The Science of Discworld II

‘out there’, big and white and shining. It’s another story.
    Because we rely so much on them, we love stories. We require them on a daily basis. So a huge service industry has grown up over several thousand years.
    The basic narrative forms of drama – the archetypal stories – can allbe found in the works of the ancient Greek playwrights: Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles … Most of the dramatic tricks go back to ancient Greece, especially Athens. No doubt they are older than that, for no tradition starts in fully developed form. The ‘chorus’, a gaggle of bit-players who form a backdrop for the main action and in various ways reinforce it and comment on it, is of Greek or earlier origin. So is the main division of the form of a play, though not necessarily its substance, into comedy and tragedy. So, possibly, is the invention of the huge stuffed joke willy, always good for a laugh from the cheap seats.
    The Greek concept of tragedy was an extreme form of narrative imperative: the nature of the impending disaster had to be evident to the audience and to virtually all of the players; but it also had to be evident that it was going to happen anyway, despite that. You were Doomed, as you should be – but we’ll watch anyway, to see how interestingly you’ll be Doomed. And if it sounds silly to watch a drama when you know the ending in advance, consider this: how likely is it, when you settle down to watch the next James Bond movie, that he won’t defuse the bomb? In fact you’ll be watching a narrative as rigid as any Greek drama, but you’ll watch anyway to see how the trick is done this time.
    In our story, Hex is the chorus. In form, our tale is comedy; in substance, it is closer to tragedy. The elves are a Discworld reification of human cruelty and wickedness, they are evil incarnate because – traditionally – they have no souls. Yet in their various aspects they fascinate us, as do vampires and monsters and werewolves. It’d be a terrible event if the last jungle yields up its tiger, and so it would be, too, when the last forest yields up its werewolf (yes, all right, technically they don’t exist, but we hope you know what we mean: it’d be a bad day for humanity when we stop telling stories).
    We’ve piled on to elves and yetis and all the other supernatural aspects of ourselves; we’re happier to say that monsters are out there in the deep dark forest than locked in here with us. Yet we need them, in a way we find hard to articulate; the witch Granny Weatherwax tried to summarise it in Carpe Jugulum , when she said ‘We need vampires, if only to remind us what garlic is for’. G.K. Chesterton did ratherbetter when, in an article defending fairy stories, he disputed the suggestion that stories tell children that there are monsters. Children already know there are monsters, he said. Fairy stories tell them that monsters can be killed.
    We need our stories to understand the universe, and sometimes we forget that they’re only stories. There is a proverb about the finger and the moon; when a wise man points at the Moon, the fool looks at the finger. We call ourselves Homo sapiens , possibly out of a hope that this may be true, but the storytelling ape has a tendency to confuse moons and fingers.
    When your god is an ineffable essence that exists outside of space and time, with unimaginable knowledge and indescribable powers, a god of boundless sky and high places, belief slips easily into the mind.
    But the ape isn’t happy with that. The ape gets bored with things it can’t see. The ape wants pictures. And it gets them, and then a god of endless space becomes an old man with a beard sitting in the clouds. Great art takes place in the god’s honour, and every pious brush gently kills what it paints. The wise man says ‘But this is just a metaphor!’, and the ape says ‘Yeah, but those tiny wings couldn’t lift a cherub that fat!’ And then not so wise men fill the pantheon of heaven with hierarchies of angels and set the plagues of man on horseback and write down the dimensions of Heaven in which to imprison the lord of infinite space. 1 The stories begin to choke the system …
    Seeing is not believing .
    Rincewind knows this, which is why he encourages Shakespeare to make elves real. Because once you’re called Mustardseed, it’s downhill all the way