Originality and Tradition

I had such a great time listening to everyone's presentations over the last several classes! There was definitely a lot of thought and creativity put into these fairy tales, and even into how they were presented to the class. It ended up being just as much fun to listen to and figure out, as it was to write my own. I honestly wasn't sure what to expect out of this project when it was first assigned to us at the beginning of the semester, but overall I think I ended up having way more fun with it than I thought I would. And this may go down in the Kenny Johnson history books as one of the better midterm projects in recent memory. 

One of the major things that I've been starting to realize in this class, especially after listening to everyone else's stories, is that to the reader with a trained eye, the boundary between originality and tradition becomes much smaller than we once thought. And that is what we are becoming with this class and each progressive English class we complete: readers with increasingly trained and tuned-in eyes. It seems the more well-read we become, and the more we learn about the structure of stories, the easier it is to trace these displacements back to their source and determine which myth or folktale tradition they belong to, because they all belong to some former story of the past. 

This predictable and formulaic structure of stories throughout the ages shows that they have something more to offer us than mere entertainment. Stories shape who we are, define what it means to be a human, and offer all of us a common ground of support in a universe that is cold, indifferent, and bent on our destruction. As Frye says, "a mythological universe is a vision of reality in terms of human concerns and hopes and anxieties: it is not a primitive form of science" (14).

Now some may say that knowledge of structure, the ability to recognize which myth or folktale it relates to, and the attention to patterns and conventions would ruin stories entirely; it would take out all of the fun. It would make them too predictable, and cause us to lose interest and the ability to get sucked in. But I'd have to disagree. If anything, the realization that every story is an imitation connected to older stories makes them that much more profound and enjoyable. When we curl up on the couch to read that latest bestselling novel, or go out on a date to see that funny romantic comedy everyone's been talking about, we are engaging in the same activity that our ancestors thousands of years before us were doing when they gathered around the fire to tell tales of fearsome giants, great battles, and epic quests. When we engage ourselves with stories, we become a part of that same experience. Stories are the great universal connecting piece between people of all different cultures and ages. As humans, we all have the same questions, share the same fears, passions, and pleasures. Regardless of culture or era, all of us, in some way or another, share the same fundamental experiences. When we open the first page of that new book, it's not entirely crazy to imagine ourselves as a member of that ancient tribe, huddled around the same smoky, thousand-year-old fire. When we read that first sentence, it's not entirely crazy to consider ourselves as sitting under that same starry sky as the first words of a hero's long quest are spoken. And I don't think it would be entirely crazy to consider ourselves as sharing in their same journey. 

Since our first shallow plunge into the ocean at the beginning of the semester, I've been starting to notice more and more in the things I read outside of class, that stories I once considered highly original and innovative, are merely just very talented displacements of the great tales told before it. And the deeper we go into the ocean, the more connections and conventions I start to notice and the more I begin to realize that maybe this business of storytelling really isn't as complicated or cerebral as I once thought it was. This assignment got me thinking that maybe all it really requires is a lightly structured framework with a modest helping of imagination to fill the rest in. It seems that the best kinds of writers have never existed as a solitary island, or conjured up stories out of the thin air of their own minds. Instead, they have the full weight of humanity's storytelling knowledge and imagination at their fingertips, and draw upon it for their own creations. Much like Haroun's father in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, great storytellers seem to rely on that well, or invisible tap, that lives as a garden faucet in the base of everyone's mind. It is rooted in The Ocean and its source has been drilled deep into the wellspring of the human consciousness. The only problem is that some of our faucets are a little bit rusted, or maybe haven't had the valve opened up quite enough to allow for stronger streams. According to Haroun's father, Rashid, this ability to tell magnificent stories comes from, "the great Story Sea...I drink the warm Story Waters and then I feel full of steam" (17). And that is what we did with this assignment. We opened our tap, and drank from The Ocean of Stories to create the steam in our bellies that was the driving force for our displaced fairy tale. It's interesting now to see how even the most realistic of realities come from the most imaginary of places.      

