finding out what works

I find that I'm rebelling against my blog, now three years old. These days I'm not sure what to say, or why exactly I'm doing this. There's a balancing act between talking about the process of creating this work, and the danger of revealing too much about it. It's a little bit like watching a "making of" documentary about a movie before seeing the movie--putting the cart before the horse.

In another sense, though, the creation of any work of art is beyond the worldly and quotidian circumstances of its physical creation, and indeed a work of art is beyond what its creator can say or indeed know about it. Northrop Frye makes this point in his Anatomy of Criticism, which I'm currently reading. What a poet may have to say about his own work, Frye says, may have special interest, but not special authority. For in talking about his own work, the poet becomes a critic, and he may be a good or bad one, but there's no such thing as a definitive critic--one who has the last word on any given work of art.

I bought Anatomy of Criticism when I learned that in it Frye talks about, at least in passing, the epic genre. I'm thirsty and hungry for anything I can find out about this. What does epic mean? What does genre mean? Are these real, actual things, or merely terms bandied about vaguely by students of literature, with no real consensus as to what they actually refer to?

Frye's landmark book, first published in 1957, addressed what he saw as the central and long-neglected question about literary criticism: is there such a thing as knowledge about literary art, or is everything, in the end, simply and merely a matter of taste? Is there or could there be such a thing as a science of literary criticism--a field of knowledge that progresses and grows in the same way that other fields of scientific knowledge progress and grow? Could the study of literary criticism be like the study of physics or geography?

Northrop Frye emphatically believed that such a science is possible, and Anatomy of Criticism is his effort to sketch out its scope, methods, and agenda. It's a brilliant work in its own right, dense with bold, deep ideas. He essentially picks up the ball of a scientific poetics where Aristotle left it 2,300 years ago, and runs it further up the field.

I'm on page 125, and have not yet reached his detailed discussion of genre, but he has already given me plenty to think about. Indeed, any given page of this book could serve as the basis of a separate thesis, so rich is it with ideas.

Why exactly am I so keen on studying genre, and especially the epic genre? Don't most writers just wing it and write what they want without worrying too much about their "category"?

It's not so much that I want to conform to a pattern, but I do want to know what I'm building. Why reinvent the wheel? If you're setting out to build a bridge, wouldn't it make sense to find out how others have done it, what the techniques and hazards are? What if you built a house, but out of ignorance neglected to include bedrooms? Wouldn't that be silly?

A genre by definition is a structurally stable form. Like a genus or species of animal or plant, it exists because it works. The raccoons that patrol our yard at night are a viable form of life; they can make it in this novel environment; as an organism, they work.

I want to create something that works: a pragmatic goal.

the same--but different

Yesterday I visited my mother and her sister for our weekly lunch (ham and cheese sandwiches on fresh bread). Afterwards, Mom and I got talking about writing, and we again visited the topic of genre, which I might define casually as the family to which a particular work belongs.

Does genre really matter to the writer? Or is it a thing of interest only to critics or to those who are selling the work--such as bookstores who need to know what shelf to stock a book on? To the extent that genres are patterns, are they not formulaic, and therefore uncreative? Isn't writing to a genre simply a paint-by-numbers approach?

I'm not an expert on genre--I'm just learning all this myself--but my first gut response is: no, writing to genre is not necessarily uncreative. It can be uncreative, perhaps, if the genre conventions are very strict.

But even here I'm not sure. I was thinking about the old-time romance plot, in which the poor, unassuming, beautiful, and principled maiden becomes the seemingly impossible love-object of a wealthy, powerful, handsome, and forbidding man. After a couple of more or less standard plot complications, they wind up married happily ever after. If you don't happen to be a fan of this genre, then these romance stories quickly become stale and repetitive, and their fantasy elements, so removed from real life, start to cloy.

But are the stale and cloying aspects of these stories the fault of the genre? Or merely the skill of the storyteller? The romance premise that I described above is essentially that used in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, a book still in print and therefore, by definition, a classic. I haven't read the book, but the famous BBC miniseries based on it, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, remains one of my favorite pieces of filmed entertainment.

Why? I think because Jane Austen makes me believe it. Her skill in crafting the situation and the characters defeats my skepticism and resistance to being drawn in. The characters are not stale types stamped out of a mold; they seem more like vibrant, actual people. The liveliness of the characters makes their feelings and their values matter. The story comes alive.

