Open Minds, Open Spaces
Gary Barbour

            Sitting around a campfire, my young mind barely comprehended the full nature of the stories being told.  Tales of hunting trips with not-dead-yet elk standing in the bed of the truck as it barrels down Main Street or stories of breaking horses in North Idaho fields now paint a portrait of an idyllic rural life.  While not always perfect, our American dream came smudged with the grit and wear of all sepia-toned memories.

            This might explain my fascination with the short story and the folk tale. I devoured the tales of the past, looking for what makes up our world.  Growing up, those stories were presented in children’s books.  The Brothers Grimm, cleaned up for the post-Victorian child, were my guides on my literary journey.  When I found some of the original endings and dark undertones of the stories, I grew excited.  The witch does not fall into quicksand and drown, but instead is tortured by her step-daughter, a much more horrible ending that would have scarred my childhood.  Frank L. Baum felt that the endings of too many childhood tales were overly violent and gory, so he set out to write a story that had the happy ending and none of the violence.  Of course, the Wicked Witch gets hers in the end, but for the most part, the Wizard of Oz felt innocent if a little sterile.

            Later, my interest turned to a more diverse folk tales.  Tales of the Native American fox serve as a warning against tricksters and lies.  Thai stories warn listeners of the importance of sense as well as the presence of omens in the home.  In one Thai story, a young man kills a deer and as he washes up, his grandfather cooks the meat.  Unaware that meat shrinks when cooked, the boy beats his grandfather to death, thinking the old man ate more than his share.  As the man dies, he yells “The meat is shrinking,” but his grandson fails to hear.  The boy eats the meat, and finds he cannot finish all of it. The grandfather’s spirit flies into the body of a raven and repeats the old man’s words outside the window.  Overcome with grief, the boy cradles his grandfather’s body.  This gives rise to a superstition that a raven seen in a tree outside the house foretells the eventual murder of one family member by another.  Similar stories abound in Thai culture.

            Jeremy Hsu says that the human mind is hardwired to enjoy a story, and we glean more enjoyment from stories that resonate within us.  We empathize with stories that share a common thread with our own.  While not every story is about our life, they have common elements that we feel in the basest parts of ourselves.  Very few people have spent time in Ivan Denisovitch’s Russian gulag, but most readers understand the soul-crushing loneliness that Solzhenitzyn’s character.

            While Jeremy Hsu recognizes that empathy is found in stories with common elements, Lee Siegel defines himself through stories.  He goes through life living as though in a storybook.  Many of the novels that Siegel finds attractive delve into the emptiness of human life and emotions.  He creates a divide between himself and reality.  He comes to the conclusion that one cannot live in the realm of books, considering how so many characters lead to their own defeat through them. 

It seems easy for overly-empathic readers to find definition in the books they read.  They use characters with similar traits and desires to aspire to something they can never really be.  Romance novels capitalize on this desire to be or have the impossible.  Every woman wants her white knight, and novels present the chance to escape that.  Many more of the great romances end with flawed men and women than Danielle Steele and Stephanie Meyer would have them believe.