Some badly-told stories get preserved forever
Strange Tales
Once upon a time, every story was about magic, because why wouldn't you want to hear about magic?
Anyway there's this whole genre of tales that you'll certainly never read, and they're basically just in the vein of "Hey, magic exists." In Tang Dynasty China there were anthologies of these strange tales, and reading them is so bizarre, if you're expecting a regular story. Like, they're not fairy tales—in a fairy tale there's a story. A guy has sex with a woman, she tells him, don't go investigate the place I go at night, and after ten years he investigates and finds out its basically a fox's hole. She's really a fox. And now that he knows, she leaves him. That's a story—that's not what I'm talking about.
A strange tale is something different. It's like...a guy was traveling and he came across another traveler, and the other traveler sat down for dinner, unrolled a scroll of paper, and these two women came out. Then at the end of dinner, the women climbed back into the scroll. The traveler explained these were his wives, and he rolled them up inside this paper for easier transport. AND THAT IS THE STORY. THAT IS IT!
Even if I told you that story now, with no preamble, you'd be like, uhh, okay? I'd be like...isn't that weird? You'd be like yeah it's totally weird but...it didn't really happen. I'd be like uhh yeah it did, some guy told me it did. You'd be like okay weirdo.
It's a yarn, it's a tall tale. We have them today. People tell them to me all the time, except I immediately forget them, because there’s no reason to remember a story like this unless you believe in magic. Like if a friend tells me, I went to a fortune teller, and they told me to beware of Chevy trucks, and later that day someone in a Chevy truck started following me home, and they offered to give me a ride, and I told them to fuck off or I'd call the cops, I'd be like wait a second, that's really scary and I'm sorry that happened, but...you go to fortune tellers? Like, you pay money to a palm-reader? You go to their establishment and sit and listen to what they have to say?
The Chevy story demands, by its very form, that you believe in magic. There is no artistry here. Without magic, there's no reason even for telling the story.
Some Tang-Dynasty strange tales work as stories, but most don’t. It’s unclear whether they were even meant to be entertainment in the first place. They could also just have been a source of information—these are some strange tales that are indeed circulating. It's kind of like urban legends. At one point I was very into urban legends, and I know hundreds of them, but I never pass them along to other people, because there’s just no good way of telling them unless you tell them straight. You can’t be better than your own story. You can’t be like, “Hey, there’s this weird story that as part of a gang initiation, guys will drive at night with their lights off, and if anyone flashes them, they’ll chase down that car and murder them.” No, you’ve gotta be like, “I heard that as a gang initiation ritual…”
And if you were to ever try to fabricate an urban legend, then to do a good job, you’d need to make it believable, and that means reproducing exactly that element of unstoryness. To make a good strange tale, in other words, it's got to be a tale that nobody would tell unless it was true.
The Membrane of the Possible
Once upon a time, a girl came home and discovered her mother crying. You can generate various versions of this story, depending on the age of the girl and the situation they're in, and the reason for the upset, but at the core level, this girl's life is no longer the same. It's like an acid trip—when she sees her mom crying, she knows that reality has dissolved, and that unacknowledged assumptions are crumbling. Her mother is no longer the genie, the fairy godmother, the person flitting around above, putting everything in order. And when this child is confronted with her crying mother, the child is suddenly alone—a compact has been broken. The mother has put herself before the child. She is unable to restrain herself.
The slow separation of pieces will take a long time—the girl's life will fracture unbelievably slowly. But there's a kind of subtle, psychic disentanglement that's occurring right now, as the girl weeps on the steps. It's impossible to describe in terms of concrete sights and sounds, which is why this story is so abstract. It's a bit like light: is it a particle or a wave? Is this a process or a moment? Is it a memory or a story?
I've been reading the late Henry James. I finally finished Wings of the Dove just the other day, and I've been struggling with how to describe the book. On the one hand, it's intensely boring. It took me a month to read. If there was the slightest sound or hint of disturbance, if my daughter or wife were anywhere nearby, I was unable to focus on it. And yet, I didn't want to read anything else. Something about the late Henry James seemed to perfectly capture the way people get entangled—he almost seems to unlock a kind of seventh sense, a social sense, that we didn't know we had. The novel is full of whispers and hints and interminglings, subtle suggestions of what might possibly be known, which in the end add up to big things.
In the case of the girl, the temptation is to flesh her out with a situation. Her mother is insane. Her father wants a divorce. Her brother is sick. We want to fill the story up with specifics, but Henry James eschews the specific, because in some ways the specific details occlude what is really happening here. (Incidentally, Henry James actually treated this very theme in a middle period novel, What Maisie Knew, about a child caught in a divorce).
