Fairy Tales As Multiverse
I want to talk about fairy tales. (I always want to talk about fairy tales). I want to talk about their form and their appeal and the way they make me notice and appreciate that all stories are conversation. And then I want to talk about how subversive that is.
Let's start with some terms. I'm not very much interested in the scholarly definition of what officially counts as fairy tale, but what evokes a fairy tale feel and what we consider fairy tales in a literary sense. I don't want a definition that puts restrictions on what a fairy tale can be, but that opens up new possibilities for what we can create.
Thinking this way lets us appreciate the common forms of fairy tales and celebrate them not just for what they are but for the ways they are undone, for the ways those forms invite us to undo them and to generate new stories in response. A fairy tale welcomes its own subversion and makes a family out of all of its strange variations. (Kinda like that spider-verse!) A fairy tale makes a claim and then it dares you to make a counter claim. And then it accepts that counter claim like a sibling, like it's always been there.
I grew up with a large extended family that got together at least every Sunday. We were a family that told stories, but we didn't call them stories, we sort of called them jokes. It was telling and then retelling something funny that had happened to someone. They were not always nice stories.
But as we retold the stories, the details would shift, usually to make it funnier, maybe to make it juicier or weirder. Sometimes stories shifted to place the blame elsewhere or to make someone else into the butt of the joke.
A story would go around the table at my grandma's house like a game of telephone and by the time it got to the end, it was hilarious but had very little relation to the original thing or to the truth. But nobody cared, because it was a better story, and maybe it got at a different truth.
Here's the thing about this sort of storytelling. A story necessarily changes as it is retold. Even if we try to be truthful, we forget parts, and we fill in holes. The perspective shifts, and so does the interpretation.
But some aspects of the story are much stickier. They are the resonant details that persist over time.
It's these sticky details–the parts we simply can't help including in each retelling–that reveal something about the community that tells the story. It's like we're all upvoting certain details. We upvote a detail by choosing to include it in our version or by saying "oh yeah I love this part" when someone else tells the story. Over time, it becomes a story that belongs to the whole community, rather than a single author, because the whole community has had a say in what parts "stick."
What emerges are our community values, the meaning that we put to the world.
Fairy tales embody this kind of conversation and the collaborative creation of meaning. In the tradition of oral storytelling, fairy tales are distilled over many years to represent the community that tells them, as some sticky resonant details (the poisoned apple, the red hood, the glass slipper) are upvoted and repeated, while others fall away.
Even when written down, fairy tales evoke an oral tradition and invite us in very explicit ways to retell them and to continue to upvote and downvote their details. They become a way to say something about the current world and our values and beliefs because we can participate in retelling them.
So how do fairy tales evoke this conversation?
Kate Bernheimer's excellent essay “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale” describes the common elements of fairy tales. These are always present in traditional fairy tales; in modern tellings they either occur outright or become subtext through their omission or subversion. They are flatness (very little introspection, interiority, background, or character complexity), abstraction (distills to most resonant details, privileges telling over showing), intuitive logic (strange things happen "because I said so"), and normalized magic (no need to explain the magic–it just is).
Together, these forms distill a story to its simplest and strangest essence—but keep its resonant sticky details–making it easier to remember and also making it feel like something that is told out loud (even if it has since been written down). The forms also create a particularity to the voice--both building a sense of “because I say so” within the fairy tale, and inviting us to question that authority, by retelling the story in a new voice.
It seems likely that these forms developed out of the oral tradition–they certainly evoke it. And when they remind us of the ongoing conversation of fairy tales, they invite us to join it.
(If Erin Kate lets me, I hope to write about each of the forms for later versions of IMPROMPT2. But for now, I'm running out of space!)
So let's talk very briefly about why this idea of conversation is subversive.
Fairy tales depend on a collaboration to exist and persist through time, and that's a thing that destabilizes authority. When we see stories as written by a single author, one entity dictates what happens and holds tightly to all of the knowledge and wisdom and power. That's a problem! But understanding stories as conversation and as collaboration is a way to subvert these hierarchical power structures.
Fairy tales are not handed down by the strong, but built collaboratively by the community. And they are slippery, which means that the powerful–try as they might–can't pin them down.
Try this:
Start with a fairy tale or other story that you know well and write a dialogue in which you heckle the storyteller, literally talking back and asking questions and making rebuttals to the parts that seem unlikely or problematic to you. And, sure, you could push back on the magical elements if that's your thing, but it might be more interesting to push back on other aspects of the original such as, say, patriarchy, regressive gender roles, heteronormativity, monarchy, happily ever after.
For your consideration:
How are all stories a conversation?
Talk to us:
And now into (and across) the Red-Riding-Hood Verse. Here are some vastly different takes on a single fairy tale. And yet they are all real.
“Short Cuts and other poems” by W. Todd Kaneko
“Riding the Red” by Nalo Hopkinson (collected in Skin Folk)
"A Girl/A Witch/A Crone" by Jasmine Sawers
“The Girl the Wolf and the Crone” by Kellie Wells
“The Company of Wolves” by Angela Carter (collected in The Bloody Chamber)
Freeway (the 1996 Reese Witherspoon movie)
Do you agree that each one counts? What holds them together? How do they invite you to answer back to them?
Any other thoughts on fairy tales, conversations, this strange world? (We could also chat about the spider-verse, if that’s more your thing.)