March 29, 2024
The stories we know as Grimm’s Fairy Tales were actually published in 1812 as Children’s and Household Tales. “Children’s” we understand, although we wonder with amazement how anyone should have thought that the tales in their original versions, which are full of grisly violence, could have been thought appropriate for young people. But why “Household”? There is something here that is easy to pass by unthinkingly. We do not tell tales in our households any longer. We are a literate culture and may read stories by others; we are simultaneously to some degree a post-literate culture and find our stories in the electronic media. But that is different. What we lack is a member of the family telling a story to the household around the hearth, an oral story that exists only in the telling. The children’s bedtime story is all that survives of a kind of bonding experience that has all but disappeared without our even noticing it, much less contemplating what we have lost by that disappearance.
The tradition of family tale telling survived in modified form beyond the period of oral culture in the form of families reading aloud together at the end of the day. Frankenstein’s “monster” benefited from this practice, getting himself an entire education by eavesdropping on members of a family who read to one another such works as Milton’s Paradise Lost. When the novel was invented in the 18th century, it had a dubious reputation, but certain authors came to be considered family-friendly and therefore acceptable for domestic consumption, especially Sir Walter Scott in the earlier 19th century and Dickens in the later 19th. Scott’s slow, meditative style, which was hilariously satirized by Mark Twain as absurdly long-winded, actually works much better orally. As for Dickens, of course he himself gave oral readings of his works that were enormously popular. In turn, Dylan Thomas appropriated the Dickensian subject of Christmas to give us “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which really has to be heard aloud, and his play for voices Under Milk Wood. It makes me nostalgic to speak of this. In an earlier period of my life, I gave a number of public readings of “Child’s Christmas” and, with friends and students, several performances of Under Milk Wood, one over the radio, the new medium that Thomas himself was quick to utilize. Maybe it’s about time to start thinking about that again. Thomas’s poetry readings were so successful because his later poetry was also composed with a listening audience in mind. It’s common to hear people say that poetry needs to be heard, not just read, but in fact the average literary poetry reading tends to be a bit low key, not to say lackluster, not because the poetry is bad or the poet a bad reader but because the poetry is basically writerly, not oral by its nature. Slam poetry has grown up as something of a counterbalance, but its energy and immediacy are sometimes achieved at the cost of a certain depth.
During the same period, some families also played music together. Despite its cumbersome size, the piano became a household instrument among the middle class families who could afford one, and the ability to read sheet music became fairly widespread. The guitar achieved its modern form as the “parlor guitar,” a small-bodied instrument advertised as being suitable for women to play. It was often tuned to an open chord, either open D or open G, so that people could play any number of three-chord songs without instruction. Reading Living Blues magazine, I am struck by the number of young blues artists who emerged out of musical families. It was, remarkably, Ben Harper’s maternal grandparents, who were Jewish, not his African-American father, who founded the Folk Music Center and Museum in Claremont, California, a music store that became a gathering place for famous folk and blues artists. In 2014, at the age of 45, Harper and his own mother, Ellen Harper, released an album together, significantly titled Childhood Home.
When I taught a course on the English language, I told my students that islands are linguistic time warps, their isolation preserving forms of language, such as African-American Gullah, that have faded everywhere else. The same seems to be true of music and domestic music making. Newfoundland preserves the wonderful custom of the kitchen party. Not just the family, but friends and neighbors gather in someone’s kitchen, bringing food, drink, and musical instruments for an evening of singing and dancing. One of my all-time favorite folk groups, Great Big Sea, emerged from this Newfoundland milieu, and, for about a decade at least, hit the big time in Canada. Just about every one of the songs listed in the article linked-to above were performed by Great Big Sea in front of huge, wildly enthusiastic auditoriums full of people. (Fellow Clevelanders take note: one of its members, Alan Doyle, is performing May 12 at the Music Box Supper Club, and I highly recommend him). My old hippie clan, as I call it, has been gathering to make music together for almost 50 years, and indeed this newsletter will appear on our “birthday weekend” gathering, so called because 3 of the 7 of us have birthdays then (including me, March 31). I have even written a song about this, puckishly called “Hell’s Kitchen Party,” from which I will risk quoting a bit:
And another year finds us still singing, Though the color scheme this year is grey Halfway through the concert The band is still desperate- -ly trying to learn how to play But another year finds us still singing Like wine, we get better with age And like ripples this song Will dilate in the dawn When the stone has gone down in the lake When the stone has gone down in the lake.
