Small stories and their irrelevant goals
Most fairy tales/folk tales are little stories. They usually deal in singles. One girl, one prince, one horse, one moon. Love, suffering, growth, separation, togetherness. When they deal in threes, you know that two will fail, be killed, or be treated as sides in the main course of the main character’s happiness.
In fact, a happy ending for a princess, prince, poor farmer’s daughter, orphan, washerwoman – these are mostly the goals of many fairy tales (or folk tales). They don’t seem to think about the good of mankind, or a kingdom, beyond whether or not the prince or princess in question was happily married. Though who knows, maybe the happy couple spreads the love.
They don’t have the weight of sagas. They’re not parables or even fables, because often they don’t have morals, or they have what we’ve been brought up to think of as bad morals – vengefulness, violent retribution, escapism, an over-reliance on magic.
Very often, an end to or alleviation of Girl A’s suffering involves paying back Girls B and C, or Stepmother A, or Witch No. 13. These happy endings are always missing in modernised fairy tales, in case children accidentally learn that a desire for retribution exists in the world.
Cinderella’s perfect suffering and its imperfect resolution
Take Cinderella, for instance. One of the most hated, most re-written and most disturbing fairy tales.
Every modern re-telling of Cinderella tries to answer the question: why doesn’t she do anything? Why doesn’t she save herself? They try to make her a little more fiery, a little more passionate, even the slightest bit more proactive. But that’s actually working against the story.
You can answer the question with a question: Why would Cinderella rescue herself? She already was rescued by a fairy godmother/witch/teapot. The overwhelmingly repeated summary is that a prince rescued her, though the truth is he didn’t. He just discovered her. There are only two real agents in this narrative:
- The stepmother, who decides what Cinderella’s place should be in this world
- The fairy godmother, who puts her in another place.
You might say that the fairy godmother made a mere cosmetic change, but covering someone in dirt and ashes is also a cosmetic change. It’s hard to know, from this bare bones of a story, what Cinderella was like. As so many movies have found, the real reason to rewrite the story is to make Cinderella more likeable. Nobody likes a doormat. And, as it turns out, the only thing that people despise more than the worm is the worm that turns.
I didn’t like Cinderella
Really, who could? What was to like? But I understood something about this story, organically, as a child.
Something about how we dream.
The purity of the suffering, the completeness, and the way daydreaming lifts you into the clouds, spins this enchantment around you, has you running. Most of us suffer in more complex ways, and in a general, long-term , low-key sense, and at times with great intensity. And so, sometimes, you fantasise about suffering, also. I did. Sinking to the lowest depths, the absolute pits, dressing yourself in rags, crawling in the ashes. If there was a name for this person you created, when you were a child, Cinderella would be her. Because there is something inside you which longs for absolutes, because edges means choices. And also there is the hope of finding in the lowest places the means for escape, the magic, the fairy godmother. It is hard to believe that you can get one simply by shedding a few tears when you walk home from school.
Why deal in the fantasies of children?
Because, for most of the story, Cinderella is a child. Another simple explanation for her relentless passivity.
The more pressing criticism, of course, is that the story ends in marriage. How does someone who has never lived learn to share a life? But who knows what happened after. Maybe she learned, maybe she lived, maybe she escaped again, with more resources and less risk. The immediate problem was solved. We don’t know what new problems came after. I, personally, don’t care.
Big stories and their better morals
There are bigger stories than Cinderella; less self-involved stories, where suffering doesn’t end in petty material gains and more or better resources. There are stories of suffering that end in self-inflicted martyrdom. Mythologies, in fact, depend on martyrdom to keep their plotlines steadily focussed on the building of civilizations, to keep their readers committed to self-sacrifice, to teach us that silence is an essential part of suffering, that there is something inherently selfish and immoral about survival. That a principle is to be lived for, and preferably also to be died for.
