"There lies the main difference between childish imaginings and imaginative literature."

 

From Ursula LeGuin's No Time To Spare, a book of essays that chews on topics from old age to writing.  In "It Doesn't Have to Be the Way It Is"(June 2022) she muses about what liberties storytellers can take with reality before losing their readers.  

"The fantastic tale may suspend the laws of physics - carpets fly; cats fade into invisibility, leaving only a smile - and of probability - the younger of three brothers wins the bride, the infant in the box cast upon the waters survives unharmed - but it carries its revolt against reality no further.  Mathematical order is unquestioned.  Two and one make three, in Koschei's castle and Alice's Wonderland (especially in Wonderland), Euclid's geometry - or possibly Riemann's - somebody's geometry, anyhow - governs the layout.  Otherwise incoherence would invade and paralyze the narrative.  

There lies the main difference between childish imaginings and imaginative literature.  The chid "telling a story" roams about among the imaginary and the half-understood without knowing the difference, content with the sound of language and the pure play of fantasy with no particular end, and that's the charm of it.  But fantasies, whether folktales or sophisticated literature, are stories in the adult,  demanding sense.  They can ignore certain laws of physics but not of causality.  They start here and go there (or back here), and though the mode of travel may be unusual and here and there may be wildly exotic and unfamiliar places, yet they must have both a location on the map of that world and a relationship to the map of our world.  If not, the hearer or reader of the tale will be set adrift in a sea of inconsequential inconsistencies, or, worse yet, left drowning in the shallow puddle of the author's wishful thinking."

I don't know how many of you, reading this, were spurred to think about how childish Trump's stories are.  What's charming in children's stories definitely doesn't age well when told by adults.  

And what does this tell us by Trump's audience?  

"The hearer . . . of the tale will be set adrift in a sea of inconsequential inconsistencies, or worse yet, left drowning in the shallow puddle of the author's wishful thinking."

To be fair, LeGuin does distinguish between oral and written story telling.   In the previous essay, "The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum" (May 2022) she writes:

"Storytelling is clearly a gift, a talent, a specific ability.  Some people just don't have it - they rush or drone, jumble the order of events, skip essentials, dwell on inessentials, and the muff the climax.  Don't we all have a relative who we pray won't launch into a joke or a bit of family history because the history will bore us and the joke will bomb?  But we may also have a relative who can take the stupidest, nothingest little event and make it into what copywriters call a gut-wrenchingly brilliant thriller and laugh riot."

While Trump does have a presence, I'm not sure he fits this description of story teller either.  It's more like he embodies the misery of his followers and allows them to act out their frustrations and blame their problems on anyone but themselves.  Trump was, up to a point, the successful version, or their own angry selves.