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Sometime ago Gauche had a thread re. fairy tales. This is a bit different as the writer puts forth other ideas of how this literature affects child readers, and others, and those readers who become writers. It's a fascinating article, to me as a writer, and I hope for others here. I urge any "serious" authors to read it. - Perdita
Sharpening an imagination with the hard flint of a fairy tale by Alice Hoffman
The intensity of fairy tales -- the sheer brutality in stories of wishes fulfilled and wishes discarded -- is so powerful that some experts believe that children under the age of eight should not be allowed to read them. Such stories, these experts say, particularly the Grimms' tales, incite daydreams, create a penchant for fantasy and an eye for the cruel and the barbarous; they spark an understanding of the nature of the world we live in that is best left for adulthood.
Perhaps this is true. But perhaps this is also a good thing. Indeed, a fabulous thing. Fairy tales inflame the imagination in ways that other, more controlled and blander stories do not. The world itself becomes a different place to a reader of fairy tales; even the youngest child is able to place a story in his or her own reality. It is not so far a stretch from castle to kitchen, after all, and children are not fools. Child-readers, no matter their age, understand the underlying truth in the metaphors. They respond to cautionary tales and understand that there is a "way" to live in the world; that the path may be dangerous and difficult, but it may lead to a worthy end: a full and realized life. Child-readers see not just the magic in the stories, but the magical and mythic that exist in their own daily lives.
I read fairy tales early on. They terrified, delighted, disgusted and amazed me. They were far more grown-up than any other children's books I read, scarily so at times. Like most children, I could feel the disturbing aspects of the stories even if I couldn't intellectually understand or articulate their underlying meanings. Still, I knew. I shivered. I thrilled to them. I learned. Everything in them rang true: the unspoken sexuality (a woman loves a beast, a girl is nearly eaten by a wolf, a frog wishes to be the husband of a princess), the violence (bad mothers, absent fathers, foul murders), the greed (the house of candy, the cage of gold). I didn't realize it, of course, but the tales were allowing me to examine fear, anxiety, desire, sorrow. It was a dangerous world, but truer to reality than anything else we were allowed -- those safe books with their happy endings. How could the trivial nature of the here and the now compare with journeys in which heads or hands were suddenly chopped off, bones were tied in silk and buried under trees, foolish brothers became swans, and a traveler might suddenly be beset by cruel spells, horses' heads that could speak and other twists of fate and circumstance?
Why such tales should feel more real to me and to most child readers than "realistic" fare is both a simple and complex phenomenon. Fairy tales tell two stories: a spoken one and an unspoken one. There is another layer beneath the words; a riddle about the soul and its place in the greater canvas of humanity. Surely every child who reads Hansel and Gretel feels that he or she, too, is on a perilous path, one that disappears and meanders, but one that must be navigated, like it or not. That path is childhood: a journey in which temptations will arise, greed will surface, and parents may be so self-involved that they forget you entirely.
It has long been my belief that writers of fiction fall into two categories: those who write to explain their lives, and those who write to escape them. Both, I suppose are looking for some "truth" about their experiences, but the former are shackled by their worlds; the latter are free to imagine new ones.
Do people choose the art that inspires them -- do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller. For me, there was no examined life without an imagined life. Just as a person is more exposed by his dreams than by his casual conversation, the imagination reveals more about one's soul than the concrete. My impulse as a beginning writer was not to write about my own life but to create another life entirely. I wasn't able to recall how I moved from "reader" to "writer" (How did it come about? Why did it happen?) until the day some years ago when I was cleaning out my mother's house because she'd become too ill to live at home. I found a loose-leaf folder in which I had busied myself during grade-school classes by inventing various new identities for myself. Everything about the characters was written down, much like that tried-and-true exercise for writers who wish to create "real" characters: Write everything down; know the people inside out -- their favorite songs and colors, what they like to eat for lunch, whom they love, where they've traveled, what they yearn for in the future, what they fear most. Know who they are.
