lyrics that fit snugly with the melody.
A poem is a little like lyrics without music. But poems also create their own music using melodies of assonance and alliteration; rhythms of syllables and punctuation. More than that, poems are like sheet music for the imagination, and when we read a poem we create images instead of sounds. The effect is immediate, distilled. A poem is to prose like a shot of Turkish coffee is to a cup of decaf. I think Archibald MacLeish said it well in his 1926 poem, Ars Poetica, as he begins:
It seems ridiculous to try to imagine a wordless poem, and yet such a feat is ultimately what everyone who transmutes life into language strives to achieve: the experience and sentiment of the story-moment is what we really care about. The words are ancillary.
And poems and songs tend to be very good with moments, focusing on a certain mood or epiphany. While there are ballads that indulge in more lengthy stories, such as L’Morte de Arthur, or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, among countless other examples, even these tales-in-verse rely more on moments of metaphor and sudden imagery than on novelistic elements like character development—are more akin to the stories your dreams make from the mishmash of nighttime visions than to what you would write about the dream in your diary next morning. So perhaps poems and songs imitate life more closely than prose, as life is made up of these bright moments and is equally without the helpful framework of exposition. As Archibald MacLeish concludes:
The very first installment of Story Euphoria explored the idea of story as a mighty unifier, a channel causing readers and listeners to identify with others. Song, too, is something we identify with, become one with as it transports us. And, being written in a universal language that all who hear can understand, a song we listen to together causes us to identify together, building a bridge of identity. People bond while listening to music.
Interestingly, from what clues we have today, it appears that the oldest stories—like the myths discussed last week—were also songs. Inanna’s Descent, for example, was likely chanted during religious rites. Modern songs also tell us stories, sometimes using nothing more than shifts in pitch and rhythm or the choice of instrumentation (as in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf). Other musical stories can be more obviously interpreted in lyrics that fit snugly with the melody.
A poem is a little like lyrics without music. But poems also create their own music using melodies of assonance and alliteration; rhythms of syllables and punctuation. More than that, poems are like sheet music for the imagination, and when we read a poem we create images instead of sounds. The effect is immediate, distilled. A poem is to prose like a shot of Turkish coffee is to a cup of decaf. I think Archibald MacLeish said it well in his 1926 poem, Ars Poetica, as he begins:
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown --
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
It seems ridiculous to try to imagine a wordless poem, and yet such a feat is ultimately what everyone who transmutes life into language strives to achieve: the experience and sentiment of the story-moment is what we really care about. The words are ancillary.
And poems and songs tend to be very good with moments, focusing on a certain mood or epiphany. While there are ballads that indulge in more lengthy stories, such as L’Morte de Arthur, or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, among countless other examples, even these tales-in-verse rely more on moments of metaphor and sudden imagery than on novelistic elements like character development—are more akin to the stories your dreams make from the mishmash of nighttime visions than to what you would write about the dream in your diary next morning. So perhaps poems and songs imitate life more closely than prose, as life is made up of these bright moments and is equally without the helpful framework of exposition. As Archibald MacLeish concludes:
A poem should not mean
But be.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Story Euphoria 13: Myths of Odin
This week, Story Euphoria presents two myths about Odin, the All-Father of the Norse pantheon, as retold by Padraic Colum in The Children of Odin: The Book of Northern Myths. Download and listen!
You can follow along or read more myths at Project Gutenberg. You can also check your local library or get this book for your personal collection:
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Transgenesis and Mountain by Megaplasma Factory Recordings
Suspense by Stephen Gashler
and One Good Eye by Doug Tapper.
Realms of Myth
Last Week, Story Euphoria contemplated one of the greatest powers of story: the power to illuminate truth. Truth is different from fact. Truth is understood on a more intuitive level than the cerebral cortex can make sense of, and it resists definition by language. Truth is why humanity has the arts at all and why we started telling stories—in a struggle to understand, and to chart the strange roads we all must travel through life and into death. Stories are the signposts of the spirit. And from the first moment a cold, bright-eyed hominid painted the first antelope stampeding on a cave wall, we have been driven to tell stories.
The oldest stories we know of, preserved in tribal memory or graven in clay tablets, are myths—stories of symbol and the world of the unseen. And one of the oldest of these is what remains of an ancient Sumerian myth about the great goddess, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, who heard a call and went on a journey into the underworld, the place from which no traveler returns, the land of the dead. Her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, commanded that, as Inanna passed through each gate into the Great Below, she be stripped one by one of her items of power (which can be interpreted each as a me, or tablet of knowledge of civilization): her crown, the lapis beads from round her neck, her breastplate called “Come, man, come!”, and so on until Inanna entered the throne room completely naked. As the Wolkstein and Kramer translation of the epic continues:
Inanna has undergone the most profound transformation we know of on this earth, and she will return from it with powers obtained from Ereshkigal and the underworld. This is a prototypical story of rebirth, of loss and regeneration into something better balanced within the dualities of light and dark: the evolution towards wisdom. This journey echoes time and again throughout mythology and religion the world over.
The renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell theorizes that this journey and return theme is part of the monomyth shared by all cultures, more commonly known as the Hero’s Journey, an element of story which Story Euphoria has visited before. Often heroes embark on these journeys to acquire knowledge of some kind—to help their tribe, or to serve a cause greater than themselves, which is what makes them heroes. Heroes are sacrificed to their greater purpose.
Examples of this cycle are everywhere, and once you are aware of the pattern, you will see it in everything from old fairy tales to modern television shows, but one excellent example can be found in the figure of Odin from Norse mythology. Odin is a journeying hero figure who, like Inanna, possesses powers connected with war and creation, but above all, with knowledge and wisdom. The two ravens who sit on his shoulders and bring him news of the worlds are called Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory, and Odin is responsible for bringing poetry to mankind, which in Norse culture is synonymous with knowledge, history and spiritual power.
Odin’s doings are often motivated from what seems to be an obsession with Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, when their mythic world and almost everything in it is destroyed. Specifically, Odin is obsessed with increasing knowledge and wisdom as his ideal weapons against adversity, as a means of aiding the Gods of Asgard and the Men of Midgard, and he does not balk at painful and gruesome sacrifices to achieve his goals. You can listen to one journey Odin makes as this week’s Story Euphoria podcast presents two myths of Odin—of how he left to seek the Well of Wisdom, and of the sacrifice he made to drink from it.
Whatever subconscious meaning you may find in these myths, one thing is clear: Odin and eventually all the Gods and Giants must travel the archetypal hero’s journey to achieve revelation and an elevated state of being—Ragnarök, after all, is not only the end of what was before but is also the beginning of a better world: the world we live in now. Odin—as a warrior and a wanderer—takes this journey many times in his relentless pursuit of understanding. There is the moment where, in order to possess the knowledge of runic writing, he hung himself from the world tree with his own spear plunged through him, as Odin himself declares in the section of the Hávamál poem called the Rúnatal:
The image of Odin on Yggdrasil has been compared to the image of Christ on the cross, both of which might also be compared to the Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree, where he decided to meditate until he died or found enlightenment. Certainly, on the mythic level, these moments tell of a similar journey: the hero must travel through death, symbolic or actual, and be willingly stripped of all material assumptions and assertions in the ultimate transformation of self from the finite thing who does not know to the cosmic hero who has obtained the answer, to the benefit of the world he left behind.
