Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale Page 14
All magical realist fiction, whether believing or doubting, dips into the streams of fairy story for its material: Rushdie’s sparkling children’s novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), takes up his predicament as an author under threat of censorship and death, and turns it into a classic quest adventure from the Arabian Nights: his child protagonist Haroun sets out on a chivalrous errand to save the wellsprings of story from pollution. And if magical realism is understood as a mode, rather than a time-bound development of the novel, then authors such as Swift, Voltaire, and Kafka have also found inspiration for their fantastic fiction in fairytale conventions: other worlds, talking animals, monsters, bodily transformations, improbable and hyperbolic plot developments, the stark opposition of good and evil. Voltaire wrote contes philosophiques (philosophical tales) as spoofs of Oriental narrative. Yet he had an appetite for marvels and drew on the literature of wonder, from fairy lore to travellers’ tales for his lacerating attacks on contemporary mores and malpractices: his villains (Jesuits, for example) strike echoes with evil sorcerers, his despots and oppressors with ogres. In other words, the irrational tenets of religion and the fanciful products of the imagination, which Voltaire derided when they required blind belief, served him perfectly to channel his iconoclastic philosophy.
The folklore of central Europe and the Near East, Judaic and other, also provided Kafka with much raw material, and he deepens the enigmatic messages of his fables by twisting fairytale promises: the end of his most famous short tale, ‘Metamorphosis’, lifts towards hope as in a happy ending, but at the expense of Gregor Samsa, who has been swept away, a dead insect, by the maid. As Kafka said, ‘There is hope, but not for us.’ His inexhaustible fable gains power from interacting with fairytale norms, and then breaking them. In this case, most resonantly, no supernatural, scientific, or psychological cause is offered for Gregor’s change; we are left in the dark. The effect is not however uncanny, but treated pragmatically as a simple fact, against all probability. Kafka learned matter-of-fact brevity from proverbial wisdom, Central European melancholy humour, and the harsh, laconic style of the Brothers Grimm, and his tales reverberate with a similar dark, wry fatalism, as for example in ‘A Little Fable’ (the cat eats the mouse), or ‘The Song of the Sirens’ (there is none), or in the savage tale ‘Jackals and Arabs’, which announces endless civil conflict in the desert. It is an animal parable, with animal anti-heroes who interact with humans and their folly. The closing lines, again in full consciousness of breaking faith with the reader, default on a promise of reprieve:
‘You are right, sir,’ said he, ‘we’ll leave them to their business; besides, it’s time to break camp. Well, you’ve seen them. Marvellous creatures, aren’t they? And how they hate us!’
Kafka allows no pay off; we are caught in the noose of the tale and its scenes of hatred and carnage forever. He takes fabulism far beyond the enchanted wood, into metaphysics and existential parable: Walter Benjamin commented that Kafka wrote ‘fairy tales for dialecticians’.
Another admirer of Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, in the short essay ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, argues that once Kafka had appeared, an entire, previously undiscovered continent of literature rose, a kind of Atlantis on the horizon behind him; similarly, Kafka himself in turn crystallizes an approach to legends, parables, and the wonder tale that has shaped an entire succession of writers, who continue to create dialectical fairy tales.
In conditions of censorship, for example, writers have resorted to folk narrative as protective camouflage: fairy tales open a door to political fable, the tyrants and ogres could be cast down, justice restored and equality achieved. Avant-garde writers, such as the artist Kurt Schwitters in Germany, Béla Balázs in Hungary, and Karel Čapek in Prague, composed many high-spirited, absurdist, and heartfelt utopian fairy stories, intended to mould the soft wax of young citizens towards dreams of a new human nature—or to attack the status quo. It was Karel and his brother Josef who in 1922 coined the word ‘robot’, in their blackly comic satire about the fate of workers in factories, RUR or Rossum’s Universal Robots. During the worst days of repression, when the early socialist hopes lay in ruins, rebels still found a means of expression in fantastic tales; and these could sometimes manage to elude the censors’ scissors.