To me this says that the story itself--the genre--is alive and well. It triggers real interest and emotions in the audience; it speaks to us. I suspect that its durability is due to the fact that it is saying something profound on many different levels. Unconsciously, we read it or view it on all those levels, and from this comes the feeling of being fulfilled or satisfied by the story.

As T. S. Eliot put it:

When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to the utmost--and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl.

Not just in storytelling, but all through knowledge and in life itself the mystery of Same and Different confronts us. We recognize Different things as being the Same, and the Same things as being Different. In some strange way, the more strongly you emphasize Sameness, the more poignant and powerful become the Differences that arise.

Genre tells us how to make our story the Same, so we can find interesting, powerful ways to make it Different. It tells us where on the great family tree of stories we are. For no matter how unique, individualistic, or even solitary we are, we are still somewhere on a family tree. Like it or not, you've got parents, maybe siblings and cousins. You can deny it--but why?

It's better to acknowledge who you are and where you're from, and work from there.

genre for fun

It's 2008, and we return to our work routine. Kimmie, off for the past 10 days or so, prepares upstairs to return to the office. I too will return to a more "normal" schedule.

Over the holiday I continued to work on my notes, but not directly toward The Mission. Instead I became absorbed in two topics: genre and theology.

Why these? In the case of genre, it's my evolving sense that this elastic concept, which according to some (including Aristotle) is key to being able to execute an artistic work properly, is not well understood. Robert McKee in his text Story emphasizes the importance to the writer of an understanding of genre, especially the genre in which he is trying to write. He provides a list of movie genres, but it is an omnium gatherum of story types ("education plot"; "revenge plot"), settings ("Western"; "historical drama"), and moods ("comedy"; "horror"). To me this is mixing apples and oranges, with a few mangoes and persimmons also thrown in.

Stories, like most things, can be categorized in a number of ways. Which are the ones that matter most to the creative writer?

I'm starting to see it this way: no work is of simply one genre. Rather, each work comprises several. I'm thinking that genre, which comes from the same root as the word gene, functions much like a gene: it is a definite unit of heredity that makes itself manifest by expression. In the body, a gene is responsible for the production of one or more proteins, which are themselves like chemical machines or robots that perform functions. Just as a person's genome is the total suite of his or her genes, what we call genre in a story is actually a genome as well: the total suite of its genre components.

Suppose you're writing a Western romantic comedy. Is your story a Western, a love story, or a comedy? Answer: all of the above. "Western", "love story", and "comedy" are all genres in the genome of that story. It has "inherited" story traits from all those genres.

The mixing and combination of genres in storytelling is much like the mixing of genes in reproduction. The vast possibilities of combination make sure that each individual is a unique expression of traits--and that is true of both organisms and stories.

What are the implications for the writer? One still needs to study genre--but one needs to understand all the genres in the genome of one's story. In this example, you'll need to know something about Westerns, about romances, and about comedies. Of course, each of those is a category with many subcategories--and you will need to know your subcategories.

One interesting task would be to take a story and analyze its genre affinities by comparing it to other stories that have similar traits. When I was explaining this idea to Kimmie over the holiday we had just watched the Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life. "Christmas story" is itself a genre, which includes things such as A Christmas Carol and Miracle on 34th Street and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It's also (for want of another term) a supernatural fable. Again, here it resembles A Christmas Carol, but also other works such as Here Comes Mr. Jordan (remade as Heaven Can Wait) and Splash. Its actual plot structure follows one of the types of what Robert McKee calls "ironic ascension", one in which the character is

pushed further and further from his goal...only to discover that in fact he's been led right to it.

In this the story resembles Ruthless People. It also falls in the category of story called "education plot", which, in McKee's words, "arcs on a deep change within the protagonist's view of life, people, or self from the negative (naive, distrustful, fatalistic, self-hating) to the positive (wise, trusting, optimistic, self-possessed)", and in this way resembles stories such as Tender Mercies and My Best Friend's Wedding. It's also a domestic drama, and its mood is mainly comedic.

All of these are contributing factors--all are genres in the genome of It's a Wonderful Life.

Over the holiday I was reading and typing notes from works such as Aristotle's Poetics, Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, McKee's Story, and even a bit of Genetics for Dummies in order to dig into my genome metaphor.

That's one way to have holiday fun--and it was fun.

