Book
review:
Myths & Stories, Lies & Truth
by Norman Talbot
1999 James Backhouse Lecture
© 1999 by Australia Yearly Meeting.
95 pages.
Reviewed by Esther Mürer
Myths & Stories, Lies & Truth is an expanded version of the 1999 James
Backhouse Lecture sponsored by Australia Yearly Meeting. Norman Talbot was professor of English
at Newcastle University before retiring in 1993 to become a full-time poet and writer of fantasy and
science fiction.
His lecture presents an impassioned defense of "unfactual truth," which Quakers
have historically found it difficult or impossible to recognize as truth at all. "Only a book
which is not factual can be true," Talbot declares. Fantasy and science fiction, in particular, are
modes of "spiritual and philosophical play" which nourish the Quaker kinds of
seeking.
Moreover, fantasy and science fiction provide alternatives to the totalitarian worldview
advanced by modern mass media via a "fast food diet" of formulaic dream stories set in
familiar "realities", providing no challenge to the imagination and lacking even such basic
structure as a beginning, middle and end.
To the charge that fantasy fiction is escapist, Talbot replies that "escapism is obviously a
moral term, about running away from the real business, the grim facts, of life," from injustice
and misery:
Nowadays even a jailer knows he needs to entertain the convicts, but he
prefers trivial, packaged entertainments. Above all he avoids two things major fantasy offers: such
wild and imaginative leaps as might give slaves "ideas", disturbing their resigned
normality, and such richly consolatory stories as could suggest sympathies beyond prejudice,
blinkered fear, and xenophobic self-love. | |
A story is like a carrier bag, portable and satisfying in itself, that deserves to be
carefully made and attentively used. There are bags that contain more than you would ever have
thought possible. Of others you may treasure only one or two items: the only thing I like about the
Red Riding Hood story is the dialogue between the girl and the wolf in grandma's clothing.
Your imaginative world, as your own Supreme Fiction can evoke it, is unique and yet, in the
shared ministry of teller and audience, communicablenot because you have found a definitive
generalisible truth to preach but to know it is yours and call it a story implies a way to share it, and
readiness to trust people to understand it and apply it in their own way.
But that last task is not easy: remember that those who receive it have to reconstruct it in their
own image. As a poem of mine says of audiences,
We have to have free will
we have no choice in the matter.
Offer your story adventurously, and be ready to forgive us if we are unsatisfactory audiences.
And even if at the moment no one seems ready to understand your story at all, you never know
where it will go or how it will change. After a few more metamorphoses, it may reappear in a new
variant, wondrous to you, and a delight to your Eternal Co-Author and Final
Audience.
from Myths & Stories, Lies &Truth
by Norman Talbot |