I'll start with a predictable question: “Three Little Men” as in “Three Little Pigs”?

I'll give you a predictable answer: yes.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, this is the second of your books (the first being "Makavettas", d' après the Shakespearean Macbeth) to re-tell a traditional story.

You have an amazing command of the obvious.

Well, what is this re-telling business, then? Bored? Out of original ideas, are we?

Well, I don't think Aeschylus or Sophocles or Shakespeare were out of ideas, yet they didn't invent a single plot in their lives - as far as we know their work, anyway. Actually, I'm constructing a grand new Theory of Everything in Storytelling - more of a manifesto, really - one of the features of which will be what I call The Ecological Principle. The premise is this: we, as story-producing and story-consuming animals are suffering the effects of narrative overabundance. The cosmos of stories is getting clogged up. So, this is what I propose to my fellow storytellers: invent stories and characters no more. Just re-tell what is already there.

You mean never invent again?

Well, we could start with a five-year Voluntary Abstinence from the New, and just take it from there.

You are joking, of course.

Only partly. And even if I am partly joking, one of my characters - the real father of these opinions - certainly is not.

Oh? Who would that be?

Alfred Hoos.

Alfred Hoos
Self portrait

You mean the fictional author of “The Tragical History of Jackson Pollock, Abstract Expressionist”?

Yes, the fictional author of the very real Tragical History of the very real Jackson Pollock, a very true Abstract Expressionist.

Whatever that means.

Whatever that means.

Alfred Hoos's JP

Flesh and blood JP

More on the Ecological Principle

So, to get back to “The Three Little Men” and your Defense of Re-telling, is there an additional comment to be made on your - or should I say Alfred Hoos's - Ecological Principle? What is the rationale behind it?

The rationale behind it is roughly this: cultures are living organisms, which operate in space-time and therefore obey all sorts of constraints, namely the legacy of their material existence. They are influenced by a host of measurable quantities, such as time, money, the weather, geography, etc. etc., but also by bytes, megabytes, gigabytes (and so on) of information. Just as a human being cannot read, see, hear, smell, or eat more than a certain amount of anything daily, monthly or yearly, but must maintain an optimum between abstinence and over-consumption, so to maintain cognitive, physical, and emotional health, it is just the same with a culture. The stories it tells itself are meant, in addition to their mere 'entertainment' value, to perform a crucial role in its self-definition, self-exploration, and self-discovery. Just as a music fanatic who spends all his waking hours buying CD's will never have the time to hear and enjoy them, likewise a culture overproducing stories will suffer narrative indigestion. It has to create and consume stories in the (rather restricted) quantities that will bring out the most of their quality. Anyway, there is only a relatively small number of basic plot patterns, characters and situations that have something truly significant to tell us. By constantly trying to create the totally new, we cannot gain maximum advantage from the old. And often, as with good wine, the meaning lies in the aftertaste. By returning to our culture's basic repository of stories (and there are thousands there), we can learn more about ourselves, our world, our society, our souls. QED.

Assuming for a moment you are - or, rather, Alfred Hoos is - right, why must we then re-tell the stories, and not just let the original telling suffice, i.e. by reading the books, seeing the films… watching the plays, or whatever.

Aha, caught you! You hesitated a wee bit before saying 'watching the plays', and you know why: while reading a book or watching a film is a re-experiencing of the author's or film-director's original product, any stage performance of an older play is, in a very real sense, a re-telling. The theatre director, designers, and actors act as necessary go-between between author and audience. The text of the play cannot jump up on a stage and perform itself. So you need a re-telling.

Granted. But what about “The Brothers Karamazov” or Bergman's “The Seventh Seal”? The book is always there. The film is always there. Should we 're-tell' those too?

Well, I don't want to descend to the level of modern theories of the 'death of the author' and reading into a 'text', according to which, everything is a text, from The Oresteia to the Mass in B-Minor to Peyton Place to the Arsenal vs. Liverpool match to Madonna's latest show to lunch at MacDonald's. Nevertheless there is definitely an element of individual interpretation in each and every 'reading'. Let us take the example of a traditional, oral society. The repository of stories (The Iliad, Beowulf, Jack and the Beanstalk, whatever) was always there, albeit in an unwritten, one might almost say 'virtual' or ethereal form. Call it The Collective Unconscious, or Cultural Heritage, or Tradition, or whatever. It was thus the function of the storyteller, whether professional or not, to embody these stories afresh in the here and now, each and every single time they were performed to a concrete audience. And, while embodying them - what we are calling 're-telling', really - he or she would also interpret and add to the stories the particulars of the time, the occasion, and the specific group to which they were addressed, as well as the marks of his or her own individuality.

