Kiddie lit.
Yep. Alice in Wonderland. Treasure Island. The Narnia novels. The Wind in the Willows and The Cat in the Hat. Goodnight Moon. We may not know Shylock, but we all know Sam I Am. Fairy tales, too, although only the major ones. Slavic folktales, those darlings of the Russian formalist critics of the 1920s, don’t have a lot of currency in Paducah. But thanks to Disney, they know “Snow White” from Vladivostok to Valdosta, “Sleeping Beauty” from Sligo to Salinas. An added bonus here is the lack of ambiguity in fairy tales. While we may not know quite what to think about Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia or the fate of Laertes, we’re pretty darned sure what we think about the evil stepmother or Rumpelstiltskin. We kind of like the idea of Prince Charming or the healing power of tears.
Of all the fairy tales available to the writer, there’s one that has more drawing power than any other, at least in the late twentieth century: “Hansel and Gretel.” Every age has its own favorite stories, but the story of children lost and far from home has a universal appeal. For the age of anxiety, the age when Blind Faith sang “Can’t Find My Way Home,” the age of not just Lost Boys but lost generations, “H&G” has to be the preferred story. And it is. The tale shows up in a variety of ways in a host of stories from the sixties on. Robert Coover has a story called “The Gingerbread House” (1969) whose innovation is that the two children aren’t called Hansel and Gretel. The story makes use of our knowledge of the original p. 60 story by employing signs we’ll recognize as standing in for the parts we’re familiar with: since we already know the story from the arrival at the gingerbread house till the shove into the oven, Coover doesn’t mention it. The witch, for example, as the story progresses is metonymically transformed into the black rags she wears, as if we’re just catching her out of the corner of our eye (metonymy is the rhetorical device in which a part is made to stand for the whole, as when “Washington” is used to represent America’s position on an issue). We don’t see her attack the children directly; rather, she kills the doves that eat the bread crumbs. In some ways, this act is even more menacing; it’s as if she is erasing the only memory of the children’s way home. When, at the end of the tale, the boy and girl arrive at the gingerbread house, we only get a glimpse of the black rags flapping in the breeze. We’re made to reevaluate what we know of this story, of the degree to which we take its elements for granted. By stopping the story where the drama normally kicks in, with the children innocently transgressing against the witch’s property, Coover forces us to see how our responses—anxiety, trepidation, excitement—are conditioned by our previous encounters with the original fairy tale. See, he suggests, you don’t need the story because you have already internalized it so completely. That’s one thing writers can do with readerly knowledge of source texts, in this case fairy tales. They can mess around with the stories and turn them upside down. Angela Carter does that in The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of stories that tear the roof off old, sexist fairy tales to create subversive, feminist revisions. She upends our expectations about the story of Bluebeard, or Puss-in-Boots, or Little Red Riding Hood to make us see the sexism inherent in those stories and, by extension, in the culture that embraced them.
But that’s not the only way to use old stories. Coover and Carter put the emphasis on the old story itself, while most writers are going to dredge up pieces of the old tale to shore p. 61 up aspects of their own narratives without placing the focus on “Hansel and Gretel” or “Rapunzel.” Okay, let’s assume you’re the writer. You have a young couple, maybe not children, and certainly not the children of the woodsman, and definitely not brother and sister. Let’s say you have a pair of young lovers, and for whatever reason they’re lost. Maybe their car broke down far from home; maybe there’s no forest, but a city, all public housing high-rises. They’ve taken a wrong turn, suburban types with a BMW maybe, and they’re in a part of town that is wilderness as far as they’re concerned. So they’re lost, no cell phone, and maybe the only option turns out to be a crack house. What you’ve got in this hypothetical tale is a fairly dramatic setup that’s already fraught with possibility. All perfectly modern. No woodcutter. No bread crumbs. No gingerbread. So why dredge up some moldy old fairy tale? What can it possibly tell us about this modern situation?
