Fairytale Sunday, 14/04/2024

Eat the Apple!

Welcome to Fairytale Sunday!

Part of me thought about rambling on about fairytales in Sunday Pomes & Words, like ‘Sunday Pomes & Words…& Fairytales’ but then so much came into my head that I thought no, it deserves to have its own place. So Fairytale Sunday it is. Alongside me doing the kind of thing you are about to read – call it narrative theory – I can also actually publish some proper fairytales. So if you, reader dearest, think you have a good fairytale in you, I may consider publishing it. But you should definitely read this first so you get a good idea of what I’m talking about.

Aside from anything else, it doesn’t seem like Sunday Pomes & Words is garnering that much positive response. Possibly it hasn’t been read much, I don’t know. I do, after all, at this time have only the grand total of twenty subscribers (one of which is me).

Anyhow, what prompted all this is this story by Hannah Delaney, which I read the other day. It’s about 1800 words or so I think and is a vignette about a huntsman, although it alternates the point of view between the hunter and the hunted, but in a very clever way. Go and read it and you’ll see what I mean (if you’ve already read it, read this then go and read it again).

I’m using the word ‘vignette’ by the way because that’s how I view stories of this sort of length (say, less than 2,500 words). Then we have ‘sketches’ which I guess would be, say, fewer than 1,000 words. Today people call this ‘flash fiction’. I have never liked that term. I readily admit this is my own prejudice speaking. I’ve mentioned this before in one episode of the Sunday Pomes & Words, that I was writing sketches and vignettes thirty-odd years’ ago in what I’ve come to call Juvenilia. I have around a hundred thousand words’ worth of this stuff and on reflection a lot of it is actually quite good, so I shall be doing something with that. Please don’t think I’m being arrogant here, by the way. All of that kind of short-sketch writing was at least half-inspired by my getting into Kafka in my late teens. It wasn’t necessarily the content of his short sketches that inspired me so much as his essentially giving me permission to do it. If he can get away with it, then so can I. So no, I did not invent flash fiction. Pioneer, possibly. Inventor, no.

What does this have to do with fairytales, you ask? Everything, actually. Fairytales are, aside from anything else, ‘vignettes’. Second, on a more personal note, I also happened to be a total Curehead at the time (to a certain extent I probably still am since gothdom is for life – a bit like being a spy – the intelligence agencies have a distinctly Hotel California thing going on, in that they never really let you retire). The link between the Cure and Kafka is probably unknown to anyone who isn’t a Cure fan, but obvious to someone who is. Same goes for fairytales. Half of Robert Smith’s lyrics is just pure romantic fairytales, from a certain point of view. Anyway, he wrote two Kafka-inspired songs that spring to mind, namely At Night (off the 17 Seconds LP, 1980) and A letter to Elise (off the Wish LP, 1992). The ‘Elise’ in the title is actually ‘Felice’ with whom Kafka was engaged for a while, and to whom he wrote a flurry of correspondence (I found myself in a long-distance correspondence relationship at the time so it kind of resonated; this kind of thing doesn’t happen nowadays because people have the Internet; I find that a little sad, because if you’ve never received a handwritten love letter then you don’t know what you’re missing).

The more well-known song you may have heard of from the 17 Seconds LP, A Forest, is just pure fairytale. So that’s what I’m getting at here. This version of A Forest takes you to the Live in Orange version, by the way, which in my view is the definitive version, never surpassed. In fact for a Cure fan that entire concert is definitive.

At Night (this is a bilingual version of Kafka’s story, around 200 words) is not exactly a fairytale, but it is a perfect little encapsulation of the Fairytale Setting. A group of humans making camp in a clearing in a forest and the necessity of watchers. Told in 2^nd person point of view – ‘you watch’. ‘Someone must watch, it is said. Someone must be there’. When I did my own little translation of this sketch I added a word to that final line, to effectively read ‘Some thing must be out there’. That’s a lot more creepy, of course.