In AS Byatt’s Babel Tower, Lady Mavis’ son disappears. Or rather, he is disappeared. They live in a utopian commune which is rapidly descending into orgiastic torture and eventual death, after many deaths along the way. Lady Mavis talks about her hope, her belief, her faith, in the essential goodness of those involved, and jumps from the top of the tower with her daughter in her arms. The daughter survives, Lady Mavis does not.
The three old men of the story discuss her death. The mistake that women have always made, they say. Thinking that their martyrdom will shame their persecutors into changing their ways. It doesn’t, they say. It only makes them more bloodthirsty. When I first read this, I was shocked by the brutality of the three old men, making nothing of Lady Mavis’ sacrifice. I was moved by her speech. I thought that her death would shame her persecutors, because it shamed me. In the story, nothing stopped the commune’s rapid descent into violence.
However, self-inflicted martyrdom has a powerful magnetism about it. The notion of oneself as a potential sacrificial victim is helpful, in times of great suffering. Just like suffering can be attractive, martyrdom, the extreme end of its spectrum, has a spellbinding quality to it. If you’re willing to listen to that silent speech.
To the most part, I found that in real life, when I pushed my own self-sacrificing desires to higher degrees, not even extremes, it didn’t shame the targets of my silent speech. It only made them more bloodthirsty. It shrunk my space in the world, made me smaller, made them bigger.
The relief of not having to witness a martyrdom
Angela Carter, in her Book of Fairy Tales, titles one of the chapters Clever Women, Resourceful Girls and Desperate Stratagems. I think back on this, repeatedly, in the past few years, when I’ve looked less for martyrdoms and more for survivals. Clever, resourceful, desperate and strategising are not extreme words, like Cinderella, suffering, martyr and sacrifice. They’re words that imply survival; they come from the belly, not the heart.
In another section, titled Brave, Bold and Wilful, you find a short and tight version of Bluebeard:
Lady Mary, in the story, is bold, loved, has many friends and two brothers. We’re told that she has many lovers, but she decides to settle down with Mr Fox, a mysterious but charming and adventurous suitor. On the day before the contract is to be signed, she decides to make Mr Fox a little less mysterious. She decides to visit his castle without his knowledge. In a terrifying sequence of signs, she sees one message after the other, as she gets closer to the heart of his mystery. At the gateway: be bold, be bold. At the doorway: be bold, be bold, but not too bold. In the gallery, over the door to the bloody chamber: Be bold, Be bold, but not too bold/ Lest your heart’s blood should run cold. Those words chilled me. Because what is one to do? Lady Mary is bold. Will she change now? I’m curious, should I be punished now? Or should I run? Should she run?
I suppose in a big story, Lady Mary would be dramatically punished for her boldness, her life would be lost, her burial would be a silent and shaming spectacle, and strange flowers would bloom on her grave. In a twee big story, a great change would come across the land, into people’s hearts, and her murderer would kill himself.
Thank god this is a little story. Lady Mary discovers the bloody chamber, the bodies of women Mr Fox has murdered. He returns while she is still there, carrying a corpse. She hides in a cask. He cuts off the hand of the corpse to take a glittering diamond ring, but the hand leaps up and falls into Lady Mary’s lap, almost like it’s giving her a sign.
The next day, Mr Fox arrives at Lady Mary’s house. She confronts him with her discovery, he lies. She confronts him with the hand, still wearing its diamond ring. Her friends and family cut Mr Fox into little pieces.
Lady Mary survived, rallied her resources, did not become a moral, a martyr, or a myth. I am grateful for this story.
A sacrificial offering who remained resolutely un-sacrificed
Last year, sometime around when my fascination with suffering and sacrifice had more or less ended, I was gifted with The Merman and the Book of Power, by Musharraf Ali Farooqi. It starts with terrible carnage, as Mongol armies take over Baghdad, with terrifying violence. Soon after, under Mongol rule, a merman is discovered. He is kept, out of curiosity, horror and fascination. Qazwini, researcher, experimenter-in-chief and administrator of the occupiers’ governance, decides at some point that the time is ripe for a potential sacrifice.
