Fairy tales

Fairy tales offer an especially potent mix of tools to refute, repair and rebuild, not just a particular story but how we conceive of story itself. They can be what Anna Reading, in a related context, calls a “restitutional assemblage” for redefining the concept of narrative, anchoring collective memory and effecting inter-generational justice. On the one hand, the poet can assume among the audience a general knowledge of the basic plot-line, themes and characters. On the other hand, that knowledge can swiftly be turned on its head or against itself; the plots are skeletal (their bones easily rearranged), the themes unclothed desiderata, the characters flat screens onto which one can project in many shapes and colours, from front or back.

Above all, the time and place of the fairy tale are indeterminate: east of the sun and west of the moon, under the hill, at the back of the North Wind, in a forest clearing where Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged hut revolves. Fairy tales impose a linear narrative structure upon the timelessness of Faerie. The more literary the tales became the more Aristotelian the narrative, and the more divergent from the lived experience of many singers of tales and their audiences, those upon whom power was exercised, for whom the events of history as recorded in the chancelleries and courts were imposed. “Once upon a time” begs the question of what preceded the beginning and what follows the “happily ever after.” As the scholar Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi (also my mother) put it:

‘As a child, I loved fairy tales. But I was never satisfied with their endings. What, I wondered, did the characters do when “they all lived happily ever after?” I always wanted details to fill in the gaps created in my mind by those familiar, but obscuring, words. Even then, I dimly sensed that most adult women spent their lives in the non-delineated Happily Ever After, rather than the exciting time-space of story.’

Daniel Rabuzzi – On the Fairy Tales School of English-Language Poetry