Fantastic Worlds Read online

  NOTES ON NARRATIVE STRUCTURES

  One may well wonder, after such an analysis, how much of what we have observed is part of the intent of the storyteller. There are at least two important responses that need to be made to that question, one psychological and one structural.

  The psychological response is a simple one: fantastic stories offer psychic economy by compensation; neither the reader nor the author need be consciously aware of the roots of this compensatory function. Compensation is the technical term for the substitution of one experience, symbol, behavior, or what have you for another which is desired but repressed. A dieter, repressing the behavior of eating, may find himself overindulging in exercise or sex or television by way of compensation; someone repressing his desire for sex may compensate for it by working that much harder to earn money. That an author or reader feels drawn to, entertained by, a narrative already indicates that the narrative in some way deals with a significant issue. Since this “dealing with” is vicarious only, occurring in the psychically economic world of art, the writing or reading must compensate for a dis-ease the reader or writer either feels or can project himself as feeling in the real world. Art, then (like dreams and Freudian slips, among other things), has a compensatory function.

  In an essay called “The Uncanny” (1919), Freud made a special application of this principle of compensation to “uncanny” literature and experiences. His major literary example was Hoffmann’s story called “The Sandman,” which is reproduced in the middle section of this anthology. Freud suggested that the uncanny arises when the familiar occurs in an unfamiliar context; alternatively, the uncanny arises when a symbol “takes on the full function of the thing symbolized.” The first part of Freud’s formulation obviously accords with our somewhat broader notion that the fantastic is not simply the unreal, but the reversal of ground rules as one reads, the reversal of the context by the text; the second part of Freud’s formulation suggests the function of dramatization which we have noticed, the externalization of a normally internal or implicit state, such as love symbolized through food. Freud’s “uncanny,” then, is an aspect of our “fantastic.” Ghost stories belong to both camps, Mary Poppins only to the broader fantastic grouping. In both cases, however, this psychological thesis implies that the entertaining text must begin by engaging the reader in a vicarious—even if unconscious—sense of something important being repressed (Grethel’s original wish to supplant her mother) and then dealing with this repressed material (food symbolism) in order to achieve a new reconciliation with the fact of repression (Grethel is now the only female in her father’s life). This simple three-part structure, of course, becomes immensely complicated when one tries to discern in any given case how the sense of repression is generated and how it is manipulated and how it is finally quieted. Freud, and the conclusions that follow from his insights, give us only a start.

  A second step toward an understanding of how much is known by the writer and reader is offered by a work by Vladimir Propp called Morphology of the Folktale (1928). This is a structural study of the order in which “functions” (“an act of a character defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action”) take place in fairy tales. (One should note at this point that “fairy tale” and “folktale” are, as we said, interpenetrating categories. Propp’s original title in Russian refers to skázka, which can mean either “folktale” or “fairy tale.” In the same way, the German title of the Grimm brothers’ collection refers to Märchen, which can mean “fairy tales,” “fables,” “legends,” or even “fibs.”) Propp exemplifies his method of analysis with Afanas’ev’s version of “The Magic Swan Geese,” which is reproduced in this section of the anthology; Propp’s surprising conclusions have been tested many times in the last half-century, and they seem to hold. He found that in all truly oral folktales there were only thirty-one functions. Some of these functions, like absentation of the hero from his home (or, in its extreme form, the death of a parent), must occur. Other functions, such as falling under a spell, if they occur, must occur with a specified co-function, such as release from the spell. Some functions, like magical tests presented to the hero, are free to replicate: he may have one task or he may have three. (In some cultures, like those of the American Indians, replication comes in fours, as in the two tales reproduced here.) Whatever sample of obligatory and optional functions happens to be in a given tale, they must occur in their archetypal order. That is, if functions 4, 13, and 6 occur, they must be in the order 4, 6, 13. Although the full detail of Propp’s discoveries is apparent only on reading his book, and although it is surely surprising that he could come up with apparently correct rules of such strictness, nonetheless his work seems to be true, and it gives us for oral folktales a much more detailed structure than the three-part compensation structure we derived earlier.

  Propp’s conclusions should give us faith that we can infer, even if only unconsciously, a sense of the right structure for a truly fairy tale. As cultures become more literate, tales get written down. Authors embellish them by changing the order of episodes or by inserting other minor stories into the main story. Sometimes a replicated function occurs four times or only twice. Sometimes a hero leaves home and fails to return, or he may return but the tale will go on for a bit. The more the basic oral structure is violated, the more literate the tale is likely to be. Hence Propp’s demonstration of structural orthodoxy in oral tales gives us a way of judging the state of literacy in a culture from which we have a tale.

  Although Afanas’ev collected his tales, as best he could, from illiterate peasants, the Grimm brothers worked quite differently. They employed a network of scribes who went into the field and wrote down, as best they could, stories from illiterate peasants. The scribes sent these transcriptions to Jakob who would sort of average them, trying to produce “typical” versions of each story. Wilhelm then took each synthesis and “refined” it so that it would read smoothly and offend few sensibilities. Although these Grimm stories began as oral folktales, they ended by helping to establish the conventions for the literate genre known as the fairy tale. In the wake of the Grimm brothers, other authors, such as Andersen, MacDonald, and Tolkien, could feel free to employ these literary conventions and, ignoring possible oral sources, construct wholly new so-called “fairy tales.” We can see where each text stands in the developing literary tradition by noting its variation from earlier conventions, all the way back to the oral forms common in so many different cultures.

