The Dragon Character: Totally Meta

Going through characters created by "G" authors reminded me of Gannett's My Father's Dragon. And that got me thinking of the character of the dragon. 

So here is a 2023 post, reposted.

* * * 

I mention in the previous fairy tale post that dragons are just awesome! 

That is, unlike other natural, supernatural, and fantastical creatures in the fantasy universe, they tend to stand alone. They are not necessarily villainous, even when destructive. They are too cool for that. They may be good. They may be bad. Whatever they are, they are above it all. 

Books containing dragons, consequently, also seem to occupy a category of their own. They tend more towards "meta" than just about any other group of fantasy books. 

Tanith Lee's The Dragon Hoard

The Dragon Hoard is a very funny book about a wry, level-headed prince, Prince Jasleth, who has no choice but to set out to find a treasure. He joins up with a group of princes headed on an adventure, namely to retrieve a hoard guarded by a dragon. The adventure is headed by Prince Fearless, whose father is utterly indifferent to the quest and considers it mostly a waste of time. 

Jasleth ends up doing much of the heavy lifting on the quest--in a wry, level-headed, occasionally exasperated way--yet he remains good friends with his companions. In the end, the hoard is obtained without anyone conquering the dragon, who went off to see the dentist about its "nine hundred and fifty-four teeth."

Patricia Wrede's Dealing with Dragons (and sequels)

In Dealing with Dragons, Princess Cimorene escapes her tedious life at court and goes to work for the King of the Dragons (who is female). She wants the job and gets extremely irritated with princes who show up to rescue her. "Go away!" 

In Wrede's universe, having a princess is considered something of a cache for a dragon but also something of a bother. Few of them are as helpful as Cimorene and many of them run away before being rescued since they get tired of the life. 

In any case, the dragons are mostly occupied with their internal affairs and don't care much one way or the other. Having a princess is like having a BMW: a nice perk but not entirely necessary. 

Oliver Selfridge's The Trouble with Dragons

Trouble with Dragons is one of those books I tracked down when I got older, I love it so much. 

The dragons in Selfridge's book are unapologetically destructive, though they go after princesses and princes (people in shiny outfits) more than ordinary folk. But they are like tsunamis and volcanoes, a force unto themselves. 

The true villain is the Prime Minister. Since dragons in his kingdom lay brilliant sapphire eggs after eating a princess--and the sapphire eggs make gorgeous and expensive sapphire goblets--and the prime minister is making a bundle off the goblet factory--he encourages the prince/king to keep sending princesses out to be slaughtered. And it's very sad but eh, what can one do?!

Until a clever, resourceful, and wise princess, Celia, comes along to change things. 

In the end, the dragons retreat to the stars. They aren't punished--but they do need to stop burning stuff down and eating up farmers' herds of cows. So  they become legends. 

Fairy Tales: Z is for Zingless or Why Not to Ignore the True Zaniness of Fairy Tales

Over the years, I have read numerous books about fairy tales, including Marina Warner's From the Beast to the Blonde and Diana Purkiss's At the Bottom of the Garden. 

I have mostly ignored Jack Zipes, even though Zipes is a prolific writer and often quoted by others. 

I ignore Zipes because of passages like the following:

Thus [the Little Mermaid] must somehow justify her existence to herself through abstinence and self-abnegation--values preached by the bourgeoisie and certainly not practiced by the nobility and upper classes. Paradoxically, Andersen seems to be preaching that true virtue and self-realization can be obtained through self-denial. This message, however, is not so paradoxical since it comes from the voice of the dominated...Andersen never tired of preaching self-abandonment and self-deprivation in the name of bourgeois laws. The reward was never power over one's life but security in adherence to power.

Now, granted, the Little Mermaid is kind of a dumb story, and many of Andersen's tales--as mentioned at the beginning of this list--don't attract me. And granted, too, Andersen was a self-denying, angsty kind of guy. 

But even I, who mostly avoid Andersen, think that he was writing for the sake of story rather than for the sake of some imposed theory about power imbalances--and that the tales have way more going for them than a reductionist theory about those power imbalances. I also consider it particularly gormless for an analyst not to figure out that a tale involves self-denial from the get-go, especially since the Little Mermaid feels the equivalent of knife slices whenever she walks. Uh, you were surprised by the ending? It's like reading a story about disguises, then being surprised at the end when the disguises are uncovered, and then having to point out WHAT IT MEANS to everyone else.  

