Fairy Tales

I hate fairy tales. They're so... convenient. Tied up nicely in a neat little package. No loose ends. Plenty of non-sequiturs and deus ex machina. Take Little Red Riding Hood, for example. In this story, Little Red Riding Hood takes a basket of goodies to her grandmother. But when Little Red Riding Hood gets to her grandmother's house, her grandmother has been replaced by a wolf, who (depending on the audience's and the author's sensibilities) has either devoured the grandmother, or has hidden her in the closet. The wolf then dresses up as the grandmother to trick Little Red Riding hood into coming close enough so that the wolf can eat her (or, perhaps, just throw her in the closet with grandma). But before the wolf devours Little Red Riding Hood (or, again depending on the audience and the author, after, while Little Red Riding Hood is waiting pensively, still intact, inside the wolf's stomach), a lumberjack, who just so happens to be passing by, hears cries for help, bursts into the cottage, and rescues grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood from their doom of being... trapped in the closet forever. Or waiting pensively inside the wolf's stomach forever. This story raises a lot of questions - like, why would the wolf go through all the trouble? Why can't the wolf eat squirrels instead? Why would grandma go in the closet, but Little Red Riding Hood go in the belly? And... OH YEAH: WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH THE TALKING WOLF? But see, this is just how fairy tales work. They lack rationality. Fairy tales introduce elements that are barely held together by logic. And this is precisely how children tlel stories: children do not follow the rules of storytelling, wherein characters, locations, and situations cannot be invented out of thin air, and conveniently disposed of, purely for the purpose of convenience and entertainment. Transitions and events are effects that must have causes. To introduce a change requires a mechanism. But kids? They don't follow these rules. Everything seems arbitrary. On the one hand, this is great - this lack of inhibition is a remarkable aspect of childrens' stories. But on the other hand, if you're not a child, it takes substantial effort to "play along." And if you're not a child and you're tell a story this way, that's not okay. This lack of rationality in fairy tales is disturbing to see, both because it engages adults in this kind of absurd, childish, hyperfantastical style of storytelling, and because it teaches bad storytelling habits. Children are impressionable, so if you tell them illogical, stupid stories that have many arbitrary elements and no clear moral, or at least no clear moral that applies to their own lives, those are the kinds of stories they're going to learn how to tell - and the kinds of stories they're going to think that all adults tell. What's more, the purpose - the whole stinking point - of telling a fairy tale, the whole reason you throw rationality out the window, the reason for arbitrary elements conjured out of thin air and deus ex machinas, is because you're trying to tell a story that teaches a lesson - a moral of the story. But the story of Little Red Riding Hood doesn't even have an obvious moral! Distrust animals of the forest? Grandmothers will always let you down? Who knows.

There are two questions I'd like to answer about fairy tales, as it relates to this discussion of how boring and awful fairy tales are. The first question is, "What makes a fairy tale?" And the second question is, "What makes a fairy tale interesting?" To address the first question - what makes a fairy tale? - fairy tales should include three elements:

1. Magic - a certain degree of irrationality, in the form of magic, is required. But, most fairy tales tend to overdo this in the extreme.
2. Desire - the character should want something, or have an objective. Magic is often introduced as a part of this desire, or as mechanism by which to achieve this desire. This characteristic is common to stories in general.
3. Obstacle - there should be some obstacle to obtaining whatever is desired; this, too, is a characteristic of stories in general.

Magic comes in a variety of forms, but generally it comes in the form of place: the world in which the fairy tale takes place is a world where magic is possible. There can be a transition, from the ordinary world to a magical world, but this usually takes the form of some kind of portal, or a process that transports characters to the magical world. You can have magic in a modern world, but this usually turns out cheesy, or forced, or clichéd. J.R.R. Tolkien said that magic is a way of revealing inner truths. Magic is not an inner truth itself. Magic provides a mechanism, a device, a means to an end - but it is not an end in itself. In the same way that a fairy tale is a device for delivering a moral, magic is a device for illuminating truth. The desire and the obstacle are common elements of nearly any story .The desire creates the endpoint of the story, and the obstacle ensures an interesting and unexpected route. A story may have many ways of creating a hook, but the obstacle provides one of the most obvious hooks. It begs the question: how will the desire possibly be fulfilled now? Now to the second question - how to make a fairy tale interesting? Turn these elements on their head. Do something unexpected. Change it up. I adopted Angela Carter's story "The Warewolf," which appeared in the latest "Magic Shows" issue of Lapham's Quarterly, as a basis from which to create a new version of Little Red Riding Hood - a version that defies the traditional notion of a fairy tale, in a number of ways. First, the magic invoked by the story is clearly much darker than is typical for fairy tales. The scene is set at the beginning of the fairy tale, with talk of the Old World, mountainous forests, evil spirits, graveyards, witches, possession, and the Devil. There are many references to evil behavior of human beings, too - not just being witches in league with the Devil, but murder of suspected witches, an illogical practice adopted by cultures with strong feelings of xenophobia and gynophobia.

But second is the moral ambiguity implicit in many of the elements of the story. There are many aspects that, regardless of the intentions behind them, lead to no good - the villagers killing the old woman, Little Red Riding Hood cutting off the wolf's paw, the wolf stalking Little Red Riding Hood, Little Red Riding Hood not acting in her grandmother's defense when the witch hunters attack her.

Of course, the most pointed moral ambiguity is reserved for the end, when we see Little Red Riding Hood become a witch, which raises the question of complicity. What if witches don't choose to be witches? What if they are chosen? Little Red Riding Hood did not choose to grow the witch's nipple, it simply grew on her finger once she wore the ring. Or - maybe becoming a witch is Little Red Riding Hood's own fault. She did covet the ring, after all; if she had not fallen in love with this beautiful object, she would not have become a witch.

Are witches evil? The villagers seem to think so, and witches appear evil in legends about witches - eating corpses and so forth. And if the legends were true, witches would, without a doubt, be evil. But we're faced with a difficult decision: to believe in magic, and side with the illogical mob, chasing after witches, murdering people who are potentially innocent; or to disbelieve in magic, and maintain the moral high ground, but wonder how the wolf's paw turned into grandmother's hand.

If you decide to indulge your belief in magic, you are faced with another question: should you dislike the grandmother, and blame her for betraying her family, not telling them she was a witch, and ultimately putting Little Red Riding Hood through the trauma of seeing her grandmother murdered before her own eyes? Or was the grandmother simply doing what any magical grandmother who could turn into a swift, able-bodied animal would surely do, which is to follow their grandchild, watching them, protecting them?

Is the information that we're given throughout the story factual? Or is it coming from a biased narrator? We know that magic does not really exist in our world - but is the story taking place in our world? Or is it taking place in a magical world?