It seems right that I began my career by creating a series of false identities. Did I have an unhappy childhood? It goes without saying. Did I long to escape it? Absolutely. I did so not by walking out the door, but by reading. The world of the imagination had the greatest emotional value for me as a reader and writer. What I knew, what I experienced came through those black marks on white paper, and that imagined life seemed much more real to me than the one I had actually led. Eventually, the two bled together; my reading life and my real life became one. I found subtexts not only in the stories I read, but in the lives being lived around me. A description of the here-and-now would not do. Not if there was a soon-will-be and a once-upon-a-time.
Fairy tales, it is believed, began as stories told by women. They were "kitchen tales," remembered and repeated by grandmothers through the generations, later retold and written down by men such as the Grimm brothers, but still called "Household Tales." How marvelous that such fabulous stories had such a down-to-earth name, for that is what they are: Tales meant to reveal the subtext of our households and explain us to ourselves, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, beloved and lover. Real life indeed, although they stray as far from realism as possible.
Sadly, in recent years, realism has come to be considered "better," more "serious," more "literary." How this should come to pass only the realists know for sure; the rest of us can only imagine. Even a realist, after all, is choosing what elements go into fiction, imagining, if you will, what "sort" of realism to present. Fantasists tend to be put into genres: This one writes science fiction. That one writes gothic fiction. Until, by some fluke, a writer becomes successful; or, perhaps late in life, an established author will decide to take a risk and turn his back on "the real."
My initial exposure to storytelling, even before I read fairy tales, came from the stories told to me by the most down-to-earth woman I knew -- my grandmother. The two of us might have been in the market or on the subway, we might have been walking down Jerome Avenue or drinking tea with cubes of sugar in her overheated apartment, but we were also in Russia. We were dropped into her childhood, stuck in a snowstorm, running for our lives. When I heard about the wolves that howled all night, about the rivers where the ice was so thick it didn't melt until May, about men who worked so hard they sometimes slept for a month in the winter, like bears, I was hearing the deeper truth of my grandmother's life, the complex universe that she carried with her, a very personal once-upon-a-time. This was the beginning of my life in the world of storytelling. And, perhaps, it was not unlike the very start of storytelling itself.
Washington Post, April 4, 2004 article link
Sharpening an imagination with the hard flint of a fairy tale by Alice Hoffman
The intensity of fairy tales -- the sheer brutality in stories of wishes fulfilled and wishes discarded -- is so powerful that some experts believe that children under the age of eight should not be allowed to read them. Such stories, these experts say, particularly the Grimms' tales, incite daydreams, create a penchant for fantasy and an eye for the cruel and the barbarous; they spark an understanding of the nature of the world we live in that is best left for adulthood.
Perhaps this is true. But perhaps this is also a good thing. Indeed, a fabulous thing. Fairy tales inflame the imagination in ways that other, more controlled and blander stories do not. The world itself becomes a different place to a reader of fairy tales; even the youngest child is able to place a story in his or her own reality. It is not so far a stretch from castle to kitchen, after all, and children are not fools. Child-readers, no matter their age, understand the underlying truth in the metaphors. They respond to cautionary tales and understand that there is a "way" to live in the world; that the path may be dangerous and difficult, but it may lead to a worthy end: a full and realized life. Child-readers see not just the magic in the stories, but the magical and mythic that exist in their own daily lives.
I read fairy tales early on. They terrified, delighted, disgusted and amazed me. They were far more grown-up than any other children's books I read, scarily so at times. Like most children, I could feel the disturbing aspects of the stories even if I couldn't intellectually understand or articulate their underlying meanings. Still, I knew. I shivered. I thrilled to them. I learned. Everything in them rang true: the unspoken sexuality (a woman loves a beast, a girl is nearly eaten by a wolf, a frog wishes to be the husband of a princess), the violence (bad mothers, absent fathers, foul murders), the greed (the house of candy, the cage of gold). I didn't realize it, of course, but the tales were allowing me to examine fear, anxiety, desire, sorrow. It was a dangerous world, but truer to reality than anything else we were allowed -- those safe books with their happy endings. How could the trivial nature of the here and the now compare with journeys in which heads or hands were suddenly chopped off, bones were tied in silk and buried under trees, foolish brothers became swans, and a traveler might suddenly be beset by cruel spells, horses' heads that could speak and other twists of fate and circumstance?