This type of analysis ends up being like AI writing:

So Andersen wrote self-denying things because he was middleclass and because he was middleclass, he wrote self-denying things, and he really loved self-denial because he  came from that class, and self-denial was something that comes up a lot in his writing.

So? 

I'm more interested in what he did with that self-denial.

In sum, I hate the imposition of theory on art and history. It becomes an excuse to stare at the naval of the analyst rather than at the writer or creation or event itself. It slathers itself across the frozen past without regard to individuality or more complex context. And it places MEANING above creativity.

Zipes writes from a historical point of view. I still dislike his work. 

The application of MEANING without any context merely bores me. I tried Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment and got tired of it within a few chapters. I lasted longer with The Witch Must Die by Sheldon Cashdan (and do recommend the latter). But not much longer.

Generally speaking, when MEANING rather than art--and context or background--becomes the object, the tales begin to suffer. It's a problem that I attempted to tackle in my thesis: how does one examine something without destroying it? How does one learn more about context without the tale losing its magic?

My overall argument is that for the examination to work, the analyst should look at events and works in terms of their individuality. That is, analysts should first behave like readers, to do as C.S. Lewis recommended and let the work sweep them away. Buy into it. Be overwhelmed by it. Stop being worried about being "taken in" by it.

I ultimately argue that readers need to believe that creativity--the desire to make something using characters and dialog--was the writer's overriding impulse. Sure, locations and mindsets and other author's influences creep into a tale since a writer/collector is the product of a time period and place. But the creative impulse takes precedence. 

Archaeology increasingly promotes the possibility that all the sophisticated theories in the world came after people were simply surviving and having fun. If a book about fairy tales doesn't start from the "surviving and having fun" perspective, it cannot do the tales justice or even the history surrounding those tales.

Consequently, I end this list not with a book ABOUT fairy tales but a fairy tale book: Rapunzel retold and illustrated by Paul Zelinsky. The illustrations use Renaissance art and settings for their inspiration. Consequently, the book is visually captivating. 

The text is one of the more classic versions, slightly less "ribald" (to borrow Zelinsky's own words in his closing note). Zelinsky points out that the tale was originally literary but became popular enough to be rewritten and retold before the Grimm Brothers got hold of it: "In recent years, scholars of folklore have traced the confluence of oral traditions and literary invention; indeed, 'Rapunzel' is a prime example of this intermingling." 

Zelinsky goes on to characterize himself as an "interloper" on the Italian Renaissance tradition, which makes the picture book an excellent place to end this list.

Fairy tales are not mere springboards to socio-political-economic-psychological meanings. They are horror and true love and humor and splatterfests and irony and literary challenges and satire and fun. They change hands. They change interpretation. They change presentation. They become what writers and readers wish. 

They are that flexible. They are that magnificent.

Fairy Tales: Youthful Yarns by Yolen and Yep

The fairy tale section at Portland Public Library provides both Yolen and Yep.

 

Both authors produced works in multiple genres, from adventure to contemporary to historical to fairy tales. Both authors produced works with a thankful lack of apology. I've mentioned elsewhere that I now avoid any books for which the primary selling point is NOT story but rather the message or  audience: "This wondrous tome which explores [jargon, indicating contemporary righteousness] aimed at this particular group of well-deserving people" signals fiction that is as yearningly preachy as any piece of Victorian literature. 

 

The extraordinary point with Yep and Yolen is that when they produced such a variety of work, they acted on an ideal rather than pronouncing it. They were diverse without constantly calling attention to the fact. Yolen produced YA and children's novels as well as non-fiction, including a picture book about the mystery of the Mary Celeste. She also retold myths and fairy tales, including "Burd Jane" or Tam Lin.

 

Unfortunately, the open letters to Yolen's two collections--Not One Damsel in Distress and Mightier Than the Sword--partly undo Yolen's good work (so skip the letters). They imply that women cannot relate to brawny heroes and that boys prefer tales that don't end "like so many Star Trek episodes--with a battle or a brawl," which is such a patently unbelievable statement, one wonders who actually reads the anthology. But I blame the publishers, not Yolen.

 

One of the positives about many of Yolen's works is that like Alvin Schwartz of Scary Stories, she adds notes about the folktales' origins. I love these additional notes! From Yolen, I learned, for instance, that Ash Lad is a Norweigian Jack. And Yolen knows her culture, so in her notes on "Burd Jane," she references her own retelling (Tam Lin), Robin McKinley's short story, and The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope.