And why is it better to have a certain Mr. X re-tell “The Odyssey”, rather than reading Homer's text?

Well, for one thing, to properly read and assimilate Homer's text you'd have to have perfect knowledge of Homeric Greek - and I don't know many people that do. From the moment you are relying on a translation, you already have a Mr. X (the translator) giving you his version of the original - it is already a re-telling. Of course, the very purpose of having translations is adaptive, to bring a dead, old, difficult, or unknown language into a living context and make it understandable. To generalize, any form of re-telling serves a primarily adaptive purpose. If you look at stories and their characters as the encoded knowledge our culture needs to survive, every re-telling is a 'serving' of this deeper nucleus, or recipe, in a form more palatable to the specific age, time and audience. Just as it would be totally useless to give a non-Chinese-speaking audience, a Chinese printed version of the Divine Comedy to read, so it is less-than-fully-useful to us to be handed down stories in forms that do not bring out their full flavor - what we might call their full knowledge-potential.

The Purpose of Stories

Why this insistence on knowledge and survival, and biological analogies and whatnot? Aren't stories primarily meant to entertain?

They are primarily meant to do all sorts of things. Depending on the specific story, the audience, the medium, and the occasion, one or another function will predominate. Also, the word 'entertainment' is a tricky one: what does it really mean? Does it mean simply to pass the time in a pleasurable way? And then, what is pleasure? Is it the same thing for everyone - for an Orthodox monk, for a Dutch businessman, for a Tanzanian peasant, for a member of the Chinese Politburo? Also, I can't just ignore the fact that the modern Greek word for entertainment is 'psychagogia', which is really an ancient Greek word meaning 'the guidance of the soul'.

Ah, you Greeks! Always so high-minded!

No, not so! In fact, modern usage of the word is usually just a mockery of the old, literal meaning. In a contemporary setting 'psychagogia' can be used indiscriminately for a Christmas pantomime, a rock concert or a strip-show. But how did this particular word come to be used at all? What is the cultural background that makes us use such a profound concept ('guidance of the soul'!) to describe what can be an absolutely inane pastime? I think it would be as narrow-minded of us to say that storytelling (in any of its modern manifestations) is only meant to serve a high, instructive purpose, as it would be to insist that its function is merely to entertain. Certainly, I have a preference for stories that also serve a higher purpose.

Is instructive (or 'culturally useful' if you prefer) storytelling not entertaining?

Ah well, in my opinion it has to be! Even the most profound, wise and deep-aimed narrative has also to be entertaining - if it wants to hit its mark, that is.

You mean the reader's soul?

You could put it that way, yes. Reader's, viewer's, listener's - whatever the particular medium happens to be.

You have been known to use Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s expression about books having to be 'reader friendly'.

Yes, it's very much to the point, is it not? To a person with even a low degree of computer literacy the '-friendly' adjunct is awfully telling.

Kurt Vonnegut
Self portrait

So, is all great literature 'reader-friendly'?

Well, it depends on what you mean by 'great literature'…

Why don't you define it.

I'll pass. But I'd say that most of the classics of older times are extremely reader-friendly. (Three examples of reader-friendly authors are Homer, Boccacio, and Charles Dickens). Newer ones less so, especially after the adventure of Modernism began. (Three examples of less-than-very-reader-friendly authors are André Breton, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf).

Some would disagree.

I know. But most won't. Try reading Finnegan's Wake from first page to last, or Beckett's Malone Dies, and then let's pick this up again.

I'll pass.

It's not just a question of numbers or statistics of course, of assigning greatness by majority vote as it were (otherwise, Barbara Cartland and Tom Clancy would rate higher than Dante and Tolstoy). It's just that modern times have seen the emergence of the ultra-refined consumer of art, literature, music or whatever, who is willing to go to unnatural lengths to 'understand' his paintings, books, symphonies, and so on. Whereas, from a more traditional viewpoint - which I happen to espouse, by the way - art has a duty to be communicable. If not to a total moron or utter philistine, then at least to a person who for the most part shares in our common human predicament. Modernists - authors, painters, composers, et al - performed a great cultural service by exploring and redefining the limits and capabilities of their respective media, but they did not achieve the high emotive force of truly useful art. The only strong emotion Modernism has achieved is shock.