Now: back to work.

meaning in the ashes

The day before yesterday I finished reading Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, a powerful and moving memoir of his childhood in Limerick. I know I'm late to the party with this book, which was a bestseller in the 1990s and has been made into a movie. But since it's not (or anyway was not) research reading, it would have been in the category of "pleasure reading" (that is, books I read only for pleasure, since I take pleasure in all my reading), of which I have at most one book going at any one time--and usually not even that.

In this case, I chose to read it for genre research, as part of an effort to help my mother write her own memoir. She's a passionate fan of Frank McCourt and this book, and sees some strong parallels in it with her own early life. Will her own work be of the same genre? I don't know yet. Memoir itself is not a genre, since a memoir can be any kind of a story, depending on the life being told.

Genre is an elusive concept, neither well defined nor well studied. Robert McKee, in his screenwriting text Story, gives a list of genres with some quick definitions and examples, but it's an omnium-gatherum, a jumble of apples and oranges, with a few mangoes and persimmons thrown in. There's not a single scheme of categorization.

From his list, probably the best fit for for Angela's Ashes would be in the social drama genre, under the subcategory of domestic drama ("problems within the family"). Angela's Ashes is a family story--and they have problems aplenty, stemming mainly from grinding poverty.

But the story is told from the viewpoint of young Frank, and could be categorized under the heading of maturation plot or coming-of-age story.

Yet the circumstances are so very harsh, with the family often struggling to find its next meal, that the story has a lot of the emotional energy of a survival story, which McKee lists as a subcategory of the action/adventure genre. I felt the same kind of anxiety for the McCourts' survival as I do for the characters in movies such as The Poseidon Adventure, for example. Will they make it? (And indeed, just as with other survival stories, some of them don't.)

Of course, if the concept of genre is to have any use, it can't be merely a superficial or arbitrary designation. It might be OK for a bookstore to shelve a book under one heading or another, without really caring which; but a writer can't be so cavalier. You need to know what species of animal your story is, and write accordingly.

I remember talking years ago with Phil Savath, a fellow TV writer who went on to become a writer-producer of Beverly Hills 90210 and other shows. He was saying that the basic structural elements of, say, TV sitcoms were the same, regardless of where the show might be set.

"You know," he said, "you could take The Mary Tyler Moore Show and set it in a monastery. There's Lou, the grumpy old abbot, and Ted, the dumb prima donna, and so on."

As I recall, he was criticizing networks' fixation on superficialities and their lack of attention to the parts of shows that audiences connect with: character relationships. The basic point is that there are structural aspects of stories that are deeper than their setting or even their apparent outward concerns.

As I read Angela's Ashes, I looked at my emotions: what are my aspirations for these characters? What would I like to see happen? To me, these are clues as to what a story is really about, how I, the reader, relate to it at a gut level. I realized that I was coming to see Frank's father, Malachy McCourt, who drank the family's few pitiful coins of grocery money at every opportunity, as the antagonist--a kind of likable ogre, willing to starve his own children to death in order to slake his thirst for booze. His wife, Angela, and their children, of whom Frank is the eldest, are powerless to stop him. They're just little children. I realized that my aspiration in the story--what I hoped might happen--was for Frank to survive and become strong enough to overthrow his father, or break his grip on the family.

There is a deep mythical dimension here, for the story of the devouring father, who must be confronted and defeated by his children if they are to survive, is an ancient one. It shows up in two generations of ancient Greek myths, for example: when Kronos overthrows Uranus, and then again when Zeus overthrows his father Kronos, each son saving himself from being devoured. This archetypal setup probably lies near the heart of the true meaning of genre--what is the core myth of a story? From what primal arrangement of people and things does it derive its basic emotional power? The other factors of genre are more like clothing and window-dressing over this beating heart.

Anyway, whatever its true genre, Angela's Ashes is an excellent piece of work. Frank McCourt deserves all the praise and honors that have come his way.

genre science

My mother and I are having weekly meetings about storytelling. She makes lunch for us and for my aunt Jackie, now also retired, then we crack the books. She's hoping I can teach her something about the art of story--and I hope so too.

It's not a planned course. I'm feeling my way along intuitively, trying to pass on things that I think make sense. I feel much doubt, because I wouldn't necessarily wish my own methods on another person (even if my methods finally turn out to work!). And yet, those are the only methods I know at first hand.