The oldest stories we know of, preserved in tribal memory or graven in clay tablets, are myths—stories of symbol and the world of the unseen. And one of the oldest of these is what remains of an ancient Sumerian myth about the great goddess, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, who heard a call and went on a journey into the underworld, the place from which no traveler returns, the land of the dead. Her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, commanded that, as Inanna passed through each gate into the Great Below, she be stripped one by one of her items of power (which can be interpreted each as a me, or tablet of knowledge of civilization): her crown, the lapis beads from round her neck, her breastplate called “Come, man, come!”, and so on until Inanna entered the throne room completely naked. As the Wolkstein and Kramer translation of the epic continues:
Then Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death.
She spoke against her the word of wrath.
She uttered against her the cry of guilt.
She struck her.
Inanna was turned into a corpse,
A piece of rotting meat,
And was hung from a hook on the wall.
Inanna has undergone the most profound transformation we know of on this earth, and she will return from it with powers obtained from Ereshkigal and the underworld. This is a prototypical story of rebirth, of loss and regeneration into something better balanced within the dualities of light and dark: the evolution towards wisdom. This journey echoes time and again throughout mythology and religion the world over.
The renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell theorizes that this journey and return theme is part of the monomyth shared by all cultures, more commonly known as the Hero’s Journey, an element of story which Story Euphoria has visited before. Often heroes embark on these journeys to acquire knowledge of some kind—to help their tribe, or to serve a cause greater than themselves, which is what makes them heroes. Heroes are sacrificed to their greater purpose.
Examples of this cycle are everywhere, and once you are aware of the pattern, you will see it in everything from old fairy tales to modern television shows, but one excellent example can be found in the figure of Odin from Norse mythology. Odin is a journeying hero figure who, like Inanna, possesses powers connected with war and creation, but above all, with knowledge and wisdom. The two ravens who sit on his shoulders and bring him news of the worlds are called Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory, and Odin is responsible for bringing poetry to mankind, which in Norse culture is synonymous with knowledge, history and spiritual power.
Odin’s doings are often motivated from what seems to be an obsession with Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, when their mythic world and almost everything in it is destroyed. Specifically, Odin is obsessed with increasing knowledge and wisdom as his ideal weapons against adversity, as a means of aiding the Gods of Asgard and the Men of Midgard, and he does not balk at painful and gruesome sacrifices to achieve his goals. You can listen to one journey Odin makes as this week’s Story Euphoria podcast presents two myths of Odin—of how he left to seek the Well of Wisdom, and of the sacrifice he made to drink from it.
Whatever subconscious meaning you may find in these myths, one thing is clear: Odin and eventually all the Gods and Giants must travel the archetypal hero’s journey to achieve revelation and an elevated state of being—Ragnarök, after all, is not only the end of what was before but is also the beginning of a better world: the world we live in now. Odin—as a warrior and a wanderer—takes this journey many times in his relentless pursuit of understanding. There is the moment where, in order to possess the knowledge of runic writing, he hung himself from the world tree with his own spear plunged through him, as Odin himself declares in the section of the Hávamál poem called the Rúnatal:
I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.
No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there.
The image of Odin on Yggdrasil has been compared to the image of Christ on the cross, both of which might also be compared to the Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree, where he decided to meditate until he died or found enlightenment. Certainly, on the mythic level, these moments tell of a similar journey: the hero must travel through death, symbolic or actual, and be willingly stripped of all material assumptions and assertions in the ultimate transformation of self from the finite thing who does not know to the cosmic hero who has obtained the answer, to the benefit of the world he left behind.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Story Euphoria 12: The Open Boat
Stephen Crane is often noted as a forerunner of realism, inspiring the spare style of writers like Ernest Hemingway. In this story, Crane draws on a real life experience to explore the strain that so easily appears when modern man is stripped of the comforts of civilization and sees his own death through nature's eyes. Download and listen to The Open Boat, by Stephen Crane.
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Fantastic Fly by Electro Wave
If you would like to read more by Stephen Crane, you can peruse the collection I used for free at Project Gutenberg, check out your local library, or buy a copy for yourself:
Truth and Fiction
Story Euphoria is concerned first and finally with fiction, but there is a place where fiction meets reality, a place where real life inhabits fictional characters. Apprentice writers are often told to “write what you know,” and the storytellers we best love are keen observers of life because we expect stories, whether realistic or not, to reflect something true about life—and better yet, about our own lives. Reading a fiction is an experience, and some fictions are real experiences thinly veiled with false names, such as the story in this week’s podcast. Given all of this, why bother with fiction at all?
Real life is full of stories that are no less true than they are fascinating, burgeoning with adventure and strange twists of fate—as evidenced by the popularity of memoirs in today’s book market—and we are all familiar with the old saw, “truth is stranger than fiction.” So what were the first storytellers thinking? Why did they decide to start making stuff up?
To answer this question in a round-about fashion, consider how a person groping to express as accurately as possible a sensation or experience may turn to other languages to find just the right word: “As the French say,” “As the Chinese say,” what have you. Most languages retain a marvelous number of loan words simply to fill in linguistic gaps. Like a foreign language with just the right nuance, fiction is a language of art, and what a language of art provides is the power to express subtle concepts, subconscious understandings that are beyond words, much as spiritual teachers may use a parable to shine light on a mystical concept. The words are not the point: It's what lies behind them.
Much as the myths of the ancients did, modern fiction explores life on a level that goes beyond reporting what happened and how. In other words, fiction allows the storyteller the same versatility of expression enjoyed by the painter or the musician. Instead of pigments or notes, the fiction writer plays with events, emotions, dialogue and images with a kind of freedom that the earnest memoirist can only long for. The deliberate juxtaposition of a fiction’s elements can evoke in the reader a reaction that goes beyond the language itself, and when that reaction reveals something vital, an epiphany of the unseen and subtle world, the power of fiction is apparent.
This is far from saying truth is irrelevant to fiction. Like any art form, the best fiction, no matter how fantastical or outlandish, is infused with the presence of its creator: it flashes with moments of truth. You can’t fake a good story; you can only labor to build a thing with heart, much as Frankenstein toiled over his Monster (though we hope with more felicitous results). So, instead of “write what you know,” a more useful precept may be to “write what you love,” for in passion lives an exulted form of truth.
Real life is full of stories that are no less true than they are fascinating, burgeoning with adventure and strange twists of fate—as evidenced by the popularity of memoirs in today’s book market—and we are all familiar with the old saw, “truth is stranger than fiction.” So what were the first storytellers thinking? Why did they decide to start making stuff up?
