Lavinia and Aeneas

Ursula LeGuin

You’ve heard of Dido and Aeneas (and Purcell, Virgil and all that). Well, a well-known author named Ursula LeGuin decided to pick one of the most obscure but potentially interesting characters of the whole Aeneid and give you Lavinia and Aeneas. The novel is called Lavinia, and I just finished it.

The book came to my attention through my wife. Her book club, having heard that NPR considers the book one of last year’s best, decided to read it. So my wife read it. “You would get more out of this,” she kept saying to me, since there was all this, you know, ancient and Roman stuff in it. I was intrigued.

But when she finished it she and her book club weren’t so convinced. My wife’s verdict: “Sloooow start, but she made the Aeneid accessible to me.”

So I picked it up. And this came to mind:

Always avoid cliché.

So I remember Alfred Hitchcock saying in some interview I once saw. The Hannibal Blog has of late been exploring what makes good storytelling good. But I haven’t said much about the enemies of good stories. I think cliché is the most dangerous of them.

And this is the dilemma of Lavinia: Fantastic conceit for a novel! Really. Exactly the sort of idea that I have time for; indeed not that far away conceptually from the book idea that I myself had. But what a shame about the corny bits.

Here is the genius of the conceit: Aeneas survives the sack of Troy and escapes with his father and son (but not his wife, who perishes in Troy) to wander the Mediterranean. He has a torrid affair with Dido, the wily queen of Carthage, but leaves her and she burns herself (presaging, I might add, what Scipio’s–and Aeneas’–heir will one day do to all of Carthage). Aeneas ends up in Italy, Latium, where his destiny is to found a people, later to become Rome. But it’s not easy. He has to make alliances and fight local wars first. Enter Lavinia. She becomes his second wife (after Creusa in Troy), with whom he will sire the Roman race.

Virgil only mentions her in a line or two. So does Livy. And yet she seems to be so important. A Rutulian king named Turnus had the hots for her and felt upstaged when Aeneas swooped in, and that–ie, she–is what set off the bloody wars. (Shades of Helen?) Oh, and Lavinia is implicitly the mother of the Roman race.

So LeGuin bravely sets out to make Lavinia come alive. And she succeeds in part, but only after page 100 or so. For the first 100 pages LeGuin colors in this woman about whom we know nothing by making her the eternal damsel in distress, slightly hippie, slightly dreamy, chaste but yearning, right out of a B movie. Everything about this Lavinia is a cliché.

Once Aeneas arrives on the scene and we finally have some mythological material to work with (Virgil’s), it gets good. But what gets good is, in effect, the last part of the old Aeneid.

More accessible, yes, as my wife said. In fact, she recommends the book, and so do I, by a hair.

Still, the last word that wants to roll of the tongue of the reviewer is the one that is so devilishly hard for the storyteller to avoid, the one that no storyteller wants to hear said: cliché.

Storytelling in ads

Story-telling: So far in this thread about stories and their telling, we’ve had highbrow and lowbrow, ancient and modern, written and spoken. How far can we stretch it? I think that every form of human communication involves story-telling. So ads, if they’re good, are stories too.

Consider the following, which is arguably the most famous single ad:

Ira Glass would commend it for immediately making us fell that:

“something is about to occur”
we are “heading in a direction” and “can’t get out” of the story now
there is “a bigger, universal something” (Orwellian oppression vs individual expression)
there is “action, action, action … and then thought”. (IBM = Big Brother; Apple = freedom)

It’s good storytelling.

Homeric storytelling (2): the midlife crisis

Homer, as I said in the previous post, is one of the great story-tellers because in The Iliad he gave us a heart-rending and timeless look at wrath. Now look at what he did in the Odyssey! Wow. Those two stories could not be more different.

There is a theory on the periphery of academia (is that a redundancy?) that the Iliad and Odyssey were actually written by different authors. The Iliad, in this theory, was authored by a man; the Odyssey by a woman. I don’t know and I don’t care, but the mere hypothesis is telling because the two stories are so very different.

The Iliad is about young men being heroes. They either win or die, heroically. It is a story written, if not by a young man, certainly for young men.

The Odyssey is a story about and for older people: It is about trying to return to something lost and traversing a liminal realm known today as the midlife crisis. (Just think of the main character in James Joyce’s Ulysses.)