Why such tales should feel more real to me and to most child readers than "realistic" fare is both a simple and complex phenomenon. Fairy tales tell two stories: a spoken one and an unspoken one. There is another layer beneath the words; a riddle about the soul and its place in the greater canvas of humanity. Surely every child who reads Hansel and Gretel feels that he or she, too, is on a perilous path, one that disappears and meanders, but one that must be navigated, like it or not. That path is childhood: a journey in which temptations will arise, greed will surface, and parents may be so self-involved that they forget you entirely.
It has long been my belief that writers of fiction fall into two categories: those who write to explain their lives, and those who write to escape them. Both, I suppose are looking for some "truth" about their experiences, but the former are shackled by their worlds; the latter are free to imagine new ones.
Do people choose the art that inspires them -- do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller. For me, there was no examined life without an imagined life. Just as a person is more exposed by his dreams than by his casual conversation, the imagination reveals more about one's soul than the concrete. My impulse as a beginning writer was not to write about my own life but to create another life entirely. I wasn't able to recall how I moved from "reader" to "writer" (How did it come about? Why did it happen?) until the day some years ago when I was cleaning out my mother's house because she'd become too ill to live at home. I found a loose-leaf folder in which I had busied myself during grade-school classes by inventing various new identities for myself. Everything about the characters was written down, much like that tried-and-true exercise for writers who wish to create "real" characters: Write everything down; know the people inside out -- their favorite songs and colors, what they like to eat for lunch, whom they love, where they've traveled, what they yearn for in the future, what they fear most. Know who they are.
It seems right that I began my career by creating a series of false identities. Did I have an unhappy childhood? It goes without saying. Did I long to escape it? Absolutely. I did so not by walking out the door, but by reading. The world of the imagination had the greatest emotional value for me as a reader and writer. What I knew, what I experienced came through those black marks on white paper, and that imagined life seemed much more real to me than the one I had actually led. Eventually, the two bled together; my reading life and my real life became one. I found subtexts not only in the stories I read, but in the lives being lived around me. A description of the here-and-now would not do. Not if there was a soon-will-be and a once-upon-a-time.
Fairy tales, it is believed, began as stories told by women. They were "kitchen tales," remembered and repeated by grandmothers through the generations, later retold and written down by men such as the Grimm brothers, but still called "Household Tales." How marvelous that such fabulous stories had such a down-to-earth name, for that is what they are: Tales meant to reveal the subtext of our households and explain us to ourselves, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, beloved and lover. Real life indeed, although they stray as far from realism as possible.
Sadly, in recent years, realism has come to be considered "better," more "serious," more "literary." How this should come to pass only the realists know for sure; the rest of us can only imagine. Even a realist, after all, is choosing what elements go into fiction, imagining, if you will, what "sort" of realism to present. Fantasists tend to be put into genres: This one writes science fiction. That one writes gothic fiction. Until, by some fluke, a writer becomes successful; or, perhaps late in life, an established author will decide to take a risk and turn his back on "the real."
My initial exposure to storytelling, even before I read fairy tales, came from the stories told to me by the most down-to-earth woman I knew -- my grandmother. The two of us might have been in the market or on the subway, we might have been walking down Jerome Avenue or drinking tea with cubes of sugar in her overheated apartment, but we were also in Russia. We were dropped into her childhood, stuck in a snowstorm, running for our lives. When I heard about the wolves that howled all night, about the rivers where the ice was so thick it didn't melt until May, about men who worked so hard they sometimes slept for a month in the winter, like bears, I was hearing the deeper truth of my grandmother's life, the complex universe that she carried with her, a very personal once-upon-a-time. This was the beginning of my life in the world of storytelling. And, perhaps, it was not unlike the very start of storytelling itself.
Washington Post, April 4, 2004 article link
