OK… let’s get this out of the way right now.  I love books.  LOVE them.

No, really!  Some of my best friends are books!  (ok, I laugh, but that’s totally true… who among us doesn’t have a relationship with a book that’s as deep or deeper than most humans we know?)

BUT – I also love it when a story gets messed about with.

Yes, I nitpick with the best of them, especially movie adaptations.  “But, where’s Goldberry’s story?  I don’t remember those weird ass throat microphone boxes in Dune!  How come Katniss said that?  Wait, I don’t recall the Dark Mist being an antagonist in Voyage of the Dawn Treader”  … and on, and on, and on.  But, when you sit back and poke at it… Books are really weird.  A book is a story we tell each other – frozen at a single telling.  It’s always the same story, no matter how many times you read it.

Think about that for a second:  Always the same.  ALWAYS.

Homo Sapiens Sapiens – you, me, aunt Gertrude, Donald Trump (well, maybe not) – our whole species the way we are now, has been around for, oh, give-or-take 200,000 years.[ref 1]  I wasn’t there for the vast majority of that, but modern humans means we had the ability to make language, language means we talked about things, and talking about things means 200 THOUSAND years of saying “No, really!  That mastodon was THHIIIIIIISSSS tall, and it had me pinned! …. THERE I WAS!!!”  and so on.  (“Seriously!  You should have seen the SPEAR on him!  That boy must ‘hunt the wild boar’ allll the time!”)

Of that 200,000 years, the metallic type printing press has existed for just over six hundred years.  Around 1377 in Korea, the movable type press came about, and while woodblock printing way pre-dates it, movable metallic type is really making a BOOK on demand. [ref 2] Gutenberg dragged it to Europe some 100 years later, and it wasn’t until the 16th century that books really started getting made regularly and sold to the masses.[ref 3]  Prior to the press, manuscripts were copied out by hand, and every copy introduced the possibility of error, transposition, or even *gasp* censorship and editing. EVERY COPY.

In other words: for only around one quarter, of one percent, of the time we’ve been telling stories, have we been putting them down en-masse, in a static form. In the grand scheme of things, the book is still new technology.

Oral traditions mean change.  Sometimes that change is inevitable and unintended

(game of ‘telephone’ anyone?)

… and sometimes totally intentional

(“THANK YOU CLEVELAND!  YOU are the BEST CITY IN AMERICA!  WOOO!”  ‘… heeeeey!  Didn’t they say that about Spokane last week?!’)

… but change happens.  We tweak the story, we cut parts.  We flesh out bits based on when people laughed, or made appropriately horrified noises.  The fish gets bigger, the trouble more dire, the teeth on the dragon longer and covered in ichor.  I think it’s fair to say we’ve been doing that the entire time we have been around as a species.  Until the book.

Enter the printed word, and mass production.  Minor typesetting errors aside, a book gets duplicated and is then a complete record of that story, told that way, from that instant… and there are dozens, hundreds, MILLIONS of copies.  That version now exists essentially forever.  Every time you pick that story up and read it, you will read the same story, setting aside the new understanding and insights we gain into works all the time.

{Fascinating sidebar here… if you happen to pick up and read translations of the written version of old sagas that were originally oral recitations, like The Iliad, Beowulf, The Táin bó Cúailnge… you will wonder how the HELL anyone ever managed to sit through the endless litany portions.  “..and he brought with him 50 ships of 120 men each from the towns of Hyria, Aulis, Schoenus, Scolus…. etc etc etc”  … I promise you, no bard ever, EVER listed all (in the case of the Iliad) 1154 ships. [ref 4]  They totally did the “AND he brought with him 50 mighty ships from… (‘…where are we?’ ‘…Scolus’)  SCOLUS!!!!” to stroke the ego of rich and quick to anger hosts.}

So: books.  Solid, unchanging, printed text.  Definitive.  Here’s the interesting part: How often do you read a story and NOT hear different characters, feel different emotions, imagine different scenes?  I should hope never!  If so, please PM me for new book suggestions.

YOU create a personal interaction with a story, when you read it.  Make it YOUR version.  I can read the same book, but I make MY version.  We lend it some of those aspects that we used to hear from the story teller, but using our own imagination.  That’s why a new adaptation sometimes annoys us so much.  It’s also, I think, why people react so strongly (often negatively) to movie adaptations, radio performances and yes, audiobooks.  (Ha!  See?  I brought it back around.)

When I read a story to me, and you read a story to you, we both hear OUR stories: we own them for that instant, we will always own that version.  When I read a story to YOU, then you share in my version; and that can be a challenge.  Sometimes an adaptation will just make you squee with joy because it feels so right, but I would argue it’s because it matches what we’re already holding as our version of the story.  Likewise, when an adaptation goes horribly astray from our vision, we feel cheated, violated.  They’ve messed up our story!  HOW COULD THEY DO THAT?!

…. But if we can take a moment, and let go of what we believe about the story, and consider it as a new re-telling of the one about the three wild dogs, the mastodon, and the foolish hunter, we can forgive the differences and maybe love a new version along with our own.

Cheers, and happy listening.

Citations:

1: “Fossil Reanalysis Pushes Back Origin of Homo sapiens”. Scientific American. February 17, 2005

2: Zhou He (1994): “Diffusion of Movable Type in China and Europe: Why Were There Two Fates?”  International Communication Gazette, Vol. 53

3: Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, 1983

4: Hyginus, Fabulae 97