to: ellipsis
from: jcj
4 July 1996
subject: letter four D
attachments: this is
dear Tom and Jonathan
If you've read 'What is a story?' you may be
wondering why and how it got written and why I got
so excited about it.
I wrote it last Christmas after buying novels by R
K Narayan for most of the people for whom I buy
Christmas presents. I was reading one of these
books, Gods, demons and others,* in which Narayan
puts some of the tales of Indian mythology into
the form of a novel, or book of short stories.
I began reading it with pleasure and I also dipped
into some of the other stories of modern India for
which R K Narayan is famous. But after a while I
felt that there is something wrong about retelling
the tales of a village story-teller in the
past-tense-convention of modern realism.
'There is a half-moon in the sky today which will
disappear shortly after midnight, said the
story-teller. I'll select a tale which will end
before the moon sets, so that you may all go home
when there is still a little light ...' [my
emphasis].
That stopped me. It led me to see that the
situation between Narayan and his readers, reading
pages that he had written years before but never
seeing him, is not at all that of the
present-tense contact between the story-teller and
the people who are listening to him re-inventing
ancient stories from a memory filled with many
inherited 'formulae' or fragments from which he or
she makes the telling into a unique performance
every time. What we might call composition, or
'new writing' in public.
But it wasn't quite that that set me thinking
- and then to writing the piece. It was a
whole set of thoughts, coming in all directions,
that suddenly jelled and connected themselves as I
wrote, suggesting something new and extensive that
'What is a story?' more than half catches.
For I've been drawn to study ancient myths and
traditional theatres for decades,* believing that
unless we can rid modern culture of its realisms
there is no getting out of the 'grim realities' of
commercial engineering and the way of life built
on it. Simply offering 'new designs' without new
culture to go with them doesn't work.
It was the seeing of connections in profusion,
between the very modern and the very ancient, that
got me going - and then the thinking flowed,
too fast by far for me to write more than a
fraction, but I think what's there is not a
nothing but something that I like that I'm glad to
see published as it is, though I know it's partly
said in a private jargon. The disentangling of its
meanings is not something that I want to do at any
time, feeling that it's a performance in itself.
And that's enough for you and me if we are ever
going to experience more than the bare reasoning
of the newness and the wonder of just everything
that is falling so sublimely into pieces all
around us as horizons recede daily and new
connections grow and grow ...
And now for the next piece which I wrote six
months later but which seems as if connected to
the other by a lunch time. 'This is' was not
written as a sequel to the first piece but I was
glad to find that temporal link and several
others.
The circumstances of its writing are I think
evident within it (a habit or a trait which I
suppose is quite central to all this
decentralising?) but what brings me to put it here
amongst the technicalities of our netlife, and its
implications, is not hard to see I hope, and
surely something
... Well that sentence was more there to make the
rhythm than the meaning, so what is it that I
really want to say before you read 'This is'?
All I want to say now is that, with these two
pieces appearing here amongst my tellings of the
structure of industrial living, I hope that these
letters will cross some of those natural-seeming
boundaries that we inherit from the time of
pre-net.
and with that I say goodnight.
jcj
ps 4 July is the anniversary of my resigning [on
us Independence Day] in 1974 from institutional
life, and from having a job, for the life and
economy of an independent writer or a student. So
I hope that this little flourish is a fitting
consequence! I have the impression that your
inviting me to become a net person is already
bringing me back into living more publicly and for
this I am thankful.