We may not have had a brutal exam, or a long research paper or project to do for our class midterm (as so many of my friends in other departments had), but it seems like if we did the same thing as other departments then we wouldn't have learned as much. I think all too often we equate assignment length or difficulty with comprehensiveness, or with how much learning potential there is for the student. If we had an extensive, formal exam, then we would have just studied the material and proved our knowledge and understanding of the subject through rote memorization. And most likely the material would have been forgotten by next semester anyway. I couldn't even count how many things I've had to memorize over the course of my education just to pass a class, that I ended up forgetting only a few short months down the line. But this assignment offered us a chance to not just use and think about what we needed to learn, but to experience it ourselves. And I can't think of a better way to study stories than to immerse ourselves in them, work on creating our own, and share them with others. 

With all of the apparent structure and convention we've been able to pick out so far, there still remains a deeper layer to everything that is not structured or rooted in convention at all. It's the other half of storytelling that isn't able to be tested, much less defined; it can't be qualified or learned through exams, memorization, and research papers. This is what we call imagination, and it's something that can't really be captured or taught in a formal academic setting because it lies beyond the realm of reason and reality that we've learned to cling so tightly to. We may be able to learn the basic framework for a story through these methods, but without any participation or imagination our framework is pointless. Because what's the use of knowledge of formulas if there is no substance? What the use in studying a story, if not to use it to tell better stories of our own and more deeply appreciate the work that other storytellers do?         

A Displaced Fairytale

Two young children named Geraldo and Gabrielle were living on their parent's small potato farm outside Tijuana, Mexico. But the crops weren't doing too well since the drought had started, and the family was quickly running out of money. Sadly, the children's mother also had an unquenchable thirst for Tequila that was quite expensive. And rather than stop drinking, she suggested they send their children into the city tomorrow morning for good, to shine shoes, since they could no longer afford to feed them.

When Geraldo and Gabrielle overheard their parent's plan to abandon them in the mean streets of Tijuana they were at first very distraught as to how they would survive. But Geraldo remembered his father's old collection of maps in the garage and snuck out to grab one before the next morning so they could still find their way back home.

The parents woke them up early the next day and told Gabrielle and Geraldo they were taking a surprise trip into Tijuana so the family could shine shoes and help pay the month's bills, and they loaded everyone into their old Toyota pickup. When they arrived deep in the city's center, the parents gave them their rags and shoe polish, but stopped by an ice cream shop before starting the day's work. Geraldo and Gabrielle had never had ice cream before, and were endlessly thrilled and distracted by it's wonderful taste. While devouring the ice cream cones their mother and father slipped away quietly and headed home, leaving the children to survive on the mean streets of Tijuana.

Luckily the farm was just outside the city, and Geraldo wasn't concerned since he still had his map. However, just as he was pulling it out to look at it, a strong breeze caught it up and swept it away from him. They both chased, but to no avail. The map had been swept away for good.

They tried to find their way back, but having never been in such a large, mean city they ended up walking until nightfall and still had no idea where they were. Exhausted, they slept in an alleyway for the night.

The next morning they woke up starving with nothing to eat, and decided to use their rags and shoe polish to try and make some money to buy food. After a few hours of looking for work, a very old woman with a large coin purse, and the nicest pair of bright red shoes walked past them, and seeing their shoe polish, offered a very decent wage for shining them up. Geraldo and Gabrielle were quite good at this, and they impressed the old woman so much that she offered them a job at her shoe factory. They gladly accepted, but unknown to them, the old woman actually ran a child labor camp, and only fed them mere crumbs to work long hours everyday making shoes. The children were horrified when they realized how much trouble they had gotten themselves into, and feared they would never get out.

A week later, Gabrielle was ordered by the old woman to sew up some new shoes. But having never done this before, and Gabrielle being the cunning girl that she was, saw her opportunity and asked the old woman if she could come show her how. Furious, the old woman came over to show her how to run the large, industrial sewing machine, and just as she was starting it up, Gabrielle shoved her hands underneath the machine and they became tangled and sewn together so that she couldn't move at all. She grabbed the coin purse off her belt and made a dash with Geraldo out the door. They ran and ran and came upon a donkey rental station, where they met up with a helpful old bandelero who offered them a ride back to the farm in exchange for a few gold pieces.

