Fairy Tales

Let's take it to the Way Back Machine, Sherman.  The way, way, way, way the hell back.

We're talking fairy tales, or so they are termed now.  We're talking fairy tales because we are still reading and writing and watching them.  Disney, of course, jumps to mind.  But our fantasy literature is rife with adaptations of fairy tales.  I've already mentioned Beastly, movie and book.  Robin McKinley spawned two "Beauty and the Beast"--the first, Beauty, being an all time favorite of mine.  Tam Lins crop up everywhere.  Beagle, Jones (twice) and Dean, among others, guilty.  Making me doubly guilty as Weaver's Web is a hard twist on Tam Lin and even Rebirth includes a Tam Lin sequence.  I even have a Beauty and the Beast slated, but I have to get through this series first.  So, why are we so fascinated?  Why do modern authors and readers return to these primal, Jungian stories over and over?  Where do they come from?

I had a fascination with fairy tales from an early age.  Even our Disney-ified versions are not the usual child's fair.  In Snow White, a step mother is so jealous she repeatedly tries to kill her step daughter.  Why were we fed this stuff?

So I did my high school term paper on Grimms' fairy tales.  Only they were originally Household Tales, and meant for adults.  The Grimms had changed up the stories to fit the every day sensibilities.  A father eating a stew made from his son being, obviously, the modern sensibility ("The Juniper Tree").

So here's the dish.  The Grimms used fewer sources than they made it sound.  Most of their sources were easily accessible.  These were the nannies and cooks of the places the Grimms frequented.  I do not believe for a second that a nanny of the Grimms' best friend told a perfectly honest account of what she told her friends.  That aside, the Grimms set out to save the oral stories of the common people to publish and save.  That was their platform.

Only many of the stories didn't quite suit their tastes.  Interestingly, the Grimms added violence.  A lot of the just deserts that were served, were served up by the Grimms, not their sources.  The original tales were chaotic folklore, based on chaotic folklore and myth that preceded it, past down through the ages by an illiterate culture huddled around fires at night, trying to out-do each other.

The only notably less disturbing thing the Grimms did before repackaging their tales--all those step mothers.  Why is the fairy tale obsessed with evil step mothers?  The answer, it isn't.  Snow White?  Her own mother wanted her dead.  Cinderella, the classic step mother?  Not a step.  Deerskin getting raped by a step father?  Um.  A little more incestuous.  At the time, mothers were held up as paragons of virtue.  They were saintly, even.  The angel of the household.  Man's better half.  We couldn't have them running around killing their children.  So the "step" got inserted.

As much as Grimms glorified in violent, bloody ends, there was something they could not stand about the tales they told, and certainly couldn't hand the high born gentry:  Sex.  We still like to skip it in our retellings.  Possibly because we don't know, and possibly because we are still a culture that would rather have blood, guts, gore, and child eating than a little rock 'n' roll (in its original sense).

Before the Grimms had their way, for instance, in one of the versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" passed around, she did a strip tease for the wolf and got called a slut by her grandmother's cat.  I love that one (another tale I'm considering adapting, once I get through the three or so books in front of it).  However, it can't be beat that in more than one version of "Rapunzel," the witch (*cough*mother*cough*) found out about Rupunzel's prince climbing her long hair because the next door neighbor (so much for a tower deep in the woods) informed the witch (*cough*mother) that by the smell of it, and the flies around the window, Rapunzel would soon be knocked up and would probably run away with the best silver.  Yikes.  That could even make me blush.

But we don't use it.  Admittedly, Rapunzel is a bit of a hard story to mess with (though I'd like to try) since she spends so much time in a tower, though if you kick it old school, she also gets thrown into a wasteland to take care of her twins (knocked up) while the prince got his eyes poked out and wandered around blind till he found her again.  Which might be more interesting.