My family did not make music, but they did love it. When the extended family gathered together socially, they would sometimes dance together, usually polkas. Almost the only time my parents did not fight was when they were polka dancing. Usually polkas, but not always: I have one indelible flash of memory of everyone trying to do the Lindy hop in my Polish grandmother’s basement, sweaty and a bit clumsy, the latter due no doubt partly to alcohol and partly out of care to avoid knocking one’s head on the low basement ceiling, but having a riotous time.
The electronic communications revolution spelled the slow end of this kind of participatory household entertainment, but in the early days, families would still gather around, first, the radio, then later the TV. People in the generation before mine (they are almost all gone now) remember being spellbound listening to the huge old vacuum tube console radios, whose radio programming went far beyond music. Most of the comedians that I remember from TV and movies began on the radio: Bob Hope, Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen. In addition, there were soap operas, serial melodramas such as The Shadow, and radio drama, including Orson Wells’ production of The War of the Worlds in 1938, which seemed so authentic that it caused widespread panic among people who thought it was actual news. By the 1950’s, the radio was pretty much replaced by the television except for music, but families often watched TV together—if only because they pretty much had to when there was only one TV set in the house, rather than one in every bedroom. That meant “family programming”: there were only 3 networks and a limit on “adult” content, nothing risqué, no swearing, limited and unreal violence. Not long ago, a friend and I watched two reruns from 1963 of The Dick van Dyke Show, and I realized how simple and corny a lot of it was by today’s standards. And that was a relatively witty and sophisticated show compared to some of the absolutely silly ones I used to like, like Get Smart or F Troop. But it was inclusive.
There was more substantial content on television, but you had to get older so you could stay up later than prime time to watch it. Simply because of a later bedtime, my last two years of high school were an expanded education: I watched the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Diana Rigg, whom I had a crush on from The Avengers, wearing a diaphanous outfit that would definitely not have met the standards for prime time; I watched Richard Burton play the lead role in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus; I watched A Long Day’s Journey into Night with Jason Robarts; I watched Zorba the Greek; I watched the production of George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan with a very young Genvieve Bujold, whom I promptly added to my list of crushes. But adolescent infatuation was not the main reason I remember such programming to this day. By that time, even regular network programming was beginning to feature more sophisticated shows, such as I Spy and The Prisoner. But I watched those on my own, enriching my education, but apart from the family. As time went on, family viewing narrowed to watching The Wizard of Oz and A Charlie Brown Christmas out of mutual nostalgia. Today’s hundreds of channels offer a miraculous variety, and that is a totally good thing. But what it means is that, today, all programming is niche programming. Individualizing offerings according to audience tastes means the attenuation of communal experience. It is a tradeoff, in my opinion, with both gains and losses.