I do think there is a kind of magic that connects people. There's a psychic connection. People call it 'vibes'. It's the X-factor, you know? The thing that clearly exists, but which we cannot measure.
Sorry, I've been trying to write this story about this girl. I can see her very clearly, coming home, seeing her mom crying, feeling unmoored and disconnected. I've known this girl in so many incarnations that it would be tedious to recount. My grandmother, coming home, her mom wild-haired, dangling her brother out the window, threatening to kill him—he's not meant for this world. My friend, coming home to find her father gone, never mentioned again. My high school classmate, whose parents were murdered when he was young. That broken connection, that sense of the little twigs that make up the nest, all snapping one by one, brittle as bird bones. I can feel that moment—the way it exists both in time and through time, how that one moment reverberates through your life. I've never felt it myself—never had a moment where my life changed utterly, but I've read about it enough and heard about it enough to know it's real—people are different, they do have different experiences—there are happy and unhappy childhoods. So I want like Henry James to hold that psychic moment, the moment when a connection is being severed. But in Henry James, there's a sense of inevitability—people want to do good, but they're unable to. They hang fire and then can't act.
What is weird to me is that the girl coming to her mom on the stair is so real. I want to heal her, and I know that in some cases it's possible. The community can pick up her mother, put her down somewhere else, set her to rights. But in other cases the household is shattered—the mother becomes a shade, present but not making lunches anymore, the girl is shuttled around to and fro. There is a strange working-out of forces.
You might ask why I'm able to write this scene—or am even interested in writing it—when it's not my life. I thought about that myself, and I think it's because I too had a moment when I came upon my mother crying on the steps—I too had a moment when my eyes opened fractionally—I too felt that cracking, that sense that perhaps now nothing would be the same, that burgeoning that always, in each moment, threatens to split open, like the little membrane that holds together the pieces of the egg shell. But in my case it didn't come to anything. There was no divorce, no sickness, no madness. Things proceeded apace—I sutured together the rip in the fabric. We each will experience ten thousand terrors, ten thousand moments when we ignore what we know, until finally, the moment comes when the tear can't be stitched together, and our world changes forevermore.
Afterword
Continuing in the vein of last week’s post about the Bible, I’m experimenting with different kinds of critical reactions—short pieces that are something in between an essay, a tale, and a joke. The first was inspired by a tale in this anthology of Pre-modern Korean Literary Prose. I’ve gotten really into Korean literature lately, and whenever I start a new classical literature I like to spend a little time perusing an anthology or two. I find that this gives me a much better lay of the land than I’d get from reading a textbook or an online article. In this case, I’d purchased a bunch of Korean books a few years back, so they were conveniently ready to hand when I started, randomly, reading The Nine Cloud Dream, a 17th-century Korean novel—a sort of parable about a Buddhist monk who is tempted by earthly desire and is sentenced to be reborn and live out a life of sensual pleasure and worldly success so he can see how empty such things truly are. His dream-life is incredibly pleasant: it’s largely a series of amorous adventures, marked by exceedingly mild hijinx.
I also finished Wings of the Dove last week. It’s maybe my twelfth Henry James. I think I’ve read Roderick Hudson, The American, The Europeans, The Bostonians, Portrait of a Lady, What Maisie Knew, Princess Canassamissa, The Ambassador, Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller, Washington Square, and sundry of short stories—nonetheless, this was the most difficult of his works that I’ve read, and probably the one where I made the most effort to engage with it and really appreciate it on a paragraph level. I’ve struggled for this month of reading to articulate precisely what makes Henry James so difficult. It’s not the writing, syntax, or diction, which are probably comprehensible for anyone who can read, say, Pride and Prejudice. It’s really the sheer level of abstraction. Sometimes the writing reads as so vague and imprecise, almost like a corporate mission statement. And yet I think the abstraction is the draw—I think the abstraction really gets at something with regards to how we see the world. That we don’t actually experience the world as direct sense experience—we are constantly abstracting it, constantly forming impressions and hints of feelings and notions—sort of like how when you take mushrooms, suddenly the coat rack looks like a person, and even though you know it’s not a person, it really, really seems like one, and somehow starts to feel embodied like a person.
Further Reading
Tales
As I mentioned, most strange tales are very short and don’t read like stories. Oftentimes they weren’t collected as stories at all, they were collected as true tales. An early collector of such tales, Gan Ban, said his explicit aim in archiving these stories was “to prove the spirit world is no lie.” By the 10th century, hundreds of these compendia existed. The Song Emperors decided that all of this information should be collected into one big document, which is called the Taiping Guanji, and is the ultimate source for most modern collections of strange tales from the 4th through 10th century. Translations into English usually prioritize readability, so they tend to select the tales that most closely resemble stories. The edition I read was called Tales from Tang Dynasty China and was a lot of fun, very readable. For tales that veer more towards the anecdotal or oddly-shaped, I have another book called A New Account of the Tales of the World, which is a collection of aphorisms, short tales, sayings, etc. Unlike the Tales from Tang Dynasty China book, I cannot imagine anyone sitting down and reading Strange Tales from the New World cover to cover—but it’s nice to have around.
