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?