And that’s the essence of the fairytale. There in the forest must be something. Otherwise you wouldn’t need watchmen (or moral fables). The fairytale is essentially a life lesson told to grandchildren – ‘don’t go into the forest, or stray from the path, because there is danger in there’. Predators, that is (yes – even that Arnie movie Predator is a classic fairytale). And you can hopefully see how that ‘wise advice’ would morph into ‘morality tales’ and ‘fables’ intended to impart life-lessons to younglings (yep, likewise, every intelligent social creature, extraterrestrials I mean, has fairytales – because they all started as hunter-gatherers – now there’s a point of mutual understanding and communication… Forget The Dark Forest – from Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem Trilogy; that’s a sign of paranoia and projection; it says more about current geopolitics and the monsters who control it than it does about the community of galactic civilisations – I’m really not keen on science fiction that is a poorly-disguised allegory for contemporary human issues.).

With all of that in mind, now please read the following fairytale:

If you’re confused, then I am willing to bet my bottom centime that the first thing that entered your head, before you could even stop it (archetypes again) was ‘what’s lurking in that forest?’. And then your imagination started answering that key narrative setup question. If that’s true and I’m right, then congratulations – you’ve just written a fairytale. And this is the essence of narrative theory. It’s the reader who supplies the subtext. A good writer knows this, and will simply make suggestions, knowing full well the reader will fill in the rest. Wallow in exposition and explicity and you’ll ruin the reader’s experience. Anyhow, if you are a writer with your own Substack and you think you’ve written what you now understand to be a fairytale (once you’ve read to the end of this essay) then you have my absolute permission to share a link to it in the comments.

And, naturally, once we are aware of all these archetypes, then we can’t start subversively messing around with them.

Should I perhaps also add, though, that another aspect to that image is the hint of the supernatural. To put this in ‘genre’ terms – we’re kind of talking ‘magical realism’ here. It is arguable that the ‘classic’ fairytale needs to have that element of magical realism in it. But the story ‘template’, however, doesn’t. And that’s important to remember. You could perhaps see Katrina’s story itself as a classic fairytale, simply by seeing the ‘forest’ as ‘the dystopian parallel world in which she finds herself’. She is completely aware of that, of course.

Given that the fairytale is, in my view, one of the two oldest stories ever told amongst humans, in order to understand this archetype (yes, think Jung) you simply need to envisage a small group of humans sometime during the ice age – say, forty thousand years ago. In fact, if you want to understand all of human nature itself (‘a group of friends sitting around a campfire’), then just imagine the behaviour of those people in that environment – their behaviour, after all, has been embedded into their brains as an evolutionary beneficial adaptation to several hundred thousand years of living in that kind of social group, in that kind of nature. It is, to a certain and very real extent, programmed into the brain. A lot of people don’t realise this when they think about evolution – a sign of the materialism of the times, perhaps – they think only in physiological evolution; but the human brain, and therefore human behaviour, has itself evolved.

Why is Dunbar’s number 150, for example? Because it’s an adaptation to living in a group of 150 individuals. If it had been a group of 300, Dunbar’s number would be 300. I’m convinced that this is one of the reasons the Neanderthals went extinct, by the way – their version of Dunbar’s number was much lower, perhaps as low as a tenth of what it is for homo sapiens. Notice too that if this number is a marker for ‘how many people you can know everything about’ then you’ll understand that a socially disruptive bad guy simply can’t survive in such a group – they’d be ostracised pretty quickly (think, as an example out of the hat, a lying narcissistic scumbag like Boris Johnson – that personality profile wouldn’t last a minute in a commune). And so they need to learn to disguise themselves, perhaps in the manner of a lycanthrope. But even then, they have to wait for an agricultural revolution and a vastly increased population size if they wish to truly conceal themselves successfully. And notice how the importance of this number is played down…

