timelets

So I approach a blank page with the understanding that children need food, and adventure (and with adventure, the promise that an adversary can and will be overcome), and a microscope to investigate the detail of daily life. But children also have a craving for jokes. A joke is a form of cherishing as well as a form of novelty.

Yet the thing I longed for most in children’s books were stories that would salute the reader’s intelligence, acknowledging that though small and hectic and clumsy without, we were not small and hectic and clumsy within.

At the end of my list of things I longed for is the most divisive among both child and adult readers: magic. I longed for the impossible.

For more than three thousand years we have been inventing mythical creatures, but the reason we have done so is less clear.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n02/katherine-rundell/why-children-s-books

Сказка вообще не знает сострадания. Если герой отпускает животное, то он делает это не из сострадания, а на некоторых договорных началах.
...
Можно показать, что рыба или другие животные, пощаженные, а не съеденные Иваном, не что иное, как животные-предки, животные, которых нельзя есть и которые потому и помогают, что они тотемные предки.

-- В. Пропп. Исторические корни волшебной сказки.

Recovery, Escape, Consolation.
...
Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view.

Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories. ... the desire to visit, free as a fish, the deep sea; or the longing for the noiseless, gracious, economical flight of a bird, that longing which the aeroplane cheats, except in rare moments, seen high and by wind and distance noiseless, turning in the sun: that is, precisely when imagined and not used. There are profounder wishes: such as the desire to converse with other living things.
...
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well...

--- J.R.R. Tolkien. On Fairy Stories.

My lord was pleased to represent me as a great admirer of projects, and a person of much curiosity and easy belief; which, indeed, was not without truth; for I had myself been a sort of projector in my younger days.
....

I was received very kindly by the warden, and went for many days to the academy. Every room has in it one or more projectors; and I believe I could not be in fewer than five hundred rooms.

--- Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift. 1726.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm
Part 3, Chapters 4-5.

But by the time people became concerned about... about students, by the time they came to consider just how you were reared, whether you should have been brought into existence at all, well by then it was too late. There was no way to reverse the process. How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease.

--- Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go.

“Unlike classical myths, fairy tales usually restore the victims of metamorphosis to their original form. Or they transfigure them to be far more beautiful than before. The restoration leads to recognition: when the beast guise falls away, the true prince appears. In every case, the outer form has hidden the inner man, and it takes something momentous to overturn the beast’s fate. Beast fairy tales like these follow a narrative arc: the story begins with a spell or a curse that binds the male hero under a terrible disguise, and after a passage of ordeals and horrors, closes with recognition and fulfilment (these are Cinderella tales with a male protagonist).”

...

“Beast fairy tales like these follow a narrative arc: the story begins with a spell or a curse that binds the male hero under a terrible disguise, and after a passage of ordeals and horrors, closes with recognition and fulfilment (these are Cinderella tales with a male protagonist). Sometimes the plot follows emotional or psychological logic, but not always; a great deal of the impact of these fairy tales depends on the stark absence of explanation, on the sheer mysteriousness of the premises and outcome: how did the Beast come to be a Beast?”


-- Marina Warner. “Fairy Tale.”

“Little Red Riding Hood” is a tale about rape and the survival or non- survival of a rape victim. It is a tale about predators and how to deal with them.
...
Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers transformed an oral folk tale about the social initiation of a young woman into a narrative about rape in which the heroine is obliged to bear the responsibility for sexual violation.


--- Jack Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick. 2006.

And the father of Taj al-Muluk spake to him on this wise, "O my son, her father is a King whose land is far from ours: so put away this thought and go into thy mother's palace where are five hundred maidens like moons, and whichsoever of them pleaseth thee, take her; or else we will seek for thee in marriage some one of the King's daughters, fairer than the Lady Dunya."