 

For Yep, I read Dragon of the Lost Sea, which finds its roots in Chinese folktales. I was engaged by the central relationship between Shimmer, the dragon with attitude, and Thorn, the human boy with attitude. I immediately put the next book in the series on hold.

 

I also read two of Yep's picture books from the fairy tales section, The Boy Who Swallowed Snakes and The Khan's Daughter. The most telling characteristic of both books is how funny they are. Little Chou, the boy who swallows snakes, has to eat them to prevent their evil from spreading He is told, after he eats the first one, that he will die. 

"How much longer do I have to wait?" he complains. 

His mother later scolds him:
 

"Evil or not you might as well eat [the snakes] like a civilized person." 

 

In the second book, the Khan's daughter decides that she rather likes the commoner who cheerfully takes on the tests set up by her mother. She gives him the final challenge. When he concedes to her, she just as cheerfully accepts him, but they won't tell anyone exactly what happened.

 

"Not even your mother?" Mongke asked.

 

"Especially my mother," Borte said.

Fairy Tales: X is for X-Rated

Originally, fairy tales were far more like manga and anime than even Western fairy tale analysts want to admit. That is, they were not inherently MEANINGFUL--at least, not all the time. They were whatever people wanted them to be--horror, romance, sermons, adventure stories...

And porn, dirty jokes, and raunchiness.

 

The original "Little Red Riding Hood" involved an older Red Riding Hood, a blatantly seductive wolf (see Sondheim), and cannibalism (of the older woman by the younger). In the original "Sleeping Beauty," the prince fathers children on Sleeping Beauty while she is still sleeping. In Basile's version, the reader is then given a strip-tease followed by an execution followed by a reunion.

 

Basile's Rapunzel, Petrosinella,

gets pregnant. She is also

far more proactive.

And then there's Donkeyskin and the whole incest motif!

 

When the Grimms became aware that children were reading their tales, they steadily, over several editions, removed the "bad" bits. In that time period, the "bad" bits were mostly associated with sex. As the Victorian Era neared, scatological humor was also pushed off the table (ah, poor 10-year-olds and their poop jokes!). Now-a-days, people get upset by the violence.

 

Eventually, I suppose Little Red Riding Hood will never leave home or encounter anything more frightening than a puppy.

 

Actually, no, the inherent flexibility of fairy tales--like anime and manga--means they will keep changing and adapting. Bowdlerize them by all means! Another version will come along, darker or lighter or stranger or...

 

...just something else.

 

Robin McKinley tackles incest and abuse directly in Deerskin. Tanith Lee unapologetically presents fairy tales as adult--not children's--fiction. And hundreds of romance writers and, for that matter, mangaka, have thrown sex back into Cinderella and Beauty & the Beast.  

In Prince Caspian, C.S. Lewis gives his characters notable insight regarding ancient tales. During the romp, in which Aslan frees all the kids locked up in boring classrooms, the possession is joined by Baachus and other pagan gods and creatures. Lucy or Susan mentions that they wouldn't feel entirely "safe" if Aslan wasn't there. I like this reminder--which sometimes contemporary pagans miss--that real myths were more dangerous and often cruel than cute. 

 

I'm not going to read Grimm before I go to bed, but I'm not going to chuck Grimm--and everything the Grimm fairy tales involve--out the window either.

Fairy Tales: W is for Woodbury, Kate

My first experiments with storytelling were playing around with fairy tales when I was a kid. My favorite fairy tale as a child was Andersen's "The Wild Swans," in which a young girl saves her 11 enchanted brothers by sewing them jackets made from thorns. 

I likely thought I had 11 brothers (I have 4); I did spend most of my youth around them. But in truth, I was attracted to the tale because the princess lives in a tree. About the same time, my mother read me My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, plus our family visited the Redwood National Park on one of our cross-country trips. I was enthralled by the idea of living in a tree!

I went beyond the Wild Swans, of course. I not only retold and acted out fairy tales, I would change the characters: all the male characters to female; all the female characters to male; all the wicked characters as good...and so on. 

For a long time, I contemplated going into the theater since those one-woman "plays" that I enacted while wandering around the house were all about action and dialog. I took playwriting courses in high school and college--and participated in drama clubs in both places. 

But I didn't have the drive or the willing vulnerability. Just about everyone I knew in those courses and clubs who did want to go on to the big-time (and some did), were both incredibly fragile and incredibly competitive, which isn't the best combination for a happy life. 

