First Love Cannot Remain Hidden for Long

"they did not know what they desired. This only knew, that the kiss had destroyed him and the bath had destroyed her" - Daphins and Chloe (pg 149).

     Daphins and Chloe share what I deem the most pure time of love. They are truly bonded together in their friendship and the way in which their lives have been intertwined since each of their interesting births. Their births may be the element of the story that makes it a worthwhile and memorable story. Frye seems to highlight that a story must catch attention in its narrative aspects in order to be a story worth telling. The love that blossoms out of their early childhood can correlate directly to a connection made from their origins initially.
     Chloe is the first to recognize and identify her feelings towards Daphins. She is innocently helping him bathe and realizes then that "he seemed beautiful to her. And because that moment was the first time he looked beautiful to her, she thought that the bath was the cause of his beauty" (143). It is an interesting idea that she thought he was beautiful as a result of the bath. I know from personal experience that sometimes you never really see a person. It takes just that one altering glance or that one instance when you really and truly look at someone that your view of them changes. This I think is what Chloe is undergoing, she has know Daphins for so long and this bath was the time when she really sees him. But even after this she has a hard time explaining to herself that she does in fact have these feelings of love for her dear friend.
    Daphins is different in that it took their first physical encounter for him to uncover his romantic feelings for Chloe. After being chosen for a kiss by the already desirous Chloe Daphins reacts "like someone who had been bitten rather than kissed...Then, as never before, he was filled with admiration for her" (146). He requires that physical awakening where as Chloe was visually stimulated. It seems as though the male and female ways of discovering love are varied, but that if those true feelings of love exist there is no way to keep them hidden for long.

Childhood Habits

     One of the most important and self molding experiences I had as a child was my mom reading aloud to my brother and I at bedtime. It was cemented into our nightly routine and something I certainly remember looking forward to. He is three years older than me so the stories were usually novels, not picture books, The entire C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia series was the most memorable for me, but I know that Gulliver's Travels, Charlotte's Web, and many other adventure stories were also in the rotation, because my brother was the one who got to choose the majority of the time. I do remember though, very specifically, in the time before I drifted off to sleep the stories that I was hearing and the mental picture my imagination was creating must have been very different from the one my brother and my mom had. Rereading the same stories now provides me the small window into my child psyche. I think I can attribute my desire for literature and the passion I have for stories and reading to be originated from this nightly ritual.
     I don't remember hating or loving the happy endings or being particularly drawn to any certain type or genre of story. I was enthralled by my mom's voice and her enthusiastic reading and character voices. It was a sort of comfort that I cherished and even to this day when I hear my mom read anything aloud there is a nostalgia that I cannot evade. I certainly was instilled with the desire to read from my mom, and we still share a good book when we happen to come across one. My childhood habit and passion is now continued and like the stories that change over time my relationship of reading with my mom has grown and changed over time. 

Words Containment

      I always enjoy when my classes cease to parallel and there is a cross over between the material. William Blake is one man who has come up in three of my classes so far this semester. His first appearance was most obviously in my 19th century Literature class, he made his second appearance in my Art History class as an example of Enlightenment ideals. And finally in this class, where stories and words are the forefront of topic and their ability to survive time and change. Frye mentions Blake in regard to "double tradition, one biblical and the other romantic, growing out of an interest in Blake which seems to have contained them both...the distinction underlying this relation is our first step" (Frye, 6).  The word that most struck me was "contain" it seems to me that while words can live in a sentence or be the structure of a single story there is something ambiguous that makes them unable to be fully tamed. To me connotation and denotation are the easiest way to explain this; while the denotation of a word may mean one thing, the connotation of the word is just as if not more important than the actual meaning. Popular culture and slang also plays into the complete value of a word and that changes over time as well. While a word may remain constant in spelling and denotation, the word can completely change in its use and  everyday meaning. 

      Blake enters the picture for me via his poem "The School Boy", more specifically the fourth stanza. 

                              How can the bird that is born for joy

                              Sit in a cage and sing?

                              How can a child when fears annoy,

                              But droop his tender wing,

                              And forget his youthful spring?