As an aside, if you want to understand ‘propaganda’ then simply remember that human beings see and understand the world through stories and narratives. Narratives are concept-forming, or belief-system forming – as such as they determine behaviour (see also the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). All that propaganda really is, then, as a ‘psyop’ (psychological operation), is simply a ‘subversive narrative’. It is, in fact, a fairytale. And that’s all it ever is. Understand that, and hey presto you’ve got yourselves an immunity from propaganda and subversion.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here when it comes to analysis of fairytales – so hold that thought. I’ll just implant the following suggestion into your head – what if the monster is no longer ‘out there somewhere’, but manages to get inside… If you want to write a good horror story – subvert the fairytale accordingly. With that in mind, I’ll tell you all about one of Katrina’s early movies a bit later, namely her adaptation of J. Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla (that link takes you to a free ebook version – it's well out of copyright by now, having been published in 1872). It’s a female vampire story, in case you didn’t know (and quite an influence on Stoker’s Dracula, which he readily acknowledged – Dracula was published in 1897, 25 years later). I was, actually, intending to make this first Fairytale Sunday all about that story and Katrina’s adaptation, but given how much I’m rambling here, it might be best not to bombard you with a lengthy dissertation at this stage. Aside from anything else it deserves an article to itself. Although I am minded to scour the Memory Palace for this movie and write down the screenplay. I guess that would become one of the ‘behind the scenes’ things for my paid-for subscribers. It is a seriously brilliant movie (yes, I have watched it in my head several times). Suffice to say that Katrina was perfectly aware of the fairytale narrative, and subverted it unapologetically. Call it postmodern irony likewise.

These previous two images, by the way, are by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash.

Anyhow, because Hannah got me so absorbed in her story, though, it wasn’t until afterwards that it suddenly struck me that I’d just read a classic fairytale. As such, it triggered something of a neuronal cascade from the Memory Palace (also known as the hippocampus, for all you neuroscience fans out there). I remembered that I do know a fair bit about fairytales, in particular with regards to various ways of analysing them, along with their place in narrative theory.

Likewise, I suggested that the fairytale is one of the two oldest stories in the book. The other one is called ‘the one that got away’, told from the hunter’s point of view. Notice how they both involve the forest (other settings also available, naturally – although I’m only going to focus on the forest setting for the purposes of this incessant burbling). One of the totally impressive aspects to Hannah’s story is that, whether consciously or semi-consciously (let us know in the comments, Hannah), she in fact combined both of these two oldest stories. Even more so, she then cleverly played around and subverted them. And to do all that in fewer than 2,000 words is, to me, the sign of a naturally gifted writer. Is this kind of thing consciously done, or is it the exposition of archetypes in the psyche? That’s an intriguing question and if I start burbling on about Jung then we’ll be here all week. So I’ll set that one aside for the mo.

So, then, here’s where I delve into my own psyche and you’ll understand where I’m coming from with all this, and why I have this intimate relationship with the fairytale. There are two reasons as it happens. The first is perfectly acceptable and believable because it’s prosaic, and stems from my education (put simply I studied the subject, that is); the second, on the other paw, you don’t have to believe in if you don’t want to because it’s a mystical, spiritual thing to do with a potential previous incarnation in Southern Germany around the turn of the fifteenth century (example: Richard II of England married a girl from Bohemia called Anne and by all accounts they loved each other; tragically she died young; how would a literate German girl romantically steeped in fairytales feel about that?). When I first started learning German it seemed the easiest thing in the world, as if I already knew the language. The same was true when I studied medieval social history.

So if you don’t want to believe it – somewhat in the manner of a modern psychologist, perhaps – then just think of that incarnation itself as a fairytale. If you are a psychologist, and you find that the existence of the supernatural totally screws up your materialist worldview and your entire profession, for that matter, then I would suggest you conjure up some useful words like ‘fantasy’, ‘delusion’ and the most useful term of them all ‘compensatory mechanism’.