To answer this question in a round-about fashion, consider how a person groping to express as accurately as possible a sensation or experience may turn to other languages to find just the right word: “As the French say,” “As the Chinese say,” what have you. Most languages retain a marvelous number of loan words simply to fill in linguistic gaps. Like a foreign language with just the right nuance, fiction is a language of art, and what a language of art provides is the power to express subtle concepts, subconscious understandings that are beyond words, much as spiritual teachers may use a parable to shine light on a mystical concept. The words are not the point: It's what lies behind them.
Much as the myths of the ancients did, modern fiction explores life on a level that goes beyond reporting what happened and how. In other words, fiction allows the storyteller the same versatility of expression enjoyed by the painter or the musician. Instead of pigments or notes, the fiction writer plays with events, emotions, dialogue and images with a kind of freedom that the earnest memoirist can only long for. The deliberate juxtaposition of a fiction’s elements can evoke in the reader a reaction that goes beyond the language itself, and when that reaction reveals something vital, an epiphany of the unseen and subtle world, the power of fiction is apparent.
This is far from saying truth is irrelevant to fiction. Like any art form, the best fiction, no matter how fantastical or outlandish, is infused with the presence of its creator: it flashes with moments of truth. You can’t fake a good story; you can only labor to build a thing with heart, much as Frankenstein toiled over his Monster (though we hope with more felicitous results). So, instead of “write what you know,” a more useful precept may be to “write what you love,” for in passion lives an exulted form of truth.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Story Euphoria 11: A Christmas Carol, Staves 4&5
Happy Holidays from Story Euphoria! We've reached the end of A Christmas Carol. Download and listen to the rousing conclusion!
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Magical Mystery by Forsonmeyer
In Somber Dreams We Dwell, pt 2, by Ken Smalts
and Amazing Grace arranged and performed by John Chamley
The Transformation Imperative
This week, the Story Euphoria podcast reaches the end of a four-episode celebration of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, witnessing one of the most famous and profound character transformations in popular culture: the hard-bitten and selfish Scrooge reclaims a child-like sense of joy and wonder. Because this transformation is “the point” of the story, the novella could be considered a transformation story.
Of course, the argument can be made that all stories are transformation stories. Students of the literary arts are often told that the characters in their stories must change in the course of the telling. Dynamic characters, we are informed, are much more desirable than static ones. Perhaps minor characters can be static, but hero protagonists must change for a story to be successful.
But is this really true?
Let’s imagine a story where the central character doesn’t change: Frank is unhappily married at the beginning of the story and sees himself as the victim of all the forces in his life—his wife, his job, his ungrateful children. During the course of the novel, his wife leaves him, his son evades a narcotics arrest by burning the garage down, he looses his daughter to an aggressive cancer, he wins a trip to Tahiti but also loses his job. However, at the end of all this, Frank’s outlook is the same. He still sees himself as the victim of these events and is passively dragged through them by his dedicated author.
Reading this, we might be frustrated by Frank and give up on reading his story—that is the risk his author runs. However, can we really say, despite the pains the author has taken to make it so, that Frank is completely unchanged? Maybe the first line of the book is Frank coming back from work, saying, “I’m home.” At the end of the book, he gets back from Tahiti, suntanned, parking his car out in the snow because the garage is yet to be replaced. When he walks in and says, “I’m home,” to the empty house, the very context of all that has happened has completely changed the impact of the words. Frank may be stubbornly entrenched in his self-pity, but he is in a different place at the end of the story than he was at the beginning, and this embodies his own transformation on a subtle level, if not on the grandiose level of Scrooge. We, the readers, can’t help but read him differently than we did at the beginning, no matter how hard the author tries to keep him the same. So, Frank has changed.
My example of Frank may be poor, so let’s look at an example from the literary cannon. Critics have suggested that the heroine of the epic Gone with the Wind is a static character, and that Melanie, as a very dynamic character, is the true heroine. But the book is not written with Melanie as the centerpiece, the vortex around which the other characters and events revolve. From beginning to end, we are emphatically concerned with Scarlet and her point of view. Yet the critics do have a point: after all she goes through—ravaged by the austerities of the Civil War, widowed, punished by the death of her child, et cetera—up to the last page of the book she is still using her same old wiles to snare her man.
Yet, enough has changed in her life and the lives of the other characters that, despite her resilience of spirit (which indeed, is a prominent theme of the story), Scarlet is in a different place. The focus of her affection has, perhaps sincerely, changed from Ashley Wilkes to Rhett Butler. Rhett famously refuses her, and by virtue of leaving the story at this juncture it is easy for the reader to imagine that Scarlet’s infatuation for him is not only sincere now, but is going to grow more tenacious, as it did for the unobtainable Ashley. And if her feelings have changed, then Scarlet herself has surely changed, even if she is also the “same old” Scarlet.
In short, the events of the book have made it impossible for her not to change. All supports her old character relied upon, other than Rhett, are dead or in other ways removed from her, and Rhett himself abandons her on the last few pages. With a change as big as this in all things against which she could be identified, the old Scarlet can no longer exist. It may have taken over 1,000 pages of narrative to do it, but she has no hope at the end but to change, and that change is the tragic taste the last page leaves in the back of the mouth.
To expand the Scarlet Principle to stories at large, just consider what is necessary for a story to be a story. It’s like the old newspaperman’s adage: “Dog Bites Man” is not a story, but “Man Bites Dog” is. A story happens whenever something out of the ordinary happens, something that only happens once in the lives of the characters who figure within it. Anything else is just a character sketch or a situation from which there is no outcome. In other words, the very nature of a story mandates that the principle characters journey through events remarkable enough to trouble an author to write about them. Characters cannot go through such events without being at a different place, physically or emotionally, than they were at the beginning. Being in a different place is just another way of saying that the characters have transformed.
So rather than asking if characters must change for a story to be successful, perhaps it is more useful to ask whether the story takes its characters from one place to another—that is, if anything happens in the story. Likewise, if the characters in a story do honestly feel static throughout (really static, not like Frank or Scarlet), then it is a sign that the story hasn’t become a story yet. Once it blossoms, there is no choice for characters but to change, as surely as the tide is pulled by the moon, for change is the by-product of story.
Of course, the argument can be made that all stories are transformation stories. Students of the literary arts are often told that the characters in their stories must change in the course of the telling. Dynamic characters, we are informed, are much more desirable than static ones. Perhaps minor characters can be static, but hero protagonists must change for a story to be successful.
But is this really true?
Let’s imagine a story where the central character doesn’t change: Frank is unhappily married at the beginning of the story and sees himself as the victim of all the forces in his life—his wife, his job, his ungrateful children. During the course of the novel, his wife leaves him, his son evades a narcotics arrest by burning the garage down, he looses his daughter to an aggressive cancer, he wins a trip to Tahiti but also loses his job. However, at the end of all this, Frank’s outlook is the same. He still sees himself as the victim of these events and is passively dragged through them by his dedicated author.
