Notes 1-30

Blog: Become the opposite of naive and get super sophisticated about romance. Read 3 pages of Frye and reread...then write about it.
Read Daphnis and Chloe by Wednesday.
February 27: displaced fairytale presentations

Additional readings we talked about:
A.S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories
Joseph and Potiphar's Wife
The Conference of the Birds
Ada by Vladamir Nabokov

(pg 73) Haroun: "chessboard...a single window, out of which gazed a princess" (of course! the elementary and crude elements of romance)
Nora Roberts--people like to read romance novels, look at bestsellers list
Why is the preservation/possession of virginity so important in romance?

(pg 27) Ephesian Tale: "Habrocomes said that he..." A summary--indication of a sentimental (literary) romance in the spirit of the oral tradition. All of us a bit ADD. Storytelling devices attempt to combat this.

Ephesian Tales to Daphnis and Chloe...moving up the rungs of the ladder. Compare beginnings: Ephesian is right into the action while Daphnis is more literary, becoming sophisticated
(pg 137) Daphnis: "The painting showed women..." the conventions of a romance
Ekphrasis: encountering in a work of literature a reference to a work of art (describe in detail the painting on the wall)
One of the conventions of romance: imagining innocence, abandoned children--the changeling, the foundling.
The Blue Lagoon: a movie about two kids shipwrecked on an island and "their weird little love story" --Jill

The Conference of the Birds is very simple and childlike...very similar to Haroun and the Sea of Stories (the king that they seek is in all of them and is all of them)
To the naive person, the world is continuously wonderful.

Notes 1-27

For next meeting: read the first story from The King and The Corpse, Daphnis and Chloe

Some tales separate from the reading list that we have talked about:
The tale of the ending of the Odyssey where Odysseus and Penelope engage in the most erotic act: storytelling.
The Hymn of the Pearl: 1001 earthly distractions for the main character; reminded of his mission when he reads a letter

All literature is displaced myth: deteriorates
The medium: myth--epics--romance
The characters: gods--heroes--men and less than men
Mythology of the declining ages: gold, silver, bronze, etc.

Literature moves from the mythic to realism and reality (the rise of the novel)

Today, value of literature is judged on its conformity to the real world, so how to explain the popularity of Harry Potter, Tolkien? Satisfies the imaginative need.
Imagination does not need reality but without the other, imagination is vaporous, reality impoverished.
Metaphor: stretching against a tree--need to push off of reality to stretch imagination
This present time is concerned with usefulness, practicality, utilitarianism.

For the displacing a fairytale assignment:
1. Be crafty. Use realistic terms but do not betray the source.
2. Clues will be in structure.
Some examples of fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Little Mermaid, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, etc, etc.

(pg 3) Frye: "Sentimental romance begins..." Breathless quality of storytelling--parataxis in Ephesian Tales, where everything in the sentence is of equal weight. Repetition and redundancy...

The Bible is the originating point where everything else ripples out from--secular scripture.

Looked at Conference of the Birds (where a Hoopoe bird is featured)

Notes 1-25

For next meeting: read "Slippers" from The King and The Corpse

Why can't we just read and enjoy stories? (instead of talk them to death, apply literary criticism, etc). Why study fairy tales?
pg 86-88 Haroun: The Plentimaw Fishes--stories undergo transformation, creation and recreation. There is no one essential story.
Do stories necessarily have to make you virtuous/include morals? Storytelling to children...You do not "be" naive, you achieve naivete.
Primary children's stories: Peter Pan, Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland
Oz: on the journey, necessity of completing series of tasks before the one thing Dorthy wants: to go home.

pg 87 Haroun: echoes of Kubla Khan "buildings with roofs...important buildings in Gup"
pg 200: The Walrus "You've been on a great adventure..."

Theosophist: religion where a knowledge of God may be achieved through spiritual ecstasy, direct intuition, or special individual relations (Dorothy already has power inside her to go home)
Sparagmos: the dismemberment of a victim, forming a part of some ancient rituals and represented in Greek myths and tragedies

Life does not end happily--ends in one way.
Less pure than when you were six and wanted the dualism (good/evil)
pg 134 Frye: "the conventional happy ending..."

MIDTERM: displace a fairy tale--tell it as a real life story.
All the stories you think are new are not.
Ephesian Tale: sentimental vs inexperienced storyteller (sentimental is aware of the conventions, doesn't tell stories that seem to come from nowhere)

A Naïve View

 “But man lives in two worlds, the world of nature and the world of art that he is trying to build out of nature” (Frye 58)

When I was six years old, my favorite stories were The Hobbit, the Chronicles of Narnia, Through the Looking Glass (but not Alice in Wonderland, which frightened me), Perloo the Bold, Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, Dinotopia, and my dad’s old collection of Spiderman comic books from the early 70s. I didn’t like stories that were set in “the real world” because I already lived in “the real world” and knew enough about what that was like, thank you very much. Fantasy books which lingered in the real world a little too long were less beloved to me. I didn’t really care about what the children were doing in the Professor’s house; I just wanted to enter the wardrobe and see the Faun carrying his parcels in the snow. These books had to include animals that talked, magic, epic journeys, prophecies, characters that were like me but also impossibly noble and self sacrificing (and characters that were so irredeemably nasty that one couldn’t possibly find a single saving quality), and legendary battles of good and evil where evil always succumbed to the forces of good. When I was six, happy endings were mandatory. If a book didn’t have a happy ending, I would take the offending item off my bookshelf and hide it in the back of my closet. It was a zero tolerance policy.