I’ve often thought how awful it must be to be a modern psychologist. All they do is study humans in cages and convince themselves they are now in a position to make sweeping, generalised insights about normal human behaviour. Sorry, but you’re wrong. You cannot study a creature in an unnatural setting and say the slightest thing about that creature. You wouldn’t, after all, go to the zoo, look at that lion pacing up and down in its cage and say that’s ‘normal’ would you? Of course not. It’s a sign of a serious mental illness. In fact it says more about the zookeeper than the lion. It’s perverse, cruel, and torturous. As I’ve said, you have to study a creature in its natural setting if you want to make statements about its innate behaviour. And there is nothing natural or normal about the modern world. So all they are really doing is studying humans with serious mental illnesses – because these modern humans have, out of survival necessity, become adapted to this unnatural setting (and perhaps this is the real, dastardly and sinister and evil intention of the monsters in control of this world – use evolutionary adaptation to fundamentally and permanently alter the human brain, and human behaviour, to become normalised to dystopia; to become monsters like them in other words; Nietzsche might have something to say about that; something to do with fighting monsters and the abyss, I think). So it must be soul-destroying for these modern psychologists.

The only psychologist I ever saw who did anything positive for me was a woman who did understand about the soul and the spirit and the essence and all the rest of that Pagan jazz. She instantly understood me and over the course of those few hours I ended up almost completely healed. ‘You’re an orchid child, aren’t you?’ she observed. As opposed to the majority, that is, who are dandelions, as she put it. Totally true. We orchids, we beautiful but vulnerable souls, really do need to be loved. And we want to love in return. This is nothing against dandelions, by the way. The implication is that dandelions are a very hardy and strong plant and one of nature’s perennial survivors. And if you catch their leaves young then they go very well in salads. We have lots of them in our garden, and they are very welcome. But we orchid children are just perennially fragile. So be nice to us, eh?

The first psychologist I encountered, who assessed me at the age of around twelve, was clearly only there to cover up the child abuse at that monstrous institution. She saw me again at seventeen and misdiagnosed yet again. On purpose? I’ll leave that as an opinion. The next one was a ‘Freudian’ who, in the manner typical of the Freudians, used me as some kind of test subject for the projection of one of his pet little theories. Freudians – as per their progenitor himself, Sigmund – are notorious, or should be, for these kinds of projections (also known as ‘transference’ in psychology). My use of the word ‘progenitor’ there (of a cult) is a deliberate ironic reference to one of Freud’s last essays Moses and Monotheism (I’m loathe to cite Wikipedia as a reference by the way but it does have a lot of references; Freud suggested that the character of a ‘religion’ and its followers is a reflection of the character of its progenitor – this I do agree with, but Freud is completely wrong about Moses and Akhenaten – but that’s just another example of Freud’s subversive agenda). Just for the record, you know. Freud’s notion of the ’sexually dysfunctional family’ only applies to him. But in order to make himself feel better, to feel ‘normal’, he was psychologically compelled to ‘normalise’. Sorry, Sigmund, but most parents are not paedos! And children do not have a ‘sexuality’ – that’s why there’s something called ‘puberty’.

For those unaware of Freud’s personal history, it only behooves me to mention that Sigmund’s father was a serious nonce (see that link also for Florence Rush and the ‘Freudian Coverup’ of child sexual abuse). And neither little Siggy nor his siblings escaped any of that. And while we’re talking about ‘projection’, it is indeed a truism that people undergoing Freudian analysis do see Freudian symbolism in their dreams, whilst those undergoing Jungian analysis see Jungian symbols. In other words, there is no ‘fixed dictionary of symbols and meanings’ going on there. Sometimes a banana is just a banana. Actually here’s a question that occurs to me – ‘do lesbians ever dream of bananas?’ (that also happens to be the lesser-known, thankfully unpublished, title of the companion piece to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Not a lot of people know that…).

Do I have personal reasons for despising Freud and his acolytes? No, you don’t say! It’s yet another reason why I like Jung so much – he was, after all, ostracised by Freud and the rest of his Vienna Circle coven. And if we’re on the subject of ‘psyops’ then here’s a conspiracy theory for you – Freudianism is about subversively undermining the emerging subject of psychology itself, precisely to prevent people from understanding themselves, and the abnormality of the world in which they live, from enlightenment and what Jung would call ‘individuation’, and thus being motivated to overturn the dystopian social control and fashion a utopia for themselves. I’ll leave that one hanging.