Reading this, we might be frustrated by Frank and give up on reading his story—that is the risk his author runs. However, can we really say, despite the pains the author has taken to make it so, that Frank is completely unchanged? Maybe the first line of the book is Frank coming back from work, saying, “I’m home.” At the end of the book, he gets back from Tahiti, suntanned, parking his car out in the snow because the garage is yet to be replaced. When he walks in and says, “I’m home,” to the empty house, the very context of all that has happened has completely changed the impact of the words. Frank may be stubbornly entrenched in his self-pity, but he is in a different place at the end of the story than he was at the beginning, and this embodies his own transformation on a subtle level, if not on the grandiose level of Scrooge. We, the readers, can’t help but read him differently than we did at the beginning, no matter how hard the author tries to keep him the same. So, Frank has changed.
My example of Frank may be poor, so let’s look at an example from the literary cannon. Critics have suggested that the heroine of the epic Gone with the Wind is a static character, and that Melanie, as a very dynamic character, is the true heroine. But the book is not written with Melanie as the centerpiece, the vortex around which the other characters and events revolve. From beginning to end, we are emphatically concerned with Scarlet and her point of view. Yet the critics do have a point: after all she goes through—ravaged by the austerities of the Civil War, widowed, punished by the death of her child, et cetera—up to the last page of the book she is still using her same old wiles to snare her man.
Yet, enough has changed in her life and the lives of the other characters that, despite her resilience of spirit (which indeed, is a prominent theme of the story), Scarlet is in a different place. The focus of her affection has, perhaps sincerely, changed from Ashley Wilkes to Rhett Butler. Rhett famously refuses her, and by virtue of leaving the story at this juncture it is easy for the reader to imagine that Scarlet’s infatuation for him is not only sincere now, but is going to grow more tenacious, as it did for the unobtainable Ashley. And if her feelings have changed, then Scarlet herself has surely changed, even if she is also the “same old” Scarlet.
In short, the events of the book have made it impossible for her not to change. All supports her old character relied upon, other than Rhett, are dead or in other ways removed from her, and Rhett himself abandons her on the last few pages. With a change as big as this in all things against which she could be identified, the old Scarlet can no longer exist. It may have taken over 1,000 pages of narrative to do it, but she has no hope at the end but to change, and that change is the tragic taste the last page leaves in the back of the mouth.
To expand the Scarlet Principle to stories at large, just consider what is necessary for a story to be a story. It’s like the old newspaperman’s adage: “Dog Bites Man” is not a story, but “Man Bites Dog” is. A story happens whenever something out of the ordinary happens, something that only happens once in the lives of the characters who figure within it. Anything else is just a character sketch or a situation from which there is no outcome. In other words, the very nature of a story mandates that the principle characters journey through events remarkable enough to trouble an author to write about them. Characters cannot go through such events without being at a different place, physically or emotionally, than they were at the beginning. Being in a different place is just another way of saying that the characters have transformed.
So rather than asking if characters must change for a story to be successful, perhaps it is more useful to ask whether the story takes its characters from one place to another—that is, if anything happens in the story. Likewise, if the characters in a story do honestly feel static throughout (really static, not like Frank or Scarlet), then it is a sign that the story hasn’t become a story yet. Once it blossoms, there is no choice for characters but to change, as surely as the tide is pulled by the moon, for change is the by-product of story.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Story Euphoria 10: A Christmas Carol, Stave 3
Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol continues with Stave 3, The Second of the Three Spirits. Download and listen!
If you missed the first two episodes of this series, check out the previous December podcasts.
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Magical Mystery by Forsonmeyer
and a medley on O Come All Ye Faithful, by Larkin Productions
Christmas Spirits
Most of the stories this time of year have something to do with Santa Claus or dysfunctional families finding the Christmas spirit despite their many mishaps, et cetera. Yet there is another kind of spirit that used to haunt the fireside this time of year—the more sepulchral sort that nowadays we more commonly associate with Halloween. But in the 19th century, ghost stories were a staple of Christmas Eve gatherings. Little wonder then, that Charles Dickens made a tradition of writing short stories with ghostly themes around the 25th of December.
Perhaps this was merely the consequence of gathering family and friends together on a cold and long winter’s night—what better way to pass the time? People told stories a lot more in those days, rather than letting the television do it for them. Furthermore, Victorians had an appetite for ghost stories, which littered all sorts of publications from magazines to monographs, and no doubt the shelves filled with annual collections when the end of the year rolled around. Moreover, telling scary stories around a fire fit well with other activities and games of the season that likewise have nothing in particular to do with Christmas—charades, cards, and blind man’s bluff—which are simply party entertainments. One version of the ghost story game followed the rule that a new bundle of sticks would be thrown on the fire at the beginning of each person’s story and the tale had to last as long as it took the sticks to burn.
The popularity of Christmas Eve ghost stories is well documented, with Dickens’ stories standing out as the most well-known. Jerome K. Jerome once wrote, “whenever five or six English-speaking people meet around a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories.” Also, Henry James’ unnerving ghost story, The Turn of the Screw begins with a frame where friends are trading spooky stories around a fireplace on Christmas Eve. Echoes of this quirky tradition can still be seen today, such as in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, or as referenced in the lyrics from the 1963 Andy Williams song, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year: “There'll be parties for hosting, marshmallows for toasting and caroling out in the snow. There'll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.”
It would be a shame to let the tradition vanish. We don’t tell stories nearly often enough as it is. Next time you are at a party on a long dark night, frost encrusting the window panes, saturated with fatty foods and punch, gather round in a circle and give it a shot. You might just be able to conjure the spirit of storytelling back to life.
Perhaps this was merely the consequence of gathering family and friends together on a cold and long winter’s night—what better way to pass the time? People told stories a lot more in those days, rather than letting the television do it for them. Furthermore, Victorians had an appetite for ghost stories, which littered all sorts of publications from magazines to monographs, and no doubt the shelves filled with annual collections when the end of the year rolled around. Moreover, telling scary stories around a fire fit well with other activities and games of the season that likewise have nothing in particular to do with Christmas—charades, cards, and blind man’s bluff—which are simply party entertainments. One version of the ghost story game followed the rule that a new bundle of sticks would be thrown on the fire at the beginning of each person’s story and the tale had to last as long as it took the sticks to burn.
The popularity of Christmas Eve ghost stories is well documented, with Dickens’ stories standing out as the most well-known. Jerome K. Jerome once wrote, “whenever five or six English-speaking people meet around a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories.” Also, Henry James’ unnerving ghost story, The Turn of the Screw begins with a frame where friends are trading spooky stories around a fireplace on Christmas Eve. Echoes of this quirky tradition can still be seen today, such as in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, or as referenced in the lyrics from the 1963 Andy Williams song, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year: “There'll be parties for hosting, marshmallows for toasting and caroling out in the snow. There'll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.”
It would be a shame to let the tradition vanish. We don’t tell stories nearly often enough as it is. Next time you are at a party on a long dark night, frost encrusting the window panes, saturated with fatty foods and punch, gather round in a circle and give it a shot. You might just be able to conjure the spirit of storytelling back to life.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Story Euphoria 9: A Christmas Carol, Stave 2
Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol continues with Stave 2, The First of the Three Spirits. Download and listen!