So I went the English major route instead, which turned out to be the best choice for me.  

And I went the writing-stuff-down route, which was also a good choice. 

Many of my first short stories were deliberate retellings or, rather, deliberate "what ifs." My first published story, "The Birthright" is based on the old story of a mermaid who extracts a promise from a fisherman and then curses his descendants: a son will be taken in each generation by a mermaid. My "what if?" was "what if one of those descendants actually wanted to go?" I still remember planning the story in a room in my grandmother's house in Pasadena over Thanksgiving while I was in college.

The next published story was a take-off on Rumpelstiltskin. It annoyed me how many renderings of the tale painted the money-hungry king as purely greedy. What if he needed the money? What if his troops didn't have shoes? Or his peasants didn't have horses and plows or, for that matter, seeds? What if his tradesmen couldn't afford materials to make stuff? So I wrote a story where the king wants money and has to make an ethical choice in a situation where there are absolutely no winners. It's a horror story, which I always swore I wouldn't write, but eh--the "what if" led to a natural conclusion.

That tale shows up alongside a few others in Tales of the Quest, published through Peaks Island Press.

The third published story was a contemporary tale in which fairy tale characters roam a college. I was working at the Maine School of Law as a secretary by then, and the setting is where the school of law used to be but is no longer, one of those 1970s freaky buildings with bad heating and cooling.

I later published a story based on the Trojan War, which background I recently used for my retelling of Herland. I then turned to the Old Testament for a story about the fall of Jericho followed by a story about Ezekiel and Jezebel in modern Portland and a sci-fi story using Ruth. (One of the first "plays" I acted out AND wrote down was based on Joseph of Egypt; I then encountered Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann and decided I was in over my head--but hey, for years, I could recite all of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat's lyrics.)

I haven't quite reached the point where, like C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, I am so-steeped in folklore, Bible stories, and mythology that I draw on the tropes and images unconsciously--or maybe I am to a degree and don't realize it! The inspiration of lore has become in some ways both more deliberate and more off-the-cuff. I mostly write novellas these days in two series. The Myths Endure in Maine series is far more upfront and deliberately satiric. My skateboard god of love, for instance, makes references to "the problem of Pygmalion, who decided to mourn his latest breakup by setting up statues of his girlfriend all over the city."

The Myths Endure on Mars series is usually more indirect but my upcoming book, The Serpentine History of the Saint, involved research into tales associated with various parts of the British Isles, including the home of my ancestors: the Isle of Man. 

I have written more about that extremely enjoyable research here:

• Laidly Wyrm and King Arthur
• Kopakonan and Other Mermaids
• Isle of Man Folklore 
• Urban Legends

Fairy Tales: W is for Wonderful and What is Folklore?

 A few of my favorite fairy tales come in the Ws:

 I am particularly fond of the works of Aubrey and Don Woods who wrote and illustrated Heckedy Peg, a creepy yet delightful story about a tough mom who has to outwit a witch, who turned her kids into food. 

The images are stunning, absolutely gorgeous. The text flows effortlessly. 

Aubrey Woods also wrote the delightful The Bunyans filled with humorous and memorable illustrations by David Shannon. 

Both books raise points about folklore.  

Heckedy Peg, claims the dust jacket, is "[i]nspired by a sixteenth-century game still played by children today." 

I couldn't, at first, find any online mention of a "sixteenth-century game" involving food and riddles. I began to ponder if the Woods, tongue in cheek, had made up the "history." 

But then I came across an older online forum that confirmed that yes, at least in Michigan in the 1930s, children were playing a game in which every participating child took the part of the Witch, the Mother, and the Child. Part of the game was to pair things, such as "bread" to "butter." A participant on the forum mentioned that the game was also played in Canada. 

Ultimately, I found a review of the Woods' picture book with a link to an article about the original game: The Game of the Child-Stealing Witch.

What interested me, though, was how many reviews, including a review in The New York Times, simply took the jacket blurb at face value: the Woods could have gotten away with simply declaring that the book was based on an old game, and they would have been mostly believed (except for all us folklore fetishists who went looking.)

The Bunyans raise a similar point about folklore. When I took a folklore course for my master's program, the professor made the point that folklore is not noble peasants "authentically" strumming guitars in a shack. As notable folklorists such as Brunvand have demonstrated, the urban legend is as much folklore as anything that happens in the countryside. 

