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:

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.

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?

The Allure of the Creeps

The “creeps” I’m talking about are those fascinating tingles you get when you hear tales of headless Anne Boleyn walking the halls of the Tower, or catch a sound bite from that kitschy “documentary” show, Unsolved Mysteries on the TV. There’s long been something about ghosts, goblins and sinister deeds that holds our imaginations enraptured. But what is it?

Anyone who has been in a truly frightening situation—a victim of a crime or a near-death accident—can attest that really, there is nothing fun about being terrified, and traumatic experiences may even lead to long-term psychological pain. So, why is it we all enjoy a good scary story? Even if the average blood-dripping horror film is not your choice entertainment, chances are you once sat passing a flashlight around a circle, sharing the most bone-chilling tales you could imagine—probably some you even claimed were true! There were at least two stories about a menacing hitchhiker. And another where someone ended up hung from a tree.

If you don’t believe that fear “sells” itself, just look at the headlines in the papers. There’s nothing like a disaster to keep us glued to our TVs and radios. Perhaps this more serious form of fear is related to the pleasure we derive from scary stories: in both situations, we are tucked safely in our homes and can give long leash to the deep, primordial parts of our brains that thrive on intense emotion. I can think of no other handy explanation to affix to the eagerness with which we turn the pages of a thriller, even when the shadows in our own little bedroom begin to leap at us.

On that note, in honor of All Hallows Eve, I’d like to share two little ghost stories with you, so that I might make the shadows leap—at least a little—for you. These two stories are quite different, but in more ways I find them similar, especially in their structure, which makes them “classic” ghost stories.

For example, both of these stories utilize a frame, which is a common device. This technique sets us up with a narrator who is going to tell us the “actual” story, usually proclaiming that they don’t pretend to understand it and can only relate what happened to them (or to the person who told them the tale, in the third-party version)—to let the facts stand for themselves, as it were. Presumably, this structure makes the supernatural events seem more credible because they are being related by a witness. In other words, it forces us to approach the story as an “account” rather than as a “story,” as such.

Furthermore, the outside layer acts as a gateway that forces us to come “into” the story in a way that is not necessary when the “real story” starts in the first sentence, the aim being to immerse the reader more deeply in the world of the story through the application of layers. This might make the ghost story have greater impact because it has real impact on the frame story characters. This is similar to the magical effects of the Arabian Nights stories (see the October 17 discussion), which must indeed be something magnificent if they are enough to keep the sultan from executing his command!—i.e., the mystical power the inner story has on the frame characters may be transmitted to us.

Lastly, a frame story sets the stage. Usually, the characters at the beginning will warn us that what we are about to hear is so terrifying it remains indelibly in the mind, often driving the narrator to terrors whenever he thinks of it. Well, in that case, of course we must keep reading!

As mentioned, this frame technique has been used in innumerable ghost stories, from Edgar Allen Poe’s common use of retrospective-first-person narration to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, where we begin gathered around a fire (as the best ghost stories often do). Perhaps the most complex use of the scary-story-frame I’ve yet seen was achieved by Mark Z. Danielewski in House of Leaves, where our narrator is telling a story that yet another character was attempting to archive (but died in the process—mysteriously, of course), and in the effort of relating events, the outermost frame character is gradually driven mad, apparently approaching a similar fate to his predecessor. There are a lot of remarks that could be made about this eccentric and noteworthy novel, but they are beyond the scope of this post.

As for other similarities between the two ghost stories featured this week, you’ll just have to listen and judge for yourself—though personally, I think it’s in the use of details at just the right moments: The clinging black hairs, for example, or poor Mrs. Bird, washing the dishes all over again…

Read more creepy stories from Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman and Guy de Maupassant online, or else check out your local library or buy something for your home collection:

Freeman's Collected Ghost Stories

In Their Own Words

Last week I was interested in the idea of “sympathy”—the way a story invites us into the world of its characters, how we naturally identify with protagonists, even those who are not “likeable,” and even when they are very different from ourselves. Arguably, the process of identification, the sense that we are immersed the story, is what makes a story fun. However, not all stories excel equally in this department, and there are many different tools an author can use to get us into the skins of their characters.