When they returned, their father was overjoyed they had come back safely. And even more pleased to see they had brought back enough pesos to save the family farm, and put their drunken mother into rehab.

A Little Taste of Love on Valentine's Day

I'm no art critic but I'd have to say that among the paintings I looked at of Daphnis and Chloe, this one by Louis Hersent has to be my favorite of them all. But the main reason for this isn't because of the colors in the picture, or the composition, or because this is what I imagined them looking like when I read the story, even though those are all part of it. The one thing that stuck out to me is the unusual action that they happen to be doing in this scene. It seems that Daphnis is pulling a thorn out from the foot of an injured Chloe, and putting his arm around her for comfort. It captures a moment of innocence, and also a moment of vulnerability between the two, which seem to show up together a lot in the story. She's almost like a child who has fallen down and scraped her knee. Forget chocolates, roses, and sentimental Hallmark cards. It's the little things like this that seem to really capture what a romance can truly be, and I couldn't think of a better depiction of love for Valentine's day.

But perhaps the most beautiful part to me is what I feel that thorn represents for our two lovers. Throughout most of our readings of romance, we have seen that innocence is often tempted by very violent, and not so innocent forces, only to be refuted time and time again because the love between the two was too powerful to be defeated by such a shallow cause. This thorn is what has punctured the innocence and chastity of Chloe in a very symbolic way, but with Daphnis there by her side there is nothing to fear for long. They make each other strong in the face of threats like this. He will carefully remove it and the thorn will no longer be a threat to the innocent love that exists between them.

All This Talk of Virginity

As we have come to find out from many of our class readings, romance always puts a strong emphasis on virginity and remaining chaste for our true love until the day of consummation. The pattern seems to follow that there is a spark of innocent love at the beginning, events which cause separation from this love, various trials and suffering as a result of this separation, the attempt to return, and a reuniting at the end which leads to the consummation and a "happily ever after." 

Now, an interesting point that Frye seems to get at (with his extensive knowledge of every single book that has ever been written) is that what constitutes all of these steps can, symbolically, vary widely between stories and is often highly displaced. This is especially true in more sophisticated and "high brow" tales. Virginity does not always mean physical virginity. However, the important thing seems to be the meaning of the structure behind it. Dr. Sexson mentioned this already in class, and Frye addresses it explicitly in the ever-so-fascinating third section of his book when he says, "It is precisely the elementary facts of structure that we are so inclined to overlook, and the social facts that we are inclined to exaggerate. One of the social facts is that in a male-dominated society a man often assumes that he ought to get a virgin at marriage, otherwise he may feel that he has acquired a secondhand possession. Yet it seems clear that romance, even when it comes to terms with this notion, is talking about something else in its emphasis on virginity" (78). At its very core, what is important about virginity isn't so much the social convention which tells us that nobody wants to have hand-me-downs in love (although this is certainly a factor); this is, at the very most, the tip of the virginity iceberg, and doesn't fly with such perceptive readers as Frye. It is precisely this often exaggerated fact that is as unimportant as it is obvious. There is a very basic structural principle at work here in romance, which lies submerged under the surface of perception in your typical reader, yet makes up the bulk of importance in our virginity iceberg. So the question that now remains is, "Why is virginity so important in romance? Why does it keep showing up time and time again? What does it say about the nature of humanity and our experience?"