The professor then completely contradicted himself by pouring scorn on the Bunyan stories. They were started as part of an advertising campaign and therefore, weren't "real" folklore.

"But," I objected, "if I didn't know that--if the stories entered the popular discourse and got detached from their commercial origins, then wouldn't they constitute folklore?"

I got a chiding, superior smile and tut-tut scold, which type of response I found (and find) irritating and rather a waste of my time. I pointed out that if we decided to determine folklore by its type of origins, we were right back where we started. A number of students supported me, and the professor turned back into a friendly, thoughtful guy.

Granted, it is a difficult call in some cases. Hollywood announcing that it has produced a "cultural phenomenon" doesn't make that declaration a reality. On the other hand, an actual cultural phenomenon--where a saying or trope or image enters everyday discourse without anyone knowing or caring where it came from--that does occur, and the origins might be as varied as a movie, commercial, campaign, script dialog, or review.  

As numerous writers, such as Marina Warner, have pointed out, the line between spoken and literary fairy tales can sometimes be immensely slight, so "translators" of The Arabian Nights get accused of falsification until it turns out that they were relying on word-of-mouth and then it turns out that they were also relying on text and then it turns out that they added in their own bits. 

I've said it before--I'll say it again: Nothing is pure, and the hunt for purity, especially with folklore, will not only disappoint but nearly always end in carping disillusionment rather than in wonder.

Fairy Tales: W is for Winsome Wilde

Oscar Wilde is like the off-the-cuff version of Hans Christian Andersen.

 

He produced new fairy tales that have as many sad endings as Andersen's tales: the Nightingale sacrifices herself to produce a red rose for the indifferent Student; the Happy Prince gives up all parts of himself; and in a rather nasty little story about "little Hans," the Miller manipulates Hans out of so-called friendship...until little Hans drowns.

Unlike Andersen, however, the tales lack the dark pathos that make Andersen's tales truly memorable. Nothing in Wilde seems entire serious and several of the tales contain quite deliberately sardonic moments, such as when the King raises the Page's salary but "as he receive no salary at all, this was not of much use to him." Also, the King plays the flute very badly but everyone praises him anyway. (Hints of Emperor Nero.) 

 

The stories are not entirely comfortable, the mocking tone is so strong. In some tales, Wilde seems to be experimenting with early child horror, the type of tongue-in-cheek writing Joan Aiken and Lemony Snicket did so well. But they wrote entirely from within the story. Wilde seems to be deploying language to keep himself at a remove: See how clever I am. That he would do this even with children seems inexpressibly sad.

 

"The Selfish Giant" comes closest to producing a gentle ending with no self-mockery--though perhaps some self-identification.

 

Fairy Tales: V is for Villains

Fairy tales are not fairy tales without villains!

Fairy tales do not require complex villains but often, they get them. The stepmother's villainy in Cinderella, as acted by Cate Blanchett in Branagh's version, is rooted in historical reality. In a world of scarce resources (or even perceived scarce resources), the second family's needs will take priority.

 

Such villainy also lends itself to complexity--as in Angelina Jolie's version of Sleeping Beauty's witch. Granted, she comes across as every "woman scorned" hoping to get even, but her motivations are also grounded and plausible for the context. The king's guilt is additionally well-coneyed.

 

The father in this tale is evil.

Both are interesting variations on the evil stepmother and witch who populate fairy tales.

 

Evil fathers do make an appearance, from incestuous to manipulative and politically stupid. Historically speaking, medieval kings shared a terrible penchant with ancient Roman emperors: a tendency to favor crazy sons when designating heirs.

 

It may seem, however, that women are villains more than men, and some analysts will argue that female villains are the result of misogynism. The problem with that argument is that such tales also tend to favor female heroines. Across the board, female heroines are the ones that set off on quests and rescue people. Granted, young sons sometimes join the party, but the young sons are often helped by animals, princesses, and female fairies. Puss in Boots' peasant-to-prince is amazingly helpless, embracing a kind of passive "I can't resist or stop or plan or be responsible for whatever happens next" attitude.

 

The emphasis on female heroines and helpers supports the idea that mostly women told the tales--to each other and to children and to family members. And analysts can't claim both: the tales were told by women in support of women; the tales are misogynistic. (Actually, one can claim both--many tough women from the 1950s could exhibit great independence alongside odd, cloying deference to men--but with fairy tales, such claims descend into a not-always convincing game of parsing exactly which parts are supportive and which parts are non-supportive rather than looking at narratives in their entirety.) 

