The Tale Itself

26 Jun, 2026

for how this all came to be? It’s not so interesting a story after all. You might imagine some writer, bored, or perhaps half-mad, but in that way wherein the line between madness and genius is so thick it could be seen from space; bored or half-mad, but if mad, mad only in an insipid way¹. Perhaps that is so—we might as well assume it—after all someone had to have put it all in motion—so we must assume such a writer sat down and put pen to ink, or typed away at a keyboard in our more modern era and set out to write it all down. No doubt they had a mind full of ideas, but something—self-doubt, self-consciousness, a more sinister sensation, neither you or I can rightly say—caused them to draw a blank, as blank as the page before them and in the terror of its emptiness they began to write whatever they could to banish the dread. Do you suppose, dear reader, that our bored or half-mad writer—maybe they are half-mad and half-boring, just maybe!—had you in mind when they sat down at their desk? Do you think they were thinking of the audience, however many people like yourself, or maybe it was always just to be you, the single solitary one, who might read their tale whenever they had finished the telling? Or do you think they were concerned more—or I suppose it ought to be, ideally, only—with the specifics and nature of the tale?² That would be for the best, wouldn’t it? This writer, our writer we have mentioned to you, focusing then on introducing their protagonist, perhaps a mysterious figure about whom they had more questions than answers and would leave us in the same state. A dry sort of character, who inhabits a world even drier, drier than the Atacama desert; and, no doubt, the prose would be called upon to match the nature of the world it contained, abstracted, at times approaching academic. And then a supporting character—wouldn’t you think?—the one to whom our hero(ine) drones on about whatever dull subject our dull writer has put into their mouth, perhaps you might now know a good deal more about them. It was supposed to be about the ouroboros, wasn’t it? It has slipped my mind and I can’t be sure I remember.³ Or it could be that they set out to work from a loftier, airier starting point, from the grandest themes down, or focusing their attentions on technique; oh, no doubt something they imagine, in their limited education, to be experimental, but which has in truth been done long before and far better, by Calvino, by Joyce, and by so many others⁴. You know, I suspect, what I mean. Surely, a writer such as the one we have discussed, being so tedious, would have to be a fool to attempt it, and wouldn’t dream to have the audacity of making such a comparison, even self-deprecatingly. Don’t you suppose it would be worse then if our writer became sloppy and began introducing bizarre little structural oddities, haphazardly,⁵ just for the sake of trying to stand out? Never you mind that, though, there are greater concerns: something would have to happen in the story, wouldn’t it? Our writer would have to direct some actions to be undertaken, some dialogue to occur between our protagonist and deuteragonist—or are they an antagonist? We haven’t uncovered that, have we? Perhaps there is little conflict to be had; perhaps that is what our foolish writer imagines to be a radical departure from the more—oh no doubt in their arrogance they might say pedestrian—nature of typical storytelling. Still the characters must work together—that is to say, to do the work of the story in its telling, to achieve something, without which there would be otherwise no tale told. Else we might be left with nothing but the words on the page, and left to wonder for what reason they were written. Then I suppose are we left in the end with the question, searching for an explanation⁶