We began with Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm’s Children’s and Household Tales, but have so far considered only the household tales. The children’s tales are the bedtime stories, a remaining oral ritual in many households. I used to teach an essay by the linguist Shirley Brice Heath called “What No Bedtime Story Means.” For Brice Heath, it means no practice in the kind of skills that will later be expected of a child by the school system: the analytical skills of answering what she calls “what” and “why” questions (“What’s this?”), the social skills of not interrupting and the like. But the bedtime story is also the child’s introduction to the imagination. What we call “fairy tales,” are more accurately “folktales,” a word that stresses the element of communal experience, the tales of the folk. But “fairy tale” has its pertinence too. Told on the borderland between waking and dream, they are filled with the type of strange wonders more typical of the dream. Cartoons and programs like Sesame Street are akin to fairy tales in this regard. Eventually, the bedtime story is phased out as children learn to read on their own. Reading alone is a cozy and comforting experience, especially if you grow up in an unhappy household, as I did. Yet there is a powerful impulse to share a story we love, and around certain stories there grows up a community of fans. The early history of science fiction is bound up with an intensely involved “fandom,” signified by the acronym FIAWOL, Fandom Is a Way of Life. Somewhat later, the same kind of phenomenon took place with comic book superheroes. Both science fiction and comic books had and still have conventions that can draw hundreds, even thousands, of people. Or a community will come into being out of love for a single work or series, such as Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, and, in TV and movies, Star Trek and at least the original Star Wars trilogy. In all these cases, many of the next generation of creators will begin as fans. These days, they may start by writing “fan fiction,” their own stories set in the reality of the work or series. In one way, certain stories are a private discovery, a personal treasure. On the other hand, there is an impulse to share. Which is a way of saying that we are both introverts and extraverts.
Eventually, the urge for communal experience begins to move us beyond the confines of the household. Our intensely individualized culture thinks of artistic creation as solitary expression, or did until recently. A healthy development of recent years, due to the breakdown of traditional genre barriers, is the weakening of the segregation of “literary fiction” from “genre fiction.” It used to be almost universal that both undergraduate and MFA creative writing programs refused to allow students to write “category” fiction—science fiction, horror, thrillers, romance. As a result, “literary” fiction and poetry became so withdrawn that its only audience was a coterie of other initiates—in other words, writing workshop students were writing for other writing workshop students. Genre or category fiction appeals to a wide audience, but it was regarded as a vulgar product of consumer capitalism. Luckily, this situation has been changing, at least to a degree, although when a “mainstream” writer like Kazuo Ishiguro or Emily St. John Mandel writes a literary novel that is clearly science fiction, it will almost never be reviewed as such, while fantasists and science fiction writers of arguably equal accomplishment, such as John Crowley or Samuel R. Delany, are largely unknown outside the field. But at least the popular genres no longer are regarded with the disdain they were a generation ago.
The tension between art as individual expression and art as communal experience occurs within the genres themselves. In the Middle Ages, the first “art song” creators were the troubadours, who composed personal expressions of solitary love in sophisticated and complex forms such as canzones and sestinas. But alongside them were the wandering popular entertainers, the minstrels and jongleurs who sang folk songs, and later, when printing and literacy came in, hawked them as “broadsheet” or “broadside” ballads. Shakespeare provides a hilarious version of such a wandering minstrel in The Winter’s Tale, whose sales pitches for his printed ballads are hilarious: “Here’s one to a very doleful tune, how a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty moneybags at a burden, and how she longed to eat adders’ heads and toads carbonadoed” (4.4.261-64, Bevington edition). One of his potential customers says, “I love a ballad in print alife, for then we are sure they are true.” In other words, the unsophisticated part of the population has always absorbed its news uncritically from the contemporary equivalent of social media.
Before universal public education, people got what education they had from popular sources, which included theatre. Perhaps the most primitive form of theatre is the puppet theatre. After I wrote about puppets in a previous newsletter, I was affectionately chided by my friend Dennis for having forgotten about the role of puppet theatre in the extraordinary science fiction novel Riddley Walker (1980) by Russell Hoban, so this is my chance to make amends. Perhaps 2000 years after a nuclear war, life in England is still at a pre-industrial level, although political and religious leaders are trying to recover the secrets of the old technology. On this “realistic” level, the book seems to repeat a timeworn science fiction plot from the Cold War years. But that is not what the story is truly about, for there are mysteries and enigmas everywhere, and the first-person protagonist, 12-year-old Riddley Walker, lives up to his name: he is determined to solve the riddles, and the attempt involves constant walking on a quest among significant sites (there is even a map provided) in the area of what was once Canterbury Cathedral. The people of Riddley’s time understand what happened centuries ago in terms of a myth that was anonymously created out of the 15th-century wall painting in the Cathedral, “The Legend of St. Eustace.” In the actual legend, Eustace is converted when, hunting a stag or hart, he sees Christ crucified between the hart’s antlers. But this has become, down through time, a myth of the Fall, and it is dramatized for the common people by a traveling puppet show in which Mr. Clevver (the devil) tempts “Eusa” to pull the “Littl Shyning Man” in two.