 

I always considered that the plethora of female villains was precisely because women were telling the tales, and domestic tales are going to involve domestic villains.

 

If one wanted to get Freudian, one would also point out that the female villains exercise an impressive degree of autonomy. From a purely narrative point of view, is a victim of social injustice really somebody that listeners want to relate to? I can see female readers debating the merits of Lucy versus the White Witch--I can't imagine any fantasy reader wanting to emulate Updike's Gertrude.

Fairy Tales: U is for Unique Uchida

For "U" I read four books by Yoshiko Uchida, a Japanese-American writer who created picture books of retold Japanese folktales as well as tales for Japanese-American children about seminal American events, from World War I to the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.

I enjoyed the first three books I picked out--The Wise Old Woman, The Magic Purse, and The Two Foolish Cats--and later picked up another--Rokubei and the Thousand Rice Bowls--though none of them struck me as books I would collect for continual readings. As in manga and with illustrators like Trina Schart Hyman, the images match the text; they simply aren't my preferred type of illustration, being somewhat muted. The choice could have been deliberate--a desire to provide a wood-cut feel to match the settings and characters.

Of the four books, I found The Magic Purse the most captivating. The softer feel felt appropriate to the tale.

 

What impressed me most, however, was the text. Years ago, I examined written folktales for an English class. I concluded that the texts avoided lots of transitions and relied on FANBOYS (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so) for conjunctions, primarily "but" and "and." In other words, the written fairy tales sounded like the spoken word. 

 

Uchida accomplishes such crisp and neat tellings and with relatively complex tales where characters go through multiple events. The writing relates and resolves conflicts with easy symmetry. 

 

An impressive storyteller!

Fairy Tales: T is for Tolstoy and Tendentious

In "T," I came across a collection of tales by Travers and a collection of created stories and fables by Leo Tolstoy. 

I didn't enjoy Tolstoy's works. 

Fairy tales have always been used--from Aesop to the French philosophers of the seventeenth century--as vehicles for lessons and morals. Even Disney--sometimes tendentiously, sometimes not--tends to attach life lessons to its movies. Consequently, the belief that fairy tales are primarily meant to improve people's lives is a common misconception.

Hopefully, this list has shown that fairy tales have been used for as many different reasons as any other creative production: to entertain, to distill social conditions, to preach lessons, to inflict horror, to work out flights of fancy, to create another world, to explore the "other," to question, to ponder, to experiment...

A tale with a lesson is definitely one possibility, and I don't automatically dislike it. After all, I adore C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald, and I don't particularly mind mice or other characters singing out their life lessons. In a sense, Into the Woods is an exploration of morals and meaning. 

So why does Leo Tolstoy bother me so much?

To start, I should stress that Twenty-Two Russian Tales for Young Children By Leo Tolstoy is an interesting compilation. Some of the tales have morals. Others are more "slice of life" and still others appear to be reminiscences from childhood. 

But the moral tales aren't simply tales with morals. They are moralistic. 

Like C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald, Tolstoy has a gift for detail. The people and animals belong to specific times and places. 

Unlike C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald, the tales seem devoid of complication. They belong to what I occasionally refer to as "Box A or Box B" religious thought. Instead of people making the best decisions they can while faced with conflicting moral goods, random outcomes, and occasional non-answers (take a path--see what happens), all life's choices are distilled into GOOD PEOPLE/CHOICE BOX A and BAD PEOPLE/CHOICE BOX B. The result is not a sense of people trying to do the best they can at any given moment but, rather, people being applauded for BEING GOOD TODAY! 

"And Sergei never again wanted to trap birds." 

"[F]rom that day, they again let the old man eat with them at the table and took better care of him." 

With C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald, I always feel (and felt as a child) that their characters are real people saying, "Right now, I'm going to take this risk, make this choice, and hope it is for the best. Later, I could change my mind. No matter what, I will keep on being the same person. I will live with the consequences of my actions. Nobody will shower me with adoration for my supposed goodness." 

Edmund, for instance, makes a series of poor choices whose consequences don't suddenly get washed away when he is rescued. He changes and begins to return to his true self. And he goes on making choices, many of which aren't clearly BOX A or BOX B. Edmund has to use experience, his wits, and his best guesses to navigate. 