Our text is Robert McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. Since 1990 I have tried to absorb and apply his ideas to my own writing. As he stresses in the book, he does not provide a formula for how to write stories, but rather lays out the principles for what makes a story good, along with diagnostic tools to help when one's own work is having trouble. When I read Aristotle's Poetics, I saw that McKee is mostly interpreting and adapting Aristotle's ideas to modern storytelling. Which suits me find, since not only is the Poetics a fantastic short course in how stories work, but my own mind naturally gravitates to an Aristotelian orderliness and keenness on accurately identifying first principles.

As McKee says, the first thing you need to do in telling your story is to work out what genre you're in. Are you writing a mystery? A love story? A fantasy? The word genre is related to genus, and I explained it to Mom as being like the species of animal you've got. You need to know whether your story is an ostrich, a crocodile, or a bison, before you can know what its component parts are supposed to be.

Once you know that, you can address the structure of your story--its skeleton. An ostrich skeleton and a crocodile skeleton are not the same. You need to know what it is you're creating. McKee is emphatic that writers need to do personal research into the genre of their story--to find other works in the genre and do their own cross-analysis of them, identifying their parts. What characters and situations are always present? What kinds of settings are used, and how do they affect the action? What are the basic themes or ideas of the stories? McKee says that you should study both successes and failures in your genre, to gain conscious knowledge of its workings--to gain a better knowledge of the genre than your audience subliminally has.

As McKee points out, there is not much good study material out there on genre. Plus, genres themselves keep evolving and combining. We have medieval whodunits and corporate thrillers and sci-fi erotica. As far as I know, a single book, Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding, spawned the whole genre of "chick lit" which overran the fiction sections of bookstores like mountain pine beetle. It is (or was) popular because it touched a chord in an audience. It spoke to its readers. If you seek to write chick lit, you would have to study Bridget Jones and other works to find out exactly what makes them tick--why, in other words, they appeal to readers (and presumably first of all to yourself).

Personally, I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of genre. It seems clear to me that the word is applied to different things--to settings, such as Western; to themes, such as "revenge story"; and to styles, such as satire. "Genre science" (if I can call it that) is still at that early stage in which things are still not differentiated clearly, like a big drawer in which socks are mixed in with shirts, neckties, and longjohns. It needs sorting out, and I for one would be interested in helping with that task. I'd like to become a genre scientist.

I was struck when I read Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale by his discovery that the basic structure of the fairy tale is quite invariant, if you look at it deeply enough. I suspect that all our story genres are similar in this respect, and that this invariance must express something deep about how our minds and emotions work. In short: the genres are expressions of our mythology.

Of course, it says something about my nature that whenever I look around me, I see only research projects...

let excitment be your guide

"Write what you know" is a well-known and basic tip for writers. And it's a good one. After all, what else are you going to write?

For the fiction-writer, it's not a completely straightforward question. Because fiction is "made-up stuff", you can put as much of it in your work as you want. You "know" the stuff you make up, and then you write it down. There--you've written what you know!

That's a specious self-deception that I myself have bought into plenty during my life, and no doubt still do. To me, "writing what you know" always suggested writing about one's own family life and so on--subjects that never really excited me as a writer. But, driven by the commandment to write what you know, I would ever and again return to my own life and look for ways to fictionalize it. After all, was that not what James Joyce did with his magnificent Portrait of the Artist, and what Malcolm Lowry did with his brilliant Under the Volcano?

Starting at about age 18, I have spent, cumulatively, a great deal of time trying to find a way to mine my own life story for fictional material. All such efforts have so far gone bust. In about 2000, when my mother put me on to a very good book by Tristine Rainer called Your Life as Story, I became excited again by the idea of "lifewriting"--simply turning one's own life episodes into story. Once again, as in the past, I beavered away at finding the "story structure" of my own life. Now I felt I might be better able to accomplish it, since, like Tristine Rainer, I was now a scriptwriter and had studied story structure.

As with so many projects, I generated a lot of pages, but was not happy with where I got to. It gradually dawned on me that I would need a definite theme in order to provide a criterion for selection. What exact story would I be telling? But to know that, you need to have an idea of what your life is about. What is the purpose of my life?

In fact, Ms. Rainer provides strong counsel in how to search for exactly this, and I went through the exercise carefully, and was delighted with the result--for awhile. I came to feel that my life is many stories, has many themes. I thought, "Fine, pick one." I picked one--but it became obvious that it interlocks with all the others. How to disentangle them? How to simplify my life into a coherent story?

Ach--I just went and checked the folder called Lifewriting, and saw that yes, it does indeed contain many documents, some of considerable length. I never was able to solve my structural problems, and eventually gave up in despair.

