The innocence of fairytales

When did we decide that children were too innocent for fairytales as they have been told for generations? Instead of the little mermaid sacrificing herself and becoming foam on the green green waves, the wolf dying of a belly-full of rocks, the evil stepmother dancing to death in a pair of heated iron shoes... we have - well, you know how it goes. When did we decide that children needed to be lied to?

As a child, my favourite fairytale was of the selkie wife: a seal who could change into human shape. A fisherman stumbles upon a group of selkie women dancing. He steals one of the seals' coats and holds it hostage, forcing one of the beautiful woman to marry him. He locks her coat in a chest, so she is indentured to him for years, even having having children with him, while her selkie husband and children wait for her. One day, the man forgets the key to the chest at home and she frees herself, escaping back to her family. So what does her second husband do? Of course he kills her selkie family, and in return she vows to kill every man in the village.

Every fairytale is a moral tale, whether you can verbalise this moral or not. That's what I love about the original tales: the rich symbolism, which as a child I would puzzle over - I could feel the meaning (almost literally taste, smell, touch, those underappreciated faculties) but still not explain or even construct a thought about that feeling. The anxiety, the suspense, the unforeseen and foreseen twists and turns, the bad choices, the beautiful tragedy - and of course the illicit pleasure in the sense of fear that is the heart of any fairytale.

The best equivalent I can think of is Hamlet - most will have read Shakespeare and some will have enjoyed the plays. In the end, our hero is the cause of his own destruction, as are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and Othello. The initial event just sets them rolling down that slope. Macabrely we wonder: Would Hamlet have destroyed himself anyway? Could he have dug his heels in and stopped mid-roll? What is it that makes this type of hero curl into a ball before their enemies have even aimed a kick? Most importantly for this post: Why do we enjoy watching them roll downhill? What are our minds distilling behind the scenes? The answer rolls like a sweet in our mouths.

Fairytales make our conscious mind shudder and our unconscious mind shiver. They warn that nothing is what it seems - that the unwary will suffer - that we must mete out punishment ourselves, because there is no one to appeal to - that bad people do good things and they do bad things and so on and so on. They warn that life is not fair, but sometimes you get lucky, and another but: you have to work for what you want and stay away from anything that so much as touches trouble. Do you think these stories are primeval? No they are not! They attribute happenings to people. They recognise that some events have no rhyme nor reason. They warn us about wolves and evil stepmothers and vicious men, but they also hand us a set of tools with which we can understand the less obvious menaces of nature and human nature, even if only on an unconscious level.

They prepare us for life.

What sparked this meander? The movie Red Riding Hood, which is really just a mishmash of Grimms' and Perrault's and Angela Carter's versions, with some movie studio rep's meddling. Even a sanitised version - imagine: the wolf is re-released into the wild (because international law forbids wild animals being housed in zoos), and the 'girl' and the woodcutter live (here it is, folks!) happily ever after - would have been less offensive. Actors with more than one facial expression would be preferable but perhaps that's taking the hand when you're offered the finger.

Illustration in Old-time stories (1921) New York: Dodd, Mead. Perrault, Charles, 1628-1703; Johnson, A. E. (Alfred Edwin), b. 1879; Robinson, W. Heath (William Heath), 1872-1944, ill

For anyone who would argue differently (and if so, I'm offended that you're reading this blog) consider these conventions of romantic cinema: the love triangle wherein Bella - I mean Valerie - has to choose between the good boy and the bad boy, the unveiling of a family secret, another unveiling: of the bad boy as a good boy (unlocked by love's virtue) and the good boy as a good loser, finally, the resolution of the lovers' trial - and, again... The conventions of the plot masked by a red cape set in relief by black and/or white. (By the by, we've been through the bad-boy-needing-to-control-his-dark-side in Buffy, Mrs Meyer, with not a whiff of abuse in seven seasons.)

What do our sanitised fairytales teach children? That life is fair, that there is a clear line between good and bad, that bad is just bad, that these people will be punished by their own plots turning back on them, that the reward for good behaviour is a picket fence (or moat), that the happiness (or sadness) of a moment will define your life, and that wealth is woven in there somewhere. Is life just less harsh nowadays that we don't need more severe warnings? Are these the things we should strive for - do they have a moral value I have overlooked? I still prefer the original tales. I like to think they taught me a few things. When I stumble, I don't fall on my ass and ask 'Why?' I regain my balance. Because I know there are far worse things to watch out for than skinned palms.

