Stress Relief

My daughter introduced me to this oddly cathartic program. If you're growing frustrated with an essay, or can't make that story come out right, or are generally coming off worse in the latest tussle with language, then what could be more appealing than to attack the recalcitrant screen with a flame thrower or a machine gun, or to scatter your text with word-eating termites? When you're done, you can wash it all clean again (and stamp on the termites).

Pointless bliss.

Stress Relief

My daughter introduced me to this oddly cathartic program. If you're growing frustrated with an essay, or can't make that story come out right, or are generally coming off worse in the latest tussle with language, then what could be more appealing than to attack the recalcitrant screen with a flame thrower or a machine gun, or to scatter your text with word-eating termites? When you're done, you can wash it all clean again (and stamp on the termites).

Pointless bliss.

Twice-told tales

When I was an undergraduate I used to enjoy poring over the Motif-Index of Folk Literature in the basement of Royal Holloway College library, trying to understand how different stories had echoed each other over and over throughout the world, for reasons that remained, at best, translucent. I was awed that someone had tried to systematize the whole thing, of course - though even then the choice of system felt a little brittle and arbitrary. Later, I would have the same feeling about John Wilkins' taxonomy of the whole of reality in his Real and Philosophical Character.

At the same time, I wasn't entirely sure what the Motif-Index it was for. Was reading it like trying to trace a family tree, a way of following the spread of stories through time - the narrative equivalent of historical philology? That was how Jacob Grimm had approached it, unsurprisingly maybe. If so, we might expect the narrative equivalent of Grimm's Law to operate, with stories modifying in predictable ways over time. And perhaps, just as we can make a stab at reconstructing Indo-European and other dead languages by applying such laws to languages that we do know, we might be able to reconstruct asterisk stories: stories that are no longer told, but once were. (This is very much in the spirit of what Tom Shippey sees Tolkien as having been about, I think, in creating his English mythology.) At the same time, that felt like a pipe-dream, rather like trying to back-predict the weather on a particular day in 2000BC on the basis of current data plus a knowledge of meteorology. The branching factor is too high, as they used to say in AI class.

Besides, perhaps that wasn't the best use of the Motif Index after all. Maybe it was more like looking through a book on chemistry, to see how a limited number of elements could be combined to make very different materials? From a writerly point of view, of course, it might be seen as list of ingredients, with plenty of recipe ideas thrown in.

If I'd known the words then, I'd have seen these two alternatives as diachronic and synchronic approaches, but back in the early '80s all attempts to get my fairly-traditional lecturers to explain about Saussure and structuralism were met with panicked brandishings of crosses and garlic.

I hadn't thought about the Motif-Index much recently, but watching a school production of the Arabian Nights the other evening I was really struck by the similarity between part of the 'The Envious Sisters' and part of the story of Pywll of Annwn, in the first branch of the Mabinogion.

( From the first Branch of the Mabinogion (Trans. Charlotte Guest) )

(  from The Arabian Nights – ‘The Envious Sisters’ )

It's fun to notice such things, of course, but I'm still as nonplussed as any undergraduate about what to say once I've noticed it. Coincidence? Influence? The universal grammar of story at work? It's actually rather irritating not to feel confident in saying what it all means, or even that it means anything at all. You pick up a shiny pebble - or is it a fossil? - from the beach and admire it, and then what is there to do but toss it back amongst the rest?

Twice-told tales

When I was an undergraduate I used to enjoy poring over the Motif-Index of Folk Literature in the basement of Royal Holloway College library, trying to understand how different stories had echoed each other over and over throughout the world, for reasons that remained, at best, translucent. I was awed that someone had tried to systematize the whole thing, of course - though even then the choice of system felt a little brittle and arbitrary. Later, I would have the same feeling about John Wilkins' taxonomy of the whole of reality in his Real and Philosophical Character.

At the same time, I wasn't entirely sure what the Motif-Index it was for. Was reading it like trying to trace a family tree, a way of following the spread of stories through time - the narrative equivalent of historical philology? That was how Jacob Grimm had approached it, unsurprisingly maybe. If so, we might expect the narrative equivalent of Grimm's Law to operate, with stories modifying in predictable ways over time. And perhaps, just as we can make a stab at reconstructing Indo-European and other dead languages by applying such laws to languages that we do know, we might be able to reconstruct asterisk stories: stories that are no longer told, but once were. (This is very much in the spirit of what Tom Shippey sees Tolkien as having been about, I think, in creating his English mythology.) At the same time, that felt like a pipe-dream, rather like trying to back-predict the weather on a particular day in 2000BC on the basis of current data plus a knowledge of meteorology. The branching factor is too high, as they used to say in AI class.

Besides, perhaps that wasn't the best use of the Motif Index after all. Maybe it was more like looking through a book on chemistry, to see how a limited number of elements could be combined to make very different materials? From a writerly point of view, of course, it might be seen as list of ingredients, with plenty of recipe ideas thrown in.

If I'd known the words then, I'd have seen these two alternatives as diachronic and synchronic approaches, but back in the early '80s all attempts to get my fairly-traditional lecturers to explain about Saussure and structuralism were met with panicked brandishings of crosses and garlic.

I hadn't thought about the Motif-Index much recently, but watching a school production of the Arabian Nights the other evening I was really struck by the similarity between part of the 'The Envious Sisters' and part of the story of Pywll of Annwn, in the first branch of the Mabinogion.

( From the first Branch of the Mabinogion (Trans. Charlotte Guest) )

(  from The Arabian Nights – ‘The Envious Sisters’ )

It's fun to notice such things, of course, but I'm still as nonplussed as any undergraduate about what to say once I've noticed it. Coincidence? Influence? The universal grammar of story at work? It's actually rather irritating not to feel confident in saying what it all means, or even that it means anything at all. You pick up a shiny pebble - or is it a fossil? - from the beach and admire it, and then what is there to do but toss it back amongst the rest?