On the literal level, this means splitting the atom, and the lesson being taught the common people is a warning about the will to power—ironically, then as now, the lesson is being taught by the very institutions seeking power. The will to power is divisive, the Littl Shyning Man, who is the “Addom”—that is, both Adam and atom—shattered into all the opposites conflicting in life, with the result that people are “oansome,” lonely, always yearning for a lost unity and community. But the solitary people are brought together by the dramatization of their myth in the puppet show. They understand the myth in a simple manner, but a woman who is Riddley’s spiritual instructor tells him in the very first chapter that there is a deeper truth latent in it, which she describes in the book’s invented language, which can be taken as English shattered back into a primitive form but which is, at least in Riddley’s hands, a visionary language capable of expressing multiple meanings at the same time, like the polysemous language of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. She tells Riddley there is a spirit that inhabits all of us: “Its looking out thru our eye hoals….Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can” (6). Riddley asks, “Wel if theres such a manying of it whys it lorn then whys it loan?” She replies: “You look at lykens [lichens] on a stoan its all them tiny manyings of it and may be each part of it myt think its sepert only we can see its all 1 thing.” And it’s afraid. What is it afraid of? “Its afeart of being beartht” (6-7), of being born. The many and the one, the communal and the private: this is the human riddle, which communal art like the puppet theatre dramatizes, drawing an audience into a communal experience. The Faust legend, another tale of temptation by the demonic will to power, began as a German puppet theatre show in the Middle Ages and ended in the epic visionary drama of Goethe’s Faust.
In addition to puppet theatre, early stage drama was a teaching device. The English mystery plays of the Middle Ages were vast cyclic productions dramatizing the entire story of the Bible in multiple episodes. The mystery plays were by the people and for the people, produced by affluent city guilds of craftspeople and put on by nonprofessional actors for a popular audience during summer festivals. As their name signifies, they taught the sacred mysteries, but grounded them in common life and earthy humor. A character in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” alludes to a stock scene in which Noah’s wife refuses to enter the Ark, reminding me of Bill Cosby’s brilliant early comic sketch in which Noah himself is the obstructionist, refusing to believe that the disembodied voice that starts talking to him is God (“Who is this really? Am I on Candid Camera?”). The “Second Shepherd’s Play,” from the so-called Wakefield Cycle, works exactly as Shakespearean comedy works two centuries later. The main plot of the adoration of the Christ child by the shepherds is paralleled with a subplot that is hilarious farce. To make a long and silly story short, it involves a thief and his wife trying to hide a stolen lamb by dressing it up in a cradle as their latest child. But the culprits are invited to see the divine Child anyway. The Homeric bards sang the glorious deeds of heroes, but they were in fact household bards, even if the household was aristocratic, and were by no means above balancing their serious tales with occasional low comedy. Demodokus, the blind bard in the Odyssey, tells a story about Hephaestus, Aphrodite, and Ares that is really an extended dirty joke. Hephaestus finds that his wife Aphrodite is cheating on him with Ares, spreads on the bed a net so fine that its mesh is invisible, and catches the couple in the act, hauling them up naked in mid-air and inviting the other gods to come and laugh at them.