Impossible Dreamers: Keeping Out of Hell
The fairy tales scholar Jessica Tiffin observes perceptively that fairy tale as a genre carries within it a contradiction between conformity and revolt: ‘The ideological implications of this continuing popularity [in the mass media] are complex and at times problematical, given fairy tale’s peculiarly coherent surface and its ability to give a deeply satisfying and utopian gloss to assumptions about society, power, and gender which are often profoundly reactionary.’ The conservatism of the form makes its appeal, especially to dissidents, even more noteworthy. Yet the two greatest contemporary masters of the rational mode of fairy tale, Italo Calvino and Angela Carter, were both self-declared leftists, and Carter, younger than Calvino, was deeply shaped by his imaginative solutions.
Calvino’s parents were both biologists (he first enrolled as a student in the sciences), and he brought scientific method to literature with marvellous flair. His exhaustive trawl through Italian fairy tales changed him as a writer and he turned away from the quasi-cinematic Neo-Realism of his early fiction to devise strange literary taxonomies—in novels that are brilliantly agile variations on Propp’s anatomy of folk tales. For Calvino, who, like his parents, was an anti-Fascist (he fought as a partisan), agnostic, and anti-clerical, fairy tale was ultimately more honest about literature than realism—verismo—because it admitted its own condition as illusion. This made it a mode of choice for someone who was searching for an ethics for society and individuals, and wanted to avoid fraudulent storytelling.
A literature that does not make false claims about its truthfulness, but owns up to its fictive condition, fitted his idealism more surely than literary attempts at faithful imitation of life. And Calvino has a fecund, indeed inexhaustible, imagination for active metaphor and fully formed allegory, at times couched in scientific language (Cosmicomics, 1969), at times in topographical flights as breathtaking as any story from the Nights, thronged with wonders. His most beautiful novel, Invisible Cities (1972), conjures fifty-five castles in the air, as it were, and then meditates, in lapidary, exquisite dialogues between Marco Polo and ‘the Great Khan’, on the varieties of their peoples and customs. Its closing lines crystallize his sensitivity to fairy tale’s false promises, when Polo says, ‘There are two ways to escape suffering it [inferno]. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.’
These words have been justly quoted again and again: they communicate Calvino’s philosophy, his wise storyteller’s counsel, as well as a description of the best function of fable and fairy tale.
Like her Italian contemporary, Angela Carter read widely and deeply in fairy tale; she worked on the corpus in a historical and scholarly fashion, was steeped in the slippery ironies of D’Aulnoy and Perrault. In her hands, fairy tale is always written in a double register, with serious romances (‘The Lady in the House of Love’ and ‘Puss-in-Boots’) striking notes of rude bawdy, and her deep love of the genre undercut by her feline, even arch knowingness. These overtones serve her political intentions: to expose the prerogatives of aristocrats, fathers, and other authorities, to liberate the libido of young women from the taboos of politesse, to tell things how they are—and how they could be. In these respects, Carter is a true daughter of Voltaire and of Kafka, an advocate of Enlightenment, who forged fairy tales into instruments of rational enquiry and scriptures for emancipation. In a firework display of radio plays, film scripts, and novels (as well as the short fictions) she continued her assault on the genr
e in a spirit of fiery love—and hate. In Nights at the Circus (1984), the title gestures to the Arabian Nights, while Fevvers, the colossal trapeze artist heroine, spreads her purple dyed wings, and flies. ‘Is she fact or is she fiction?’ keeps recurring as a question in the novel. Again, in the interests of truth-telling, a fairytale impossibility—a winged woman—allows the author to call attention to herself as an honest broker.
Nights at the Circus was followed by another ambitious novel, Wise Children, which was to be Carter’s last book. An affectionate concoction, brewed from Shakespeare’s comic romances, this novel also performs a series of extreme, ebullient variations on a vast set of traditional motifs (foundlings, twins, rags-to-riches trajectories, and back again).
