So. This wasn't what I expected to be writing about, really. I thought it was going to be about Tales. What they are, and the way they are reused. Tale-collections. Why Tales are the building blocks of literature, those ribbons of shaped space time Pratchett talks about, and sort of in the way Nohrnberg says studying Three Blind Mice is more revealing about music than you think. But here I am with - riddles, the last thing I would have thought to write on, just because I hadn't realised there was so much to write about. Riddles, then, to me, have mostly been "What goes into the water red and comes out blue?" or you know, Chinese lantern riddles, deng1 mi2, (which is a whole different story altogether, dengmis are COOL). All because of one random class - I really came to this from Old English riddles, hearing two of them read aloud, and feeling that they are poetry. And in contrast to that are Rowling's riddles - terribly BAD riddles. I wondered why she bothered if she's so bad at them, but then I thought, why, she *has* to, even though she's awful at it, you couldn't have a children's quest story without one. When I asked Nohrnberg about that he helped me get one step further. He said that riddles are not just the literature of childhood, but the very childhood of literature. And people like Andrew Walsh and Frye believe that riddles are the roots of lyric – and then I looked up riddle in the encyclopaedia and found that they are practically universal. So they must be right in some ways. You don't think of all cultures having the novel, say, but riddles, yes. And listening to those Old English riddles made me think they're not really about games, though they are that too. That making it poetry is what counts. And then I started thinking about riddles and how so many forms of literature are like riddles. Metaphors are riddle-like, or riddles are a kind of metaphor. Allegories. Oracles and prophecies, things depending on surface meaning and hinted meanings. This was before Frye and charms, I got it distilled through Nohrnberg though: charms and carmina, literature casting a spell, and answering riddles a kind of disenchantment. All that was terribly interesting. Of course I think it's going too far to say all literature is a kind of riddle though. Someone, I think it was Herbert Tucker, told me to read someone else (I forget who) who said that all literature answers a question, and to figure out what a work means you have to figure out what question it was trying to answer, and I can't really think that is right. (although anyone who does know who said that or where that came from please let me know pronto) And Bob Reeder says that Barthes says the opposite. Or at least he was supposed to have spoken dismissively against literature ordered around revelation of a secret. But I can't help feeling that these people have got one thing, and that was one way I came to it: through the sense that riddles are connected to literature, are literature.
The second way I came to it was through Rodari. I don't know how I heard of him, or why I was looking for his books. I don't think anyone recommended him to me, although after I got it Poach tells me she's read his stories in Italian and that they were very good. However I came to him, a book with a title like "The Grammar of Fantasy" naturally interests me. I tell people that I was lucky in finding this book because it happened to have a section on riddles. That's sort of overstating it, since this consists only 2 pages, actually. And Rodari isn't entirely right. His explanation of how riddles are made explain only one kind of riddles. But that was enough. Three step structure: enstrangement-association-metaphor. I seized on that and thought, I can use this to make something of a project on riddles. And with some adaptation I used it to read the Faerie Queene for Nohrnberg as a test, and he didn't think it was bad. Then the Railway Children, which I was only rereading for fun, gave me another way of looking at it. A riddle has two parts. That sounds obvious, but that made my heart leap. Madeleine L'engle's title: The Two-Part Invention came floating out to me. That told me other things: that if a riddle is a form of literature that can be broken into two parts, and if the two parts can be separated, then riddles are important in literature because they are timechangers. They create delay. You have to wait for the other half, and everything that comes between is the story.
What to do with riddles though? It would be nice to come up with a way of reading through riddles, the curious reader and the riddling mode, or something like that. But I knew I wasn't very good at formulating theories or models: I seem to understand things intuitively, but have trouble explaining why. I tried with the Spenser to do something on how fairy tales and epics are alike, but I abandonned that because I realised I lacked the brains or experience for it. And really philosophical discussions on language and meaning and identity made my head boggle. I was trying very hard to read, or at least browse through Quine and Kripke just yesterday, and I didn't understand a thing. What to write on, too? It would be much easier to be writing on one work, or one author, you knew where you were going. With riddles, especially with a broad definition of riddles and riddling, the possibilities are endless. I got onto children's lit, partly because I always wanted an excuse to do something with it, and also because Railway Children suggested that children naturally learn through a Q&A format. Rodari said about children's reaction to riddles, that "the world is full of mysterious objects, incomprehensible events and undecipherable figures. Their own presence in the world is a riddle to be solved, and they circle it with direct or indirect questions. The pleasure derives from an objective manner of testing through play, training emotions to search and be surprised…" Children like riddles because it shows them that we can find meaning. I think that's sort of like G.K Chesterton saying that children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell them that they can be killed. Something like that? Also because it's one place you can have real riddles, riddles in the strictest sense, standalone riddles, and not just riddle-like writing, without them being out of place. Although I'm writing nearly nothing on children's lit - rather I've got Shakespeare and Oedipus and Thurber and hardly any children's lit. Oh well. The other thing was seeing in a glossary that some riddles end by asking: “Tell me what am I?” So I got to where I decided that riddles have to do with Identity. With hiding names and restoring names. A whodunnit has to answer, who? (well, the how and why is also important, though if you’ve got the why and how, the motive and means, the murderer can only come down to one correct person. According to Hercule Poirot at least.) Morgan of Hed, maybe, searching for his identity. Bilbo hiding his. Rodari says "The riddle has a different principal content - of reliving, finding oneself."
Is this the most incoherent entry or what? I'm not sure I've cleared my head any, although it was good, going over all that. I’m building something, but I don’t know what. And I haven’t a blueprint, a plan. Only a rough shape, which is awful, I realise now. Okay for an essay, but not for a project like this. but I want to surprise myself. Finding things to stopper up leaks, plaster over my own gaps of knowledge. I am also very hungry and sleepy. If I go to sleep now I hope I can wake up in two hours to write. Oh well. Night everyone.
Not making progress with writing, so here to think abit. No idea how to progress, or what this project is really about. Or, too many ideas, too many steps in too many directions. So. Maybe I need to think about why I chose this project in the first place, and see what it was that really I want to do.