What follows are a number of short pieces on various topics related to children's literature, literary theory, and related subjects.
The task I set myself tonight is to write about why I like fairy tales, especially those by the Brothers Grimm. My usual tack is to move into one or two stories and read them as if they were poems, but I want now to organize my thoughts on some tales I do not normally teach or write about. In fact, I shall turn my mind to two stories--"The Bremen Town Musicians" and "The Wind and the Sun"--which I clearly recall from my childhood. I grew up in a house with few books; I did not like to read and I read very little except comic books, but I know that when I was quite young my mother would read to my sister and myself from an old and battered volume of fairy tales. The two tales I mention are the two I remember most vividly. I cannot remember with any accuracy what I felt about the stories when I was young, but I know that I heard them, especially "The Wind and the Sun," repeatedly. And I know that these stories have stayed with me since then. Why?
First, I suspect that these two stories, like all the fairytales, speak with what I call a "common tongue." By this I mean that the tales are earthy and homespun, akin to extended jokes. One feature of folk narrative is this spareness and this unpretentious quality. The stories present a world in which animals and aspects of nature such as the sun and the moon speak and function as if they were human; this is not so much anthropomorphism as it is animism. In other words, the world of the tales is an innocent world which seems made for, rather than set against, human beings. Provided one is careful, prudent, kind to nature's creatures, or crafty and sharp-witted one will succeed in one's tasks or quests. And over and over in the tales, those who exhibit such prudence, kindness, and wit are the smallest ones or the lowliest ones: old soldiers, children, maids, third sons or daughters, tailors, decrepit animals, a miller's daughter. Often characters succeed despite foolish behaviour: e.g. Hans, the young prince in "The Golden Bird," Jack with his beans.
"Common" too is the thinly veiled aspiration of the peasant people, their desire for power, position, wealth. The tales seem to hold conflicting notions concerning upward mobility; some are optimistic and suggest the possibility of the common man or woman rising in the world (e.g. "The Gallant Tailor" and "Rumplestiltskin"), and some are satisfied with the way of things as they are (e.g. "Hans in Luck" and "The Fisherman and His Wife"). Whether the tales take the one stance or the other, they invariably take the world as they find it. And what they almost always find in the world is the inevitable fact of death.
If the tales are as concerned with common things as I think they are, then it should not surprise us that they are concerned with sex. Sex and death: these are the common themes of the fairy tales. The two are implicated in each other as a story such as the beautiful "The Almond Tree" makes clear. Human beings experience in their sexual experience a futile stay against death, and at the same time that sexual act is a death or at least a sign of impending death. The fairy tales are constantly reminding us that procreation involves its opposite: the beginning of life implies the end of another life. I think I react positively to this aspect of the tales, an aspect that sometimes irritates other readers of the tales, especially those readers who think the tales should be "free of the clash of sex" because small children either read them or have them read to them. For myself, the sexual aspect of the tales is part of the literary (as opposed to the psychological) aspect of the tales. In other words, the sexual themes have to do with familiar literary themes: power and its abuses, rites of passage, transgression and independence, generation and the cycles of nature, the quest for a renewed earth.
But I wander far from my two stories. Why did these two stories stay with me in ways that are deeper than the way some other stories have lingered in my mind? As I think about it now, I am comforted to suspect that even at a young age I was attracted to a story ("The Bremen Town Musicians") which is about the creation of a counter-culture group, in this case a group of aged and washed-up old animals no longer considered useful by their owners. Cast aside by the power brokers, these old guys form a community and oust a group of robbers from a very attractive home in the woods. Perhaps I should like this story even more now that I too am becoming one of the old guys, but the fact is I am less attracted to the idea of community now than I obviously was when I was younger. I suspect that living in a home which my father often compared to a motel was one reason why the community of animals attracted me. In any case, I tell a version of this story when I visit elementary grades (Division 1) and I note that children continue to appreciate it. Whatever the reason for this, I know that its creation (even through the telling) of a community is a strong part of its appeal.
The same cannot be said of the other story I remember with such clarity. In fact, I have not read or seen a copy of this story since I was a child. Yet the vision of the man blown about by the blustery and burly wind is still strong. You will recall that the story involves a competition between the sun and the wind to see which of them is the stronger. To test themselves, they decide to see which of them can make a lone traveller take off his cloak. The wind tries to blow the cloak away, but the man simply holds on with more and more firmness as the wind blusters about him. When the sun trains his hot beams on the man, the man soon removes his cloak. The sun wins. I realize the story is openly didactic: the warm sun bests the blustering and bellicose wind. Perhaps I was a sucker for a good lesson. But I suspect what spoke to me most forcefully from this story was its message of non-violence. To get what you want, you don't need to buffet and beat your object. A warm caress works wondrously well--and quickly. Certainly, I have grown into an adult who supports non-violence. Whether it was that my own childhood home was not without its violence or whether it was simply my own natural bent, this story filled a need.
And now I will close out this short paper on this idea of filling a need. To make my point, I must draw on a personal anecdote not from my childhood but from my recent past. A few years ago, I told stories one afternoon in an early childhood education classroom in a school located in a lower economic area of the city in which I live. The stories--mostly folk and fairy tales--which I told, contained lots of violence: shot and decapitated cats, drowned fish, headless men, young girls tossed in deep wells, and so on. Some days after my visit, I received a package from the school. In this I found pictures drawn by the children depicting the stories I had told. Also, the teacher had written the children's comments by their pictures. These comments indicated to me that my violent little stories had filled a need for these children. It was clear to me that the stories acted as something of a catharsis for children whose real lives experienced all too vividly and closely real violence. In these stories they had the opportunity of organizing and distancing the violence in their lives. I suspect some of this was also true for me when I was young. In any case, I find these stories compelling and powerful.
No comments:
Post a Comment