As She Climbed Across the Table

Bear with me, folks. I have two very unlikely books to compare, and I'm sitting in the sun on an autumn Sunday mor- - midday, and if I stand the cat will claim my cushion and I won't have the heart to move him. Keep me company, because days spent contemplating in the sun are best shared, in silence.

Speaking of silence... That Tome of Silence, Agaat (it's there, to your left, under 'today's read') where the diacritics are plentiful and so are the pages (metaphorically speaking, since I'm reading on Kindle), but the plot is not. This is not a spoiler, but a warning. At least one of the characters has the symptoms of clinical depression and no personality left to anchor herself. By turns, the farm that is the setting (Groetmoedersdrift - Google translate that one out) is a metaphor for the protagonist's... reality... and for relationships on the farm and perhaps in general.

And herein lies my real gripe with South African literature. It takes itself too seriously. 'Serious' being the operative root word here. As if it is intent on revealing the truth about humanity, in a world in which truth is undecipherable.

Deja vu.

That's the cue. As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem. I picked it up to ward off the spreading depression in the soil of the Western Cape that is 'Greet Mother's Drift'. And finished it in a few hours. I may have mentioned that I dislike the tongue-in-cheek playground of contemporary literary fiction that attempts to disguise the cynical seriousness with which it is written - a protective critique before the critics spot it. But some authors have a style that forgives this.

Perhaps its forced metaphors are tolerable because it is short. The metaphors? Can you guess? The principles of physics and quantum physics, forced into the shape of people and relationships and even settings. Ugh, how the physicists must hate us writers. (They must hate Ian McEwan the most, for his empathetic critique of their critique of our critiques in Solar. It's the lowest hand in any argument: empathising with the other person, so they aren't sure whether it's genuine or not, which the first person knows, because they're being empathetic.)

But Lethem's novel fits more comfortably than van Niekerk's does. There is a scene at the end of Possession by AS Byatt in which she observes, basically and probably badly paraphrased, that post-modernists (meaning me and every other BA student) crave to simply cease to be, to dissipate, to go gently into that good night. Right there is the sum of my desperate scrabbling, which made me stop for a second to nod.

Because, as all those tongue-in-cheek-to-catch-us-out authors are trying to express, here is a piece of science that embodies our conundrum: the world seems to be real - to possess 'truth' - but it is not. Take your moral relativity and subjective realities, pour some paraffin on them and light it. Perhaps you realise that you are replacing one paradigm with another to be able to live (because our minds need it - and that's the human condition), and perhaps not. But think of the word 'truth', think of the word 'real', and no matter how much you twist them, they are bonded to objectivity.

And here comes the inevitable 'there was this study...' I'm not asserting the 'truth' of it, only that it is a good display of my point. There was this study at some university (has anyone ever made that connection with 'universe'?) into how we make everyday decisions - reaching out for a glass of water, taking a step down one path and not another. They recorded at what level and in what sequence decisions are made in. They found that the instinctive, automatic part of the brain is triggered first, and you begin moving before the rational, supposedly decision-making part of the brain kicks in. That, in essence, you justify decisions on a conscious level in retrospect.

Paradigm. Oh I hear your chorus of hooting. Simmer down, I disclaimed myself first - look above.

Study or not, paranoia or not (and what post-modernist isn't?), your subjective reality is controlled by a part of the brain that does not consult you. Does that sound like something you really want to hold too tightly on to? You might want to check with it before your answer. Maybe by Ouija Board.

All I'm really saying here (and this goes out particularly to the physicists) is that the quantum realm offers us hope. It would give us a definitive answer. Hope. The option of dissipating into tiny particles. But also, of knowing for sure. Because despite my argument and those of my fellow writers, and in part alliance with - we don't know. Our language says there are things that are true and real, but our experience says not. So which is it? We just want to know. Even as we spit on knowledge and trample it.

I cannot relate to Agaat because (apart from the constant whinging) the characters have realities and we can see them and we can see the misunderstandings, and even though each does things they cannot rationally justify, they remain blithely unaware of the effusiveness of any kind of truth - in the moment - but justify these irrational moments in hindsight to make another complete story. An evolving one.

To me, it reads as a Romantic story - as in that era of human history where Luther has questioned religion and that question has kept rolling, on and on, with each rotation pulling up the scabs of societies' paradigms. Forcing some backlashes, some projections, some truces - in Romanticism, the transcendent was forced to earth to imbue everything that human beings have not touched. (The Modernists did the same, but with less babbling, and with more cynicism. That I get.)

