I got dem ol' storytelling blues again, mama

I have now been informed by John Crowley of a new translation of the Hamzanama (I feel silly constantly referring to "crowleycrow" even though the basically unknown me stays concealed behind joculum, who is a much more interesting fellow than Dr. Cullum, anyway). Having made such a big deal out of Salman Rushdie's lecture a year ago (I did on counterforces.blogspot.com, at least, and may have reposted here), I guess I need to pay as much attention to the words now as I did to the pictures then. Rushdie, talking mostly about the pictures, made it sound as though the words were collected slapdash, one of many alternate versions of a collection of tales: I wrote, "It is worth noting that this is strictly a visual epic; the long story of Hamza apparently never found its definitive storyteller, and the text on the back of these superb images seemingly has no literary pretensions, so these 1400 paintings are, as much as anything, another high-art predecessor of the comic book; not that Rushdie said any such thing, for he did not."

What still interests me most, I confess, is less the corpus of stories than what the stories do to the hearer or reader when repeated; even the ones without lessons have lessons.

Yesterday's post was about those who consider various dispensers of someone else's wisdom to be either rogues or saints but decidedly frauds in either case. I forgot to mention that these people also believe that those who remark on such things are fools. With that opinion they are right on target.

Longsuffering readers of this journal will be familiar with my habit of noticing the narrative strategies of magazines and newspapers...I'm struck by the slowly increasing number of news stories designed to educate about far from obvious chains of cause and effect, just like the rambling stories that eventually come back to the frame tales within frame tales that generated them.

Item: The story in this morning's New York Times about European overfishing off West Africa, the result of lax enforcement plus sweetheart deals with governments. The depletion of fishery stocks has gotten more American media attention in the case of the deep oceans, where it impacts United States markets; but the depletion of West African coastal species has resulted in the near-collapse of local fishing industries, which has led to economic desperation, which has led to increased illegal immigration into Europe.

The story would be complete if it were the heads of the fishing industry who were leading the demands for rigorous enforcement of immigration controls, but real life always leaves a few loose ends hanging.

So do traditional stories, some of them, anyway.

footnotes to the foregoing

Rushdie also commented on the circumstances of the Hamzanama's creation as a visual masterwork, and the relationship of its specificity to the generality of world tales; as I wrote, "He did say that the plethora of dragons and magical battles may have been tailored to a teenage monarch’s love of fantastic stories, and that, given the ubiquity of such tales of derring-do across world cultures, 'it may well be that in our dream lives, and in our waking imaginations, we are indeed of one kind.'"

Confirming that I did not cross-post the summary of Rushdie's February 2007 lecture but did direct readers to the other web journal, I was startled to find that the post was headed "Rushdie revisited; also John Crowley" and that an earlier post that February about a four-word sentence in a particularly vivid dream was titled "a strong smell of turpentine." I knew I had cited the supposed William James revelation somewhere.