Well, what elements do you want to emphasize in your story? What feature of the plight of these young people most resonates for you? It might be the sense of lostness. Children too far from home, in a crisis not of their own making. Maybe the temptation: one child’s gingerbread is another’s drugs. Maybe it’s having to fend for themselves, without their customary support network.
Depending on what you want to accomplish, you may choose some prior tale (in our case, “H&G”) and emphasize what you see as corresponding elements in the two tales. It may be pretty simple, like the guy wishing they had a trail of bread crumbs because he missed a turn or two back there and doesn’t know this part of town. Or the woman hoping this doesn’t turn out to be the witch’s house.
Here’s the good deal for you as writer: You don’t have to use the whole story. Sure, it has X, Y, and B, but not A, C, and Z. So what? We’re not trying to re-create the fairy tale here. Rather, we’re trying to make use of details or patterns, porp. 62tions of some prior story (or, once you really start thinking like a professor, “prior text,” since everything is a text) to add depth and texture to your story, to bring out a theme, to lend irony to a statement, to play with readers’ deeply ingrained knowledge of fairy tales. So use as much or as little as you want. In fact, you may invoke the whole story simply by a single small reference.
Why? Because fairy tales, like Shakespeare, the Bible, mythology, and all other writing and telling, belong to the one big story, and because, since we were old enough to be read to or propped up in front of a television, we’ve been living on that story, and on its fairy variants. Once you’ve seen Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck in a version of one of the classics, you pretty much own it as part of your consciousness. In fact, it will be hard to read the Grimm Brothers and not think Warner Brothers.
Doesn’t that work out to be sort of ironic?
Absolutely. That’s one of the best side effects of borrowing from any prior text. Irony, in various guises, drives a great deal of fiction and poetry, even when the work isn’t overtly ironic or when the irony is subtle. Let’s face it, these two clandestine lovers are hardly babes in the woods. But maybe they are. Socially out of their depth in this part of town. Morally misguided, perhaps. Lost and in danger. Ironically, their symbols of power—BMW, Rolex watch, money, expensive clothes—don’t help them a bit and actually make them more vulnerable. Finding their way and avoiding the witch may be as hard for them as for the two pint-sized venturers of the original. So they don’t have to push anyone into an oven, or leave a trail of crumbs, or break off and eat any of the siding. And they are probably far from innocent. Whenever fairy tales and their simplistic worldview crop up in connection with our complicated and morally ambiguous world, you can almost certainly plan on irony.
p. 63 In the age of existentialism and thereafter, the story of lost children has been all the rage. Coover. Carter. John Barth. Tim O’Brien. Louise Erdrich. Toni Morrison. Thomas Pynchon. On and on and on. But you don’t have to use “Hansel and Gretel” just because it’s the flavor of the month. Or even of the last half century. “Cinderella” will always have her uses. “Snow White” works. Anything in fact with an evil queen or stepmother. “Rapunzel” has her applications; even the J. Geils Band mentions her. Something with a Prince Charming? Okay, but tough to live up to the comparison, so be prepared for irony.
I’ve been talking here as if you’re the writer, but you know and I know that we’re really readers. So how does this apply? For one thing, it has to do with how you attack a text. When you sit down to read a novel, you want character, story, ideas, the usual business. Then, if you’re like me, you’ll start looking for glimpses of the familiar: hey, that kind of feels like something I know. O
h wait, that’s out of Alice in Wonderland. Now why would she draw a parallel to the Red Queen here? Is that the hole in the ground? Why? Always, why?
Here’s what I think we do: we want strangeness in our stories, but we want familiarity, too. We want a new novel to be not quite like anything we’ve read before. At the same time, we look for it to be sufficiently like other things we’ve read so that we can use those to make sense of it. If it manages both things at once, strangeness and familiarity, it sets up vibrations, harmonies to go with the melody of the main story line. And those harmonies are where a sense of depth, solidity, resonance comes from. Those harmonies may come from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from Dante or Milton, but also from humbler, more familiar texts.