Round and round the question rolls, even though my fellow writers and I like to believe we have stopped it in mid-rotation. And in a sense, in a moment that is shorter than the speed of light, we have. We have stopped it to look at it, but we are no wiser than we were before. Cynicism is a kneejerk reaction to the desecration of something you hold dear. (I know this well; I work in publishing.) It is an insufficient response to the world, but the only one that keeps us safe from being hurt again.

The other side of the fence

Confess. At least every so often - I'm guessing more often that less - you wonder how you got here. 'Here' being shorthand for your life (isn't it interesting that we use a vague spatial indicator to refer to this 'thing' (again) that feels like an undiscovered dimension). I wonder why I have been so lucky (I haven't been: I have worked myself into diagnosed exhaustion and fought my way through every obstacle, with dirt and flesh under my fingernails) and why it feels like reading an autobiography and identifying with the author. Hey, but then, my brand of nihilism allows for this.

This is not actually my point now, although it makes for a meandering tangent (oxymoron intended).

My career was always meant to be enough - to be the thing that defined me and filled me and distracted me from all the pain in the world. I predicted that I would have nothing else for fear of turning around one day (unforewarned) and realising that I had nothing. Forewarned, after all, is forearmed. Now, destructively curious, I am turning around (more like turning my head cautiously so as not to alarm anything, anyone, myself) and there is... almost everything. Almost everything I had written in a list a year and a half ago in a crisis similar to this one now.

Damn right I'm watching someone else balance on this precipice! I say. You respond: but what's the problem?

Did you ever have a mantra that you leant against when life overwhelmed you because you were young and needed something? And did that mantra ever have sprout from some perceived deficiency? In other words, did you ever think you weren't 'good enough'? Urgh, you've read this story before, probably some Catcher-in-the-Rye-esque coming-of-age tale, about the misfit made hero, the duckling made swan, hopefully the damsel made the narrator of her own tale. Well, I am reading the story of my own life, so just think about it.

If you lean there long enough, you grow around the mantra, like a tree around a chainlink fence. You hold onto it just as closely as you do your fantasy of your future. Maybe the two even bond and so break each other down and so create something else, corroding, like rust on said fence. My mantra was work hard and achieve (implicitly convincing me that working is the same as being). Obvious, but not so obvious to me until I turned 16. Logic driven by emotional distress (this is why you should never send an email when angry) concluded that the only way to be whole would be to work hard. Ta-da, the secret of life!

A decade and a bit later, blah blah exhaustion. Believe it or not, this is not the problem.

Heaven help me, I have a will and a sense of determination to fuel it that need an outlet. At the risk of dissociating, my will always reminds me of those horror movies where the living dead are crushed by something and then stand back up, clicking bones back into joints. No, my will is really a Nancy Drew who wants to learn (oh, knowledge!) and keeps sneaking back into the library, perhaps because it drafted every line of the building plan.

I have seen so much and learnt so much, and can appreciate that no 'problem' is unsolvable, and that people are damaged, and who to trust and who not to, and now my life is filled with people and passions and hard-won security. I can appreciate how 'lucky' I am, even if from afar.

The problem is that I hadn't really thought further than this point. For that decade and a bit, my world has been the curling of bark around the chainlink fence. You can't chop a gap between them without damaging the tree and even if you were to separate them cleanly, there would be a gap in the tree trunk in the shape of the wire with a plaster of rust. To compound my dilemma, scrutinising and defining this isolated point of a larger system has brought me closer to myself, just not close enough.

What now? I can think of at least 50 things, but choosing one of them would mean accepting that the wire should be there, rather than accepting that it already is. Surprisingly (to me), my will wants the latter - perhaps because I want to have my own story and perhaps because I have tried a few of the 50 things and the latter seems like a greater challenge. (Discarding the metaphor now - can you see in the previous paragraph how it started to blur - and that that is the point - that it cannot move and it cannot change and it is but a tool of dissociation.)

I have already chosen: to 'pull myself toward myself' and with arms accordingly folded around myself slowly stand and scrutinise the world around me rather than scrutinising my huddled self with the world's eyes. Confession made, liturgy recited from behind a veiled screen (what that makes you, you'll have to figure out), and as I leave I wonder why I am confessing that which is not a sin. Why I asked you to confess, whether you heard my instruction and sat yourself on the other side in the confessional, or heard it, held my hand and let me talk it out, or heard it and had heard enough and walked away.