Now what? You have to do what excites you. Excitement is the psychic energy that drives you forward--is perhaps the "intoxication" that Nietzsche said must precede the creation of any work of art. You need to be excited. I remember visiting the Pacific National Exhibition here in Vancouver with my friend Brad back when we were in school. At age 12, we loved James Bond-type action-adventure, and would talk enthusiastically about turning the various aspects of the busy exhibition-ground into sets for action-movie scenes. For us, a ride on the chairlift-style people-mover that traversed the site was like a movie-location survey. That creative excitement got us involved in story-writing, filmmaking, and animation. I remember staying up all night at his house making animated films with his 8mm movie camera. We were powered by excitement: how will this turn out? What will it look like?

I do seem to be naturally inclined toward the adventure genre (I note that The Odyssey, which I created and wrote with Warren Easton, was an adventure-fantasy show). The adventure genre, with its exploratory, revelatory, and questing elements, speaks to me--gets me excited. It's the genre of questing in uncharted territory, and that somehow connects with my heart.

But you need to know enough. In writing about your alien world, you need to know it, and that means research. You need to know enough about the world of your story to make your characters seem at home in it, and therefore to let your audience feel at home there as well.

Kimmie and I are currently watching the HBO series Rome. I watch with special interest because it is set in my period and place, and so I have researched that world myself--although not in as much depth, for one thing because I'm only a single person, and each department of the series--writing, art, wardrobe, props, hair, makeup--will have done its own research. But the show is striving for authenticity, and so it has authority, and the ability to involve me. (Some things I'm less happy with--such as the Forrest Gump-like appearance of its two commoner heroes at all the critical junctures of the period's history.) I'm very interested and excited by the prospect of creating authentic exotic worlds. The Odyssey was an example.

So, as much as possible, I try now to let spontaneous excitement be my guide--and follow that up with the discipline of research.

cheered up for the epic

After my "fake it till you make it" self-advice in yesterday's post, I did have a good (for me) writing day, pushing a few pages ahead in the morning, then coming back in the afternoon to start setting up notes for my next chapter. This is pretty much my fantasy of productivity: writing prose in the morning, then, in the afternoon when I'm feeling less creative, tinkering with administration and notes for the coming chapters. Yesterday was an instance of that, and I felt good. I actually cheered myself up!

Partly as a result of that, I think, I slept better last night. I dreamed that I was stuck in a massive traffic-jam on a convoluted freeway system, but that I found a way through, to skip past the worst of the jam to get where I was going. I couldn't believe my good fortune.

We'll see how today goes, but yesterday I felt a distinct shift in my attitude.

Meanwhile, in my afternoon reading, I was very pleased to come across, in Toynbee's A Study of History, a brief reference to the development of the epic genre. Here is an extract:

The Saga and the Epic arise in response to a new mental need, a new awareness of strong individual personalities and of momentous public events. "That lay is praised of men the most which ringeth newest in their ears," Homer declares. Yet there is one thing in an epic lay more highly prized than its novelty, and that is the intrinsic human interest of the story. The interest in the present predominates just so long as the storm and stress of the Heroic Age continues; but the social paroxysm is transitory; as the storm abates, the lovers of Epic and Saga come to feel that life in their time has grown relatively tame. They cease to prefer new lays to old, and the latter-day minstrel, responding to his hearers' change of mood, repeats and embellishes the tales of the older generation. In this later age the art of Epic and Saga attained its literary zenith. "Drama...develops in the home country, Epic among migrating peoples."

I regard my own work as an epic, but I want to find out more--all I can--about what exactly an epic is. I need to know my genre.

Here is an extract from N. G. L. Hammond's A History of Greece to 322 BC:

The comparative study of heroic ages has shed light also upon the genesis and development of epic poetry. It appears to originate under the troubled conditions of a heroic age as oral poetry, composed and transmitted by minstrels, even though the art of writing survived from an earlier civilization. The earlier epic lays are usually short and deal with the exploits of one or more heroes. The later lays develop in length and in technique, are recited as court poetry, and deal with leaders of the princely class both male and female. In this later stage the interest of the poet tends to shift from the exploits of the heroes to the study of heroic character, and nonheroic themes such as religion or manticism or matters of general rather than personal scope may begin to intrude.

