In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [16]
This pattern continued once I was at university, except that my escapism expanded to include double-bill B sci-fi movies of the lowest possible brow level. I saw The Fly when it first came out, and The Attack of the 60-Foot Woman, whose growth in size rendered her semi-transparent, and The Head That Wouldn’t Die, and The Creeping Eye, a giant eye with tentacles that came from Outer Space like a lot of threatening things in those days, and that—when it finally put in an appearance—had tractor treads clearly visible beneath it. Meanwhile, in my highbrow guise, I was making my way through English literature from Anglo-Saxon to T. S. Eliot, and French literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and going to Ingmar Bergman and nouvelle vague films.
It did not entirely escape my notice that Beowulf and The Creeping Eye had a few things in common. Both had monsters. Both had gore. Both had heroes. Jane Austen’s heroines, on the other hand, had money worries instead of talking skulls, and Madame Bovary did not have her still-alive head preserved under a bell jar, complete with Bride of Frankenstein hairdo, but died of overspending. Could it be that the sensational, monster-ridden tales of the distant past—now sanctified as part of our priceless literary canon—were joined at the hip to the sensational, monster-ridden tales of the present, which were vilified as trash?
Why do people tell or write such wonder-tale stories? Or, more generally: why do they tell or write any stories at all? How did stories originate? What purpose do they serve in our lives? Are they the result of nurture—we learn our stories, as children, from the adults around us—or are they built in, hard-wired into the brain in “template” form, thus causing stories to generate semi-spontaneously if the epigenetic switch for them is turned on?
To speculate further: do stories free the human imagination or tie it up in chains by prescribing “right behaviour,” like so many Victorian Christian-pop novels about the virtues of virtuous women? Are narratives a means to enforce social control or a means of escape from it? Is the use of “story” as a synonym for “lie” justified, and if so, are some lies necessary? Are we the slaves of our own stories—our family narratives and dramas, for instance—which compel us to re-enact them? Do stories optimistically help us shape our lives for the better or pessimistically doom us to tragic failure? Do they embody ancient tropes and act out atavistic rituals? Are they essential to us—part of the matrix of our shared humanity? Do we tell them to show off our skills, to unsettle the complacent audience, to flatter rulers, or, as Scheherazade the Queen of Storytelling did, to save our own lives? Are they the foundational bedrock of our various societies, or possibly even our various nations—whether those nations have been aspiring ones, in the throes of defining themselves; imperial ones, justifying their domination of others; or declining ones, lamenting their own passing? Are they inseparable from our cultures, whether ancient cultures encrusted with age-old symbols or recently formed cultures in search of such mental jewellery?
Or are stories just pastimes—old wives’ tales to be spun round a cottage fireplace—or sentimental and sensationalistic novels to be devoured by bored young ladies reclining on nineteenth-century chaises longues, or TV-series spinoffs, a minor part of the entertainment industry—in all cases frivolous by definition? And are slabs of foundational bedrock and frivolous, entertaining pastimes mutually exclusive?
The answers to such questions have varied over the years—indeed, over the millennia—and many heads have literally rolled and many panel discussions have been held over the differences among those answers. It was—once, and in