This is not irrelevant to the subject of fairytales, by the way, readers dearest, before you think ‘what the hell is she going on about now’. When I was studying Märchenanalyse (‘analysis of fairytales’) we primarily looked at two distinct, but related approaches. Namely the Freudian, and then the feminist (the feminist, as you’ll readily see, is in part a reaction to the Freudian). You can read a pdf of Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment here, if you can stomach it (that’s the Freudian one). Maybe it’ll be better if I just give you the briefest intro from memory. With regards to the feminist critique that’s a serious minefield strewn with academic articles so I will not subject you to links, but do an overview likewise (that first link I gave, from a quick online search, however, seems approachable as an overview of some of the obvious themes – patriarchal gender roles and all that). Use your search engine of choice if you’re interested in further reading and you’ll see what I mean. This article, however, has a look at the Disney thing and is somewhat layperson’s and quite approachable in terms of modern themes. If I do have time then I’ll try my best to dig you up some accessible references (perhaps for a future Fairytale Sunday).

Actually, guess what I just did in typical fairytale fashion? I put some eggs on to boil, got totally frustrated with my search engine and totally forgot about the eggs! Pop! Pop! Pop! And there was I thinking I was a good cook. Ridiculous. Don’t laugh.

Ok, laugh.

So the Freudian, then, which incorporates the ‘interpretation of dreams’ (symbolism), analyses the fairytale by assuming the story to be like an expressed dream of the (child-)protagonist. It then evaluates it through the lens of the ‘family dynamic’. That’s to say perverse shit like the ‘Oedipus complex’. Or perhaps more pertinent would be the female version of that which is the ‘Electra’ complex. That’s to say, attraction to the opposite gender parent, view of the same gender parent as a ‘rival’ for those affections (Jung probably came to regret ever suggesting it to Freud – it’s where ‘penis envy’ comes from – which is an utter absurdity). The fairytale then is the sublimated expression of the subconscious wish to ‘eliminate’ the rival (notice how in most fairytales the father is a widower). And of course, because this is ‘suppressed’ instead of the protagonist consummating with the opposite-gender parent (the father, let’s say), they ‘transfer’ or ‘project’ that desire onto a substitute, namely the ‘handsome prince’.

Well I say fuck that shit.

Not to put too much of a point on it, you know. Now you can tell I’m a feminist, right. All feminists should view Freud and Freudians as an enemy. The amount of social damage Freud’s quackery did is somewhat incalculable. Think of it this way – by sexualising children did he not effectively suggest that ‘child abuse is normal’?! And how about subjugation of women likewise? Instead of simply understanding that all those ‘women with neuroses’ were expressing a perfectly understandable reaction to being forced to live in a patriarchal, misogynist social setting – a cage, in other words – what Freud fundamentally did was internalise the cause of that ‘hysteria’. You’re the problem – said Freud. No – patriarchal society is the fucking problem, Sigmund! I mean, how obvious does it have to be?

Feminist analysis, then, fundamentally objects to this. But it goes further, to be fair. If we return to many of the Brothers Grimm versions (German High Middle Ages) the feminist analysis would suggest that these stories are ‘reinforcing socially-constructed gender roles’. In particular with regards to young girls. Cinderella, for example, in this reading, sees the ‘prince’ as the archetypal desirable alpha male, as opposed to the humble woodsman, that is. But given the prince is at the top of the hierarchy, she is by definition subordinate. Others might suggest it’s implanting unrealistic and unfulfillable desires into young women (teenagers), ultimately making them unhappy when they inevitably don’t end up marrying princes (or Mr. Darcy, even). That’s quite relevant to the modern world, of course.

But take my favourite, Rotkäppchen (literal translation ‘little red cap’ – you know this one as Little Red Riding Hood – I’m going to assume you know this story already). The original Grimm’s version uses the word ‘Dirne’ instead of ‘girl’ (‘Mädchen’ in German), so we actually have the opening line ‘once upon a time there was a sweet little prostitute’. Bet you never knew that, eh? And do you think they’d ever get away with that one in this day and age? I seriously doubt it. So a feminist reading of this story (yes, think Angela Carter likewise) would say the ‘charming wolf’ is a ‘moral warning’ of unsavoury men and the dangers of ‘loose morals’ – thus, a girl must not stray from the path. This is, as it happens, one of the reasons I am totally in love with Neil Jordan’s breathtaking adaptation of Carter’s Company of Wolves. There is – shall we say from a third wave feminist perspective – a beautiful subversion of the patriarchal morality tale there with the amazing line ‘for she was just a girl, after all, who had strayed from the path into the forest, and remembered what she’d found there’. Beautiful. If you haven’t seen that movie – do so. Notice also how this movie starts with the girl in the modern, contemporary setting, who then dreams about this other life in the fairytale setting.