Moreover, his personality doesn't radically alter. Throughout the series, he remains somewhat wry and diffident about his past. It gives him wisdom and good judgment. It doesn't alter his innate ability to observe. Nor does it excise his responsibilities: to exercise wisdom, he has to call on his past--not simply "be" that guy now. 

As for George MacDonald, his characters seem, like the characters from Babette's Feast, to be overwhelmed by grace. They are ordinary, flawed, odd people (like everyone!) who come in contact with the sublime. Grace doesn't lead them to the perfect choice. Grace enables them to make choices over and over again. And to not be ashamed of their human need to make choices over and over again.

In comparison, Tolstoy's characters--at least his characters for children--get applauded for behaving in seriously restrictive yet approved ways. 

One can understand why children's literature in the mid-twentieth century suddenly began to swerve into Lemony Snicket-type territory: children got tired of being squeezed into proper "here's how the good people act" and "here's what the good people say" roles. 

Kids know: Life is more complicated than that. 

Fairy Tales: T is for Thoughtful Transformations

For T, I read About the Sleeping Beauty by P.L. Travers and a collection of Russian tales by Tolstoy.

Despite the urban fantasies of P.L. Travers and the occasional fantastical motifs within Tolstoy, neither are writers that I associate with folklore.

 

P.L. Travers' book interested me because it reminded me of Vivian Vande Velde's collection of fantasy short stories surrounding The Rumplestiltskin Problem.  

 

Like Vande Velde's collection, P.L. Travers' collection presents a discourse on the tale though Travers' discourse comes after her retelling and before the various versions she has collected, from Grimm, Perrault and others.

 

Vande Velde focuses on the inherent inconsistencies of the original tale and Travers does the same in passing (Why not invite the thirteenth fairy?!). However, while commenting on Sleeping Beauty, she comments on fairy tales in general. The quotes are worth presenting in full:

 

"Is it not true that the fairy tale has always been in a continuous process of transformation? One cannot say of any of the Sleeping Beauties in this book that here is the sole and absolute source, if, indeed such a thing exists." 

 

The best-known version "is as though the tale itself, through its own energy and need, had winnowed away everything but the true whole grain." 

 

"[My version] was written not at all to improve the story...but to ventilate my own thoughts about it." 

 

"[W]e must not forget that there has to be a story...and once we have accepted the story, we cannot escape the story's fate." 

 

"The Thirteenth Wise Woman stands a guardian of the threshold, the paradoxical adversary without whose presence no threshold may be passed...she, not the heroine, is the goddess in the machine" [I love this line: the goddess in the machine]. 

 

"No amount of rationalising will bring us to the heart of the fairy tale." 

 

Like Vande Velde, Travers does attempt to explain some loose ends, such as the king (or sultan, in Travers' version) wiping out a cottage industry in order to protect his daughter. Travers has the spinners turn to other occupations and the merchants make a bundle importing fabrics from other kingdoms!

 

While I'm not generally a fan of the Mary Poppins' books, I admire their intense fantastical reality. Though I didn't find Travers' version of Sleeping Beauty all that unique, I did find it engaging. Travers knows how to write!  

A look at Tolstoy's fairy tales will follow next week.

Fairy Tales: S is for Scieszka and Smith, When Fairy Tales Get Too Meta

Jon Scieszka & Lane Smith produced The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales plus Squids will be Squids. These are parody-break the fourth wall-fractured fairy tales. 

The first, for instance, tells the story of "The Really Ugly Duckling" who grew up to be "a really ugly duck." Squids will be Squids parodies Aesop, pointing out that it is possible to make fun of people by pretending they are animals (as opposed to instructing humans by pretending animals are like them). My favorite morals from Squids will be Squids are "Everyone knows frogs can't skateboard, but it's kind of sad that they believe everything they see on TV" and "Whatever looks like a pigeon and acts like a pigeon usually makes good pigeon pie" as well as, for the tale about Straw and Matches: "Don't play with matches."

I laughed like crazy through both books.

 

Except--here's the thing--I don't have much desire to read them again or read more books by the pair.

 

Fractured fairy tales--as opposed to retold fairy tales--are like Robin Williams' genie in the first Aladdin.

 

Absolutely hilarious. A total hit. So funny, Disney just let Williams do his thing and then designed the genie around him. A legitimately top of line comedic production!

 

But--then everybody started to do it in Hollywood, and people lost interest.

