Rambling about fairy tales
Swap this week: Jodi Milner’s Stonebearer’s Betrayal.
Sorry about the gap in blog production there. After Chapterhouse came out, I needed a bit of a break, and what with Thanksgiving and all, I just zoned out for a while. Anyway, back now.
As you know, I’ve been working on fairy tales and such for The Dancer’s Tale, which is volume 4 part 3 (or arguably volume 6) of Swords In Darkness. The rough notion, giving nothing significant away, is that the main body of the novel is a progression of four “fairy tales,” increasing dramatically in length and complexity, but with very roughly the same underlying morphological lines (in Propp’s terms, anyway). There’s a linking narrative which explains what this is all about. That’s a writing challenge for the future; the initial job, now about 60% complete, is to write the tales themselves.
Now in the paragraph above, I put “fairy tales” in quotes because these things aren’t really properly classified that way. I’ve got four types, based on quite specific sources:
1. Germanic, from Grimm, 1st edition (quite different from later editions)
2. Celtic, from a range of anthologies of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish folklore
3. Arabian, from The 1001 Nights (several translations)
4. Chinese, from Wu Cheng’en, Xiyouji [The Journey To the West]
Now the Germanic stuff is arguably “fairy tale” in the proper sense, i.e., in the sense for which the phrase was coined (or the German term märchen).
The Celtic stuff is certainly partly about fairies (fae, sidhe, etc.), but Celtic folklore actually doesn’t fit terribly well into that Germanic category, and if you line up the Celtic stuff against Propp it sort of does and doesn’t work. (Why Russian stuff does and Celtic doesn’t is an interesting question, but above my pay-grade.)
The 1001 Nights material is fascinating in this context, because each “tale” arguably fits the Propp system perfectly… but there’s no such thing as a single tale in the book. In part because of the famous frame-story—Scheherazade tells a tale a night, but always is on a cliffhanger come morning, so the king spares her just one more night to find out what happened, etc.—the whole thing is circles within circles. If you haven’t tried to read a big chunk of the complete collection, you may not understand what I mean; if you have, bear with me a minute. Let’s say you dive in on something like “Sinbad,” ok? So there’s a tale, which is about how this poor man is rude about the fabulously wealthy Sinbad, and Sinbad overhears, and invites him in for some lavish meals, during which he instructs the poor man in the virtues of hard work and suffering and faith in Allah and so forth. But the “instruction” provided is Sinbad telling a series of tales, one for each of his horrendously ill-fated voyages. So tales within a tale, right? But within most of those voyage tales, you get a thing where the narrator (Sinbad) encounters someone with a major back-story going on, and he asks what that might be, and the person he’s talking to goes and tells a tale. So that’s a tale within a tale within a tale. Within the Scheherazade tale. Oh, and every now and again you get one more circle inside that…. It’s a fascinating way of stringing together a huge quantity of wildly disparate material without having to make it cohere. Now each sub-tale probably does fit the Propp morphology reasonably well—every time I’ve tried to line things up it works dandy, certainly—but in what sense is that analyzing the material in question? I mean, are these things really separable as tales, properly speaking?
When we come to Xiyouji, we’re going even further from folklore or fairy tale. It seems clear (at least based on my very scant research on the subject) that 1001 Nights is essentially a collection or compendium of folk-tales, edited and strung together loosely. Exactly what sort of editing or revision has occurred is difficult to say, but it doesn’t seem as though the editors have any particular “point” to make, other than ensuring that the whole thing is appropriately pious. That is to say, the Nights isn’t about anything, if you see what I mean. But Xiyouji is a whole nother ball of wax: it’s a novel, or anyway a honking big book, and most likely it has one author, most likely Wu Cheng’en (1500-1582); there are some addenda written by others later on, but Wu does seem to have been the one who wrote Xiyouji. To be sure, he’s drawing heavily on all sorts of folklore—and lots of other material as well—but the end-result is not a collection or anthology.
I know something about Xiyouji, not least because I was reasonably close to Anthony C. Yu, who did what is unquestionably the best translation of it. But I’ve always found it difficult to read, because it’s simultaneously extremely repetitive and deviously inventive. I’ll save a deeper dive into the thing for next column, but suffice it to say, the basic outline of any main incident (mostly in 2-chapter units, beginning anywhere after about chapter 20, and before about chapter 90) goes something like this:
Tripitaka, the Tang monk, gets himself into trouble by being a pusillanimous idiot. Piggy makes it worse. Sha Monk does nothing much. Monkey uses some magic and a lot of fighting, but eventually even he needs help from some kind of bodhisattva or other senior power from the celestial hierarchy. They show up, beat the snot out of the current bad guy, who turns out to be the power’s escaped pet. Tripitaka is dusted off and given a nice vegetarian meal, and off they all go to the next adventure.
Again, and again, and again.
The thing is, underlying this repetitive structure is a lot of intricate weirdness about internal and external alchemy, plus a huge dollop of scatological humor and sexual double-entendres. In addition, a lot of the hints about what’s really going on, incident to incident, are embedded in complex verses written in several poetic styles. Then there’s the local satires and teasing, and so on. There’s no end to it—but at the same time it’s immensely difficult to read, because without a set of Cliff’s Notes twice the size of the whole 4-volume thing, you’ll never figure out most of what’s going on.
I started out by talking about fairy tales, and now we’re into something probably most comparable in Western literature to Dante, in the sense that everything is a reference and an inside joke…
… which is what I’m now supposed to write, for 30,000 or so words.
Next time I’ll get into the details a bit.
As always, thanks for reading!