Rational dreamers are still reflecting on gender, on effects of the new media, concepts of the self, relations of human beings with the natural world, and ways of avoiding hell. Some engagement with political visions continues in the fairytale tradition, both in the wake of the mordant modernists, and of their utopian predecessors (Dickens staging phantoms to torment Scrooge, and George MacDonald disguising gentle and eccentric sermons as whimsical fairy tales). Philip Pullman’s heroine, Lyra, is given a truth-telling device, an ‘alethiometer’. Like George MacDonald’s Golden Key, it’s magical instrument that will lead to better worlds and better understanding. The traumatic scene of animal metamorphosis returns in Marie Darieussecq’s 1996 bestseller, Truismes (Pig Tales) a fierce, Voltairean satire of lust and greed; the acerbic essayist and novelist Dubravka Ugrešić mischievously unleashes three hags for our time in Baba Yaga Laid an Egg; while the film Spirited Away (2001), by the Japanese master animator Hayao Miyazaki, issues a Swiftian manifesto against consumerism.
The fairytale repertory of fantastic possibilities continues to provide writers and others with a fine scalpel to probe and test the conditions of daily survival, and then imagine alternatives and redress.
9
On Stage & Screen
States of Illusion
Now I always knew
Fairy tales could come true
Today’s hard fact was once a fairy tale.
Velimir Khlebnikov
Like many little girls, Princess Victoria was ballet-struck, and her most favourite prima ballerina of all—worth five enraptured exclamation marks and quadruple underscoring in her journals—was Marie Taglioni, who was the first to pad her dancing slippers so that she could lift up on her tiptoes and intensify the impression of ethereal lightness that was so desired by the Romantic choreographers of the classical ballet. The future Queen filled pages of her watercolour albums with paintings of the fairy vision of Taglioni en pointe and the corps de ballet of swans or wilis or sylphides fluttering in their frothy tutus and gauzy wings. These are the only direct allusions to fairy tale in her journals, and in this Victoria represents a widespread phenomenon, often overlooked in discussion of fairy tale and attempts to define the form. Fairy tales have never been exclusively verbal, and the slippery interactions of oral and written transmission over the course of the genre’s history result as much from the stories’ constant reincarnations on stage and on screen, from pantomime to puppet shows, again showing its affinity with migrating tunes, cross-pollinating plants. C. S. Lewis pointed out that fairy tales don’t have to be great works of fiction, or even especially well written, to be unforgettable. Elite children like Princess Victoria emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the prime audience for The Nutcracker ballet or the opera of Hansel and Gretel, but the current is running firmly now towards larger and larger audiences, all over the world, and darker and more disturbing treatments, in the theatre, the cinema, and on television.
‘What a joy it is to dance and sing!’
The libretti of ballets such as The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and many others invent this and borrow that, crystallizing various elements from national folklore (Russian folk tales) and literary classics (Perrault, E. T. A. Hoffmann). The raw materials are not, however, always readily identifiable, but have been transformed freely by the creators’ imagination: Firebird and Giselle are original dramatic works in their own right. Yet they are also essentially fairy tales, composed by bricolage with features that define the genre: supernatural and mysterious beings, a prevailing atmosphere of enchantment and vulnerability to destiny, and opening onto another, imaginary world that is only accessible through the work of art. And they are also, by definition, performed; their effect produced by a combination of skills carried out by a group, the ultimate origin or responsibility for the work distributed across a number of participants. Both as an artefact and as a process, a fairytale ballet, play, opera, or film reveals the reason that the genre is hard to pin down: it is a narrative, the labour of many hands in constant action over time, not tied to a specific medium, and its manifestations are fluid; they do not keep still.
When sung, stories also shape-shift into new, unprecedented forms, and composers of opera have mined classic tales and national folklore for material: Der Freischutz (The Freeshooter, 1811) by Carl Maria von Weber is the source for the proverbial phrase ‘silver bullet’ after the magic instrument given to the hero in this opera’s libretto; Jaroslav Kvapil, for the libretto of Dvořák’s tragic and beautiful opera Rusalka, drew on a Czech Undine tale; in Bluebeard’s Castle Bartók and Balázs profoundly reinterpret Perrault to create a metaphysical drama. Far lesser known fairy tales, written by the Venetian wit, playwright, and defender of traditional theatre Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806), have inspired composers, from Wagner’s first opera, Die Feen (The Fairies), to Hans Werner Henze’s fabulous epic L’Upupa (The Hoopoe), a reworking of the Nights.