As it happens oh so often, the sacrifice is a woman, and she is to be sacrificed to an experiment. Can the merman procreate with a human? The ‘chosen’ woman, Aydan, is the most annoying, persistently rebellious member of the harem. Like Lady Mary, she is consistently, unstoppably bold. So bold that she can’t help herself for being bold. She can’t save herself from being bold.
Like every other sacrifice, she is dressed for the offering. Clothes are made that will make her both beautiful and accessible. Because she might have sex with a merman, she should be able to swim. There are guards, onlookers, ill-wishers, and one observer present – Qazwini. She is lowered into the pool that houses Gujastak, the merman. Will they have sex? Will they not have sex? Will she be killed? Will she be eaten? Will she be loved? A thousand questions hang in the air, observing the scene.
As it turns out, Aydan cannot be tamed even by a creature of indeterminate species. Her boldness crosses boundaries. She tames (or teases) the merman, they have a dramatic howling wilderness of sex, that permeates into the minds and bodies of their little audience, which falls into an orgiastic, animalistic display of collective empathy. They make a baby. Still, she lives. A guard falls in love with her, there is jealousy and attack. Still, she lives. A crisis falls, the strange, squabbling little family disappears. Still, she lives. The merman is boxed and put into a ship. Still, a ghostly woman and child are viewed, somewhere, on some port.
Is survival a non-story?
Self-sacrifice does have an imaginative power. You can’t deny it. Being swallowed by the earth, being consumed by flames – have a narrative impact that stays in your mind, that is carried along by generations. Rarely do those narratives go into the physicality of these things, because that’s a little more than anyone really wants to know or imagine.
Always, though, the self-sacrifice, like Lady Mavis’ is accompanied by a moral. It’s a didactic act. The question is, who was the audience and did they catch it? The cause of Lady Mavis’ suffering, Culvert, never really got the picture. He didn’t need to, after all. In fact, he had a fondness for dramatic acts of self-violence and for theatrical cruelty. In a sense, Lady Mavis, while escaping the machine, also fed the machine. She kept the plot running the way we expected it to go.
Aydan and Lady Mary, on the other had, stopped the story in its tracks, or took it down a new path. Insofar as their own personal narratives went, the pattern was broken. Mr Fox was a collector of corpses. Lady Mary was intended to join the others in his secret chamber. But she didn’t. The story ended with her. Aydan’s fate was unknown, when she was given to the ‘experiment’ but as a follower of narrative convention, I expected terrible things to happen. Strange things happened, instead. Aydan, in some sense, unleashed a force of reversal. When she and Gujastak went into their frenzied interspecies coupling, every woman in the room was overcome by wild desire, men were grabbed, kissed, forced to fuck. This was one of the most wildly entertaining passages I’ve ever read, in any book. The story didn’t stop in its tracks so much as pivot.
Maybe this is the greatest value of stories with non-sacrificial resolutions.
Satisfaction starts in the solar plexus
When Lady Mary was hiding in Mr Fox’s house, I was in terror. I wanted nothing more than for her to escape. I couldn’t breathe until she did. When Aydan was lowered into Gujastak’s pool, I almost drowned.
A story of self-sacrifice – suicide, let’s call it what it is, stays in my memory, for sure. But it leaves me bitter, resentful, hankering, not to mention watching whomever I think of as a perpetrator and waiting for understanding to hit like a hammer. It’s only satisfying for a little while, during which you’re saying to yourself – now you see what you’ve done? Then comes the frustration when the story ends there, or when they see but they don’t actually give a shit.
Stories of survival, on the other hand, give me a different kind of satisfaction. It starts somewhere deep in the belly – let’s call it the chakra lodged in the solar plexus – manipura; colour – yellow. So this little spot of yellow light, fed with something that is not fear, not resentment, that is given reason to stay on this world, this dimension – travels up a little higher – to anahata, the heart chakra; colour – green. Think of these as the latitudes and longitudes of the body. Imaginary, invisible, but vital to getting a sense of location. Light, from Point A at the belly travels to Point B at the heart. This is a healthy satisfaction.
A yellow satisfaction. They survived, and so can I.
