 |
| Myths break, but fairy tales bend |
This year’s London Short Story Festival was a feast of
tender morsels. If you already know, or would like to find out, what a deep
pleasure it is to be read stories as an adult, then make a note to go to 2016’s
festival. Combined with beautiful readings, there is much discussion. I thought
I’d relate here, like a crone passing on second hand gossip, some of the wisdom
provided this year by Marina Warner.
Marina Warner is
an expert on fairy tales, and has approached them from many angles in her books.
Under time pressure in a brief session with two other writers, she gave a hugely
compressed rundown of what fairy tale means, but even in this tiny space, there
was much inspiration to be found.
She began by differentiating between ‘a fairy tale’ and ‘fairy
tale’.
A Fairy tale, Warner defined as ‘a short story with
supernatural elements and some relation to historical folk tale’. This is
pleasingly loose, and I’d go as far as to say the supernatural elements need
not even be writ large – they may be implied, for you to take or leave as a
reader.
Fairy tale, on the other hand, she described as a language
of the imagination. It interprets everyday experience with a system of images
that lurk somewhere behind. A story may deploy fairy tale but not be a fairy tale. As an example of this, she
invoked the work of Alan Garner, who
is a hero of mine. As she put it, he sets his books and stories in a world
(Alderley Edge in Cheshire) where all matter is saturated with memory and consciousness.
His stories inhabit an enchanted landscape, but are not categorisable as fairy
tales. She is absolutely right on this count. It is possible to read a Garner
story that is ostensibly about very earthly, mundane things, such as building
stone walls, and yet feel as though you have been somewhere magical. His stories
in The Stone Book Quartet are
perfect examples of this.
Warner made a couple of other points that got me thinking. The
first was about the way fairy tales can be re-worked, re-mixed, re-visioned,
whatever you want to call it. We’re familiar with this, but she distinguished
it from post-modern approaches to old forms, and pointed out that we can still
surprise the reader in new work based on old fairy tales. This made me think
about the distinction between myth and fairy tale in this regard. If you change
something fundamental about a myth – e.g. how it ends – it will stop being that
myth at all. If Oedipus doesn’t fulfil his fate, then it’s not the Oedipus myth
anymore. The same goes for Narcissus and all the rest. But we can change, over
and over, what Little Red Riding Hood decides to do when confronted by the wolf
– run, seduce him, eat him, suggest a game of rummy – and some essence of the
original story only enriches the new work.
The second point Warner made which I think is so important
is directly relevant to this: she claimed that, as adult readers, we cannot go
back to the time of fairy tales before Angela Carter got her hands on them, and undo all of the eroticism which now
appears so overt in the tales. Carter’s The Bloody Chamber was published the year I was born, and while I hardly grew
up on her skewed and sexual retellings, it’s true that I can’t unthink
what I have now read. The same is supposed to be true of Freud – it is impossible
for us to read many texts nowadays without at least being aware of potential
Freudian interpretations, and it channels us towards a certain take on the turns
of a story. I think Warner is right to see Carter as having done the same
again, forever changing how we can see the glint in the wolf’s eye.
As a writer dealing often with folk tale, these nuggets will
keep me chewing for some time. But I think fairy tales and fairy tale as a mode
are prevalent in all kinds of contemporary writing, from the political to the
commercial, and it is worth considering our odd attachment to them whatever we
are reading.