Yet even the bards’ serious tales of heroic deeds, most of them tragic, were household tales in a larger sense, for their characters were regarded as the audience’s ancestors, sometimes even including the gods. The enormous catalogue of ships in the opening of the Iliad, which goes on for pages, is a huge bore to us but was meaningful to its listeners because it recorded their lineage. This is true of the northern Norse, Germanic and Icelandic tales and sagas as well. They are to some degree all family sagas. Shakespeare’s history plays deal with a time closer to the audience’s present, but they too dramatized the audience’s actual past, having no qualms about mixing it with low humor in the form of Falstaff, and ending with a rousing piece of patriotism in Henry V. In my day, the great Western films and television shows dramatized the myth of the frontier. It is sad that our national myth has been subverted by revisionism in the name of social justice, though such revisionism is a moral necessity. Some of the great film directors, such as John Ford, attempted to provide a communal vision for the country, and Ford’s later films, such as The Searchers (1956), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), while hardly politically correct by contemporary standards, show an increasing awareness of the moral ambiguities underlying the myth of the West. Ford is quite aware that John Wayne’s character in The Searchers is a half-crazed racist. When Travis Bickle models himself on Wayne’s character in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), it tells us something about himself, and what it says is not complimentary. From here it is a line to the outright revisionism of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which I suspect was unjustly passed over for Academy Awards because its truths were too ugly for audiences to contemplate with detachment. Ford and Shakespeare were faced with the same task, of dramatizing a national myth for a popular audience while at the same time providing a means of questioning that myth for those who had ears to hear. In this, they are in fact no different than Homer in the Iliad, which is anything but a straightforward glorification of war.
Perhaps we are past the time for heroic epics. What then could be a kind of story around which we all could gather? Walt Whitman attempted to answer that question with an unheroic epic, Leaves of Grass, an epic of inclusiveness that celebrated not violent heroes but the common people of all races, genders, and walks of life, calling himself a “kosmos” who contained multitudes. Whitman tried hard to give voice to those unknown people who have no voice, but he lived on the verge of the electronic revolution—there is actually a recording of him reading—and it is now possible to preserve the stories of many ordinary people, as Peter Jackson did in his wonderful They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), which consists entirely of film footage plus the voices of actual World War I soldiers telling their stories. It seems a shame to me that Studs Terkel’s oral histories have fallen out of public awareness, temporarily I hope. Terkel wrote down the oral histories he recorded and published them in book form. As a counterpart to Jackson’s memorializing of World War I, he published “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. His other oral histories include Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) and Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do (1974). A fictional counterpart to these accounts is Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), also a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and made into a famous film the very next year by John Ford, celebrating a very different kind of heroism than that of Western gunfighters. Whatever we may come to think of the myth of the West and the frontier, these works contain the elements of an American mythology worth preserving, worth gathering around and listening to despite our bitterness and our differences.
Myths have a tendency to become what Northrop Frye called “encyclopedic”: that is, they seem to have a natural tendency to connect up with one another and become a larger pattern. Biblical mythology exfoliated into a vast and complex vision over the centuries. Classical mythology did not, but there have been attempts to see it as a unity, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the tour de force of Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1988). Folktales by contrast are episodic, and so is the literary development of folktale, the genre of romance, the tale of wonder. Shakespeare invents (or most often steals) a new plot for every comedy and romance. And yet, studied over a lifetime, the plays seem so interconnected under the surface that they do indeed seem like parts of some undefinable whole. In the early days of Marvel Comics, Stan Lee and his artists seemed to be wildly, randomly generating new superheroes, new comics, new villains, in all directions. Yet slowly they developed into a Marvel universe.