As I see it, epic is the genre par excellence of heroes. While every fictional work has a hero or heroine, epic is the genre that deals with the hero as such. It is therefore the antithesis of modern works dealing with antiheroes. (I recall hearing the movie star Gregory Peck more than once deploring the rise of the antihero in Hollywood moviemaking, which he felt made for insipid and uninspiring movies. Peck himself of course was the perfect Hollywood heroic actor, by nature unsuited to antiheroic roles.)

And what is a hero? Nowadays that question has been best addressed by Joseph Campbell. The hero is he or she who, taking courage, journeys to the seed-source of universal creation--a place within--to find the new forms that will energize and give new life to his or her society. Societies age and die, as ours is aging and perhaps dying. New life is found only by those few who have the courage, vision, and independence to make the hazardous journey to find it. These are the heroes.

Those, anyway, are some of my thoughts on it. It's not that epic is a larger type of story, it's that other types of stories are little pieces of epic.

the dead hand

Coming down a bit early today to do my post. Rain drips down from a drenched cotton-batting sky. Kimmie's office is having a barbecue at a coworker's house. I'll be heading up in due course, so I wanted to take care of this, and also get some afternoon reading in before attending the gathering.

I've been meaning to do a post based on the powerful and chilling term dead hand. Here is my faithful Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition:

dead hand 2: the oppressive influence of the past

The term swam up into my mind when I was writing something a few weeks ago. When I looked it up I was surprised at its strength. The oppressive influence of the past is a vast topic, and, phrased that way, also chilling.

It feels very relevant to the writer of historical fiction. One question I sometimes ask myself is, Why write (or read) historical fiction? Robert McKee's answer (in his storytelling text Story):

Many contemporary antagonisms are so distressing or loaded with controversy that it's difficult to dramatize them in a present-day setting without alienating the audience. Such dilemmas are often best viewed at a safe distance in time.

He of course is talking about screenwriting, and how to justify the tremendous added production expense of setting a story in a past period, but I believe the argument translates to fiction-writing as well.

While I'm sure there's something to that, I don't believe McKee's explanation gets to the heart of the matter. I'm thinking that historical stories have, for one thing, a quality of "once upon a time"--they evoke the mythical realm of the fairytale. Closely related to that is that they show people of remote times to be the same as we are now, merely with different fashions, social codes, language, and technology (which in turn reveals all these things to be incidental to the human condition). The problem of life, of how to live, was ever the same. The human condition has an eternal quality, which points to questions of meaning, of the spiritual.

At the same time, those very differences call attention to the corresponding aspects of life in our own time: we are thereby made aware of our own existence by seeing it through the eyes of another time, so to speak. We may notice afresh, and appreciate--or question--the social structures and things in our world that we usually take for granted.

And now: the dead hand of the past. In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus says, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." I'm sure many neurons have fired in the effort to unpack his meaning. Mircea Eliade, in his The Myth of the Eternal Return, says that for archaic man,

neither the objects of the external world nor human acts...have any autonomous intrinsic value. Objects or acts acquire a value, and in so doing become real, because they participate, after one fashion or another, in a reality that transcends them.... [H]uman acts...are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning...by gods, ancestors, or heroes.

Later on he says:

[I]nterest in the "irreversible" and the "new" in history is a recent discovery in the life of humanity. On the contrary, archaic humanity...defended itself, to the utmost of its powers, against all the novelty and irreversibility which history entails.

For archaic man--who, after all, is us under our Calvin Klein briefs--historical acts, that is, acts that were not performed originally by a god or hero or ancestor, are necessarily imperfect and in fact sinful. It is the accumulation of these sinful, profane acts that is wiped out each year with the ancient New Year festival--a rite we still practice with our saturnalian New Year's party and list of resolutions. In the ancient world, much more than now, life started afresh after the New Year. History was erased like an Etch-a-Sketch and everyone was reborn.

What I seem to be creeping toward, here, is the idea that the dead hand is the accumulated dead weight of profane history--the irreversible events that have piled one on another since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, or since the Big Bang, depending on your view. The dead hand makes its way into spiritual thinking as the doctrine of original sin, or as karma: what was done in the past, by people we no longer identify with as ourselves, catches up with us.

The dead hand says that past and present are connected, not only in obvious ways, but in a deep mysterious way that affects each of us like a powerful current we usually don't even know we're swimming in--or drowning in.

I'm not quite sure, but I think I'm suggesting that historical fiction, historical drama, brings us closer to this reality by showing us the relativity of time. The past is now if we know how to look.