Fairy Tales

 

We pay too little attention to hero legends, fairy tales, and fables. We value them too little. “Tall tales” and “fairy tales” are commonly scorned as mere lies. Yes, we encourage our children to read them; but mostly for idle entertainment. They are “escapism,” and childish; not worth adult attention. And they are bowdlerized or perverted each generation. In the Disney versions circa the 1950s, they were all laundered to the message that romantic love (in other words, sex) solved everything. In recent years, they are invariably recast from the point of view of the villain. Shrek the ogre turns out to be misunderstood. 

It seems a deliberate perversion or undermining of the tales.

They are not traditionally studied in the academy as serious literature. Perhaps they may be studied for anthropological interest; perhaps as supposed expressions of a diseased psyche; but always from an alien perspective, and not in standard Literature classes as we would study real art.

When I was a kid, many parents did not allow their children to read comic books as somehow corrupting. They are classic hero legends, but we are so disconnected from this literary tradition that they are rarely recognized as such. Even those who compose them have been remarkably clumsy in their composition. They seem commonly to think that all that is needed is to come up with some new super-power and a catchy name, for a new hero or a new villain. Stan Lee’s effect on the genre in the early Sixties was electric simply because he understood the conventions. 

I imagine they are shunned because here, of all places, we find truth. The stone that is rejected is the cornerstone of the temple. Jesus spoke in fairy tales and fables—the parables. As did the Buddha.

The fairy tales, hero legends, fables, and parables are the literature of the common people. The literature studied in the schools and academies instead is the literature written to appeal to the upper classes. There is nothing wrong with that, but such literature is more likely to serve the purposes of the earthly powerful and maintain them in power. The folks who wrote and are the audience for the fairy tales and legends are those less connected with worldliness and the game of thrones, those Jesus identified in the Beatitudes.

Fairy tales are, proverbially, written by “Mother Goose”: a composite figure representing generations of illiterate women who passed these stories on nursery to nursery, village green to village green.

The hero legends were the male equivalent: told old hand to new hand in the lumber camps, in the barracks, on board ship at twilight. 

The fables were supposedly composed by Aesop, a slave. The New World equivalent, the Uncle Remus stories, were also told by a slave. They too represent the wisdom of the lower classes.

The lower classes have not been, at most periods, the less intelligent. Class was arbitrarily assigned by birth. And there were at all times a lot more of them. Accordingly, this literature is actually going to be better than the canon of the salons. The fact that it was oral also meant it had to be worth memorizing, generation after generation. That is a good test for quality and relevance.

And yet, we mostly ignore it. We rarely read it. We mock it.