It came up in class discussion of this poem that this stanza and the metaphor of the bird and child could also be imposed to be a reference to words and the inability to cage them. Even though these words exist in this poem in this order, they are merely put there by Blake. And one person cannot get the same meaning from the poem as another simply because words do not mean, or connote, the same meaning to people universally. I think that Frye too would agree that words cannot be caged, it is their nature to move and change in meaning and from story to story. While the context of words, or application of a genre or description for the text as a whole, these may only be able to provide a linear explanation and sort of imposed boundary on words they are still unable to be tamed. Perhaps this is why words and the tradition of story is such an interesting an complex study.

Liquid Stories

"As a body of myths expands, it absorbs other stories, especially the stories connected with specific local places and people that are called legends...Such an absorption of legend marks the political and social ascendancy of a society with a central mythology, as it takes over other areas, and this mythical imperialism is possible because of the structural similarities among all forms of story." -Frye, 12-13.

         Frye's explanation of stories allegiance with geographical and cultural local makes for an interesting perspective gain on Rushdie's explanation in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Haroun is taken to the place where all stories are kept in liquid form and his guide Iff helps to shed light on the massive collection Haroun is so enamoured with.

"Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here...And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and become yet other stories." -Rushdie, 72.

       While most stories that are read or told today have already been told before in some capacity, be it a similar form, a generic recipe of peril and salvation, or a play off of characters and hero's, there is still reprise in the newness to an individual. As Frye explains, stories are inherently connected to the place they were first told, or where the setting of the story is. The audience also plays a key roles in why a story may be altered or changed, as it came up in class Friday, Disney may be the most influential offender in the manipulation of stories. Disney does a phenomenal job of altering stories in way that they will be appropriate to little kids. They are addicting though in that as those children grow older and the stories and movies that were "Disney-fied" for them as children are what still makeup the reality of those stories to the now grown children. Culturally an American child may fall more predominantly into this realm than say a European child who grew up with the more closely original version of the same story.

    It is however well within Disney's rights to alter the stories as they see fit. This is what Iff is explaining to Haroun, that the liquidity of the streams of stories allows them to be changed and if nothing else encourages that sort of fluid nature. Anything that is worth carrying on as time passes must have some ability to change. Since the "only constant is change" for a story to withstand the tests of time it must be able to fit the changing needs of a certain culture or group as their needs change and shift.  

Can Truth be Found in Fiction...

     Reading Haroun has only furthered my curiosity in wives tales and fairy tales. I have always wondered where they came from, and the fact they are present in society today makes me believe that they are at least roughly based on truth. Or if not truth they are meant to teach or share something. In Chapter 4 when Haroun is first introduced to the streams of stories that all commingle to create the moon of Kahani's surface, he is told by Iff that a story worth telling will not get mixed up but will hold its own. This really got me thinking about the stories that have survived today. What was it that made them more special the tother stories which may have been told hundreds of years ago and did not survive the passing of time?
   Just as Haroun discovers on the Dull Lake, the stories his father told were coming true. There really was truth in the seeming magical and nonsensical stories his flatter the Shah of Blah spewed. Haroun was able to find truth in the stream of his fathers entertainment. I too have wondered if stories like Peter Pan and the Little Mermaid could be true. I grew up a Disney child and with that I lived in a world of make believe. I wanted to find my own talking fish and Tinkerbell, I wanted to be whisked away in the still of the night and go on an adventure.
    My mom would read to my brother and I close to every night growing up, I listened to and was entangled in the entire C.S. Lewis The Chronicle of Narnia series. I drifted off to sleep countless times with those images and story lines running through my head. It was this power of story that entertained me, taught me, and frightened me. Any woman I met and disliked was instantly the White Witch, because for me that was the ultimate symbol of evil. It is the truth that I found in these stories and paralleled with my own adolescent life that made them a truth.
    Stories come from somewhere, whether they start as truth then morph into fiction, or they start as a fiction that then becomes a truth in the lives of the listener, the cross over is present. As Haroun sped across the surface of the Kahani surface he was going past the truths and fictions that link all stories into the beautiful moon that houses all those worth being remembered.