Early Years: Nick

I am writing this when any sensible, diurnal person would be long in bed - where, as a penitential exercise, the monks of La Grande Chartreuse are about to perform the ‘reclaim the night’ they have done since their inception.  But with a conference bid to complete tomorrow, and with Mark Rowlands’ enjoyable The Philosopher and the Wolf just finished, it’s time, I feel,  to move into a more reasoned look at a question I’ve been mulling over for years, the question of where, exactly, is the landscape of traditional tales?

The most immediate answer is that I know where it used to be; it used to be on the doorstep of the storyteller.  But of course it doesn’t stay where we left it, not least because we, the audience, have moved off. We moved off from clearings to common land to enclosed fields, and then to the towns, with our stories as cultural baggage in the handcart. We moved into a wolf-free country, then into a country where there is less darkness. We might argue that the stories we brought with us retained their currency because we brought the darkness with us too - but maybe this is a little fanciful, and while it might take us some way to an answer to a spiritual question, it doesn’t help me answer my research question much.

More on this when I can, in the research pages.

I have two books in front of me as I write. One is the book I was going to write about – Sandra Beckett’s Recycling Red Riding Hood – the other (Rosa’s) is the movie companion for New Moon

It strikes me that the relationship between Bella and the Native American werewolves is in some ways a Conte a l’envers, as Beckett describes them.

Working from the writings of Gianni Rodari (who has more than seventeen entries in the Beckett index), she explores how Red Riding Hood has become such a universal tale that it is possible to play with the plot (including the Perrault text and images) as a tale told “Upside Down, Inside Out and Backwards.” And in finding a heroine like Bella Swan, and placing her in the situation she does, Stephanie Meyer effectively creates a Conte a L’Envers, a mixed-up version where a young woman in the woods is the one who holds the power over the wolves who are her friends, her would-be lovers. Bella smacks a werewolf on the nose as if he were a boy stepping out of line in a soap-opera prom; we are somewhere Angela Carter might recognise.

As something of a footnote, it is interesting to see this reversal taken even further in the movie book I have in front of me, where the wolves, however terrifying they are as wolves, are, in human form, mostly young and lacking in much body hair, exemplified in the website a - very far from the older, predatory wolves in so much of the Red Riding Hood iconography, yet drawing on the idea of the wargus (see this entry) as on the margins of society.

Beckett takes the wonderful Zipes exploration of Red Riding Hood to a new stage. She uses a European overview - rather she uses an understanding of countless retellings in Europe - to look at what Rodari calls A sbagliare le storie, Getting Stories Wrong, and what other contemporary writers identify as Upside-down stories.  Ths method is exemplary; it allows Beckett to explore the variety of Riding Hood stories (if Zipes removes the ‘little,’ Beckett presents a rainbow of different coloured hoods!), and in doing so to look again at what makes this story so special.  Hats off to her - hoods down, whatever - for updating the critical literature to include exploration of two lacunae in Zipes’ book: The wolves in the Ahlbergs, notably in Jeremiah in the Dark Woods and the Jolly Postman, and the RRH tales of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes.

More questions than answers in this post: a work in progress.

The more I think of there really being chalk pits in Suffolk, the more I want to explore more deeply my assumptions about the universal mythic landscape. A sideline about a pub called “The Lime  Burners” and here is their link - suggests to me all those out-of-town (or out of settlement) occupations that might have been part of the storyteller’s landscape.  Quarriers, limekiln workers, miners (like the seven dwarfs?), charcoal burners - all people whose occupation maybe allowed them a little latitude.  It is interesting that charcoal is now something of a tourist attraction, even mentionedin the sanitised Suffolk walks discussed here. I suspect no-one on these well-signposted walks will discover demonic figures gleefully plotting by a fire!

Is this part of a warning myth, as I’ve speculated before? Part of a recognition that people away from the huddle of village and town are not recognised? Not “one of us”?

Philip Pullman, in today’s Observer, is deep in Bettelheimland when he talks about the Fairy Tale protagonists and their struggle for Independence and adulthood - and maybe this is where the two themes intertwine, although this is merely conjecture:

Is there a warning about the ‘others’  in the woods because they are dangerous, or because they represent a possible different set of choices? A world away from the close-knit and settled farming community?

Or is it that, for adventures to take place for the young, the protective adult needs to be absent?

