timelets

“Folktales are real (le fiabe sono vere)” [Calvino]

The structures of wonder and magic open ways of recording experience while imagining a time when suffering will be over. Fate will be changed; perpetrators overcome. The wishful thinking and the happy ending are rooted in sheer misery.

Unlike myths, which are about gods and superheroes, fairytale protagonists are recognizably ordinary working people, toiling at ordinary occupations over a long period of history, before industrialization and mass literacy.

-- Warner, Marina;. “Once upon a Time.”

"In The Invention of Literature (1999), the classical scholar Florence Dupont reminds us that many of the greatest works of human imagination were created to be performed, to be heard.

Before the printing press and mass literacy, the written versions existed as blueprints or records of performances, recitals, speeches, songs, and other forms of oral communication. Voicing was an art of living creators, and the voice of the storyteller was polyphonous; the stories created were all different and the same at one and the same time—again the fairy tale as tune, riffed by singers or instrumentalists. Every listener is potentially a new storyteller. Early literature was not composed of fixed texts, but of play scripts and prompt books, storytellers’ scrolls, pattern books. ”

-- Warner, Marina;. “Once upon a Time.”

About the Grimm Brothers:

“In 1812, the first edition of their anthology, comprising eighty-six stories, came out in an edition of 600, with an apparatus of notes running to hundreds of pages. It was not really intended to be read for pleasure at all by the children and households of its title; it was a learned work setting out to reconfigure the cultural history of Germany along lines that would emancipate it from the monopoly of classical and French superiority. Yet this collection—by the final, standard edition of 1857 the number of tales had grown to 210—was to become the most widely translated work in the world after the Bible and the Qur’an, rendered into more than 160 languages so far, including Xhosa and Tagalog, and still counting.”
...
"Germany wasn’t yet Germany. It was a congeries made up of dozens of principalities and archdukedoms, free Hanseatic ports and archbishoprics. History shows us that the modern nation-state develops long after a national culture and its language: think of Italy and of Dante, writing five hundred years before Italian unification. For centuries, “most of the peninsula had been under German or Austrian or Spanish rule, while the Renaissance, indisputably Italian, was influencing the whole world. The Grimms were living in a time of turmoil and bloodshed. ”
...
“One response to humiliation is to assert cultural riches and distinctiveness, even pre-eminence. ”

--- Warner, Marina;. “Once upon a Time."

“Fairy tales operate according to several other fundamental principles of magical thinking besides natural magic and animist vitality: animal metamorphosis and changeable bodies on the one hand, and the binding power of promises and curses on the other, govern the logic of the plots—although logic is hardly the mot juste, since magic springs continual surprises that break all the rules of probability. The implied, ever-present possibility of transmogrification means that fairytale protagonists...may be changed, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. A stroke of fate will raise them high or lay them low.

Although magic operates according to fundamental principles, its manifestations differ from culture to culture, and era to era, which adds spice and variety to fairy tales.”

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The stress falls on the binding power of words: the father must keep his promise to the Beast, the beauty will sleep for a hundred years, according to the letter of the spell.
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“Prophecies—and curses—march on unstoppably. One message of fairy tales is ‘Beware what you wish for.’ Another would be ‘Beware what you promise.’ Yet another would be ‘Beware what you utter.’ You can’t take back what you say. There’s a profound respect in the genre for what words do in the world, as well as in the stories.”

--Warner, Marina;. “Once upon a Time.”

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Promises create a stable structure, while everything else is changeable. This way "what is" and "what ought to be" ultimately are the same.

“Fairy tales are one-dimensional, depthless, abstract, and sparse; their characteristic manner is matter-of-fact—describing a wolf devouring a young girl, ordering a palace chef to cook a young woman, or chopping up a child to make blood pudding arouses no cry of protest or horror from the teller. “This is as it is, as it happened; the tale is as it is, no more no less.”

...

“The poet W. H. Auden, discussing these imaginary zones, adopted the term ‘Secondary World’, which had been used by Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and declared, ‘Every normal human being is interested in two kinds of worlds: the Primary, everyday, world which he knows through his senses, and a Secondary world or worlds which he not only can create in his imagination, but also cannot stop himself creating … Stories about the Primary world may be called Feigned Histories; stories about a Secondary world myths or fairy tales.’ ”
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“but whatever their atmosphere, they’re also laboratories for experiments with thought, allegories of alternatives to the world we know.”

-- Warner, Marina;. “Once upon a Time.”

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