The case of Gozzi, the last, self-declared, and valiant champion of the old commedia dell’arte conventions, discloses the connection that binds modern fairy tale to theatre. In a spirit of enlightened, light-footed scepticism, Gozzi concocted joyful fantasies from his wanderings through the Arabian Nights, Basile’s Pentamerone, and other collections of fairy tales. Interestingly, it was the féeries or court entertainments of the seventeenth century, counterparts of the commedia, that established the rich colloquy between flights of fancy and fairy illusions on stage. Renaissance court masques and the later féeries in royal palaces and in noblemen and noblewomen’s chateaux mustered Italian players in extravagant décors and arrayed them in exotic costumes to mount spectacular events. Dance, music, slapstick, celebration, ritual, and pageantry coalesced in these mythological performances. Féeries were also the chief spur to the spectacular inventions of stage machines: flying chariots, underwater voyages, seven-league boots, devils exploding with fireworks, and other marvellous, extremely ambitious effects of great ingenuity.
The running interactions between fairy tale and performed media continue more vigorously than ever today, but the example of Gozzi also illuminates a crucial dimension of modern fairy tale: its emergence in symbiosis with the Enlightenment.
The plots, characterization, and libretti of ballets and operas have been thought of all too readily as mere pretexts for display or coathangers for the gorgeous raiment of music. Fortunately, the experience of going to a production of La Cenerentola, Die Frau ohne Schatten (Hofmannsthal’s original libretto for Richard Strauss), Blond Eckbert (Judith Weir, based on a tale by Ludwig Tieck) reveals how mistaken and how limiting this view is, and, by and large, it has been superseded. Today, when a composer and librettist open horizons on to the marvellous they plunge deep into the streams of story in order to attain a more intense enveloping experience—often the Gesamtkunstwerk that Wagner proclaimed. Prokofiev’s opera, The Love for Three Oranges (Figure 14), draws inspiration from a very weird and wonderful tale by Gozzi, who took it from Basile in his most madcap mood.
Figure 14 Unlikely divas: three sisters are turned into singing fruit. The Love for Three Oranges, opera by Serge Prokofiev (1921), at the Paris Opera, directed by Gilbert Deflo, 2005.
But the intertwining of opera and ballet with enchantment does not ent
ail that we who are listening submit to any particular cosmology invoked by the story—the deus or dea ex machina is not brought before us to invite our belief in their existence beyond the stage. We are not asked to clap our hands to say we believe in fairies (except by Barrie). Nor do we have to suspend our disbelief; the fairies, sorceresses, mermaids, and sprites excite a different kind of consent and one that is bound up with the period when dance and opera emerged in the multimedia entertainments we experience today. Opera is not sacred oratorio sung in church, nor is it a reprise of bacchanalian ritual. It absorbs their function, but as an art form, it came into being in the age of reason and it brought myth down from its solemn heights by blending it with fairy tale.
‘The function of the central moral in fairy tales’, writes the music historian David Buch, ‘made them vehicles for Enlightenment allegory as well, where the “improvement” of the audience replaced that of the child’. The creators of grand opera in the eighteenth century weren’t wrapped in nostalgia for lost hierarchy and solemnity, but forging a new, secular event that looks through the lens of wonder at all kinds of deep questions, about people and polities, passion and loyalty, power and fate. It invites our involvement to share in the predicaments it explores, some of them to do with myths’ central concern—the place of humans in relation to mysteries of love and death. By a revealing paradox, Voltaire, the great rationalist, satirist, and sceptic, collaborated with the French composer Rameau on several (failed) operas. The counter-world of hopes and dreams that fairy tale summons is filled with marvels and illusions, which act as catalysts of a rational outcome, when harmony, justice, and mercy will prevail over threats from evil powers. A famous example is Mozart’s Singspiel, The Magic Flute, an opera first performed in 1791, which combines allegory, comedy, and fairy tale, and culminates, after many ordeals for the protagonists, in rejoicing—at liberation from danger and happiness in love. Carter picks up on this exuberance in the last line of her last novel: ‘What a joy it is to dance and sing!’