It doesn’t answer my query about Tom Tit Tot, though.

Autumn

A significant detail in Jacobs’ telling of Tom Tit Tot, especially since this story has a cognate in Rumplestiltskin that has rather that precedence over the English version, and according to a much earlier commentator, has much in common with a range of stories world wide in which magic secrets overheard allow someone to escape some nemesis. The English story, of course, needs the demonic Tom not to be readily available, but his not expecting to be overlooked is itself worth mentioning. The creature is in ‘an old chalk pit’ – a hollow away from sight, like the dwelling of Stig in Clive King’s book – but an oddly accurate topographical detail. Does this suggest a particular place to the original tellers and audiences? Or a particular kind of place?

If we assume Edward Clodd is correct that this is a Suffolk tale, we could ask where are “The Woods,” or “Woods with Chalk Pits?”  This one, perhaps? But does a mythic landscape need this? At times it does: stories that explain why a geographical feature is how it is depend on the audience knowing the site and wanting an explanation of the feature. Sometimes the post eventum nature of this might seem obvious, as in the Robin Hood connections in Sherwood or the strong suggestions of such at Tintagel. At times certain features are needed for the story: a church, a path (a crossroads for Bzou – see earlier posts), but in general woods becomes The Wood so that The Witch can live in them; they are universalized by being used as the stage set for mythology.

It was interesting reciting the edgy DeLaRue/Zipes’ reconstruction of the Story of the Grandmother to PGCE students in the woods today, those lovely dappled woods where the magpies chatter and one group saw a deer and we all felt at ease with children in the outdoors. In some ways it felt rather like the side-by-side comparison of Red Riding Hood stories on Katherine Harris’ site or rather the student project on the site

And it set me in mind of the power and transferability of Sendak’s Outside Over There, represented in Labyrinth , where themes such as burgeoning sexuality, sibling rivalry - not to mention the more complex issues of siblings and new babies in reconstituted families - are dealt with so openly. Is OOT more menacing because of the subtler treatment of the themes?  Or is it merely ambiguous to the point of being open to any interpretation?

Not “Don’t do that” but a link to the Being Human BBC3 blog that explains why there’s a link to the show on my work blog - apart from the quality of the drama, of course.

This link takes us to a series of clips on werewolves. Timid, high-voiced and nervy, George is the antithesis of the monstrous werewolf or even the ordinary, opportunist carnivore,  canis lupus, the grey wolf. Or is he? He is - as are all three protagonists - without hope, one of Agamben’s criteria for the wargus (see my post from November of last year). And at a deeper level, this is what makes the ghost, the vampire and the werewolf essentially human in the post-modern world: they muddle through, ineffectual and without an aim, hopeless.

And rather than characterise this by a link to Richard Dawkins, I’ll link this to another anti-religious polemicist (although perhaps with more of a sense of purpose, and to my mind a better writer anyway), Tony Grayling.

He would probably chastise me for not distinguishing between aimless and hopeless. But they both sound like cows from Cold Comfort Farm…

This was just going to be a place to put some links for Play Day really, but it is interesting to see BBC reportage on the issues around play. On the one hand, it reports that Parents feel something is fundamentally wrong with modern childhood - and this is the link - but Over-cautious parents stop play in the report linked here. One of their latest posts bemoans the lack of knowledge about nature, but it’s a shame that BBC Wildlife’s article is only half-heartedly represented here, as a sort of teaser for “go and buy the magazine.”

The tension is not just from the BBC needing both stories and balance, however; it comes from the ambiguity we have around seeing outside as a place of danger, something I suspect we get, at heart, from maintaining the warning stories of a rural past (e.g. Red Riding Hood from France [although note that the link takes you to the great book by Jack Zipes rather than a text of the story per se], the almost global Witch-in-the-Woods type stories such as Teeny-Tiny and the Witch Woman, which is the folk-tale basis for our generation’s flagship fear-of-the-woods experience, the Blair Witch Project) in urban environments, so that the myth comes about that Outdoors is Bad. It is possible that we feel somehow that children should learn from adults to fear an Unknown and possibly supernatural evil in the Antiqua Sylva. I don’t know.

Tragically, this juxtaposition has a further complication in today’s story from S Wales, and there might be more to contemplate about incremental exposure to hazards being part of the education we need to give children, if we are not to seem as if we accept awful occurrences like this with a callous “accidents will happen” shrug.