by Teresita Pumará
I
I am bewitched by stories. But aren’t we all? I should certainly like
to begin this piece with a universal statement like: “Since its birth, humanity
has been fascinated by stories”. But I have neither the courage nor the ability
to ignore with peace of mind all those tiny differences of graduation that
separate us, the human individuals, sometimes stretching such distances between
us that we can no longer understand each other. For instance, I cannot share
the passion some people have for cars, but I can well recognize in their
passion some of the obsessive traces I myself show when it comes to stories. I
do dare say that stories have been with us for a long time. They have taken
different shapes. And, like food, cars, or Sauron’s ring, they have the power
to bind us.
I can follow this fascination with stories to the
farthest corners of my memory. And I love them in all their modus.
I can equally fall for a book, for a film or for a series. The better the story
is told, the deeper my involvement with it. But I have noticed that this is not
enough. I don’t fall easily for a newspaper story, no matter how well written
they are. I like to watch documentary films, but to me they are just
interesting. I don’t fall in love with them. I have come to realize this fact
for a short time. Maybe because I started to seriously ask myself where does
the power of stories lie. How does their spell work?
II
A couple of years ago, Amazon released a series based on a book, both
called The Man in the High Castle. The book was written by Philip
K. Dick and published in 1962. It depicts a world where the Nazis and the
Japanese have won the Second World War. The net that connects the different
characters of the story is woven through a fictional novel that depicts a world
where the Allies actually won the war, written by a man who supposedly guards
himself in a well-protected fortress.
After watching the first season of the series I was
left with the uncomfortable feeling that the story had lost its power. The series
is well done, it achieves its purpose of hooking you up and making you want to
see more, to know what happens next. It develops the characters and events in a
different way than the book does. But that is not what bothered me. On the
contrary, I believe everyone has the right to variate a story, to tell it again
in another way, this is how stories survive. But I felt that this version of
the story had washed away the rusty, pointy, unclear and dangerous elements of
the book and achieve a more digestible version of it. Nothing new under the
sun, one may say, the typical Hollywood problem.
III
One of my favourite answers to the problem of art in general and
literature in particular is the idea of ‘defamiliarisation’ of perception which
Russian Formalists brought forward at the beginning of the 20th century.
Either by using language in unexpected ways, or by arranging the narrative
elements in an unexpected order, or by including the absurd as a matter of
fact, a literary work would achieve, in the first place, to disturb the usual
mechanism of our perception and in the second place to turn us to those
mechanisms and question them, in other words, to discuss what we feel as
natural. Across the past century this idea has, in one way or another, drawn
the blurring line between art and entertainment. But, then again, some products
of the entertainment industry have achieved a powerful and uneasy combination
between these two “poles” (which perhaps are no longer such). The
differentiation between what is a work of art and what is entertainment is losing
its effectiveness. Besides, this industry is also changing, taking other shapes
and producing works that deserve to be thought of. Not only because of the
number of people who consume them and how they change the world of those
people, but also because of their own qualities as cultural products.
IV
I am mainly thinking of this new series-wave. The fascination some of
us now experience with series is how I imagine the fascination people in the
nineteenth century experienced with the novels published and delivered in
chapters by the newspapers. But the spell this series cast is, at
least on me, only sometimes effective. Many of them, like The Man in
the High Castle, have the charm of a teenage party supervised by parents
and teachers. It is probably a silly comparison, but this is how they seem to
me: controlled, contained and wanting to make sure that the message is sent,
and does not give place to misunderstanding. And then, while reading some
articles of Carl Gustav Jung, I came upon this statement:
Concrete
values cannot take the place of the symbol; only new and more efficient symbols
can be substituted for those that are more antiquated and outworn, such as have
lost their efficacy through the progress of intellectual analysis and
understanding. (Jung, C. G, “Author’s Preface to the First Edition” of Collected
Papers on Analytical Psychology)
A preliminary and very general answer to the
question above, then, could be: stories work as symbols, when their spell works
well. This symbols, says Jung later, are produced by the individual unconscious
and represent something “whose intellectual meaning cannot yet be grasped
entirely”. The encounter with this quote helped me think of stories under a
different light, no longer constraint by the mainly rational approach of
formalism, but neither falling in a purely emotional, romantic point of view.
The concept of symbol, its ability to linger in our souls and work in many
directions, appeals to me as an unexplored territory.