My fav adaptation is a broad range of adaptations and goes not to a fantasy writer, but to Stephen Sondheim in the musical "Into the Woods".  He tackles a host of fairy tales with both the violence and some of the sex as each for their own reasons, one after another of his characters must go "into the woods".  The woods represent a archetype of leaving society, leaving reality, and entering a space of dream, emotion, danger, and change.  In the second act, the storyteller meets an abrupt end, and the confines of the stories we know and understand bust loose even more all over the place.  Even more than in the first act, stories meet each other, and at points confuse characters into the wrong stories.  Characters learn what they really want in their lives, somewhere in the woods.

This reputation of the woods--this is what I believe we are all attracted to.  Be it children's movie, YLP book, YA movie, adult movie, that kind of adult movie, or a myriad of fantasy books, we all strive to walk back into the woods, to retain this portion of our lives and share it.  Fantasy books and films are especially prone as the goal is so often the same anyway.  We strive for this archetypal space where chaos and learning meet in twisted metaphor.  This is why we write fantasy.  This is why we love it, and this is why we return to those ancient stories over and over again.

Diana Wynne Jones

All right, this is late in coming, but I must:  the Homage to Diana Wynne Jones.

I cut my teeth on Diana Wynne Jones.  My mother read Jones to my brother and me as we sat by the Franklin stove cold wintered.  As I got older and learned more about writing I returned again and again to her earlier writing.  In books such as Charmed Life, what is so fascinating is that not only does Jones create complex characters that drive the book, but they drive a complicated book in a YA format.

When I look at Rowling, I do not see a visionary genius--as much as I might be hated for that remark.  I see someone standing on the shoulders of Jones.  Gaiman was in close with Jones.  In Britain, she is well known.  Here, she was out of print till the Rowling explosion brought her back to the fore (and for that I will thank Rowling as searching out Jones's novels on line and in used bookstores was an exhausting endeavor).

 When I first start describing Charmed Life:  orphaned Cat and Gwendolyn are taken in by their mysterious relative Chrestomancie--sounds really fucking simple, right?  And something you would put in a query letter, which I despise.  When I try to tell a friend who wants to read the book what it is about (don't worry, no spoilers)--with Howl's Moving Castle and Archer's Goon and Witch Week as well--what starts simple, I realize the plots are complex in a beautifully streamlined way.  She gets away with all of it because her characters have an inner complexity that puts me in mind of a snowflake, or Jenga.  If she had moved one piece of her characters out of line, the whole book would fail.  But because each character has the inner integrity of a tank, you never question one move that character makes or, because of her world building and other characters, why that choice lands the character where it does.

That is the key to a novel, in my opinion.  The characters must be complex, but that complexness cannot be loose.  You can't have facets of them hanging every which way that could easily be ripped off or fall off and not change the basic integrity of the character.  Each piece of the character must be vital, and stack together into an important vehicle that will take us seamlessly through the novel.  Everyone talks about the need for complex characters, but we rarely discuss the fact that every complexity has to be build in, to have grown in a tangled knot with every other complexity.  That character will determine the world we see.  That character will determine in what direction the we, as readers, move.  If we feel that viewpoint or movement is false, we will lose the book.

Not to say that absolutely every one of Jones's novels are epitome the of fabulous writing.  She has written, over her long, and now cut dead, career a swath of childrens', young adult, and adult fantasy.  She has explored Tam Lin in multiple books.  She, as far as I know, created the idea of a "multiverse"--that being more than one universe through dimensions.  We all know it has been around in speculative fiction forever, but I still find her classification charming.

Towards the end of her career, I have to admit my heart sank a bit.  She still used marvelously complex and original plots, but I felt as though sometimes they drove the character, rather than the other way around.  Her characters' strengths are what make me love her, and make me beholden to her for my own values in writing.

Her passing passed us by without much of a bump, but we will feel the reverberations of what she created in others work throughout the years.  If you have any wish to write--yes, especially speculative fiction, but really in any genre--go pick up the four books I listed above:  Charmed Life, Witch Week, Archer's Goon, and Howl's Moving Castle (which isn't anything like the movie, by the way).  Read them once and fall in love.  Read them again and understand what and how she created.