Notice also in the Red Riding Hood story how you have the archetype of Maiden-Mother-Crone. Red Riding Hood is the maiden, the grandmother is the forward projection of she herself as a grandmother to come (the crone), with the forest and its path in between representing her adult life (mother), populated as it is with dangers for the unwary and all that. You might also think of this as a warning against bad men pretending to be good men – think coercive controllers and domestic abusers, who nearly always start out presenting themselves as the archetypal ‘charmer’ but once they’ve got you dependent on them, suddenly reveal their true, predatory and abusive nature.

The feminist analysis, likewise, will readily criticise the fairytale for it being ‘the charming prince’ or ‘the valiant woodcutter’ who rescues the hapless girl. Thus enforcing gender stereotypes – yadda yadda yadda. It’s one reason why I like the original Wonder Woman character – she may always get herself tied up (yes, there is a bondage element to that, her creator (William Marsten) was a swinger after all, who also invented the lie detector test, intriguingly enough), but she always rescues herself. Feminist antidote to Superman, see?

Yes – whilst I am perfectly fine with the feminist critique of Freudian Märchenanalyse, and I do know where they’re coming from with regards to the patriarchal gender role thing, I would counsel against generalisations and saying ‘that’s all the fairytale is’ – i.e. a ‘subversive method for the patriarchy to enforce gender stereotypes for the purposes of social control’ (notice also how that patriarchal subversion also applies to these anti-trans ‘gender critical’ types – they are blatantly anti-feminist, what with their bioessentialist definition of males and females; it’s not surprising their agenda ultimately stems from the Vatican).

Why would I disagree with this? Because the fairytale – as I say – is so very, very much older than that. And because it is indeed true that there are ‘dangers for the unwary’ in any social setting – namely in the form of ‘wolves pretending to be gentlemen’. Or, to put in another way ‘evil pretending to be good’.

How, after all, did those sociopathic aberrations in ancient times escape ostracism? Nice little epiphany there, I hope. I like that.

So let’s finally apply that insight to one of the oldest written fairytales in the book. You all know it, just that you’ve probably never thought of it as a fairytale before.

Garden of Eden, reader dear. Garden of Eden.

Here’s the fairytale. Adam and Eve are children. But let’s call them Hansel and Gretel instead. Why not. The snake was a symbol of wisdom in the ancient world (everyone hearing this story at the time would’ve understood it that way – these symbols were common knowledge). The God of Wisdom (let’s call the snake ‘Lucifer’, bringer of light and wisdom, for want of a better name) exhorts the children to eat the apple – the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (at the heart of the forest). If they do this, they will be able to see through the disguise of the wolf masquerading as a charmer. They will certainly see through the deceit and deception and fear-mongering propaganda of a demon pretending to be a god. The moral of the story, however, is that even though the children do take the wise old serpent’s advice, they tragically allow themselves to be terrified into submission and subjugation by the demon pretending to be a god (the patriarchal demon, if you want to get feminist about it). To such an extent that they end up believing what it says. They believe it really is a god and that it ‘does love you, really’ (like the classic coercive controller) and that they must obey it (that’s what the Bible means when it uses the word ‘love’ as in love of god). And what effect has that had on human history since?

Evil always pretends to be good. Why? Because if humanity saw the monster for what it really is, then ostracism wins. Pure self-defence. A behaviour embedded into the human psyche over hundreds of thousands of years.

Of course the monster must deceive. And conceal, and hide. Its very survival depends on it.

All of human history is a fairytale, dearest readers. All of it.

See you next Sunday…