So next time you go to your local bookstore and carry home a novel, don’t forget your Brothers Grimm.
9 – It’s Greek to Me
p. 64 IN THESE LAST THREE CHAPTERS we’ve talked about three sorts of myth: Shakespearean, biblical, and folk/fairy tale. The connection of religion and myth sometimes causes trouble in class when someone takes myth to mean “untrue” and finds it hard to unite that meaning with deeply held religious beliefs. That’s not what I mean by “myth,” though. Rather, what I’m suggesting is the shaping and sustaining power of story and symbol. Whether one believes that the story of Adam and Eve is true, literally or figuratively, matters, but not in this context. Here, in this activity of reading and understanding literature, we’re chiefly concerned with how that story functions as material for literary creators, the way in which it can inform a story or poem, and how it is perceived by the reader. All three p. 65 of these mythologies work as sources of material, of correspondences, of depth for the modern writer (and every writer is modern—even John Dryden was not archaic when he was writing), and provided they’re recognizable to the reader, they enrich and enhance the reading experience. Of the three, biblical myth probably covers the greatest range of human situations, encompassing all ages of life including the next life, all relationships whether personal or governmental, and all phases of the individual’s experience, physical, sexual, psychological, spiritual. Still, both the worlds of Shakespeare and of fairy and folk tales provide fairly complete coverage as well.
What we mean in speaking of “myth” in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry—all very highly useful and informative in their own right—can’t. That explanation takes the shape of stories that are deeply ingrained in our group memory, that shape our culture and are in turn shaped by it, that constitute a way of seeing by which we read the world and, ultimately, ourselves. Let’s say it this way: myth is a body of story that matters.
Every community has its own body of story that matters. Nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner went back to the Germanic myths for the material for his operas, and whether the results are good or bad in either historic or musical terms, the impulse to work with his tribal myths is completely understandable. The late twentieth century witnessed a great surge of Native American writing, much of which went back to tribal myth for material, for imagery, for theme, as in the case of Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Yellow Woman,” Louise Erdrich’s Kashpaw/Nanapush novels, and Gerald Vizenor’s peculiar Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. When Toni Morrison introduces human flight into Song of Solomon, many readers, white readers especially, take her to be referring to Icarus, whereas what she really has in mind, she has said, is the myth p. 66 of the flying Africans, a story that matters to her community, her tribe. On one level, there’s not much difference between Silko’s project and Wagner’s; he too is simply going back to the myths of his tribe. We sometimes forget that people in an age of top hats and stiff collars had tribes, but we do so at our peril. In all these cases, what the artist is doing is reaching back for stories that matter to him and his community—for myth.
In European and Euro-American cultures, of course, there’s another source of myth. Let me rephrase that: MYTH. When most of us think myth, we mean the northern shores of the Mediterranean between two and three thousand years ago. We mean Greece and Rome. Greek and Roman myth is so much a part of the fabric of our consciousness, of our unconscious really, that we scarcely notice. You doubt me? In the town where I live, the college teams are known as the Spartans. Our high school? The Trojans. In my state we have a Troy (one of whose high schools is Athens—and they say there are no comedians in education), an Ithaca, a Sparta, a Romulus, a Remus, and a Rome. These communities are scattered around the state and date from different periods of settlement. Now if a town in the center of Michigan, a fair distance from anything that can be called Aegean or Ionian (although it’s not very far from the town of Ionia), can be named Ithaca, it suggests that Greek myth has had pretty good staying power.