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Magical Mystery by Forsonmeyer
and Jingle Banjos, by G.H. Wikfors
Author Spotlight: Charles Dickens
Biographies of Dickens abound, and one short blog entry cannot hope to cover all the facets of any man’s life, yet, in tandem with Story Euphoria’s four-week celebration of A Christmas Carol, it’s worthwhile to take another look at the life events that shaped his writing.
Innovations in paper-making and the publishing industry that accompanied the Industrial Revolution allowed a popular author like Charles Dickens to reach a larger audience than any writer before his time, both in England and abroad. It was estimated that one in ten literate adults in Great Britain read Dickens, and that these readers frequently read his works aloud to many others. He was beloved in his own time for much the same thing he is admired for today—a talent for crafting memorable characters, often using natural speech and slang from across all levels of society. Because of these large and diverse casts, Dickens’ stories did indeed appeal to privileged and poor readers alike, no doubt helped along by larger-than-life plots that, while often displaying dark sides, frequently incorporated fairy tale turns of fate, as in the story of Oliver Twist, the orphan who goes from rags to riches, or in the frequent number of happy love matches that protagonists find by the end of the novel. In the 19th century as today, people loved happy endings, and Victorian taste was such that Dickens did not have to worry about coming across as “too sentimental.”
That is not to say Dickens’ tales are all roses and sunshine. Far from it. If protagonists find happiness by the end of the story, it is only after experiencing many trials. Themes of abandonment and betrayal are rampant, frequently embodied as ill-treated children, such as Oliver, David Copperfield, and poor Little Nell, one character who does not survive her story, The Old Curiosity Shop, or meet with any happy end. Dickens himself claimed this was due to the fact that, when he was twelve years old, his father’s financial mismanagement landed the elder Dickens in debtor’s prison. The entire family went to live there with him with the exception of Charles, who was sent to work at a shoe-blacking factory. The jarring transition from his middle-class and genteel upbringing to work as a factory boy was traumatizing to Dickens, and he never could forgive his mother who, even after the family managed to get free of the debt collectors, wished to see Charles remain at the factory. His father spared him the fate, instead sending him to attend a day school. Surely this pivotal crossroads haunted Dickens, for he narrowly escaped an uneducated and mean existence from which he almost certainly couldn’t have emerged as an author.
Whatever the case, it’s clear that this episode became a source of creativity for Dickens, providing an unending supply of material for plots and his colorful characters. This is seen prevalently in David Copperfield, a semi-autobiographical novel, in which the title protagonist goes through experiences that echo young Dickens’ own life. Also, one of the more memorable characters (and an incorrigible mismanager of money), Mr. Micawber, is a caricature of Dickens’ father. Likewise, Dickens drew on these early years when writing Little Dorrit, which begins with the principal family of the story living in debtor’s prison. And it is surely no coincidence that those family members constantly hound and take advantage of the title protagonist, much as Dickens’ own family badgered him for money after he became a successful author.
These characters (often caricatures, exaggerating qualities Dickens observed in those around him) might easily be criticized by the modern literary scholar as “flat.” In fact, Dickens’ minor characters are notoriously affixed throughout the entire course of his novels with repetitive tag lines and characteristics that never change—that’s how we know them. The effect is comical, and students of writing today would be leery to allow simplistic characters to inhabit their stories for the sole purpose of comic relief. Every character should add meaning to the story, should be real and “round,” even minor ones. Writers should know intimately every character who appears, even if they share but one line of dialogue. Caricatures, after all, are predictable and therefore not interesting, not alive.
So why do Dickens’ most boiled down caricatures still manage to resonate, to vibrate with something more? Take, for example, Mrs. Micawber who, in David Copperfield, seems to appear only for the purpose of delivering the laugh line, “I never will desert Mr. Micawber.” This is what she says from beginning to end, and indeed, she never does desert him.
The point, perhaps, is that characters can be flat but still be true and embody something vital about human nature. While many of Dickens characters may be considered “flat” by modern standards, his magic touch lies in his careful choice of what he caricatures. While Mrs. Micawber remains static and predictable throughout the narrative, her character still achieves a funny sort of complexity simply because her catch phrase reveals something about the human condition, and about who she really is: a housewife devoted to publicly maintaining a noble-sounding but deluded standard. This doesn’t make her a “round” character, but it does make her an interesting one.
In short, any student of literature interested in the possibilities of characterization would do well to read Dickens. A commentary on Dickens work, in an 1858 publication of Blackwoods’ Edinburgh Magazine, put it this way: "we are engrossed with a few favorite personages, and are delighted when they appear, look with eagerness for their return, and when the book is closed, we have some vague impression that we may possibly catch sight of them somewhere about the world.”
Innovations in paper-making and the publishing industry that accompanied the Industrial Revolution allowed a popular author like Charles Dickens to reach a larger audience than any writer before his time, both in England and abroad. It was estimated that one in ten literate adults in Great Britain read Dickens, and that these readers frequently read his works aloud to many others. He was beloved in his own time for much the same thing he is admired for today—a talent for crafting memorable characters, often using natural speech and slang from across all levels of society. Because of these large and diverse casts, Dickens’ stories did indeed appeal to privileged and poor readers alike, no doubt helped along by larger-than-life plots that, while often displaying dark sides, frequently incorporated fairy tale turns of fate, as in the story of Oliver Twist, the orphan who goes from rags to riches, or in the frequent number of happy love matches that protagonists find by the end of the novel. In the 19th century as today, people loved happy endings, and Victorian taste was such that Dickens did not have to worry about coming across as “too sentimental.”
That is not to say Dickens’ tales are all roses and sunshine. Far from it. If protagonists find happiness by the end of the story, it is only after experiencing many trials. Themes of abandonment and betrayal are rampant, frequently embodied as ill-treated children, such as Oliver, David Copperfield, and poor Little Nell, one character who does not survive her story, The Old Curiosity Shop, or meet with any happy end. Dickens himself claimed this was due to the fact that, when he was twelve years old, his father’s financial mismanagement landed the elder Dickens in debtor’s prison. The entire family went to live there with him with the exception of Charles, who was sent to work at a shoe-blacking factory. The jarring transition from his middle-class and genteel upbringing to work as a factory boy was traumatizing to Dickens, and he never could forgive his mother who, even after the family managed to get free of the debt collectors, wished to see Charles remain at the factory. His father spared him the fate, instead sending him to attend a day school. Surely this pivotal crossroads haunted Dickens, for he narrowly escaped an uneducated and mean existence from which he almost certainly couldn’t have emerged as an author.
Whatever the case, it’s clear that this episode became a source of creativity for Dickens, providing an unending supply of material for plots and his colorful characters. This is seen prevalently in David Copperfield, a semi-autobiographical novel, in which the title protagonist goes through experiences that echo young Dickens’ own life. Also, one of the more memorable characters (and an incorrigible mismanager of money), Mr. Micawber, is a caricature of Dickens’ father. Likewise, Dickens drew on these early years when writing Little Dorrit, which begins with the principal family of the story living in debtor’s prison. And it is surely no coincidence that those family members constantly hound and take advantage of the title protagonist, much as Dickens’ own family badgered him for money after he became a successful author.