(I’m ashamed to admit this, but I once tearfully begged my Grandpa to throw away a movie that ended so sadly that I couldn’t bear its continuing existence in my house. Poor Papa had rented it…he pretended to throw it in the trash and retrieved it later when he thought I wasn’t looking).

Six year old Breanna would have loved Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I don’t think my six year old self would have cared for the Ephesian Tales very much.

Some examples of naïve storytelling in the Ephesian Tales include: characters who undergo little character development (if any at all), characters who see one aspect of life (love) as salvation rather than a more complex and realistic view, and the occurrence of love that is both simultaneous, mutual, and overwhelmingly dominate over all other life events. But perhaps I’m confusing naïve storytelling with examples of unrealistic plot…the storyteller does, as the introduction points out, use repetitive language perhaps in a reflection of his limited abilities or careless story crafting. He also achieves a light kind of suspense that appears to haphazardly introduce small amounts of tension—but this is without the protracted conflicts and resulting pleasure of solution after buildup that a more seasoned storyteller may employ. However, as Frye points out, this very early and very formulaic example of a romance is a more obvious illustration of the underlying archetypes and formulas that romantic fiction typically follows.

 But while romance follows set formulas, there are always worlds of possibilities contained within these streams of stories. “’But why do you hate stories so much?’ Haroun blurted, feeling stunned. ‘Stories are fun…’” And Kattam-Shud responds: “’The world however, is not for Fun…the world is for Controlling’” (Rushdie 161). Because he cannot rule all the worlds contained inside every stream of story in the Ocean, Kattam-Shud must destroy it. For myself at age six, the world of fantasy and its stories were fun because it felt removed from the constraints of reality. The differences between good and evil were as easy to recognize as the difference between black and white, and the good characters always got their happy ending.

And if they didn’t, it wasn’t a story worth reading and rereading. Let the closet have it.

Notes 1-23

For next blog: What did you like (in terms of story telling and happy endings?) when you were six years old? Look at the Ephesian Tale for examples of naive storytelling.

Please dumb down blog entries--try to become naive.
A story starts with the storyteller--a fraud, sham, often will be a lie, albeit an interesting lie
"It was so and it was not so" Persian, the business of storytelling
Once upon a time--the Western beginning, taking you to a time of timelessness--no morals, no direct destination in history
In illo tempone--"in that time"--used to mark an undetermined time in the past--found in Gospel lectures

Two storytelling halves:
1.Kenosis: full (comedy, romance)
2. Plerosis: empty (tragedy, irony)

All good romances must have a happy ending
Close to the structural core of making up stuff: romance
Disregard your cynical thoughts and think thoughts of your 6 year old self: naive--sit in rapturous wonder and awe at whatever is happening
pg 125 Haroun and the Sea of Stories: "how many opposites are at war...childern of the light" story for the child and intellectual

Irony--the literature of people who want to stop talking, nonbeing (Samuel Beckett)
Comedy--brings isolated individual into the social system

pg 51 Secular Scripture: "the profoundest kind of literary experience...to question narrative logic"

The Idea of Order

“A mythological universe is a vision of reality in term of human concerns and hopes and anxieties: it is not a primitive form of science. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, man first acquires a mythological universe and then pretends as long as he can that it is also the actual universe” (Frye 14) Just as the universe of myth is centered around man, so too was the tangible universe believed to revolve around man, the mortal inhabitant of an indifferent world that is so fond of his stories. Stories offer escape from this reality, if only to create the illusion of understanding and order by reordering the tangible world of a man into art.

I feel that I’m not alone in assuming that when many readers hear the word romance, awful images come to mind. Most involve the seediest of second hand bookstores overwhelmed by the presence of every Nora Roberts and Nicolas Sparks that has happened upon their shelves. Tattered and creased with use, these little sections of paperbacks are either studiously avoided or openly mocked by customers. Formulaic “escape fiction” is hardly the fare of serious readers. However, the concept of literature governed by formulas and the need for escape through art is not an odd concept. As Frye points out, the same building blocks and conventions reoccur throughout a wide tradition of literature beyond my shallow modern conception of romance. Perhaps the art that deals with romance—with the grand adventures, the interplay of light and dark, and even the most misunderstood element (love)—is art irrevocably linked to the elements of reality that man most wants to understand and structure. In displaying the elements that most demand our attention to escape to, the threads of myth and stories betray the preoccupations and needs that weigh most heavy on the collective mind of mankind. On this great adventure, we all want the same thing: the happy ending.

“Happy endings must come at the end of something…if they happen in the middle of the story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for a while” (Rushdie 202). I agree with Jill’s sentiments: give the reader a little bitter with the sweet in the best mirrored image of this world. The best of art reflects life, beautifully. Let art have the promise of happy endings, if only we realize that happy is as temporary as the hard times and our tapestry of life and art must hold true to its nature of chiaroscuro. As Soraya says, “There is a limit to how much rain a person can enjoy” (Rushdie 210). We need a balance of both; a time of hardship to feel happiness, a time of silence to enjoy song.