However, if you’re a Westerner, you can get an equivalent effect (in a much more familiar package) by reading Herodotus, who is full of weird, off-putting, random tales—oracular sayings, strange customs, little asides, geographical bits and pieces. The most famous such paragraph concerns a purported Egyptian and Phoenician expedition to circumnavigate Africa:
After two years of sailing, in the third year they rounded the Pillars of Heracles and came back to Egypt. And they declared (what some may believe, though I myself do not) that as they sailed round Libya they had the sun on their right.
It’s precisely this random detail, about the sun being on their right, that makes (some) modern historians believe that perhaps this expedition actually occurred, because this is a phenomenon that only occurs in the Southern Hemisphere.
However I’ll be honest—I found Herodotus pretty tough going, precisely because of this random magpie quality to the work. Unless you have a fairly thorough grounding in classical history and (even more importantly) classical geography, it’s very difficult to understand precisely what you’re reading and how it relates to people and places you already know about.
For something infinitely more readable, but just as random, I’d recommend the Greek and Latin biographers: either Plutarch1 or his imitator, Suetonius. Both cram their biographies full of weird facts and anecdotes. For instance, in Plutarch you get the story of how Julius Caesar was captured by pirates, became great friends with them, and after being ransomed joked with them “I’m going to come back and kill you all” And then, of course, that’s exactly what he did. Plutarch’s biography of Lycurgus also has lovely anecdotes about Spartan pithyness:
Demaratus, when a troublesome fellow was pestering him with ill-timed questions, and especially with the oft repeated query who was the best of the Spartans, answered at last: "He who is least like thee."
And Agis, when certain ones were praising the Eleians for their just and honourable conduct of the Olympic games, said: "And what great matter is it for the Eleians to practise righteousness one day in five years?"
And Theopompus, when a stranger kept saying, as he showed him kindness, that in his own city he was called a lover of Sparta, remarked: "My good Sir, it were better for thee to be called a lover of thine own city."
And Pleistoanax, the son of Pausanias, when an Athenian orator declared that the Lacedaemonians had no learning, said: "True, we are indeed the only Hellenes who have learned no evil from you."
And Archidamus, when some one asked him how many Spartans there were, replied: "Enough, good Sir, to keep evil men away."
Henry James
Obviously the place to start with Henry James is Washington Square, which is readable, fun, and short. But…it’s also not really a Henry James novel, in that it lacks precisely that opaque quality that’s made Henry James a writer for the ages. The same goes (to a lesser degree) for Portrait of a Lady. If you want a glimpse of James at his more-Jamesian, you could do a lot worse than his mid-period novel What Maisie Knew, which begins:
The child was provided for, but the new arrangement was inevitably confounding to a young intelligence intensely aware that something had happened which must matter a good deal and looking anxiously out for the effects of so great a cause. It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than she at first understood, but also even at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before.
Korean Literature
Kinda too soon for me to make any recommendations! I knew essentially nothing about Korean history until this week. I’ve been listening to this History of Korea to fill me in, and I’ve been reading these two anthologies. I finished Nine Cloud Dream and moved on to The Tale of Hong Gildong and The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong, but I haven’t yet developed strong opinions about any of this.
Addenda
I’ve really been enjoying writing tales on Substack. It’s such a relief to write a piece without that nagging thought that no editor is ever going to want this. I’ve decided to give my new approach six months and see what happens. I think Tuesdays will be essay-type pieces and Thursdays will be fiction-type pieces, but there’ll probably be significant overlaps in those categories.
However the downside of Substack is that, well, it’s social media. I like Substack. I enjoy reading Substacks, but it has all the downsides of social media: lots of trivial chatter, a tendency to embrace fads, and how (at least for me) it can feed an obsession with status. Right now all my newsletters get dumped into my inbox, and it’s hard to manage. I’d like ideally to route all the newsletters I read into some kind of queue and then spend no more than 30-45 min a day on Substack reading. How do people manage their Substack reading? Is there some app or technique people use?
Personally I just read the Project Gutenberg public domain translation of Plutarch, and I honestly think that might still be the best option for the completist, because most reprints eschew the comparison sections (Plutarch often had short chapters where he compared a famous Greek to a famous Roman to see who was more virtuous) and those are the funnest parts!