I think the answer to this question of what it means to remain chaste, can only be answered by first asking ourselves what it means to lose our chastity, our naivete, and our innocence. And in this, we not only ask it in the literal sense that we find in early stories such as Daphnis and Chloe, but in the deeper sense that Frye mentions as well. This realm of the symbolic virginity goes beyond the scope of single, isolated stories and plucks at one of the threads in Jung's collective human psyche that defines who we are, and defines our identity. If I may quote from page 89, Frye summarizes the nature of our existence by saying, "One of the most fundamental of human realizations is that passing from death to rebirth is impossible for the same individual." We are human, and part of being human is dying. We are born, we live, and we die, which is why our sense of identity is so crucial. To make a Lucretian reference, it is the meaning we create for ourselves, the swerve that comes about in the midst of our linear plunge. So in this sense identity is not only present in the world of stories, but also in the foundational make-up of how we create meaning for ourselves as humans. In thinking about romance we must remember that identity is key. In the pages previous to the above quote, Frye plays off of this idea, and explains exactly why virginity is so important when he says, "Deep within the stock convention of virgin-baiting is a vision of human integrity imprisoned in a world it is in but not of, often forced by weakness into all kinds of ruses and stratagems, yet always managing to avoid the one fate which really is worse than death, the annihilation of one's identity" (86, my emphasis). That sounds to me like romance setting up a perfect imitation of human mortality in a nutshell, and offering a short explanation as to why we feel the need to tell these sorts of stories. When we lose our identity, when we forget who we are, we're as good as dead, if not worse. However, a few sentences later Frye shows us how this same concept ties in with virginity. He explains that, "What is symbolized as a virgin is actually a human conviction, however expressed, that there is something at the core of one's infinitely fragile being which is not only immortal but has discovered the secret of invulnerability that eludes the tragic hero" (86). I think this may serve as an answer to my question at the beginning of the paragraph. To lose our virginity (and not just in the physical sense) means to lose our identity; the two almost go hand in hand. When we lose our virginity, our naivete, our identity, we begin early the slow process of the death that is ultimately inevitable. In the context of romance and humanity's experience, virginity represents that immortal part of our selves that has somehow found a way to cheat the epitome of human foils: death. Much like Scheherazade telling stories every night to the King to avoid sleeping in his bed, so we tell stories to prolong our life, maintain our own virgin innocence, and avoid death.    

And it is in this way that a romance ultimately starts to reflect the cycle of human life. Maybe I am stretching this too far or in the wrong direction, but if I may refer back to the pattern that I mentioned in the first paragraph of my post it would seem that it still holds true, except now we have a deeper and richer understanding of how it relates to ourselves. In the beginning there is a spark of innocent love which resembles our human birth and a fresh sense of naivete, innocence, and love of life. Then there are events which cause the separation from this love and cause us to become experienced and lose our naive ways. As a result, we lose a part of our original identity and meet many trials and suffering along the way in an attempt to get back to what we had before. This can be seen to resemble the break in consciousness and descent to a lower world which Frye covers in later chapters where we see a distinct split between the self as a dreamer and the self as a dream character. This descent to a lower world signifies a return to a maternal creator and to our own life source from which we first came. Afterwards, there is the ascent where the spell we have been placed under is cast off, our disguises are removed, the ideal and abhorrent begin to polarize, and an event of recognition reveals to us our original identity, our innocence. From here we are reunited with our true love, our identity, the one who completes us. And there is a consummation of that love and a "happily ever after." Whether or not this consummation results in a rebirth of virginity that prolongs life, or a redemption in death, depends on the story. But it can still be seen as humanity's answer to the inevitability that we all must face at the end of our lives. We're born, we live, we die. All of us our falling, and in the midst of it we must create a swerve. 

Of course, Frye puts it much better than I can. So I've decided to close with one of his lengthy examples in an excerpt from page 125 that really stuck out to me. He says, "In William Morris' Earthly Paradise, a group of lonely old men from Classical and Northern worlds gather on an island and exchange the traditional tales that they have known from childhood. It seems the most futile of activities, the work of disillusionment, weariness, and exhaustion, almost of senility. Even the designer of the whole enterprise calls himself 'the idle singer of an empty day.' And yet, we read in 'The Epilogue' that they are not simply putting in the time until they die: they are fighting a battle against death, with some dim understanding that the telling and retelling of the great stories, in the face of the accusing memory, is a central part of the only battle that there is any point in fighting."