Let’s go back to Toni Morrison for a moment. I’m always slightly amazed that Icarus gets all the ink. It was his father, Daedalus, who crafted the wings, who knew how to get off Crete and safely reach the mainland, and who in fact flew to safety. Icarus, the kid, the daredevil, failed to follow his father’s advice and plunged to his death. His fall remains a source of enduring fascination for us and for our literature and art. In it we see so much: the parental attempt to save the child and the grief at having failed, the cure that proves as deadly as the ailment, the youthful exuberance that leads to self-destruction, p. 67 the clash between sober, adult wisdom and adolescent recklessness, and of course the terror involved in that headlong descent into the sea. Absolutely none of this has anything to do with Morrison and her flying Africans, so it’s little wonder that she’s a bit mystified by this response of her readers. But it’s a story and a pattern that is so deeply burrowed into our consciousness that readers may almost automatically consider it whenever flying or falling is invoked. Clearly it doesn’t fit the situation in Song of Solomon. But it does apply in other works. In 1558 Pieter Brueghel painted a wonderful picture, Landscape with Fall of Icarus. In the foreground we see a plowman and his ox, just beyond him a shepherd and his flock, and at sea a merchant ship sailing placidly along; this is a scene of utter ordinariness and tranquillity. Only in the lower right corner of the painting is there anything even remotely suggestive of trouble: a pair of legs askew as they disappear into the water. That’s our boy. He really doesn’t have much of a presence in the frame, but his presence makes all the difference. Without the pathos of the doomed boy, we have a picture of farming and merchant shipping with no narrative or thematic power. I teach, with some regularity, two great poems based on that painting, W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1940) and William Carlos Williams’s “Landscape with Fall of Icarus” (1962). They’re wonderful poems, very different from each other in tone, style, and form, but in essential agreement about how the world goes on even in the face of our private tragedies. Each artist alters what he finds in the painting. Brueghel introduces the plowman and the ship, neither of which appears in the version that comes to us from the Greeks. And Williams and Auden find, in their turn, slightly different elements to emphasize in the painting. Williams’s poem stresses the pictorial elements of the painting, trying to capture the scene while sneaking in the thematic elements. Even his arrangement of the poem on the page, narrow and highly vertical, recalls the body plummeting p. 68 from the sky. Auden’s poem, on the other hand, is a meditation on the private nature of suffering and the way in which the larger world takes no interest in our private disasters. It is astonishing and pleasing to discover that the painting can occasion these two very different responses. Beyond them, readers find their own messages in all this. As someone who was a teenager in the sixties, I am reminded by the fate of Icarus of all those kids who bought muscle cars with names like GTO and 442 and Charger and Barracuda. All the driver education and solid parental advice in the world can’t overcome the allure of that kind of power, and sadly, in too many cases those young drivers shared the fate of Icarus. My students, somewhat younger than I am, will inevitably dr
aw other parallels. Still, it all goes back to the myth: the boy, the wings, the unscheduled dive.
So that’s one way classical myth can work: overt subject matter for poems and paintings and operas and novels. What else can myth do?
Here’s a thought. Let’s say you wanted to write an epic poem about a community of poor fishermen in the Caribbean. If this was a place you came from, and you knew these people like you know your own family, you’d want to depict the jealousies and resentments and adventure and danger, as well as capturing their dignity and their life in a way that conveys all that has escaped the notice of tourists and white property owners. You could, I suppose, try being really, really earnest, portraying the characters as very serious and sober, making them noble by virtue of their goodness. But I bet that wouldn’t work. What you’d wind up with instead would probably be very stiff and artificial, and artificiality is never noble. Besides, these folks aren’t saints. They make a lot of mistakes: they’re petty, envious, lustful, occasionally greedy as well as courageous, elegant, powerful, knowledgeable, profound. And you want noble, after all, not Tonto—there’s no Lone Ranger here. p. 69 Alternatively, you might try grafting their story onto some older story of rivalry and violence, a story where even the victor is ultimately doomed, a story where, despite occasional personal shortcomings, the characters have an unmistakable nobility. You could give your characters names like Helen, Philoctetes, Hector, and Achille. At least that’s what Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott does in his Omeros (1990). Those names are drawn, of course, from The Iliad, although Walcott uses elements—parallels, persons, and situations—of both it and The Odyssey in his epic.
How to Read Literature Like a Professor Page 7