Returns

The return is a classic theme of the monomyth theory by Jung and Campbell. For example, there is an entire genre of plays and stories that have to do with the heroes of the Trojan War, now as older men, trying (and often failing) to return home. Agamemnon comes home to be murdered by his wife in his own bathtub. Aeneas wanders all around the Mediterranean. Ditto Odysseus.

I’ve heard that the Odyssey is often used in seminars for Vietnam vets. Apparently the story speaks to them in a particularly direct and intimate way.

Midlife liminality

Limen is the Latin word for threshold. The Greeks and Romans often put little statues of Hermes/Mercury near their thresholds, because they believed that crossing thresholds was of particular significance and had its own divinity. The biggest thresholds are death and middle age (the “death” of the young hero and “rebirth” as old man.)

The Odyssey is about this extended liminality of midlife. Odysseus (like Aeneas) literally walks through Hades, the underworld of the dead, with Hermes. For ten years, he has a full-blow midlife crisis: Dangerous women, crazy ideas, irresponsible behavior. But he also yearns for stability and reconnection with his son, Telemachus, and wife, Penelope, whom he last saw twenty years ago. His home is in chaos; his status is in question; he no longer knows who he is and must redefine himself. This is midlife!

So don’t be fooled by the colorful stories of Sirens (pictured above) and Cyclops and what not. All of those famous adventures are part of a story within the story, a speech that Odysseus himself gives to his hosts to explain what he has been through. It is assumed that he is spicing some of his adventures up for the telling.

But most of the Odyssey is about his son Telemachus trying to find his absent father, about Odysseus trying to come home, and then about trying to reestablish himself at home.

So how does my story-telling theory fare? The Odyssey is less simple than the other stories I’ve featured so far, but that’s because it aims at older audiences that savor complexity; it has great momentum; and, yes, it has a universal idea.

Homeric storytelling (1): wrath

What an intriguing cast of characters this thread on story-telling is becoming: Scheherazade, Ira Glass, Herodotus and Truman Capote, the Grimm Brothers… I like this mixing of high-brow and populist; grown-up and children’s; oral, audio and written; ancient and contemporary…. After all, it’s all story-telling. So let’s move on to Homer.

What makes the Iliad (and, in the next post, the Odyssey) such an enduring story?

For the time being (because you’ve not yet dissuaded me), I will continue to apply my emerging theory: the Iliad is a great story because it has:

simplicity
momentum and
universality.

What could be simpler than to tell your audience what your story is about in the very first word! The first word in the original Greek is menis (as in mania), which means wrath. The wrath of Achilles and of all mankind is what the Iliad is about. The Trojan War is “merely” the backdrop.

We meet the characters: Achilles and Agamemnon, childish and vain, but awesome to behold. Here is our hero and he is … sulking! We get tense. This isn’t good. Something awful will happen. But what?

Then, a delay. And what a build-up. We have looong sections listing all the heroes and ships that sailed to Troy. To us this is boring, but to the ancients this was an occasion for cheering, because each and every Greek was waiting for his ancestor to be named. The list signaled the grandness and the inclusiveness of what was about to unfold.

Then, action: Gory, individualized fighting, with spears piercing through breasts and swords cutting off limbs. The excitement and horror build.

Before long, we are disgusted. Achilles takes things too far. He defaces Hector’s corpse, and one just doesn’t do this. We sympathize with both heroes (Achilles = wrath; Hector = duty) and both sides in the war at this point. We suffer as humans, because we see how wrath has destroyed civilized behavior.

And this is the thought that gives the story universality. We come down from the thrill of the violence and are exhausted. We yearn for civility. And we get it. The Greeks stage funeral games for Achilles’ fallen friend, and now at last we see conflicts resolved without violence. It is as though everybody, even Achilles had learned.

Grimm storytelling

Back to our story-telling thread. Why not take some of the most obviously great story-tellers in history and think about what made their stories so great? I think the most obvious two must be the Brüder Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm. Perhaps I’m thinking of them first because I am re-reading them aloud a lot, in the original German, to my daughter these days.

They did not invent the stories they told. They collected and selected the folk tales that they heard all around them, rather as Homer narrated the legends that he grew up hearing. And that is the first interesting point about them. You don’t need to invent something completely new; instead, you need to tell something timeless in a new way. Indeed, if Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell are right, then you can’t invent anything new, because there only are a few stories, or monomyths, which we tell again and again in different forms.

So what makes Schneewittchen (Snow White), Hänsel und Gretel, Aschenputtel (Cinderella), Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood), and the countless others–all of them with a Disney character, it seems–so enduring?

I’m going to try to answer that question, for the Grimm brothers and other story-tellers we’ll talk about, by using some of the ideas we’ve already tried on for size. If that doesn’t work in future posts, fine, we’ll adjust the framework. The point is to test these ideas.

Simplicity

By now you know that I consider simplicity the root of all genius and all beauty, whether we’re talking about Einstein or Brancusi or story-tellers. And the Grimm Märchen (fairy tales) are very simple. (But not simplistic.)

Momentum

The stories also all have have the kind of trajectory that Ira Glass describes. Recall that Glass talks about “portraying people at exactly human scale.” Well, Hänsel and Gretel are at extremely human scale–vulnerable, exposed, afraid, desperate. Like all of us, only more obviously so.

Glass then said that we immediately need a feeling that “something is about to occur”, that “things are heading in a direction”, that we “can’t get out” because we are trapped not with our “reason but emotion”. We know the wicked stepmother wants to get rid of them, by leaving them stranded in the dark forest. We see Hänsel’s first attempt to get back to safety, by dropping little pebbles, failing; we know that his second attempt, dropping bread crumbs which the birds will steal, is doomed. We’re along for the ride. We are now stranded in the dark forest.

And then the house: We know that the ginger bread and sugar windows are snares. Stay away! But they don’t. Then the witch. Now Hänsel is in the cage, to be fattened for the slaughter, with little Gretel to do the fattening….

Universality

But remember that Glass said that action for its own sake is not enough for a good story. It must be “action, action, action … and then thought!” There must be a recognition of the universal, otherwise the story is banal and loses us.

What is universal here? Quite a lot. In Jungian terms again, the characters are archetypes–that is, we already know them from our dreams and lives. The anima of the stepmother and witch; the Hero and Heroine who heed their call to adventure (Campbell’s terms), travel the road of trials, achieve the boon and self-knowledge, then return to the ordinary world in order to apply the boon.

Or, to put it in Glass’s terms, what is the thought? Is it that the world is full of people who can’t be trusted? I would call that the backdrop, the premise, the scene. But if that were all, my daughter and girls like her everywhere in all eras would not be glued to the story. No, the thought is that …

… Gretel discovers who she is!

The witch gets fed up and fires up the oven to roast Hänsel, and tells terrified Gretel to climb in to test that the heat is right for her brother. ‘I don’t know how to get in,’ says Gretel. ‘You stupid girl,’ croaks the witch, ‘you get in like this’–and climbs in herself. The ruse has worked. Gretel slams the oven door shut. Now it is the witch who is roasting.

Gretel, little red-cheeked Gretel, is the one to win the boon! She is her brother’s savior! She was clever, decisive and strong.

The “thought” is her sangfroid in the name of love, her savviness in overcoming. My daughter gets it. That’s why this is a great story. It is, as Isabelle Allende says, “truer than truth”.

Can a storyteller make stuff up?

Truman Capote making stuff up

The book manuscript that I’ve just sent off to my editor at Riverhead happens to fall into the genre of “creative non-fiction.” It is a story built on actual lives–ancient ones and modern ones–that illustrate various themes around the great mystery of success and failure in life, including yours and mine.

The job of creative non-fiction, as Ira Glass would agree, is to make true stories riveting and small stories grand. It is, in short, simply good story-telling.

Still, you would have to lack all sense of irony not to smirk at that phrase. Creative non-fiction. Say what?

Creative means making stuff up. Non-fiction means not making stuff up. The very notion would seem to be an oxymoron. Or perhaps not?

Herodotus and Thucydides walk into a bar….

This particular question happens to be the oldest controversy in non-fiction writing. Recall that Herodotus believed in embellishing history to make it more palatable and (ironically) realistic, whereas Thucydides took him to task for telling lies and promised to stick to just the facts, ma’am. But even Thucydides then found that he had to “make stuff up” to get at the actual truth, because if he had used only, for instance, dialogue that he himself had actually overheard (while taking notes), he would have painted the wrong picture of the Peloponnesian War altogether.

By the time, we get to the era in which my main characters–Hannibal, Fabius and Scipio–lived, Polybius is the one who tries to stick to just the facts (but again doesn’t quite manage), whereas Livy is the one who says ‘Oh Heck’ and just tells a good yarn. By the time we get to Plutarch, we essentially throw out the rule book and just enjoy–even as we, paradoxically, come away with the impression that we have finally gotten closer to the truth of the characters involved. And so the controversy bubbles on, down the ages.

… and Truman Capote serves them a drink

Jean Ku, a friend of ours, just passed on a fascinating essay on the topic by her writing teacher, David Schweidel, the author of two books. Schweidel begins his history of creative non-fiction more recently. One strand, which Schweidel calls reportage, started with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and continued with Tom Wolfe and The New Journalism. The other is memoir.

So what makes reportage creative non-fiction? Schweidel thinks that

Creative nonfiction, I’d say, attempts to convey the feeling as well as the facts. Clearly, Truman Capote does a lot of work to convey feeling.

It does this by using the techniques of fiction, which are

dramatized action
dialogue
the point of view of a participant
the presentation of specific details, … such as gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, ….

And what makes memoirs creative non-fiction? Well, the fact that they

are works of memory. Memory is selective, self-serving, often mistaken. People lie to make themselves look better. Sometimes people lie to make themselves look worse… Or simply misremember. Most readers understand that story-tellers, especially when they’re telling stories about themselves, take such liberties. In the words of Grace Paley: “Any story told twice is fiction.”

And so, concludes Schweidel,

In theory, creative nonfiction has to be an oxymoron. Creative means made up, and nonfiction means not made up. Hence, oxymoron. In practice, though, creative nonfiction is a redundancy. Why? Because virtually every work of nonfiction is creative.

Humanity, suspense and surprise in storytelling

Ira Glass

So what makes a good story good? That’s where we left off last time in this series on the art of story-telling.

To begin deconstructing the magic, listen to th amusing and thought-provoking video talk below by Ira Glass, the host of NPR’s This American Life and a great story-teller. (I already mentioned once just how good a story teller I consider him to be when I praised the episode that explains the current financial crisis and that remains the most memorable, clear and touching piece of journalism done on that subject.)

In the talk, Glass says what I’ve always thought: that journalism, and the American sort in particular, imposes a “fake gravitas” on stories by artificially separating the world into a) serious or b) funny, with a barren no-man’s-land in between. Glass calls this a “failure of craft”–the craft being story-telling.

What he and his team do, and what so many other journalists don’t do, is to “inject joy and pleasure” into stories. They choose–and I love his way of putting this–

stories whose aesthetic is suprise.

These stories, furthermore,

portray people at exactly human scale.

There is no fake or contrived grandness, at least not in the conventional sense. Somehow, these very human characters make us feel right from the beginning that

something is about to occurr.

Why we feel that way we cannot quite say, because this is

not about reason but emotion.

Events seem to “accumulate”, and they seem to be

heading in a direction.

In the process, the story-teller is constantly

raising and answering questions,

which leaves the audience (in this case listeners rather than readers) feeling that they

can’t get out.

And now, just as they are hooked, there is a surprise. What seemed small suddenly reveals itself to be about a

bigger, universal something.

The big idea comes effortlessly but forcefully in a rhythm not unlike that in Beethoven’s Fifth:

Action, action, action and then thought.

And so, what seemed small was really grand after all! Only, there was no need to yell at the audience at the start. It became clear all by itself.

Fittingly, Glass then illustrates all of this by choosing the story of Scheherazade, whom The Hannibal Blog anointed as the matron saint of story-tellers in the previous post.

I just came across Glass’s talk but, as you can imagine, I felt as though I were meeting my soul mate. All of this is exactly what I have been trying to do in the book manuscript that I just sent off to my editor this week.

Matron saint of storytellers: Scheherazade

So let’s take our journey into and through the world(s) of story-telling.

In the great comments under this post, you guys convinced me that we have to go about it differently than we did in our search for the greatest thinker (where I staged a mock contest, in which Patanjali narrowly edged out Darwin, after the early ejection of Hegel.) When it comes to story-telling, there can’t be a winner. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t discover a whole lot of things about story-telling!

So let’s turn things upside down and start by declaring, not a winner, but a matron saint of story-tellers:

Scheherazade

Scheherazade must have been rather gifted at story-telling because that is how she saved her life!

A Persian king was livid at women everywhere (and who isn’t?) because his wife had cheated on him. He had her executed and then went one step further, to collective punishment. Every night he had himself one virgin, whom he then executed the next morning. This was not sustainable because he ran out of virgins. The vizier, who was in charge of managing supply issues, got nervous because now it was the turn of his own daughter: Scheherazade.

Scheherazade did not seem very concerned. She joined the king for her, ahem, night and then …. told him a story. Only, she left him hanging in the morning. How did the story end? The king wanted to know. So he didn’t kill her.

The same thing happened the next night. And the next night. Indeed for a total of (wait for it) One Thousand and One Nights. By that point, the king (in some versions he and Scheherazade are now papa and mama) pardoned Scheherazade permanently. The story had won.

The inevitability of story

So Scheherazade is exactly the metaphor that suits me in this post. Which is: story is life. Story is human. Story is inevitable. We cannot help ourselves. All we do is to tell stories.

A while ago I quoted Isabel Allende saying: “what’s truer than truth? Answer: The Story.” In the same post, I also quoted Dan McAdams, a psychologist who believes observes that even our identities are stories.

So today, let me just anoint Scheherazade and plant that thought. For the rest of the series, let’s all figure out what stories are, and why some are good and others not.

The great story-tellers?

Well, I’ve taken this week “off”, so to speak, to finish writing my book. Yes, I do expect to send off the manuscript by the end of this week!

That won’t mean that it’s done, but it does mean that we will move on to the next stage, once my editor at Riverhead takes a look. And then I hope to get a publication date and … title! (Here is why the book doesn’t have one yet.) I’ll keep you posted, of course.

In the meantime, I thought our recent inquiry into the great thinkers of world history was fun. The whole thing was really just an excuse for me to think about what ideas had influenced me the most, and for you to point me to some thinkers that I might have been overlooking, which you did in the comments. Gödel, Salk …

In fact, it was so much fun that I’m thinking of starting new inquiries. Since my mission in life is to tell stories, perhaps a search for the world’s greatest story-teller ever?

The Ur-Story

Joseph Campbell

A follow-up to my my post on why truth is in stories: Many of you know about this fascinating theory that there really is only one story, which we tell one another again and again in infinitely many variations.

This is the so-called Monomyth, which I prefer to call the Ur-Story.

The man who popularized the idea is Joseph Campbell, whose book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is naturally on the bibliography of my own book.

To simplify his idea, it is that the same fundamental plot and character types and experiential vocabulary underlie all major myths and movies and novels and, well, stories. From Odysseus to Jesus and the Buddha, from Navajo stories to Chinese ones, from ancient tales to modern ones.

An archetypal hero of some sort receives a call to adventure, often refuses the call before accepting it, sets out on a quest, crosses various thresholds, overcomes adversity and trials, encounters a woman as temptress, atones with his father, obtains a boon to society and attempts to return and bring it back. And so forth.

Carl Jung

Campbell was influenced by James Joyce, but the bigger credit, in my opinion, goes to Carl Jung. It was he who came up with the concept of archetypes (which I use in my book). The Hero, the Child, the Great Mother, the Mentor, the Wise Old Man, and so forth.

All this may strike you as odd. Aren’t there infinitely many stories, one for each person? Well, no. There are infinitely many variations and twists. But one fundamentally stable storyline.

This idea has wormed its way into conventional wisdom now. I was chatting about my book with my friend Evan Baily, a teller of children’s stories in film. Evan said that story is always about character, and how pressure is brought to bear down on him until he breaks down or reveals himself. Evan pointed me to Robert McKee’s seminars on story-telling, famous in Hollywood and beyond. Ultimately, this is all about the Ur-Story.

What’s most wonderful about all this is that we never get tired of hearing the Ur-Story. Telling and hearing it is about being human. And we all get to tell our variation of it. Which is why I’m writing a book.

Hannibal and Me: life lessons from history

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Lavinia and Aeneas

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