These characters (often caricatures, exaggerating qualities Dickens observed in those around him) might easily be criticized by the modern literary scholar as “flat.” In fact, Dickens’ minor characters are notoriously affixed throughout the entire course of his novels with repetitive tag lines and characteristics that never change—that’s how we know them. The effect is comical, and students of writing today would be leery to allow simplistic characters to inhabit their stories for the sole purpose of comic relief. Every character should add meaning to the story, should be real and “round,” even minor ones. Writers should know intimately every character who appears, even if they share but one line of dialogue. Caricatures, after all, are predictable and therefore not interesting, not alive.
So why do Dickens’ most boiled down caricatures still manage to resonate, to vibrate with something more? Take, for example, Mrs. Micawber who, in David Copperfield, seems to appear only for the purpose of delivering the laugh line, “I never will desert Mr. Micawber.” This is what she says from beginning to end, and indeed, she never does desert him.
The point, perhaps, is that characters can be flat but still be true and embody something vital about human nature. While many of Dickens characters may be considered “flat” by modern standards, his magic touch lies in his careful choice of what he caricatures. While Mrs. Micawber remains static and predictable throughout the narrative, her character still achieves a funny sort of complexity simply because her catch phrase reveals something about the human condition, and about who she really is: a housewife devoted to publicly maintaining a noble-sounding but deluded standard. This doesn’t make her a “round” character, but it does make her an interesting one.
In short, any student of literature interested in the possibilities of characterization would do well to read Dickens. A commentary on Dickens work, in an 1858 publication of Blackwoods’ Edinburgh Magazine, put it this way: "we are engrossed with a few favorite personages, and are delighted when they appear, look with eagerness for their return, and when the book is closed, we have some vague impression that we may possibly catch sight of them somewhere about the world.”
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Story Euphoria 8: A Christmas Carol, Stave 1
It's not much of an exaggeration to say "everyone" knows this story. We are surrounded by various adaptations where Muppets or modern misers in Brooklyn step in to fill familiar roles, yet when was the last time (if ever) you read Dickens' original? Our December-long journey through Dickens' timeless tale starts here. Download and listen!
If you want to follow along this month with a text of your own, you can get a digital copy for free from Project Gutenberg, or check your local library. You might also consider making a gift of it this season (maybe to yourself):
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Magical Mystery by Forsonmeyer
and God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen performed by Bob Couchenour
The Makings of a Timeless Classic
In the short story collection, You’ve Got to Read This, John Irving introduces A Christmas Carol by relating a story from a time he spent living with a circus in northwest India. One afternoon he was having tea in the ringmaster’s tent when he was surprised by an overheard snatch of English dialogue from a nearby TV. He at once recognized the voice as that of Jacob Marley’s Ghost, crying out against Scrooge’s compliment on his business skills: “Business! Mankind was my business.” He wandered over to the television to find a troupe of child acrobats seated on rugs, glued to the TV. He was surprised by their fascination, as he writes, “If the principal point of A Christmas Carol is that Scrooge reforms—that he learns ‘how to keep Christmas well’—these child acrobats had never kept Christmas at all; moreover, they never would keep it. Also, they spoke and understood little English, yet they knew and loved the tale.”
Mistaking Irving’s bemused curiosity for unfamiliarity with the tale, one child attempted to explain who the characters were and what was happening. Irving tried to convey his own understanding when he replied to her, “A Christmas Carol.” But the words didn’t seem to mean anything. Then the ringmaster, also not a man who kept Christmas, explained to him, “The children’s favorite ghost story.”
Indeed, A Christmas Carol is a ghost story. It is also a Christmas story. It is both and it is more than either of these things, or how else to explain the popularity the tale has achieved globally, with translations extant in every language group and countless adaptations to stage, opera, film and television. Dickens’ novella has been credited with popularizing the expression, “Merry Christmas,” and of course gave us, “Bah! Humbug!” When Thomas Carlyle, a Calvinistic thinker of the times, read A Christmas Carol, he was, rather out-of-character, “seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality,” according to his wife. Indeed, so wide is the influence of this little ghost story that it has never been out of print since it first appeared in 1843.
How to explain it?
It helped that A Christmas Carol appeared in a perfect storm of conditions. Victorian England was undergoing a rejuvenated interest in old Christmas traditions, as well as introducing new traditions like the Christmas Tree, providing fertile soil for this tale to blossom. Furthermore, Dickens was already a popular writer and had a veritable mob of loyal fans who would insure the work was not overlooked. Yet these factors alone would not be enough to catapult the novella into the status it enjoys today as a Timeless Classic. After all, if it was just about Christmas Irving would not have had that charming experience in the circus tent, and none of Dickens works is nearly so ubiquitous, though equally loved by his fans, past and present.
I think it comes down to the fact that this tale is a warning, as Marley tells us in the very first “stave,” which all humans, regardless of culture or era, cannot help but heed. Scrooge’s adventure shows us clearly and believably that the greatest wealth is derived in equal proportion to our capacity for sympathy and generosity, and the cost of not cultivating these gifts is to die unmourned and unloved. Interestingly, Dickens conveys all of this through use of the prototypical hero’s journey.
Joseph Campbell, philosopher and mythologist, popularized the theory that all myths across time and culture share common elements, and in particular he thought hero myths exemplified this “monomyth” tendency. Campbell summarized the cycle of the hero’s journey in his 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
The infamous Ebenezer Scrooge—a geriatric and antisocial “old sinner”—may seem like a bizarre choice of hero, but the elements of the hero’s journey play out to the letter! If Campbell is correct that all cultures have such stories, then it is no wonder the Hindu children in the circus tent loved the tale as much as Christian children in the West. Like all of the greatest stories, A Christmas Carol speaks to the most basic human fears and desires, and furthermore, it offers hope that even the nastiest members of our species can change.
Mistaking Irving’s bemused curiosity for unfamiliarity with the tale, one child attempted to explain who the characters were and what was happening. Irving tried to convey his own understanding when he replied to her, “A Christmas Carol.” But the words didn’t seem to mean anything. Then the ringmaster, also not a man who kept Christmas, explained to him, “The children’s favorite ghost story.”
Indeed, A Christmas Carol is a ghost story. It is also a Christmas story. It is both and it is more than either of these things, or how else to explain the popularity the tale has achieved globally, with translations extant in every language group and countless adaptations to stage, opera, film and television. Dickens’ novella has been credited with popularizing the expression, “Merry Christmas,” and of course gave us, “Bah! Humbug!” When Thomas Carlyle, a Calvinistic thinker of the times, read A Christmas Carol, he was, rather out-of-character, “seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality,” according to his wife. Indeed, so wide is the influence of this little ghost story that it has never been out of print since it first appeared in 1843.
How to explain it?