  Just as the fact of a three-part structure of compensation argues for the perhaps unconscious but nonetheless real understanding on the part of reader and writer of a story’s subtle structures, so the existence of the even more complex Proppian structure indicates that there is a stable and repeatable meaning to fairy tales and people know this when they construct and attend to them. The regular development of convention shows that even those writers who choose to violate conventions do so in full knowledge of what those conventions are and hence of what those structures can do, or once could do, in providing psychic economy. The fact that the structural study of the psychological aspects and functional aspects of tales can proceed in a regular way argues that the universal human concerns we have mentioned are being dealt with by people who in some way know what they are doing.

  AUDIENCE ANALYSIS

  Much of the preceding discussion has implied ways by which one could use a text to analyze its audience. The degree of structural variation from just prior norms indicates the degree to which the audience (and writers for that audience) are sophisticated in those norms. Although traditional fairy tales are intended for children, Hoffmann subtitled “The Golden Pot,” his own favorite among his pointedly adult tales, “A Modern Fairy Tale.” He realized that to interest his sophisticated audience he had to take known conventions and “modernize” them. Similarly, the nature of the fantasy or psychological problem structurally laid to rest by a tale gives us clues as to the concerns of the tale’s au
dience. In the same way that some conventional information can be correlated with reading education, some psychological information can be correlated with approximate age (or, more logically, life experience).

  “Little Red-cap,” for example, is a story that, among other things, concerns a little girl’s fear of approaching menarche. This thought may at first seem quite strange, but if we attempt the sort of analysis here that we employed with “Hansel and Grethel” we notice that the mantle of red velvet (blood, sensuality) is passed down from the (menopausal) grandmother to the pre-pubic granddaughter. The grandmother lives safely in the forest (inhabited by all sorts of things, like wolves, that become dangerous when a young girl like Red is about), while the mother lives in the socially controlled world of the town. The mother makes a social demand for propriety, telling Red not to tarry in the forest, but the wolf talks her into stopping to sniff the flowers (sex organs of plants) and she is drawn ever farther afield. The whole reason for her trip is to bring the grandmother, who is (obviously) waning, restorative (red) wine and cake (clearly a post-Christian version of the story). The wolf swallows the grandmother and then Red, but they are rescued by a passing hunter who magically knows to cut the belly open (a birth image) instead of shooting the beast. Out pops Red, out pops Grandma. Red, not the hunter, takes stones and sews them (woman’s work) into the wolf’s belly, so that he is killed by falling to (Mother) Earth. Red also administers the wine to Grandma and rejuvenates her. The danger of dabbling in the sensuous is real here. The mother, who is necessarily a sexually active female, is protected by virtue of her civilized habitation; the grandmother is protected by virtue of her infertility. Only Red is at stake. Mothers love and sustain. Red is bringing the sustenance from her mother to her grandmother while wearing the red mantle of love passed down to her from her grandmother, her mother’s mother. The hunter, who mediates between the sensuous world of the forest and the civilized world of the town, saves Red, and she herself then knows how to dispatch the wolf. In our version, the story ends thusly: “Little Red-cap said to herself that she would never more stray about in the wood alone, but would mind what her mother told her.” (What follows in the text is obviously an anti-Proppian accretion from the Grimm brothers.) This line expresses Red’s knowledge that mother knows best. How old is Red? Metaphorically, we might say she is ten, quite aware that sexuality will be soon upon her (these are peasant stories, recall, from agricultural areas), but content to be reassured that she need not yet submit to her own guidance. In the Perrault version of the tale, however, the huntsman does not save Red. She stays eaten. The message of that story is not so much reassurance as warning. For the child listening to that version, keeping out of the woods is an even harsher lesson. Perhaps that Red is eight. And, finally, in the version of the story told in Once Upon A Time: The Fairy Tale World of Arthur Rackham (1972), the story ends with these lines: “Red Riding Hood thought: ‘I will never wander off into the forest as long as I live, if my Mother forbids it.’” That last proviso is the giveaway: this Red is feeling her sexuality already, not enough to be willing to break out of her home, but enough to want to leave open a pathway into the woods. We might call her—and her ideal audience—twelve.

  Thus we see that our knowledge of how the fantastic dramatizes basic human problems has led us not only to a fuller understanding of the texts, but of the people who appreciate them. Different narratives have peculiar importance for different people depending upon their experiences and education. Yet at the same time that we can use this knowledge to analyze an audience, we should recognize that the analysis depends first on our recognition of similarities. The three versions of Little Red Riding Hood attest to the widely shared apprehensions of girls approaching womanhood. And we must remember that all women have the memories of their girlhoods within them. Beyond this, the facts of apprehension need not be so specifically attached to the sexual or even the sensual. The wolf is a physical danger, after all, and the huntsman is the defense against it. Boys too can understand Red’s predicament and are led to hope that they will grow up to meet their own crises successfully. And every man has the memory of his boyhood within him. And yet more broadly, we have the common Proppian structure of the fairy tale to give us a complex, yet palpable, aesthetic order as an alternative to our world. And we have the three-part structure of compensation to let us know at least that there is art to oppose life. Individuals will prefer one narrative or another, surely, but they all feel the attraction of narration. With all the differences among narratives, the creation of fantastic worlds places humanity more comfortably; no longer in the chaos of eternal night, we arise at God’s caring behest in Genesis and live through to some vision, perhaps like Tolkien’s, of a permanent realm of fantastic beauty.

  MYTH

  The First Book of Moses, called GENESIS

  King James Version

  CHAPTER 1

  IN THE BEGINNING GOD created the heaven and the earth.

  2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

  3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

  4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

  5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

  6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

  7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

  8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

  9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

  10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

  11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

  12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

  13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

  14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

  15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

  16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

  17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,

  18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

  19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

  20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

  21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

  22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

  23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

  24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

  25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it
was good.

  26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

  27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

  28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

  29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

  30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

  31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

  CHAPTER 2

  Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

  2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

  3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.