“...from the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner: “A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude.”
“...from the American novelist and critic Ronald Sukenick: “All fiction can be profitably regarded as argument. When you define fiction by representation you end up confining it to realism at some level and arguing that fiction, as a form of make-believe, is a way of lying to get at the truth, which if not palpably stupid is certainly round-about and restrictive. My approach frees fiction from the obligations of mimesis, popularly, and most often critically, assumed to be its defining quality.”
An important qualification to this argument is that there is not necessarily any single privileged way of reading the conflict in a story, or sometimes even defining what or who it involves. This sounds extreme, but it can be especially true in longer and more complex narratives like the story of Oedipus.
--- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”
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
“The French writer Henry de Montherlant famously said, “Le bonheur écrit à l’encre blanche sur des pages blanches.” Happiness writes in white ink on white pages.”
Salman Rushdie. “Knife.”
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.
“Cultural representations such as Little Red Riding Hood, the Golden Rule, or multiplication tables are, most of the time, considered in the abstract, even though they must be instantiated in mental and public representations in order to play a role in human affairs.. Since representations are recognized in our commonsense ontology, the question arises: What cognitive mechanisms do we have, if any, for drawing inferences about them? ”
“There must be a mindreading module—actually a minds-reading module, with “minds” in the plural—that has the job of managing, in our mental files about other people, what these people have in their men “mental files. No such module, however, could do the job on its own. In order to perform mindreading inferences about the inferences that are performed in other people’s mind, the mindreading module must be linked to a great variety of other inferential modules and use them for updating the information represented in individual files.”
Dan Sperber. “The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.”
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.
...it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the
vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician. There is one proviso : if there is any satire
present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be
taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away.
--- J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories
http://ieas-szeged.hu/downtherabbithole/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Tolkien-On-Fairy-Stories.pdf
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.
Apollonius, we are told, not understanding the Roman language, requested Cicero to declaim in Greek, with which request Cicero readily complied, thinking that in this way his faults could better be corrected. After he had declaimed, his other hearers were astounded and vied with one another in their praises, but Apollonius was not greatly moved while listening to him, and when he had ceased sat for a long time lost in thought; then, since Cicero was distressed at this, he said: "Thee, indeed, O Cicero, I admire and commend; but Greece I pity for her sad fortune, since I see that even the only glories which were left to us, culture and eloquence, are through thee to belong also to the Romans."
--- Plutarch, The Life of Cicero, 4:10.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Cicero*.html
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.
In a fairy tale, internal processes are externalized and become comprehensible as represented by the figures of the story and its events. ”
--- Bruno Bettelheim. “The Uses of Enchantment.”
“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.”
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