Questions, Intuitions, Revisions: Telling and Re-Telling Stories About Ourselves in the World A College Seminar Course at Bryn Mawr College

Friends and fellow-tellers of tales:
This week's questions (posed by me and Paul, to be chewed over by us all...) are two in number:
Is Flatland a fairy tale? (If so, what makes it so? If not, why not?)
Is it a story?
(So, and: what's your working definition, four weeks into the semester, of story...?)
Hm. Seems as though this week's questions are...
five in number. Go for the bold.
(Sometimes I get ahead of myself....or rather: ahead of the common story we are writing.
Chalk it up to enthusiasm for the tale, in all its dimensions, and know that...
we will be filling in details as we go on, figuring out together which ones are meaningful....)

While we're on the subject, the Galileo space craft was deliberately crashed into Jupiter last week, for an interesting reason: to avoid possible contamination of Jovian moons with earth life forms. To avoid our changing THEIR stories?

And, remember/notice that, if you want some additional spaces/stories to explore yourself there are always links related to our conversations on our course home page ("some relevant web resources" lower down in the right column).

Since this has been so utterly ambiguous, let's start with the defininition of a fairytale:

Is Flatland about fantastic forces, fairies, wizards? Is it about any other fantastic creatures? No. Furthermore, a fairtale is a compulation of folk tales taken from the general consciousness (at least, so I see it), which Flatland is not. But, furthermore a fairytale is the metaphorical dead horse that we're collectively beating with our semantics.

Is Flatland a story? What is a story, anyway? I hear you wonder. Again, thanks to our friends

So, is Flatland a story? Why, yes, as a matter or fact, it is. It's an account of imaginary events, it's even a narrative and a tale. In the life of A. Square, it's the history of a person, and in view of Flatland itself, it's the history of a society.

Interestingly, it took me about five minutes to come to reach these conclusions, instead of 90.

Second subject: I had a bit of a surprise last Thursday when I went to my C-Sem let's-talk-about-your-papers meeting. I had gone with the thought in mind that my three essays so far had gone from ok to bad to worst, the first being the life of learning paper, the second the fairy tale, and the third the analysis of the fairy tale. When I got there, though, Professor Grobstein said that he had actually found the fairy tale to be a powerful story. I spent that afternoon thinking about why our opinions had been so different, and I came up with a guess. As a part of my personality type, I don't like to publicly display my emotions. I don't really have a problem when other people do it, but it's just really difficult for me to pull off. The best example I can think of is The Kitchen God's Wife, by Amy Tan which is an entirely emotion-based book. I love reading it, and I think it has lots of literary merit, but when I talk about the same sorts of things, I tend to view it as a cop-out, like I'm not actually thinking about anything, or like I'm relying on my emotions to do all the work and I'm not really doing anything at all. But when I thought about, I was working when I wrote the fairy tale, just in a different sort of way. What place does emotion have in literature anyway? Is it an intellectual subject/ is it valid for emotion to be the drive, subject, decision-maker when it comes to writing? I don't know, maybe this is silly, but it really struck me as something that was maybe important for myself, and maybe for other people around, too. What do you think?

A. Square starts out in a miserable position -- in jail, unheard, isolated. He then gets un-separated from his wife and family. He goes on some wild journey to another land with this magical character (who seems to grow from being flawed to being all-knowing). The sphere floats out of view, and the Square is magically restored to his normal two-dimensional world and the social order is unperturbed.

Ok, so maybe that's a stretch. But forwards or backwards it's a story. What's not a story, after all? If the reader supplies enough personal allusions and context, maybe even a grocery list could turn into a story.

I've been thoroughly enjoying the conversations about stories which we've been having in my section, as well as listening in to the stories being told over in the other section....

and just wanted to archive here, for the record and further mulling-over, some of what I've been learning...

When the McBrides and I tried defining "story," we came up with a range of possibilities:

• an explanation for the purposes of making our experience (=the information/data we've gathered about the world) harmless
• an explanation for making sense of it, making it understandable
• an account told to change the world for the better
• an account that gives us power over our experience in the world.

"The set of rooms on the same level of a building. From Middle English storye, fr. Medieval Latin historia, originally a row of windows with pictures on them, from Latin historia, story (tale)."

The house of fiction, Henry James told us, has many windows.

I play w/ this in my book: am I telling certain stories in order to limit the possibilities of my own life, and those of others? Can doing so open up new possibilities instead? In the McBride section, we also talked very interestingly about the role of the listener in the construction of story: is she the critic? the authority? is telling a story a way of making a connection/entering into a relationship w/ others? a way of inviting them to tell their stories back, to fill in all sorts of gaps you may have left open? what sort of action is requested (required?) of those who listen to tales?

Yet another key idea that emerged from our discussions this week: the idea of the a-symmetry of the process of revising stories: once you have new data, and draw up a new story to accomodate it, is it possible to "go back"? Is this why the narrator of Flatland couldn't return to the old story of 2-dimensionality? Because his experience of 3-dimensionality made it impossible to tell the the old story any more?

In regards to the "is it a fairy tale?" question: The answer is NO! It doesn't work as a fairy tale, it does not have the components of a fairy tale and as clever as Jenny's response was (to read it backwards) it still does not satisfy the "fairy tale theory" because, let's face it, we're not going to read it backwards (no disrespect of opinion intended JB).

That's all for now.

Alicia

The theme of Flatlands is similar to that of Galileo: fear of change to an established order leads to repression of new ideas.