Eventually, the interconnecting process reaches beyond the texts and begins to include their readers. In his book on romance, The Secular Scripture, Frye uses an old tag from Horace to express this: de te fabula, the story is about you. That would imply that we are in a story. We are included. Odd as it seems, this is a form of redemption. Mallarmé said that the purpose of the world is to be contained within a book. There is something paradoxical that goes on here. In another one of the great modern fantasies, John Crowley’s Little, Big, published in 1981, the year after Ridley Walker, the protagonist Smoky Barnable marries into the Drinkwater family—who are fairies. They know that their lives, which seem idle and eventless, are part of a larger plot, and confidently knowing this gives them a sense of destiny that Smoky, as a mortal, can never share. Sure enough, in the bittersweet ending of a book over 500 pages long, Smoky’s heart, significantly, gives out, while the fairies are gathered into the Celtic Otherworld, although it is not called that. It is sad not to be part of a story, though, as I read the ending, Smoky is included, for he is forever a part of the story we read, whether or not he gets to fairyland. Achilles knew that his true identity was not as a shade in the underworld but as a story told endlessly, in households and palaces, and in that form he is alive today. Wordsworth is determined to put his Lucy into poems that will survive precisely because she is the type of quiet girl that everybody overlooks. To be included as even a marginal part of a larger story is important. I am always touched by the portraits of donors in medieval and Renaissance paintings, small figures humbly kneeling in the margins, as the shepherds and wise men knelt in the stable at Bethlehem. Unlike some, I am not bored by the recitation of all the people thanked by the winner of an Academy Award, any more than I am bored by the calling out of the name of every graduating student at commencement. I sit and watch the credits of every single movie until I am the last one in the theatre, even when it is not a Marvel movie with a little trailer at the end. So many people needed to make a movie, hundreds for the big-budget spectacles, each one contributing something, however minor, to the story, which would not exist without them.
When we tell or read our bedtime stories, our household tales, a complex interplay goes on between author, story, characters, and audience. If we love the tale, maybe have known it for much of our lives, we feel that we have internalized it, possess it, so that it is a part of our inward identity. At the same time, as we have said, we feel that somehow the story contains us, that we are inside it, de te fabula. The story was once within the imagination of some author, but once it is given to the world it no longer belongs to the author but to the readers or audience. The complexity of the interplay is amazing. Velasquez seems to be trying to show something of this in his painting Las Meninas. If we wanted to take the complexity one step further, we could add in the series of recreations of Las Meninas that Picasso painted late in life, for the audience of a work includes the later artists who are influenced by it and try to recreate it in their own works.
Looking at that famous painting, we at first suppose its subject to be the little princess at its center, because she stands at its focal point. Yet Velasquez has put himself into his own painting, standing at his easel, looking outward at the viewer. The king and queen—the donors—are reflected in a mirror on the back wall. But to be reflected there, they would have to be standing in the place of the viewer, and the Velasquez inside the painting would then seem to be painting their portrait, not the little girl’s. However, if that is so, it would close off the world inside the painting, just as the characters are not aware of the audience beyond the invisible fourth wall of a theatre. Indeed, it is as if we are viewing a Shakespearean play within a play, a device that Shakespeare repeats so often we know it must have meant something to him. In Act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the “rude mechanicals” are putting on their play, an uproariously naïve version of the myth of Pyramis and Thisbe from Ovid. Meanwhile, the other characters are sitting as the audience, watching them. We, in turn, are an audience watching the audience. And the play’s closing remarks hint that perhaps we should be asking who or what might be watching us. Or dreaming us, as the title of the play suggests. In another Shakespearean play, the magician Prospero says that we are such things as dreams are made on. Alice is told not to wake the Red King because he is dreaming us, although in fact at the story’s end the actual dreamer appears to have been Alice herself. Are we dreaming the world, or are we being dreamed? Or, on another level, are these somehow inexplicably the same thing? Suddenly, at one point, Riddley Walker is seized by one of the intuitions that make him a kind of shaman figure: “The thot come to me: EUSAS HEAD IS DREAMING US” (61). Yet every one of us is Eusa: that is the point of the myth. In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce tells us that we fall asleep every night and dream the entire corpus of myth, history, and literature, though all we remember when we wake up is some nonsense about getting lost and not being able to find our way to class. Somehow, the telling and listening to the simplest of bedtime stories and household tales touches upon the mystery of reality itself. And then the fire of the hearth burns down, and the child slips into sleep.
Reference
Hoban, Russell. Riddley Walker. Washington Square Press, 1980.