He finds out where the beginning of genre fiction lies
Bardelys walked along the street, watching the river that ran between the stone wall and the road bed. Normally this was a six foot stretch of grass with a buttress of weeds at the foot of the wall. After two days of tropical rain, however, the water ran up to a foot deep down to the culvert and wormed its way beneath the street to the ditch on the other side of the road.
Bardelys stopped about midway up the road. He could hear quite distinctly the sound of a waterfall, although no such thing could be seen. This was the main point where the water drained out of the field beneath the stone wall. About ten meters to the north he could hear another, lesser waterfall.
He went back to the house shaking his head and wondering what could be done to slow down the runoff of water when the rains were this heavy. Maybe sculpting the ground beneath the hayfield in keyline patterns would do the trick, but it would mean a lot of work digging and sculpting and hauling earth.
Recently he had been reading old Russian folk tales as adapted by the British children’s author Arthur Ransome. Bardelys had been struck at how close the tales came to despair over poverty and starvation. In tale after tale, it seemed, families were in imminent peril of starving to death, and in every family they faced the prospect of killing one of their children in order for the family as a whole to survive.
Take for example the tale entitled ‘Frost.’ Here an old man loses his first wife and marries again a woman who has two children of her own. This makes three daughters in the household, and the stepmother as is usually the case decides that the daughter of the first wife must go. She tells her husband to take the child deep into the woods to a tall fir tree, where Frost will come to be the girl’s bridegroom.
Bardelys had felt a chill run up his spine when he read this tale. Even though the setting was explicitly Christian, and Christians have always condemned and forbidden the exposure of infants, this small fairy tale shows the old man leaving his daughter to freeze to death as night comes on. The tale becomes quite explicit at this point, (at least in this translation and adaptation) because the old woman sends her husband back to the fir tree in the morning out of what seems to be sheer malice and cruelty. The older man fully expects to find his daughter’s corpse frozen stiff in the frost.
Instead, as it usually does in folk and fairy tales, the daughter is alive and well and has even prospered, because Frost has actually spoken with her and been impressed by her goodness and her pluck. Therefore he has given her a rich fur coat, jewelry, and other wedding gifts.
The cruel stepmother immediately once her daughters to share in the bounty, and so she sends them off in the evening with the husband so that they too might be wedded to the demon. Naturally, these spoiled and ugly girls don’t please Frost in the slightest, and they do end up frozen stiff when the old man goes to collect them on the following morning.
Was not in this, Bardelys wondered, the roots of all Romantic literature? And was not this kind of tale the very origin of ‘escapist’ fiction?
In real life, Bardelys was certain that almost every child and infant exposed to the elements had died. He supposed that the best that could have happened to them would’ve been the very ugly fate of slavery, toil, and prostitution, and death would only have been postponed or a few painful, miserably ugly years.
In tales it works the other way. Even the people who knew better – the very peasants were forced to give up their own children or knew neighbors who had done so – spun these tales with their happy endings. Their happy and unbelievable endings. Bardelys supposed that it could go no other way. Life was cruel enough. And there was no controlling life, or else no child would ever die. Tales were something else. Tales could be controlled, tales didn’t have to be so cruel. Tales could have happy endings.
And so the old talesmen of bitter harsh hard times could not bring themselves, could not bear to tell ‘realistic’ tales where the children froze to death. Bardelys knew that these tales were ‘escapist’ in nature. Why not escape, when life is so dreadful?
And, he thought, maybe the converse was also true: only fat people in rich happy times could afford to tell tales of ugliness and sorrow with painful, unhappy endings, in which good people suffered and died and the wicked triumphed.
‘Realism’ is a luxury that only well to do bourgeois families can afford. ‘Fantasy’ and ‘escapist literature’ is what poor and suffering people need to be able to endure the lives they lead.
(Composed by dictation Saturday 27 September 2008)