It helped that A Christmas Carol appeared in a perfect storm of conditions. Victorian England was undergoing a rejuvenated interest in old Christmas traditions, as well as introducing new traditions like the Christmas Tree, providing fertile soil for this tale to blossom. Furthermore, Dickens was already a popular writer and had a veritable mob of loyal fans who would insure the work was not overlooked. Yet these factors alone would not be enough to catapult the novella into the status it enjoys today as a Timeless Classic. After all, if it was just about Christmas Irving would not have had that charming experience in the circus tent, and none of Dickens works is nearly so ubiquitous, though equally loved by his fans, past and present.
I think it comes down to the fact that this tale is a warning, as Marley tells us in the very first “stave,” which all humans, regardless of culture or era, cannot help but heed. Scrooge’s adventure shows us clearly and believably that the greatest wealth is derived in equal proportion to our capacity for sympathy and generosity, and the cost of not cultivating these gifts is to die unmourned and unloved. Interestingly, Dickens conveys all of this through use of the prototypical hero’s journey.
Joseph Campbell, philosopher and mythologist, popularized the theory that all myths across time and culture share common elements, and in particular he thought hero myths exemplified this “monomyth” tendency. Campbell summarized the cycle of the hero’s journey in his 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” The infamous Ebenezer Scrooge—a geriatric and antisocial “old sinner”—may seem like a bizarre choice of hero, but the elements of the hero’s journey play out to the letter! If Campbell is correct that all cultures have such stories, then it is no wonder the Hindu children in the circus tent loved the tale as much as Christian children in the West. Like all of the greatest stories, A Christmas Carol speaks to the most basic human fears and desires, and furthermore, it offers hope that even the nastiest members of our species can change.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Story Euphoria 7: Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen
It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and O. Henry lampoons Tradition and treats us to no less than two feasts, both of which must be, heroically, eaten by one man. Download and listen!
In case you are wondering about the Turkey Trust mentioned in the first paragraph, you can check out this New York Times article for a point of reference.
To read from The Trimmed Lamp, and other Stories of the Four Million for free, visit Project Gutenberg, or else borrow an O. Henry collection from your local library. Of course, you can always dress out your home library with a copy of your own:
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Rag by David Alberto
The Perils of a Twist Ending
To be honest, I’m not a fan of twist endings. There are just too many things that can go wrong, like maybe it will be obvious from a mile away, or it’s the same cliché twist found in a hundred other stories, or it just doesn’t add anything to the story and is therefore anti-climactic. Those problems can potentially be avoided if the twist is inspired and clever, but even then there is a big risk: the story itself relies upon the sudden revelation at the end to inform all of the events that have come before, so the only pay off of reading the story is the twist and re-readability is zilch. In short, a good twist ending is hard to pull off and probably not worth it, so I doubt I would ever attempt one myself.
Twist endings and related varieties of dramatic ends were quite a bit more popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, it was more common to have your protagonist suddenly die or kill themselves in the last few paragraphs, perhaps because of a greater sense that ends really had to be final, whereas contemporary tastes not only find such conclusions melodramatic but are more apt to find satisfaction in stories that continue past the last pages of the manuscript, inviting our imaginations to linger upon them. Twist endings tend to feel as worn-out as last-page-protagonist-suicides, and I am hard-pressed to think of any authors who use them today—though there are probably a few out there.
However, there is a distinguished modern literary award that bears the name of perhaps the greatest twist-ending writer of them all: O. Henry. Because O. Henry incorporated a twist in the ending of basically every story he wrote, one almost wonders if some of the supposed unpredictability of the twist is compromised. Yet, while many people love O. Henry for just this very reason, I think what really makes him worth reading is his use of humor. Fortunately, there is more to his writing than the twist endings, which tend to work rather like the punch lines of jokes, and the characters he brings to life have an unpolished honesty and intimacy evocative of another American Everyman, Mark Twain.
What a fitting choice for America’s Thanksgiving weekend podcast story, when something as down-home and friendly O. Henry makes a proper addition to the comfort food on our tables. Of course, this story also comes with a patented twist ending. Do you think the ending works and adds to the story? Do you love twist endings and think I got it all wrong, or do you agree that such flourishes of the pen are all too fraught with peril?
Twist endings and related varieties of dramatic ends were quite a bit more popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, it was more common to have your protagonist suddenly die or kill themselves in the last few paragraphs, perhaps because of a greater sense that ends really had to be final, whereas contemporary tastes not only find such conclusions melodramatic but are more apt to find satisfaction in stories that continue past the last pages of the manuscript, inviting our imaginations to linger upon them. Twist endings tend to feel as worn-out as last-page-protagonist-suicides, and I am hard-pressed to think of any authors who use them today—though there are probably a few out there.
However, there is a distinguished modern literary award that bears the name of perhaps the greatest twist-ending writer of them all: O. Henry. Because O. Henry incorporated a twist in the ending of basically every story he wrote, one almost wonders if some of the supposed unpredictability of the twist is compromised. Yet, while many people love O. Henry for just this very reason, I think what really makes him worth reading is his use of humor. Fortunately, there is more to his writing than the twist endings, which tend to work rather like the punch lines of jokes, and the characters he brings to life have an unpolished honesty and intimacy evocative of another American Everyman, Mark Twain.
What a fitting choice for America’s Thanksgiving weekend podcast story, when something as down-home and friendly O. Henry makes a proper addition to the comfort food on our tables. Of course, this story also comes with a patented twist ending. Do you think the ending works and adds to the story? Do you love twist endings and think I got it all wrong, or do you agree that such flourishes of the pen are all too fraught with peril?
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Story Euphoria 6: Longhouse Stories
It’s American Indian Heritage Month, and seeing as how these nations have a rich oral tradition, Story Euphoria brings traditional storytelling to the forefront. Learn how Chipmunk got his stripes, why Rabbit has long ears and how Owl got such big eyes. Download and listen!
If you want more, check out this free online library of American Indian stories and legends.
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Flight of the Arrows by Kathy Reynolds
Oral Origins
The Odyssey, as (presumably) created by Homer was composed primarily in dactyllic hexameter, which was very much the thing at the time. This means the lines of poetry had six beats each, with each measure being a triplet, so the rhythm would have been: BUM-da-da BUM-da-da, BUM-da-da, etc., wash and repeat. This might very well be musical in Greek, but in English the result tends to be awkward at best, or, as one anonymous translation reviewer put it, akin to “pumpkins rolling on a barn floor.”
So, over the years, translations of The Odyssey have taken strange forms, such as putting the tale in rhymed iambic pentameter, as George Chapman did in 1616 (which was very much the thing in his time), and though quite entertaining, it’s not considered very accurate to the original. In 1961, Robert Fitzgerald received wide acclaim for a translation that did away with attempts at rhythmic symmetry, casting Homer’s words into unrhymed poetry with lines of unequal length. Then there are plenty of translations that throw out poetry altogether, weaving the tale as a piece of prose. In fact, more than 24 translations of The Odyssey into English are available on the market. Would Homer recognize any of them as his own work?