The Three Little Pigs…

After this lengthy aside on 're-telling'…

Which you prompted… 

…let us proceed to the matter at hand: “The Three Little Men”, a re-telling of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Three Little Pigs”.

One little matter, before we proceed: the Brothers Grimm were anthologists, not composers of fairy tales (like Hans Christian Andersen, say, or Oscar Wilde). So, although The Three Little Pigs is indeed best known through their collection, we should perhaps more accurately term it The traditional German folk-tale The Three Little Pigs.

Ah, mathematicians are such sticklers for accuracy.

If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times: I'm an ex-mathematician! …Anyway, to get to the point: I've known the story of The Three Little Pigs since my childhood, but it was not until I read Bruno Bettelheim's analysis of it in his wonderful book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairytales, that I realized its more profound significance.

Pleasure Principle versus Reality Principle?

Well, that is Bettelheim's psychological reading, yes. But to me, his analysis helped drive home the fact that this is a tale about life choices, about the materials out of which we construct our lives. Straw and wood are the choices of the first two little piggies, who eventually become the wolf's ham and bacon. And I believe that the question of 'what we make of our lives' is now becoming more pertinent than ever…

Oh? I thought it was always pertinent!

It was, but it was also, very often, rhetorical. Now, changes in the economic, social, and technological spheres (at least in the West) tend to give people more choices. And more choices means greater difficulty in making decisions - just as in a restaurant with a huge menu.

Fair point.

…Becomes The Three Little Men

Thank you. Finding myself at a rather critical point in my life at the time when I began The Three Little Men (actually, I seem to have a propensity for finding myself at critical points in my life - too many choices perhaps!), I felt I wanted to explore some of the traditional options for success available in our culture.

Money, fame…

Precisely! Great doses of money and fame are certainly not unappealing to most people - except, perhaps, to those who possess them - but few would dare publicly to identify either one as THE central ambition of their lives. So, what's left? Love, honor, friendship, family, faith, integrity, creativity… perhaps a combination of the above? Set in the mundane context of, say, a modern, middle-of-the-road psychological novel, any answer can be made to appear sufficiently convincing. But if you transpose the question to the more archaic, more focused world of pared-down oral narrative, the essential is brought much more easily into focus. If you think of values as weapons in humanity's match against Nothingness, Obliteration and Death, then the criteria for success become stricter.

Perhaps too strict for anything to pass. What is strong enough to fight Nothingness and Obliteration? No one can escape Death.

Well, it's a question all great religions (and some not-so-great-ones, too) have tried to answer.

So, does “The Three Little Men” attempt a religious approach?

I approached the writing of the book as I would approach the solution of an equation, the deciphering of a cryptogram. I knew what the questions were (I knew the setting, I knew the problem, I knew the central dramatic dilemma) but I did not know the answers, I did not - to pursue the mathematical analogy - know the value of x.

You mean you actually started to write the story without knowing how it would eventually turn out?

Oh how embarrassing to admit: yes!!! But I was conscious of my ignorance, and planned to use the story as a means of attacking the riddle. Even before I started to write, I knew the story would begin ‘Once upon a time there were three little men…’ There's something magical about beginning a story with this line, even if you later discard it; it forces the writer to be as clear-minded and focused as possible. I also knew who the Big Bad Wolf would be (after having written the book, I actually discovered that there was an actual historical early twentieth century gangster called Lupo!), the nature of his ‘curse’, as well as the life choices of the first two brothers, Al and Nick Frank (money and fame, respectively). In fact, these elements were so clear in my mind, that writing the first half of the book took me just two months, and I only went back to change the most minor details. The remaining half, however, (just over a hundred pages), took me close to three years of constant re-writes, tension, cul-de-sacs, and sleepless nights. You see, I had to find x before I could write it to the end.

And did you find it?

Of course, otherwise I would have trashed the whole damned thing.

So, in effect you are saying that you have solved the problem of life choices for all eternity?

Don't be silly! Art is not mathematics - remember, it serves an adaptive purpose - it cannot give answers for all eternity. In all humility, let me say this, though: I do believe that I answered the question I had set myself to my satisfaction.

The answer being?

Buy the book, damn it!