 

The truth is, when it comes to storytelling, people want to be caught up in the moment; they want to engage with a story that takes them from Point A to Point C or D or Z. Constantly being reminded, "This is a story. The narrator is now addressing you" is momentarily hilarious and can be well-constructed. 

 

But it pales over time. Even Monty-Python's extremely funny skits lose their appeal (and it is likely not a mistake that the Holy Grail, which has an intelligible arc or journey, is one of the most popular). It's rather like having a very rich and sticky dessert and then wanting to go back to solid apple pie.

 

I recently watched an Asian drama series in which Season 2 started two of the characters' stories over. Such an approach is not unusual. But I was out of proportion angry until I watched the entire Season 2 and decided that the writers did a better job with the characters' stories the second time around. I was angry, however, because my engagement (I care about these characters--where do they go next?) was almost ruthlessly broken. I didn't get to follow the characters into the next season. I had to re-engage with them, which I did.

 

Readers and viewers know the difference between fantasy and reality. That doesn't mean they want constant interruptions, a kind of "Do you get it now?" query from the sidelines.

 

Let us enjoy the story for its own sake first.

Fairy Tales: R is for Romance (The Old-Fashioned Version)

Romance originally did not refer, necessarily, to love matches. It often included love matches, though not always positive ones. "Romance" in the medieval era referred to prose with heroic deeds. The term was often used  to categorize what moderns might call "action novels," though these would be action novels with great deeds and dealings that revolve around honor and dishonor. 

At the beginning of the Modern Era, the Romantic movement included authors such as the Brontes (not Austen who is grounded in the Classical movement), the Romantic poets, and the Gothic subgenre. Altogether, the movement emphasized feelings and the fantastical. It bridged several movements, so Frankenstein, for instance, pulls directly from the Romantic movement yet also anchors itself in Realism. Now, it is often also associated with science-fiction.

"Fantasy" eventually got drawn into the term. Mysteries also often fall under the general romance standard: Conan Doyle's original Sherlock masterpieces are far more suffused with ambiance and the "lone hero" (with sidekick) exploring the dark and unknown and odd than those short stories are often credited.

The Pre-Raphaelite steampunk-like combination of history, futuristic speculations, and personal emotional observation entails that the genres connected to Romance rely, to a degree, on allusion, the ability of the authors to deploy tropes and archetypes with ease. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien come to mind, of course. They so thoroughly understood Northern Mythology, they created unself-conscious works full of allusions that they utilized without pause.

The cowboy is, of course, a romantic

archetype, in the older sense.

Likewise, many Golden Age mystery writers were well-versed in the tropes and archetypes of their field--and not ashamed of them. The mystery show Psych somewhat self-consciously employed multiple allusions every episode to outside works and authors and, in the better episodes, a casual and intelligent use of tropes. 

Highbrow writers do the same, of course, but they are far more fastidious. (These are writers who insist on calling fantasy, "magical realism.") The deployment of allusions is often more about the writers than the characters or plot. They are calling attention to the archetypes rather than using them. (Psych, unfortunately, did the same in its later seasons.)

When fairy tale/mythological archetypes and tropes are used--and used for the love of those archetypes and tropes--the result can be entrancing. 

"R" contains a number of bona fide romantic authors/editors: Rusch, Rowling, Roddenberry (Original Trek is awash with tropes and archetypes drawn from classic tales), Riordan, Raskin (it is hard to characterize Raskin but the works are definitely fantastical, however grounded in realism). 

There's more. For this post, I decided to showcase Emily Rodda of the Rowan series. 

I was immediately impressed in Book One with how easily Rodda presents the protagonist, the village, and the problem. 

I was further impressed by the honesty of the narration. Rowan is a shy, easily frightened youngster who, readers quickly realize, is capable of clearly and objectively assessing a situation. He does not recognize he has this strength, and he has no plans on joining the expedition to the top of the Mountain. 

Once he joins, he keeps going. Near the end of the novel, when the group is reduced from seven to four, Rowan realizes that not only he but at least one of his other companions is more relaxed now that the group is smaller. The other characters weren't evil or even bad--in fact, the author treats them with great compassion. But they weren't compatible with the group that remains.

And, of course, I could appreciate the use of tropes and archetypes, such as the puzzles or tasks. Rodda doesn't simply throw them into the story--ah, here's another one. Although Rowan is an archetypal undeclared hero who undergoes a hero's journey, including an exciting return home, he is part of a group of quite distinct companions. And though he solves the quest alone, he is not alone at the end. 

I highly recommend the series.