This question is not just about what gets lost in translation. The epic ballad had to get written down in Greek before it could even be translated hundreds of years later into a tongue that didn’t even exist in Homer’s time. And in fact, the idea of fixing in print a story intended for oral performance, the presentation of which probably would have been tailored to the audience and the taste of the performer, would very likely seem alien or even ghastly to Homer and his contemporary bards. When the notion of putting information in writing first took root in Greece, with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, Socrates argued against it as a meaningless crutch that would seem to give students information without actually giving them knowledge. He believed discourse to be a far superior tool, describing it in dialog with Phaedrus as the “...living word of knowledge which has a soul and of which the written word is properly no more than an image...”
Nowadays we take writing for granted. Our society is surrounded and shaped by text, which is our primary means of storing information. Yet, for the bulk of human history, knowledge and culture were passed on orally through story and song, from teacher to student.
Few societies survive today that maintain an operating oral tradition, but interest in the oral packaging of information is more than a historical or anthropological side-track. A great deal of excitement has appeared over the past couple of decades as social scientists, communications experts and philosophers contemplate the future of the written word, some of whom predict that writing is on the way out to be replaced by oral tradition 2.0—a heady cocktail of sound and image-based hyper-media accessible through the internet, wireless devices and even chips implanted in our brains that allow us to communicate telepathically (yes, this has been done).
At first glance, the way we store and transmit information may not seem to matter, so long as the information is transmitted. However, since Marshall McLuhan first argued that “the medium is the message,” an increasing number of communications theorists and historians, such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Dene Grigar, have suggested that the way we handle information has more impact on our society and culture than the information itself. This can be explored by studying the impact of writing on society, which Leonard Shlain argues in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess gave rise to patriarchy over mother-goddess traditions by favoring word-signs over image-signs. Another example is the fascinating transformative power of the printing press on everything from national economies to religious reform. If this train of thought interests you, I highly recommend William Sonn’s book on the subject, Paradigms Lost: The Life and Deaths of the Printed Word
.
If we truly are headed to a revival of oral and audio-based information fluency, what might our society be like in the future? Will the written word become an obsolete technology, or will it continue to coexist with the new, being incorporated in unforeseen ways, as most old technologies do? As we contemplate these questions, let’s take another look at the oral tradition of storytelling. This week’s podcast features two American Indian stories told the traditional way—completely from memory. Because human memory is imperfect and limited, there has been a tendency in modern Western culture to look at oral information as inferior to text, which maintains fixity. Yet because of this same quality, I suspect orally-oriented cultures are more comfortable with change and improvisation.
So, if contemplating the death of the written word pierces you with the cold dagger of dread and dystopia, it may be a result of text-based socialization. We are a product of our time and place, and perhaps the stories of the future would seem as bizarre to us as Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey would seem to Homer. Change is inevitable; the real question is whether the change will maximize benefit to civilization, and how much we can do to insure it does. On that note, I also recommend taking a look at the work of Marshall McLuhan:
So, over the years, translations of The Odyssey have taken strange forms, such as putting the tale in rhymed iambic pentameter, as George Chapman did in 1616 (which was very much the thing in his time), and though quite entertaining, it’s not considered very accurate to the original. In 1961, Robert Fitzgerald received wide acclaim for a translation that did away with attempts at rhythmic symmetry, casting Homer’s words into unrhymed poetry with lines of unequal length. Then there are plenty of translations that throw out poetry altogether, weaving the tale as a piece of prose. In fact, more than 24 translations of The Odyssey into English are available on the market. Would Homer recognize any of them as his own work?
This question is not just about what gets lost in translation. The epic ballad had to get written down in Greek before it could even be translated hundreds of years later into a tongue that didn’t even exist in Homer’s time. And in fact, the idea of fixing in print a story intended for oral performance, the presentation of which probably would have been tailored to the audience and the taste of the performer, would very likely seem alien or even ghastly to Homer and his contemporary bards. When the notion of putting information in writing first took root in Greece, with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, Socrates argued against it as a meaningless crutch that would seem to give students information without actually giving them knowledge. He believed discourse to be a far superior tool, describing it in dialog with Phaedrus as the “...living word of knowledge which has a soul and of which the written word is properly no more than an image...”
Nowadays we take writing for granted. Our society is surrounded and shaped by text, which is our primary means of storing information. Yet, for the bulk of human history, knowledge and culture were passed on orally through story and song, from teacher to student.
Few societies survive today that maintain an operating oral tradition, but interest in the oral packaging of information is more than a historical or anthropological side-track. A great deal of excitement has appeared over the past couple of decades as social scientists, communications experts and philosophers contemplate the future of the written word, some of whom predict that writing is on the way out to be replaced by oral tradition 2.0—a heady cocktail of sound and image-based hyper-media accessible through the internet, wireless devices and even chips implanted in our brains that allow us to communicate telepathically (yes, this has been done).
At first glance, the way we store and transmit information may not seem to matter, so long as the information is transmitted. However, since Marshall McLuhan first argued that “the medium is the message,” an increasing number of communications theorists and historians, such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Dene Grigar, have suggested that the way we handle information has more impact on our society and culture than the information itself. This can be explored by studying the impact of writing on society, which Leonard Shlain argues in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess gave rise to patriarchy over mother-goddess traditions by favoring word-signs over image-signs. Another example is the fascinating transformative power of the printing press on everything from national economies to religious reform. If this train of thought interests you, I highly recommend William Sonn’s book on the subject, Paradigms Lost: The Life and Deaths of the Printed Word
. If we truly are headed to a revival of oral and audio-based information fluency, what might our society be like in the future? Will the written word become an obsolete technology, or will it continue to coexist with the new, being incorporated in unforeseen ways, as most old technologies do? As we contemplate these questions, let’s take another look at the oral tradition of storytelling. This week’s podcast features two American Indian stories told the traditional way—completely from memory. Because human memory is imperfect and limited, there has been a tendency in modern Western culture to look at oral information as inferior to text, which maintains fixity. Yet because of this same quality, I suspect orally-oriented cultures are more comfortable with change and improvisation.
So, if contemplating the death of the written word pierces you with the cold dagger of dread and dystopia, it may be a result of text-based socialization. We are a product of our time and place, and perhaps the stories of the future would seem as bizarre to us as Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey would seem to Homer. Change is inevitable; the real question is whether the change will maximize benefit to civilization, and how much we can do to insure it does. On that note, I also recommend taking a look at the work of Marshall McLuhan:
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Story Euphoria 5: Rothschild's Fiddle
This week’s podcast features a man who is hardly the sort you’re likely to invite over for tea. Yakov is a coffin maker whose existence is perpetuated—as well as tortured—by the losses he sees all around him. Anton Chekhov was a master at capturing the harsh and ironic voices of the Russian peasantry, and this is certainly the case in Rothschild’s Fiddle. Download and listen!
If you would like to read the same text I used, check it out at Project Gutenberg. Otherwise consider your local library, or snag a collection of Chekhov’s tales for yourself:
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Gotta Go by Wicker Basket
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