One of my favorite techniques is the free indirect style, sometimes called the “close third person.” This is quite different from the objective or omniscient third, can be thought of as both subjective and limited, but is distinctive in the degree to which it allows the character’s own language to infect the author’s—to such an extent, in fact, that the narrative becomes fluid, moving between the character’s language and the author’s (often more poetic) language, without barriers like quotation marks placed between. Such an approach provides that intensity most often associated with first-person narration while still leaving room for the author’s insightful observations or turns of phrase to shed light on the character that the character himself might not choose: Inelegant characters, for example can still be expressed elegantly without sacrificing closeness.

There are certain situations where this is a particularly useful storytelling technique. Right now I’m working on a story told largely from a dog’s point of view. I elected to write in the third person and use a number of free indirect moments because my goal is both to minimize barriers between human readers and the canine characters while at the same time give these creatures a form of expression they themselves are extremely unlikely to employ (that is, the dogs are relatively realistic dogs, not cartoon dogs). I am hardly the first person to do this; Paul Auster does a very similar thing in his “dog book,” Timbuktu, although his mangy protagonist is gifted with exceptional acumen and sensibility.

Another situation where a free indirect third can be quite useful is when the story’s point-of-view character is a child, allowing us to inhabit the world of children without sacrificing a sophisticated literary style—which would be difficult to swallow if the story was told instead in the first-person. A famous example can be found in Henry James's novel, What Maisie Knew, a tangled web of a tale about divorce and adultery told from a child’s perspective. James pulls off the stunt by confining his observations to things the child herself directly observes, often employing her own interpretations and words, without sacrificing any of that sensitive and concentrated style that is so distinctly his own.

For example, on hearing the Captain speak kindly of her mother, Maisie bursts into tears, as James describes it:

“She became on the spot indifferent to her usual fear of showing what in children was notoriously most offensive—presented to her companion, soundlessly but hideously, her wet distorted face. She cried, with a pang, straight at him, cried as she had never cried at anyone in all her life. ‘Oh do you love her?’ she brought out with a gulp because that was the effect of her trying not to make a noise.

“It was doubtless another consequence of the thick mist through which she saw him that in reply to her question the Captain gave her such a queer blurred look.”

The first sentence describing Maisie’s tears is James describing with an adult perspective the effect of her weeping, but the second sentence is all Maisie, feeling the cry inside herself and the motion of her cry “at” the Captain. That “at” is Maisie’s word, as is the “noise” she’s trying not to make. You can almost imagine an adult in Maisie’s memory admonishing, “Oh don’t make such a noise!” Finally, the “queer blurred look” is Maisie’s innocent perception which James knowingly leaves his readers free to interpret with their more nuanced understanding of the Captain’s position.

James’s voice and Maisie’s have completely overlapped and become inseparable. Of course, this is not unusual for this writer, considering the frequency with which James employs a “stream of consciousness” throughout his stories, where a series of thoughts, winding ever deeper, erase the lines between author and character: their voices meld and become one. Other authors employ a similar technique and to an even greater extent allow the characters to completely take over during such moments. Virginia Woolf, for instance, certainly mastered the “stream of consciousness” technique, and I would consider her use to be one form of free indirect style.

James Joyce is another, more subtle master of the free indirect narrative. When reading Joyce there is a sense that every word was selected in deliberate reflection not only of how his characters perceive the world, but of how they assume their own purpose (or loss of purpose) within that world. A transformation of these perceptions almost always forms the dramatic climax in Joyce’s short stories. This week's podcast is one such short story, “A Painful Case,” which appears in Joyce’s iconic collection, The Dubliners. You can get the same text I read for free from Project Gutenberg, or, if you'd rather have the collection in hand, try your public library, or buy a copy of The Dubliners for your home library: