Sto in the dig age

C O N T E N T S One The Anti-conspiracy 1 Two Homecoming’s Not a Dance 7 Three Truth and Beauty: When Divine Horizons Shrink and the Gods Pack Up to Leave 13 Four Sex, More Sex, and a L

Storytelling in the Digital Age

List of Previous Publications

The Absence of Angels, novel (1994)

All My Sins Are Relatives, narrative essays (1995)

The Telling of the World: Native American Stories and Art, selected and

edited, with new translations and stories (1996)

As We Are Now: Mixblood Essays on Race and Identity , anthology,

edited and introduced with a contributing essay (1998)

Killing Time with Strangers, novel (2000)

This is the World, stories (2000)

Feathering Custer, narrative essays (2001)

Storytelling in the Digital Age

W S Penn

in the United States— a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,

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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,

registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,

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Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies

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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,

the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries

Includes bibliographical references

ISBN 978–1–137–36528–6 (hardback : alk paper)

1 Literature—Appreciation 2 Storytelling 3 Popular culture and

literature 4 Storytelling in literature I Title

PN56.S7357P46 2013

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library

Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

First edition: November 2013

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This Book is dedicated to the memory of

George P Elliott Writer, Teacher, and Friend

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C O N T E N T S

One The Anti-conspiracy 1 Two Homecoming’s Not a Dance 7 Three Truth and Beauty: When Divine Horizons

Shrink and the Gods Pack Up to Leave 13 Four Sex, More Sex, and a Little Corruption 23 Five The Nibelungenrap 35 Six Separation of Life from Life 45 Seven Dublin’s Polonius 57 Eight Censoring the Censor 69 Nine Death by Hot Air 83 Ten Unsanforized ™ Time 89 Eleven Hamsters with Liquid Eyes 101 Twelve Simplifying Our Days 115 Thirteen Weary Work 127 Fourteen The Life of Swans 143 Fifteen Inversions 159 Sixteen In a Hole in the House of the Famous Poet 171 Afterword: Remembering What We Don’t Know We’ve Lost 181

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I hope this book is organic, a book about literature written by a person who finds it necessary to be a writer For writer I am I have always said that I had to write and that writing made me a better husband, father, and sometimes friend Certainly, it has made me more willing and able

to laugh, again, I hope, sometimes at myself

Virtually all of the reviews of my earlier books have noted largely the humor, so if something here makes you laugh, please go ahead and laugh, even if it is not with me but at me I prefer satire, but even bur-lesque is better than f lat-faced dullness If books can’t make you laugh,

if you don’t get joy out of the privilege of being alive as a thinking Human Being, then I am sorry Humor, not always “ha ha” humor, but amused or delighted attitude and outlook is one of the perspec-tives that literature’s Times and the awareness of death, not so abstract

in my experience, was one of the driving forces behind this book If you laughed, if you enjoyed it, if you think you see something more or other even if you disagree with me, then I am content I have Norman Mailer’s “Enough.”

When you reach my age, you realize that Time may well do what people have been unable to do and that is shut you up, so you want to thank everyone, whether they desire such blame by association or not

So here goes: thanks to my wife, Jennifer, and my two children, Rachel Adams and Willy Penn, who have given me all the reasons and love

on the road, at home, and everywhere else, and who somehow always seem the same age

Preface x

To great teachers, Miss Marion McNamara who taught me Latin and also made Charles Bacon and me stand in front of the class to tuck in our shirts, and Lindsay Mann who gave me my first round grade, on a Milton essay

Special thanks also to Marty and Judy Shepard of The Permanent Press

for way back when, as well as to Bill Regier, then editor at Nebraska Press, who said he’d publish a book like I described if I wrote it and so

I did

Finally, I am grateful to Brigitte Shull, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan who started me on a short path that became longer and turned toward hardcover publication Blame her and her assistants And thank them for all the work they have done

The notes provide modest bibliographical information, which lations were used, if they were, or direct you to poems and books you may easily find Though I’ve taken Spanish, Latin, German, French, and Anglo-Saxon (Old English), my debt to scholarly translators has been lifelong The notes also offer other material that could not easily

trans-be integrated into the body of the work For the most part, they are nothing more than reinforcements of the bullet proof vest of humor

C H A P T E R O N E

The Anti-conspiracy

Note, not “a” conspiracy as in conspiracy theories, those arguments for what might be going right or wrong that lead some people like Timothy McVeigh to do some insane, immoral, and wrong things Horrifying as those things are or may be, the conspiracy I mean is the one going on all around us, controlled (evidently) by no one, and damaging not to some abstract “world” or “culture” but to very particular persons—you Each

of you And me

I seriously doubt that any philosopher, historian, strategist, inventor, politician (from any country or region), theologian (from any religion),

or teacher sat down one day and thought,

Let’s see, people are lazy and they like to be busy about little or nothing, so let’s give them television and then Al Gore’s inter-net Once they’ve bought into those (and which of us hasn’t?), we’ll start narrowing their senses: first Time We’ll make that time (with a lower case “t”) and then we’ll reduce that to Tweet Then language: we’ll take it away People won’t think anymore, they’ll post (“blogs”) They’ll react, not respond What they post

or how they react will be narrow, banal, simplistic and ultimately barbaric We’ll kill off beauty, and therefore truth, and if we make humor infantile, substitute burlesque for satire, for example, we will prevent “them” from ever getting truth and beauty back They will be well-fed and clothed barbarians (unless they belong

to the group Jon Stewart calls, “The Poors”) who hate Big Brother while carrying big brother in their pants pockets right next to their little tiny brother Once we have the thoughtless barbarians sold on the idea of instant time and the importance of all things

Storytelling in the Digital Age 2

instant like coffee and five hour energy, we’ll be able to sell them anything from the illusion of power to the illusions of porn, from the fantasy of uniqueness and the foolishness of un-meaning to thoughtless and loveless pleasures like “hooking up.”

No one person could have thought this up But our relationship(s) to Time and time have changed significantly and the change continues to advance, despite some people becoming weary of the constant mne-monical intrusion into their lives, of the twittery illusion of impor-tance or meaning, and of the sometimes thoughtless immediacy of the Internet (a tool, a wonderful tool, but a tool that overused can lead to

a loss or two, not unlike too many medical CT scans can lead to brain

or other cancers)

Very few persons have discovered and claimed a higher status by not

having to have their cell phones and computers and toys turned “on.” Go

to an airport See that woman sitting on the edge of the group smiling? See that man grinning in the middle of all those people buying and sell-ing and talking about reports and graphs and outcomes and indicators? They are not “un” connected, they are “dis” connected, enjoying their own thoughts, thinking about what their children said yesterday, maybe even missing them, enjoying—even in the fetid air of an airport—being alive, feeling tired enough by work that they are content to sit back and relax (Or, in the instance of educational bureaucrats, they are fantasiz-ing ways to eff up other countries’ educational systems.) 1

They know that traveling is stressful enough without making it into

a moveable meeting via cellular phones or Skyping computers There they are, about to f ly from New York to London, getting more irradi-ated than from several CT scans, having already undressed for security and then stood feeling just a tad bit silly dressing again; watching men

in f lex-fabric shirts, gold chains, and eyes the like of which you’ve not

seen except on Nature shows imagine that somehow they are exempt

from inquisition and scrutiny; feeling sorry for the poor person who has to keep his or her eye on their—or anyone else’s—full body scan; and wondering just what brand of pet food will be tricked up and thrown down before them by f light attendants, a gauntlet challenging you to eat cheese substitute and not toss it up And they are supposed

to be “in touch” with the office, their boss, a meeting with similarly bored, distressed minds?

Imagine a time when you got four days off work, spending one f ing and checking into a modest but nice hotel, the next two in meet-ings or at presentations or marketing fairs that laminate your life, and

ly-The Anti-conspiracy 3

the last in returning home to the wife and family you’ve missed not seeing and talking with Sometimes you left on Monday, got back on Thursday, and were given Friday off to recover

That time is called the late twentieth century

Nowadays, in part because of your beloved technologies, you belong not to yourself or your family or your community but to work This irritating belonging begins with friends who actually waste time tex-ting you that they are just now leaving Wells Hall There you are stop-ping to notice the bright red crest of a woodpecker working over a telephone pole (one that isn’t prefabricated out of Russian concrete) and your “friend” (and the word needs quotation marks) doesn’t think,

“Gee, John may have a mental life, and maybe he doesn’t want to have

it stolen by my banal trivialities.” In fact, your “friend” doesn’t think

at all but rather, feeling somewhat lonely, thoughtless, unimaginative, uninteresting, and uninterested in the natural and human world around him, pulls out his toy tool and texts, “Coming out of Wells.”

You, John, have three basic responses “Tad is thoughtless and I don’t really like him much.” “Tad is okay and I’m such a twit that I need friends like him.” Or, “Gee, how interesting.” With the latter two, you reply—whatever one replies to such inanity—almost without thinking,

“I’m diving into a tub of fried lard at the local fast food Meet me.” But there is a fourth choice, a Fourth Way John does not have to read

or reply When the half hour of commercials and 30 seconds (done twice)

of weather called “the Local News” says, “Like us on Facebook ™ , and we’ll enter you in a drawing ,” you can think, “I hate Facebook ™”

If you feel anything French or revolutionary, you may add with f lair,

“Je refuse.”

When Monty Python is going on about how you are all unique, you can be the one person who raises his hand and calls, “I’m not,” thereby demonstrating your unique understanding that people are different but not so unique and mostly they act like large ruminant mammals that

go “Moo.”

In order to be that person—and forgive me, I am assuming you want

to be—you need to be able to think and think reasonably well and in language You won’t defend technology by saying with overwhelm-ing defensive banality, “It’s done a lot of good things, too.” Of course

it has But it has done good things as a tool or set of tools; it turns ugly when you become a tool who thoughtlessly bangs away with it Imagine a cave man, the first one to strap a rock onto a stick, using it

to hammer—and he sits there hammering all the livelong day until he actually gets a little bored But then he needs to be able to think, “I’m

Storytelling in the Digital Age 4

bored And this granite hardy thing on a stick isn’t doing much for my needs, my emotions, my happiness, my self-esteem, my identity.” He can’t think all this He doesn’t have language yet So he grunts, “Huh”

or “Duh” [or “cool” or “%-)”] Just how do you manage line breaks or punctuation with “ %-) ” or “ %-( ”?

His wife—though she’s not a wife because the legalities of marriage haven’t been invented yet, but rather a continuous hook-up who seems

to get round and thin as she puts out baby caveboys and cavegirls—recognizing that men are good for doing, comes over and tries to get him to hang curtains at the entrance to the cave But she, too, lacks language

“Duh? Duh Duh duh duh,” she says, and points (thank heavens she has pointing, huh?)

Well, “Duh,” he says, meaning, “Hey, look at this sticky hardy thing

I made.” Or maybe it means, “I’ll do it tomorrow The game’s on.” Or maybe (and respectably) he means, “I’m a huge Spartan fan.”

Without language, he not only cannot think (your cats and dogs and gerbils don’t think, though they can react), he cannot reply even in the simplest ways to his significant other Might he tell her the story of

Homecoming (“Nostoi”—Homer’s The Odyssey )? Might he explain to

her that she and he are not the center of the cosmos, but that the earth travels in an elliptical path around that great fireball in the sky? Might

he have thought, “Hey, I think I’ll paint the ‘Water Lilies’ at Giverny?” Might he have thought, “Hey, that Piano Concerto Number 2 wasn’t half bad I think I’ll do one called Number 3?” Might he have said,

“I think, therefore I am?”

That’s the point If you can’t think, you eventually devolve to ing “Duh,” debasing the language you use until its tooliness is lost and

grunt-you reach this strange linguistic and a historical, a philosophical state in

which you do not realize what you’ve lost And you cannot miss what you don’t know you’ve lost

All of this comes in large measure from our concepts of and tions with and to Time While plastic art and music may ref lect the devolution of that relationship and understanding, if we give our cave-man in his time the tool that allows him to think—to reason, ana-lyze, investigate, and conclude—language, that tool and ability that distinguishes Human Beings from mammals like Moby Dick, we give him storytelling 2 True, at first caveman and cavewoman have to distinguish between “:-o zz” and “:-O,” the duhs or huhs that mean this hardy sticky thing or curtains After all, we don’t want caveman surprising cavewoman one hungover late morning with sticky hardy

rela-The Anti-conspiracy 5

things decorating the entrance to their cave They can draw pictures like the few at Lascaux or those lucky servants to Ancient Republicans writing pictograms on the walls of pyramids, but until they acquire a reasonable vocabulary of ten or twenty thousand words, stories beyond,

“Yesterday old Thompson ran too slow and he got eaten by a tooth, LOL,” won’t exist Indeed, the earliest “stories” probably had a lot of nouns and verbs—Thompson and eaten and Sabertooth (did they have capitals?) Tense, the narrative past of he said, she said, he was, she was, was probably as close to present tense as one may get, given the dangers and shortness of life itself

As the “stories” were probably not a good deal more sophisticated than those told by contemporary college students, the language was probably fairly mimetic (here this means representational, without requiring analytical interpretation or sensitivity to metaphor or sym-bol) One’s sensitivity to emphasis or nuanced speech extended not far beyond “Sabertooth!” and the quick ability to run, if unarmed One did not need to stop beside the group’s dying fire to analyze the mean-ing or “Saber” and how the experience of being eaten by a Sabertooth differed from being mauled by a lioness, or whether the “tooth” had anything to do with Freudian psychology

The early notions of time and temporal relationships in this ined relationship of caveman to cavewoman were short and small It would take time and linguistic development for her to begin to be able

imag-to remind him that he promised imag-to simag-top “hamoring” and get at those curtains several weeks ago, and when did he think he’d be able to get off his furry ass and do it? Winter was coming and the cave would be cold For her to decide to go out to Target ™ and buy new curtains for him to hang in place of the old ones, with instructions written in syntactically Asian English that need modest interpretation and sen-sitivity to sentences without articles, would take centuries And, in English—though it’s all Greek to most of us—this would require eight hundred years of Homer sitting around the banquet hall with his harp

to sing the story of Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus

By then, of course, the caveman was living in somewhat better accommodations and had learned agriculture and war and all those other good things we’ve come up with and Penelope had become a woman capable of sharing and keeping an important secret, a woman equal in cleverness to her husband and somewhat superior to him in trustworthiness and faithfulness Unless, that is, we don’t think the singer meant for Circe to be realistic 3

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C H A P T E R T W O

Homecoming’s Not a Dance

“Sing in me gods, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending.” 1

A line like that is about as far away from present day narcissism as you may get This isn’t the individual memoirs of the actions and activities

of unimportant persons, written by the self-ref lective self or worse, a ghost writer whose very job is to make the subject sound and seem This is a storyteller who knows that all stories connect to the gods and knowing that, asks the inspirator of the gods, the muse of storytell-

ing, to tell through him not a story but the story of the man skilled in

all ways of contending Against the backdrop of the known cosmos

is set the story of Odysseus’s homecoming, related by the poet whose importance is as vehicle and not as personality The vehicular poet is,

as we know him who is called “Homer,” someone who lives over a span of eight hundred years Either he is extremely healthy, exercising daily aerobically and eating lots of whole grains, vegetables, and oily fishes, sleeping soundly and well without apnea, or our vehicle is a combination of Greek singers who spend centuries inventing professo-rially red-inked clich é s—the epithets and tag lines like “rosy-fingered dawn”—that allow the oral singer to keep to his meter and pattern

No one photographed him 2 No one interviewed him, not even Jonotus Stewartopolous No one even named him until after eight hundred years of the orally traditional epic someone let him be called

“Homer.” The theory that The Odyssey was written down by the

daughter of a blind poet named Homer, though interesting, makes not

a wit of difference Though intriguing to the modern reader, perhaps, such contemporary concerns have nothing at all to do with the story

Storytelling in the Digital Age 8

and its importance as an orally composed or sung cultural record of proper and improper behavior, generosity toward strangers, cleverness

to protect innocence, understanding between husbands and wives, the strength and courage and cleverness of women opposed to the deceit and licentiousness of girls of little stature, to the need for a boy to grow

up and match his father in his skills of contending (of course we no longer contend, we medicate)

The Odyssey is not about the storyteller-singer who is held in high

regard by his auditors not for originality, but for his skill in piecing

together the story that everyone already knows By time auditors are 20,

they have heard this story over and over again So the emphasis, then,

is on process, and we listen to the story of the man skilled in all ways of

contending sung by a man skilled in all ways of telling a story Poetry? Not really, not as we know poetry with its metaphors and images, its slant and internal rhymes, its purification of language and sense Meter

is the important aspect, and in his lyre-bag the singer holds a cache

of taglines and stock phrases that will help him round out the meter

of a line Dawn is almost always “rosy-fingered,” though dawn may have “fingers of pink light.” The language is essentially mimetic: dawn frequently shows up stretching her fingers out across the underbelly

of clouds or over the peaks of an approached island—especially in a maritime culture 3 Moreover, the language is not invented but merely used There is no attempt by the singer to make us notice his inventive cleverness and indeed, no attempt by the singer to make his personal-ity or personal history matter He wins no National Book Awards, he headlines no conventions So much is he erased that to this day we are

not sure of his gender or his person If he is mentioned in The Odyssey ,

he is mentioned barely and he would never sit at an evening’s banquet holding up his book and inviting people to read or even to teach it Thus is offered to us the omniscient first person We teachers, for all our expertise, often describe for students the omniscient, limited third person, and first person narrators, and in doing so, forget the well-spring of stories as well as their purpose(s) In our modernity and modernism (and post and post post modernism) we tip the scales so that modernism balances with classicism and ancient literature But, as turgidly weighty as it may be, it doesn’t And it can’t, if we buy into

T S Eliot’s idea in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that a good poem joins and extends the body of poetry; a good poet contributes

to that which is “Poetry.” That which we know is history and only if

we foreshorten our historical horizons may we pretend modernity is more than a blip There is nothing new under the sun Without making

Homecoming’s Not a Dance 9

too much of it, I hope, in Greek the word from which ecclesiastes is evolved means, roughly, “speaker-member of the assembly.” It would

be Homeric if Ecclesiastes hadn’t lost the omniscient first person and substituted the autobiographical first person

The omniscient first person knows the entire story and he may move geographically wherever necessary to complete the story, which is the story of the Greek people of the Eastern Mediterranean He is not the inventor of the story—it’s a commonly known one—and what he is celebrated for is his being an anonymous vessel for the muse who is skilled This is why apprentice writers should imitate, offering their take and spin to stories that already exist (and, sure, are judged by teachers to be not only worthy of imitation but also available in their structure and language to allow imitation) The story must be enter-taining, of course, but we may assume that the story of who, what, and how was entertaining in a way that no “survivor” show may ever be And the principle holds today: there are no new stories

The canvas of The Odyssey , the background against which are set

whole episodes, uses a time I sometimes call “Horological,” all known

or imagined Time—and certainly all Times having to do with gods, goddesses, prophets, or divine sons of god are imagined The human horizons are wise and long in a time of evolved cultures, culturally important people, deeds, and events: Troy has already been sacked, Helen has been returned, and Telemachus is nearing drinking age, and the Achaeans want this guy Homer to let them relax while they listen

to stories about the winners

Their gods and goddesses, like all divinities, act like immortal human beings After all, it is Poseidon’s snit about his barbaric one-eyed son, Polyphemous being blinded by Odysseus that has Zeus mulling over the proper punishment for the arrogant human hero, a punishment that Athena manages to get reduced from death or forever down to a lonely journey home—a journey that will last long enough for Telemachus

to grow up under the tutelage of his mother Penelope and Laertes (his grandfather) and set out on and return from his own journey of renown Heroes need that, renown, and one may say with some certainty that it

is a real advantage to have the Goddess Athena watching over the events and incidents of your trip home These divinities created in the Greeks’ own image may be likable, understandable, and participatory in human affairs, but they outlast mortals and give those very mortals a sense of their relationship to history, the beginning and end of the world If the gods may be spiteful, jealous, exceptional, then so may the humans who take their meaning from those gods

Storytelling in the Digital Age 10

Against this backdrop are stories, interior tales set in smaller, shorter, and contained times—chronological in their movement, but with

un ordinary (or fantastic) agents and characters, or large histories of time

occupied by heroes and heroines In such times, the characters like their gods offer themselves up for telling as types, and if they endure individuation at all, they do so at some risk—and not always risk to themselves, though most often

One-eyed Polyphemous calls Odysseus by the name that Odysseus initially gives him which resembles “Nobody,” reaching down to grab a couple of Odysseus’s men and crunching them up in his mas-sive maw, and laughing at “Nobody” as blood and gore drip from his brutish lips Polyphemous’s brutishness is not merely a judgment of his

“differently–abledness,” but comes from his lack of community, his lack of laws, absence from counsel with others, his disregard for effort and agriculture, and his complete and narcissistic indifference even to other Cyclopses To be human means to have counsel and laws, among other things The type-hero skilled in all ways of contending invents

an escape with his men hanging from the underbellies of the sheep over whose spines the Cyclops runs his hand as each morning he lets them out to graze

Escaping, the men row for their lives and, thinking his boat beyond reach and danger from a blinded Polyphemous, our not-yet-

p erspicacious hero becomes for an instant individual, a prideful and needy man who, against the counsel of one of his sailors, shouts back his true name, giving Polyphemous details of his heritage as well as his postal address The idea of the anonymous singer’s unimportance—so very unlike contemporary writers—is reinforced Had Odysseus not succumbed to pride and entitled self-love, had he kept his identity or name secret, he might have made it back to Ithaka 20 years earlier (of

course, The Odyssey would have shrunk to the size and meaning of Kerouac’s On the Road, which, as that nasty little man Truman Capote

noted, wasn’t “writing but typing”) And without the breadth and

scope of The Odyssey , we would lose all the episodes that give us

mean-ing and instruction, whether it be courtesy or the need for discretion and temporary disguise, the fact that a home with husband and wife in concert and mutual counsel is preferred to disharmony If you accept Helen’s penitent return from Troy, you treat her with the respect she deserves in her station, but you don’t forget how she went round the Trojan Horse tapping on its sides and reminding the men inside of their dear wives at home Or what furthers Odysseus’s case with Nausikaa but words well-formed, and why do Nausikaa and her parents deal

Homecoming’s Not a Dance 11

kindly with Odysseus? All strangers may not come from the gods, they may be gods or goddesses Be rude to Athena and you’ll be in a fine pickle very quickly

There may have been a moment when Telemachus was tempted to join Facebook ™ and post pictures of himself drinking from golden goblets and carousing with Antino ö s and the other uncivilized suitors

of Penelope Or worse Fortunately for the Ithakans, he chose to keep himself to himself, command a ship and go out in search of his father as well as prove that he has, at his majority, become equal to his hero dad and worthy of his heroic and clever mother No one who is wise in this culture forgets the Time of the gods and goddesses, the on-goingness, the totality of meaning in Every Time

Against this backdrop, we in part get the storied history of a culture, and the values we take away from the entertainment of listening or reading with our aural imaginations engaged are many We learn that women do not need bureaucratic “empowerment” but rather cleverness and cunning, using cultural responsibilities to fend off the improper harassment of Antino ö s and Eurynomos And nothing is better, when married, than a husband and wife who act together in counsel and concert We learn that sons need to grow up to achieve a stature that challenges or matches their father’s We learn skepticism and caution, keeping oneself a little disguised until sure of his circumstances (a wis-dom Odysseus acquires by means of his two-decades long journey home and the gradual loss of all his men), and we learn the hardship

of being above other men and women in abilities and reputation—of being a hero We learn the importance of family, of households, of keeping faith with those households And in the case of Eurynomos, who is one of the abrasive suitors slaughtered in the great hall, we learn that to a wise man like his father Aig ý ptios, bent down and sage with years, values supercede a father’s desire for revenge for his son’s death

If we are Greeks, or if we are persons who understand the value

of storytelling, we learn What we learn includes how to behave, the value of language, and how mortal men connect their history and cul-ture through the muse to All-Time Discretion remains best and anonymity is not all bad If you give your name to a stranger, he may call your name loudly as you step into the path of an oncoming bus, causing you to pause and turn just long enough for the bus driver’s eyes to go wide before the bus f lattens your belly permanently Truly

we hear the same advice from Boswell in 1746, who tells us that he went to London to learn discretion and proper behavior 4 We learn it everywhere in stories that the self should not be loved so seriously that

Storytelling in the Digital Age 12

it gets exposed to all manner of response and ridicule and danger—for

us or for others, as when a gigantic monster nearly hits our ship with a boulder As for language, we know it when we hear it and if we need to read it, we have George P Elliott’s masterful short story, “In a Hole,” in which the narrator uses common words uncommonly well

We learn because of the structure of story, and that structure involves frameworks of Time Chronological time, clock time, the time of the day-to-day actions and events, is set against the historical, which is in turn set against the Horological, and thus one event or set of events is connected to the history of a people that is connected to the horology

of the gods

Just imagine if Penelope had been too busy to rear Telemachus and instead sent him off to the gulag of Greek Day Care where the sons and daughters of the rich and famous were taught that they, too, one day could be king They wouldn’t have to do a thing to earn the privi-lege, and they wouldn’t even understand that privileges—the public knowledge of your previous hypocrisies or errors—carry with them a heavy burden Unlike political candidates’ wives, they couldn’t tell the interviewer to “Just stop it” because being a wife of a man running for president was hard (“Why just today, my dressage horse began a hunger strike and refused his oats and my Cadillac wouldn’t start and I had to call Jos é in to fix it before I could go get my hair done”)

Just think if little Tele had wanted to start growing grapes and his dad wasn’t around to write him a check And his mom thought being First Lady in Ithaka was hard and she didn’t want to discuss Odysseus’s absence with Stone Tablet News She certainly wouldn’t want to hear about that witch Circe and her husband’s dalliance with her But then Circe, besides being beautiful, has magical powers and serves drinks that, when consumed, cause Odysseus’s men to lose all thoughts of home This is not a simple matter of losing one’s memory or forgetting that which you knew a long time ago Rather it is mimetic and specific: Home is that place of routine and comfort, relation and knowing your relations and furthering them, the one true wellspring of possible and complete happiness (which, not so ironically, is mixed and not pothole free) It is a place where one returns to be free of the getting and spend-ing of the capitalist world It is the metaphorical place that little Alex

and his Droogie-Woogs violate and disrupt in A Clockwork Orange, not

unlike Antino ö s and Euronymos and the rest of the loud-mouthed, violent, and disrespectful suitors here 5

C H A P T E R T H R E E

Truth and Beauty: When Divine Horizons Shrink and the Gods Pack Up to Leave

With The Odyssey , we are a long way from “Duh,” stitched into an

interwoven tapestry of truth and beauty, which is all we know and all

we need to know on earth Things mean—one’s home is sacrosanct and to intrude on it and lay waste to it thoughtlessly and insensitively invites an exact justice Antino ö s has played the role of braggart and bully, rude and insulting, his voice ringing out in the banquet hall

as he abuses the serving women, Telemachus, and at one point, even the poet-singer who ought to be most honored among men Thus it’s appropriate for him to be the first one to die with his voice box skew-ered and his head pinned to the royal, usurped banquet throne There are few moments in storytelling that are more satisfying than Antino ö s being pierced through the throat by a spear thrown by the suddenly revealed Odysseus, side by side with his grown son, Telemachus In proper realistic storytelling, bad people come to bad ends One might only wish to have been there to see the surprised look fixed to his con-gressional face

Synecdoche and mimesis offer us language that means what it says and it will take thousands of years for us to run out of things to say and turn on the language itself like survivors of the Donner Party eating the friends who made the journey possible and traveled with them Thousands of years, until Freud turns to Jung in New York’s harbor and says, “They don’t know the plague we bring”—the plague of ama-teurs approaching you at the Confucius Bar to ask, “Do you understand why you play with your moustache?”

“It feels good,” you reply

Storytelling in the Digital Age 14

“No,” comes the sententious response “You are putting yourself back in touch with yourself.”

That’s the moment you wish for an Odysseal spear to strike him down, to puncture the certainty of his practiced voice

“No, really, it just feels good.”

He refuses to believe you—and if you protest, he’ll accuse you of testing too much just like in that famous play, though he can’t remem-ber which play or why it’s famous If he could, he’d realize that you are not Gertrude and he’s not Hamlet and besides, Little Ham is just a tad too weirded out by a ghost and Gertrude might simply be making an aesthetic comment on the Player Queen’s over-the-top language and promise If he were a well-meaning liberal, he’d probably make you sit beside Hamlet at lunch to encourage you (and him) not to bully Moreover, thousands of years ago, we lacked the fatuous fascist dis-guised in the f leece of good-feeling to tell us it is wrong to enjoy Antino ö s’s death After all, his father was drafted off to a Trojan War from which he never returned and his mother became addicted to

pro-Wannana dates and, a tad on the pudgy side he was teased in scholio ,

bullied, really, with the violence of hurtful words, and he always had

to struggle for self-respect and empowerment For breaking half of the rules of Greek society—invading another man’s home, harassing his wife and son, wasting his goods and wealth, insulting the owner’s father as well as the master’s housekeepers, for being a loudmouthed

punk in a baggy chiton and kicking the poet-singer—he must be sort of

forgiven by being understood

Around the fatuous fascists in the office, we must enjoy Antino ö s’s death in secret Although the frame of time against Time, of legendary action against the Time of the Gods assures us that we are, if not right, then okay It is the way people always have felt; it is the way people always will feel, regardless of however much intolerance for violence of speech, action, or thought is invented

Sure our enjoyment demands the poet’s control, the tion of us by his words and their beauty—a beauty that is not sim-ply the measured singing but also the exceptional control of language, which includes event, point-of-view, moral, and most of all structure and structural consistency A story poorly told, like a lie, lacks inter-est (though it may be dangerous) A story inadequately told, like an equivocation, does not convince thoughtful people This Greek story

manipula-is not only well-told, but it manipula-is also well-structured, time against Time, with the smaller time moving in a recognizable direction (from rosy-fingered dawn to star-guided night) and—the important part—the

Truth and Beauty 15

story acquires and accretes meaning because it is set in relation to the Time of forever: this is not justice in broad and historical human terms, this is Justice as it ought to be exacted and understood

The arts in Greek culture are highly valued and daily emphasized, although with the pre-Socratics, certainly, science is well into its inves-tigations of how the cosmos came to be so ordered (apparently) Natural philosophy exists, but no one has suggested that studying it will produce opportunities for gainful employment It will take almost 3,000 years before the absurd theorists of Edification first enter American class-rooms to tell children that with each rung of the “educational” ladder, the expectancy for their lifetime incomes rises No Achaean would ever consider substituting the study of natural philosophy for the truths and beauties that are offered by the sylvan historians—those foster children

of slow Time—of structured art Poets and storytellers have not only a place, but an important place, a peripherally central place

Three thousand years later, not only will poets be condemned to the ash pits of Culture, so will Culture (except among the rich who send their offspring to private schools) The stories the Greek poets offer are sung and resung until—if they are pleasurable and instructive—they merge into the Story that doesn’t merely represent some of their cultural attitudes, but is their Culture Everyone is familiar with them Every individual human life is connected and not just to a widget turner at

GM but outward in time to his own family’s history, his country’s tory, and to the history and stories of his Culture, to the Time of a divine pantheon of gods and goddesses or The Big Bang, and even there Cronus can kill his own father, Uranus, and in turn be killed by his erotically inclined youngest son, Zeus

The gods, simply put, are tricky Inventive, protective, and creative, sometimes like Coyote, they trick or injure themselves At farther reaches of the Western World, several time zones away, Coyote is hid-ing a f lint knife on his body and allowing the monster Ilpswetsichs

to swallow him after the monster has gone about gobbling up one and every thing (and making Coyote feel lonely) He lights a fire

every-to light the darkness giving Ilpswetsichs heartburn, finds the people Ilpswetsichs swallowed, and together—like Odysseus and his men blinding Polyphemous—they toss people out each time Ilpswetsichs belches and finally kill the monster by cutting out its heart Various people are formed by parts of the monster falling to earth; the heart’s blood on the ground spawns the Human Beings (Numip ú ) who have strong hearts and great courage They, too, connect time to Time; they, too, have similar cultural values and their people must try to keep their

Storytelling in the Digital Age 16

names polished so that what they pass to their children and great great grandchildren is bright and worth having

So, though somewhat varying, stories about who The People are, how they should be, act, and think or feel, get told and retold, shaped and polished over hundreds and thousands of years As language grows and evolves, as our caveman and cavewoman learn, develop, polish their abilities to tell stories that are beautiful and that entertain while conveying truth or truths to others, as their stories are augmented

or embellished, they become their Culture And since people don’t change much in terms of Time, their stories in terms of time don’t really change much either

For example, though the sometimes illiterate and commercially

“successful” Americans in their bubbles of wealth or administration often romanticize those nice little Native tribes, unaware of thousands-of-years-old stories that describe the creation of the world, f lood stories that ante-date old two-by-two Noah, and Coyote who, though not exactly like Odysseus is loads more fun than Jes ú s, laying claim to

“truth” or reality for their gods or prophets with an arrogance that leads them and those who would listen to them Like Odysseus—who doesn’t really delve with the help of his shrink into the notion that

mis-if he hadn’t shouted his name and address to Polyphemous he might have reached Ithaka with his boat and crew intact and alive—Coyote

in his cleverness sometimes stumbles, tricks himself, and then denies

it Coyote isn’t Human, but he is amusingly, entertainingly a little like us

In the same way that storytelling is essential to the Achaeans, so

is it to the Numip ú , the Navaho, Pueblos, Assiniboine, Shoshoni, Blackfeet, et cetera: stories come out of the natural experience, come out of hundreds and thousands of years while describing The Culture Stories are not romanticized, cute little metaphorical “histories.” From them a Numip ú knows the beginnings of the world and by means of stories, they pass the knowledge of the world and how to behave in relation to it on to the generations Coyote will always be, and he will always be Coyote Stories teach, and well-told (or, in the language of Physics, “beautiful”) stories teach truth while they entertain So Mari Waters, remains a wise and great teacher She, too, adapted her lan-guage and detail to fit her audience, not unlike the anonymous poet-singer, Homer The Culture(s) depend on the stories

Harrow Hell in Homer (I couldn’t resist) long before the Christian version where Odysseus is replaced by Christ (the Catholic Church replaced so much and conveniently dropped the apocryphal rest) and

Truth and Beauty 17

we hear truth from Achilles, fallen hero of the Trojan War, pierced through his heel: it is “better to break sod as a poor farm hand than lord it over all the exhausted dead.” It is indeed better to be alive and working, even if having to work hard, than to be dead, and lording it over anyone, especially the brain-dead, exhausted units who vote with their feelings or deny climate change with (and for) their money just is not fun Real work, work that engages in process rather than punditry, matters—even though public appreciation may be absent In fact, we might just suspect that lording it over any of the 47 percent of irrespon-sible victims, is a worthless ambition Better to be Yeats’s poet friend who, in “To a Friend Whose Work has come to Nothing,” learns the valuelessness of reputation and fame and is told, after all his work, “Be secret and exult.” 1

Better to learn that work is what people do for its own sake and inherent value, regardless of awards or money or reputation After all,

is it not the inherent value of work—whether paid or not—much of the impetus behind women wanting equal opportunity and recompense?

Is it not the bureaucratic niggling meaningless of much highly paid work that causes some women and now men to drop out of the world

of pressure and pay?

Exultation is wisely happy, and I, for one, would choose to be wise and happy over many things Writing poems, like telling stories, should aim at pristinely evocative language mounted in a beautiful structure, both may get better but neither should be aimed at reputa-tion or one’s name on everyone’s lips But with the absurd expan-sion of creative writing programs in the increasingly less educational American Edification System, that is what gets sold: you partially lit-erate and insecure human unit can be all that you can be Which is apparent, unhappy, and dull

Note the word “can.” Most can not

Politicians often lie At the very least they propagate falsehoods, and with Virgil, the poet steps forward into political history The Muse recedes from teller of the story to the poet’s inspiration for a story he invents, an acknowledgment that moves the Muse into an á la mode position, coming a little like an afterthought, several lines into the poem We get the sense the individuated storyteller is simply satisfy-ing the conventions of the form; the story seems less organic and more constructed It’s the kind of reading that gave literature a bad name in school: one ought to encounter it, true, but one need not enjoy it Even

Caesar’s Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres is more fun or fun work, if

only because one has to translate it for Miss Marion MacNamara 2

Storytelling in the Digital Age 18

True to our feeling, The Aeneid is a story superimposed upon a

vari-ety of peoples in a somewhat wooden attempt to justify the foundation

of Roman Culture Virgil goes back and invents those things needed

to support the establishment of Rome not unlike a novelist sometimes writes backward—finishing a chapter and then going back in time before that chapter to establish that which leads up to the initial chap-ter Time is shrinking to history—just—and Augustus is the power that’s pleased Contemporary concerns—the status of the poet and the status of Caesar suddenly have everything to do with the story and its importance

Time’s horizons start to shrink as the poet’s role begins to swell

No longer is he or she an anonymous storyteller who pieces a known story together while with the process he entertains persons who already know the story He becomes a historical individual—a real person—

who invents not the story but a story Where our Greek harper may

have depended on the generosity of his pleased and entertained tors for food and shelter and honor, after Virgil, poets depend on those people and institutions that have captured power, continue to hold it close by means of secrets and handshakes, the color of chimney smoke and the expensive delicate ship that claims to have seen something amazing—institutions run by shadows who may dispense favor or pun-ishment as the whim or political need dictates

Virgil carves the story of the founding of Rome out of faceless marble

to please a Caesar, possibly with the hope of winning a Pullet Surprise

or an Empire Book Award, charging his editor to be sure that nothing

in it displeases those in supreme power Art and politics make alliances and the story of where and how the people came to be is fabricated out

of our life”) and creates a vehicle in The Divine Comedy by which he

may criticize not The Church itself, but officials of the Church Dante names names: Hell is replete with cardinals and bishops and popes who deserve the punishment the poet invents for their blatant sins But the

criticism does little good: after The Inferno , another hundred years of

hypocrisy will produce the perfectly criminal Pope Alexander VI (ne é

Truth and Beauty 19

Rodrigo Borgia), a corrupt pope guilty of all the sins of Hell in one lifetime—simony, adultery, theft, rape, bribery, incest, and even, pos-sibly, murder Alexander had been a cardinal who maintained a long-time illicit affair with Vanozza dei Cattanei, who bore him four bastard children His daughter, Lucrezia, outdid her father by becoming one

of our historical representatives of Machiavellian ruthless politics and sexual corruption characteristic of popes of the Renaissance And we think some paedophilic priest of Irish descent is awful (he is, of course,

as despicable as any paedophile, whether a priest, boy scout leader, or coach of Penn State’s football team)

Dante maintained his sense of structured beauty, though for many

modern readers, Purgatorio and Paradiso for all their beautiful language

lose entirely the element of entertainment If that is all we know, it is far more than we need to know, and few sensible people would wish

to live anywhere else but right outside the gates of Hell, with Aristotle and Socrates, Archimedes, Democritus, Pythagoras, Plato, Diogenes

or Heraclites Purgatorio sinks beneath the weight of religious agendas and Paradiso is about as inviting as a disco dance in a nunnery Nothing

happens, certainly nothing as interesting as the descent through Hell and the pilgrim’s emergence out of Satan’s asshole

There, in Hell, Virgil, the poet-persona’s guide down through the levels of hell, teaches, educates, illuminates, scolding Dante for sym-pathy or fellow feeling toward any of the sinners: again, the poet is, metaphorically, both the inventor-author and the central character and Virgil stays with him until they emerge from Satan’s asshole and climb

up Satan’s leg, inverting their view to see the stars One is fascinated

by all the mimetic representation of clerics inhabiting their various levels like lemon trees lining Amalfi’s coastal hills, specific popes and cardinals guilty of murder or simony or whatever sins are matched to

whatever punishments he deems appropriate If one prefers The Inferno

to the remainder of The Divine Comedy —as clearly I do—then one

has to wonder if it isn’t that human element that makes not only the literature truthful and beautiful, but also that which provides the enter-tainment in a serious, aesthetic way Good persons come to ends that are, if not good, then allowing the possibility of goodness, while bad people are punished either while they are bodily alive or in the imag-ined afterlife

Consider: the Greek gods and goddesses not only act like tal human beings, with jealousies and rivalries, favorite heroes and heroines, complaining to Zeus when Odysseus puts out the eye of a specially sighted son, but they also participate in a very real way in

immor-Storytelling in the Digital Age 20

the human world They throw storms at Achaean ships, they disguise heroes returning home until the time comes for the Athena to unbend Odysseus and make him powerful and nearly numinous, they guide, teach, protect, defend, and punish While the Time frame remains large, the gods are participants alongside the heroes and heroines With Virgil, the gods are pushed into that unrealized and unexperi-enced realm of mythology in just the way that the children of invaders pushed Native gods, legends, and stories into the trash bin of “myths”—which means unimportant (though cute) and definitely unreal (this from people who actually believe in a realistic synecdoche of crucifix-ion and resurrection) By time the gods are found in Dante, they have been removed further, to the position of a ball of light at the center of the universe God’s eye cannot be on the sparrow because God lacks vision and in Dante a Christian aspires to join the angelic host sing-ing Hosanna to the blinding light The gods, in other words, have gone from instructively entertaining and participatory, to instructively dull, inexplicable, and unknowable To one who wonders why anyone would want to be a cardinal except for the reasons of privilege and power, though Christianity does have a lot to teach, he wonders why Christianity has to destroy other legends, other ways of understanding, other ways of relating its time to all Times Why must it claim priority when priority is so blatantly false? Certainly, Coyote never fantasized about this tiny little planet, out of billions and billions of planets, being the one true planet with the gods dissolving into the aether

Storytellers—poets—have just wiped out a middle frame, the time frame of gods and heroes we want to hear about and imitate as best we can Eventually, they will replace it with sports, but that will require the dissolution of Culture and its replacement by Commerce Before that, though, we can learn through Dante’s life and death what truth and beauty get you in the fourteenth century when the poet and person displeases the Catholics of power

Though Dante was powerful enough to resist the Church and its evils and corruptions and survive even after being forced into exile, after his death the Church of forgiveness tried to exact its vengeance,

placing his posthumously published De Monarchia on its list of banned

books Evidently, our poet, any poet was not to argue for the tion of Church and state, and especially not when the Church was, in

separa-essence, the State ( De Monarchia demanded the pope be “merely” a

spiritual leader kept out of “earthly” intrigues; in other words, in an early demand for the separation of Church and state, the Church had to give up the power it still covets and cherishes, offering up semblances of

Truth and Beauty 21

goodness while doing things forbidden under canonical law like ning whores up the passageway from Hadrian’s Tomb to the Vatican)

run-That censorship only secured the immortality of De Monarchia, so the

Catholic Church decided to attempt to exhume Dante’s body and ject it to public humiliation After the end of the journey of Dante’s life, the plain, honoring citizens of Ravenna chose to hide our poet’s remains from the capos of the Church They were not restored to their proper grave until 1865

Thus the horizon of Time has shrunk Mimesis remains, while ecdoche has shifted toward metaphor Machiavellian politics and the reputation of the poet have enlarged as Time has begun to recede into a colorless all-color of Belief (or Nonbelief ) making a god who is a sort of cosmological white whale who cannot be found anywhere but against the canvass on which men may paint what they need to see, given their personalities Men, even garbed in a rich holiness still believe that which they wish Belief (or Nonbelief ) is less certain, more insistent,

syn-a kind of vsyn-ague senssyn-ation syn-aimed syn-at proving or disproving the tent, and the actions of the gods are becoming even more whimsical as the end-game that gods describe for people turn to politics and later to Fate (though not yet) Floating in the massive and before long orbital eternity of our teeny solar system, earthbound human beings begin to take on importance not simply as solitary pilgrims guided by Virgil, but Human Beings—although the joy of being human is a long way from dissolution

And joy it is Giovanni Boccaccio

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C H A P T E R F O U R

Sex, More Sex, and a Little Corruption

Boccaccio’s individual language and the uses to which it is put is one

of the main distinguishing features that takes character types and somewhat individuates them with a kind of consistency that has been unusual in that it is demanded by the process of storytelling to be repeated and repeatable Mimesis begins to transform into metaphor, using not only comparatives but also letting indirection and implica-tion give us laughter, joy, and a recognition that, yes, this seems true

to being Human The indirection adds pleasure, not confusion, stays blushing, and leaves elegance not-too-troubled or upset

Here we may reach ahead to answer that age-old question proffered

by lazy or shallow minds: What has Boccaccio or The Decameron to do

with me? The answer to which is, “Everything.”

Of course, if you enjoy watching yet another season’s sitcoms with their stale jokes and banal repetition of noncharacters who are nothing like you or me (one may only hope), or if you measure things in terms

of “winning” and “losing” as in who won the presidential debate last night or which scum bucket used loopholes in the tax codes to avoid paying even a small percentage of his fair share of federal income taxes (look up “CRT’s”) and whose supporters still hold Puritanical notions

of the “elect” being rewarded by luck or money, or if you are so culated as to need at 45 or 50 a pharmaceutical to give you a four-hour stiffy, or if you are so driven by your job of selling life insurance (really death insurance) that you don’t have time to read when you reach home and crack open your Buds or Bubalinas—well, then, you may be able

emas-to resist the idea that Boccaccio is not merely important emas-to semas-torytelling but he is also essential to your shrunken, impoverished life in ways that you can and will not imagine 1 And imagining is one of the actions that

Storytelling in the Digital Age 24

separates us from primates and mammals of the King Kong or Moby Dick kind

Teachers get a lot of “times have changed” dog dung from not telligent students In response, they may either start banging students

unin-on their empty noddles or shouting, or they may in as reasunin-onable a tunin-one

as possible, invite these oh-so-modern children of oh-so-inattentive and confused parents to imagine watching three boys and ten girls sail off toward Cozumel during Spring Break Or, if that is not sufficient, you might tell them that they may find new arguments for sex, as well

as learn a few warnings against some attitudes That word “sex” perks their little parts right up after their faces betray astonishment that any-

one in his right mind might read The Nibelungenlied for the pleasure of

learning

Times have not changed, though Boccaccio’s context is more gant, restrained, and uses a language and syntax that may convey simi-lar desires in amusing and not degrading ways For what do three boys cast into gardens and leisure with seven girls want? Sex, sex, and more sex They really need only to excuse having it And unlike contem-porary college students, they do not stagger drunkenly down Albert Street shouting “Whoo!” at 2 a.m as though such Whooing irresistibly will attract vaginas

The date is 1351 (or 1353) The characters intend to survive the Plague by traveling to country estates a couple of miles out of town Two miles was a long way in the fourteenth century whereas it’s less than a dollar of gas today as long as the president miraculously keeps the price below four dollars which, of course, anyone with any knowledge about economics knows he can’t Even though debating candidates seemed to suggest, and their “candidate” perpetuated (he doesn’t think

up anything on his own, having learned to say only what will appeal to his thick-headed audience; he was running for president for Pete’s sake, whoever Pete is and, by the way, if he’d bought an election—OMG!!!, I’ve just realized—his spouse would have replaced one of the finest first ladies we’ve had outside of Barbara Bush and inhabit, not live, in the White House—the one that looks to her husband like a vacation home), the president has nothing to do with the relatively free market price of gasoline, especially not if those nasty Chinese are willing to pay US$450 a gallon Unless the president wants to be labeled—on that busy despoiling Day One—an energy currency manipulator

But way back, back before dinosaurs and cell phones, clear back in the fourteenth century, it must have taken most of the afternoon to load up clothes in the carriages and roll on out to a country villa

Sex, More Sex, and a Little Corruption 25

If Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” represents Modern English, then Boccaccio, who wrote an Italian made modern by Dante only ten gen-erations before the British Bard, represents the beginnings of the struc-tures of modern stories

Where Dante set his Divine Comedy against broader times, telling

interior, typifying stories about rotten clerics, cheats, popish raphers, usurers, and murders, Boccaccio strips away not the inf luence but the aesthetic use or importance of the broadest frame of time “In the middle of the journey of our life” in Dante transmutes to “Human

pornog-it is to have compassion for the aff licted” for Boccaccio 2 Being human

demands increasingly metaphorical language, and the structure The

Decameron uses is smaller in scope, though its extending force remains

temporal Let me put it another way: whereas the temporal frames shrink, the meaning—for the modern storyteller and participatory reader—deepens

How? For one of the first times in Western Literature, the narrators aren’t simply tellers of the interior stories, they also are participants in the broader story framing the tellings (and not just by actively listen-ing) Their characters are revealed by the stories they select to tell, as well as the way in which they individually choose to tell them, as well

as by the moral learning or instruction that they offer by means of that telling, and they are all controlled by an omniscient storyteller behind the entire collection, the implied and very human and humane author-narrator himself

Whereas many of my colleagues might insist that you may not “find” the writer in his invention, I would maintain that a careful reader, certainly another writer, can do so carefully and easily Where they used to talk about Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s article, “The Intentional Fallacy,” I would talk about the Intentional Fallacy fallacy If a writer doesn’t know his intentions in manipulating his readers, then he prob-ably isn’t much of a writer—and such a statement does not exclude the happy accidents or good fortunes that occur in the act of writing because a writer aware of his intentions recognizes both the accident and its happiness and seizes upon it, a seizing that requires experience, learning, practice, and perhaps most of all a good editor If one of my students says, “I was trying to ,” the appropriate response is, “Well, you failed, so try again (and here are some suggestions).” That’s what learning to write entails—trying, trying again, and never quite getting

it right though getting it closer to right

So we get Boccaccio, who invents ten young people who decide in Santa Maria Novella to escape The Plague by going to countryside

Storytelling in the Digital Age 26

villas Which villa and where doesn’t matter What matters is that Boccaccio must find a way to excuse their f leeing the troubles of their fellow humans Were they simply callous rich people or Ayn Rand Objectivists, we would not like them, and not liking them we would

do the same we victims do when we hear their droning voices—we would cover our ears

People who tell us stories must be people we either like or at least persons we are willing to journey with, or people who ironically we

see through and enjoy the seeing, as in F M Ford’s The Good Soldier:

A Tale of Passion —one of the most brilliantly controlled and pleasurable

novels ever published When we read Ford, we realize in our tive participation that there is no passion, that it is a “tale” that is cold and somewhat heartless not unlike one of the other great and perfectly controlled novels, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart where

imagina-without irony Portia’s heart is trod upon by all but Matchett, the ily’s domestic retainer These two writers suggest that the likeability of the narrator, the enjoyability of the story, and the beautifully justified manner of its telling all slide up or down in relation to each other: when the narrator is less likeable, we may forgive the author-inventor

fam-as long fam-as the language is styled, appropriate, consistent, even beautiful, and as long as the story maintains our interest and enjoyment, often with recognition and understanding as simple as, “She’s right, people can be, may be, or are (and have been) just like that.” Though all are necessary in some measure, it is not always in equal measure, any more than the same opportunity is equal to two different individuals Every writer, with an instinct learned or gifted, pays close attention to this sliding scale of interplaying processes He may cheat a little in one or another direction—authors have their tricks—but he must be careful to uphold the standards of realism And realism, by the way, is not pass é , though those who cannot handle it or who want to teach comic books and so-called graphic novels (comic books by another name that smell very unlike a rose), who do not understand the inherent contradiction

in combining “digital” with “humanities” would like it to be Realism

is the umbrella beneath which all other genres compose themselves 3 Boccaccio knows these things (and to think he never took a creative writing seminar) Love is his subject, and there is no literary subject more ubiquitous and more captivating Indeed, an entire industry has been made out of love in Jane Austen, and hidden love, disguised love, restrained love are all the more powerful when revealed in contrast

to earlier restraint Boccaccio, our author-narrator coyly suggests that even though his support, or perhaps more accurately his comfort may

Sex, More Sex, and a Little Corruption 27

“little enough avail to the aff licted, nevertheless [he thinks] it should rather be proffered where the need appears greater, both because there it will do more service and because it will be there held the dearer.” He’s going to offer his support, or rather his comfort, to “lovesick ladies” rather than to men, because these ladies hold hidden in their bosoms the fires of love, constrained by the wishes, the pleasures, the com-mandments of fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands Given so much time to think thoughts that are not always merry, lovesick women need his help to dispel with new discourse the annoyance of having their feelings locked inside As for men in 1350, they have means of easing

“melancholy or heaviness of thought” by doing many varied things that draw such thoughts away

Regardless of what the modern feminist thinks of Boccaccio’s ascribed or diverted sensibilities, I think, or I hope, that we might agree that in general, women are different from men (not “less” and perhaps

“more”) even when we occupy or temporarily inhabit the same spheres

of action or thought That aside, our storyteller here is working his way toward “the succor and solace of ladies in love” so that they—really we—may learn what is to be eschewed and what is “on like wise to be ensued.” If these ten days of stories succeed in the cessation of chagrin, thanks are due to Love who by freeing Boccaccio from his bonds, “has made it possible for me to apply myself to the service of their pleasures.” These stories, then, are offered with the intent of truth, beauty, and pleasure We learn from them the ways that may be deemed good and those that may lead us toward bad ends We learn the processes that in conjunction with accident or fate end in comedy: marriage, relief, sur-vival, restoration of place and purpose, rejoining with lost family and

friends, and love engendered and expressed Platonically and physically

All opposites to the plague that is the Black Death

As the frame narrator or implied author tells it, the citizens of Florence are reduced by the Plague to a state akin to barbarity, their fears and notions causing them to shun and f lee from the sick, seeking immunity for themselves Some try living with extreme moderation Others try the opposite, carousing and making merry, going about singing and frolicking and satisfying the appetite in everything possible The laws lose their authority—divine and human—falling into decay for lack

of the ministers and executors of law who are all dead Still others try

on a middle course between moderation and excess “Some were of a more barbarous, though, perhaps, a surer way of thinking, affirming that there was no remedy against pestilences better than—no, nor any

so good as—to f lee before them” (p 10)

Storytelling in the Digital Age 28

Wait a minute In the space of a few pages, our author has taken us from barbarity to two extreme and one middle course and then back

to not barbarity but a more barbarous way of thinking that is better than staying in Florence to die And the interjection, with the echo-ing “no, nor” gets us to let slip the barbarity mentioned two pages ago and making their—whoever they are—reasoning somewhat our own,

or at least admissive that going to one’s or another’s country seat “as

if the wrath of God, being moved to punish the iniquity of mankind, would not proceed to send the pestilence wheresoever they (or we) might be, but would content itself with aff licting those only who were found within the walls of their city” (p 11) Boccaccio lets us know that whichever way we opine, some of us may escape and some may not In other words, the Plague has nothing to do with the wrath of God and those who f led or died abandoned were the ones who set the example for those who yet lived Fleeing may save you, but then again

it may not, and either has nothing more to do with the other than the pestilence itself, and the human action of abandoning sick people may well come (almost justifiably) full circle so that a sick abandoner is afterward abandoned Why, Boccaccio says, things have gotten so bad that a woman fallen sick thinks nothing of having a man tend to her, without shame uncovering any part of her body the same as she’d have done with a woman

Even the customs of death and dying—Boccaccio again leads us through the twists and turns of subtle self-justification, possibly to help the less astute of us reader-listeners understand that he is doing this purposefully—going from kinswomen and women neighbors gather-ing in a dead man’s house while the men and closest relatives gather before the dead’s house whither—and this is so very like Dante’s satire

of clergymen—“according to the dead man’s quality, came the clergy,” and the dead man was borne away to a church chosen by himself The plague, as with the actions of the living, has changed all that Other strange customs spring up in their stead and “not only did folk die without having a multitude about them,” but many died without wit-ness Finally, in lieu of former customs, we get “laughter and jests and

feasting and merrymaking in company” while the beccamorti sprung

from the city’s dregs hurry the corpse off to stick it in whatever graves are available

This movement through changing actions and responses is what shorter than the one from barbarism to justified f light, as it would

some-be in any writer of Boccaccio’s skill While it makes points of ing judgment, the repetitions underscore not the judgments but the

chang-Sex, More chang-Sex, and a Little Corruption 29

processes of arriving at those judgments Authors may seem to digress They may seem to repeat themselves Often an author may do so with purpose, and hopefully with more skill than I With and from recogni-tion of the skill comes pleasure, a pleasure that augments the truth and beauty therein revealed

Then comes an initiation, the prelude to what will be repeated, when Boccaccio says disingenuously, “Moreover—not to go longer searching out and recalling every particular of our past miseries, as they befell throughout the city,” and brief ly decamps narratively to the countryside where people are dying in droves just as in Florence Then follows a series of rhetorical questions that summarily work through a process from “How many great palaces,” to “How many valiant men and how many fair ladies,” to how many sprightly youths breakfasted with kinfolk and friends and that same night supped with ancestors in the other world

The repetition, the echo, is in the first person of the author-narrator:

“I am myself weary of going wandering so long among so many eries”; having decided to leave those miseries aside where I may—especially as Florence is virtually empty of people—“It happened ” Finally, we reduce our temporal focus to our “once upon a time” with which all stories begin, whether stated or unstated All of what came before was setting, context, and all was aimed at making us read-ers think that the machinations of reason exercised by the ten young people—good young people, if only because they are in the habit of gathering in the venerable church of Santa Maria Novella—are rea-sonably okay

It is now that Boccaccio feels up to the claim of realism and truth “as afterward I heard from a person worthy of credit,” combined with our implied author telling us that the young people—all 18–28 years of age

“of discreet and of noble blood, fair of favor and well mannered and of gracious bearing”—whose names he would list except for the just cause that forbids his doing so to keep any of them from taking shame here-after for hearing and telling (and doing) things that are most lax, espe-cially because times are somewhat straightened He wants not to cause anyone to disparage the fair names of the seven ladies with unseemly talk Therefore, Boccaccio disingenuously and laughingly tells us, he’s changed their names in order to protect their innocence—or at least their good names And he’s chosen names that fit each one’s quality The first of these, “and her of ripest age, I shall call Pampinea.” The rest

of the ladies are Fiammetta, Phylomena, Emilia, Lauretta, Neyphile, and Elissa