I have followed the talented & brilliant Joanne Harris (most well known for Authoring “Chocolat”) on Twitter for a while now – her insights into Writing, Storytelling, mystery and all around general Wisdom have been a personal Blessing. I highly recommend everyone I know to follow her. (@Joannechocolat on twitter)
One of the great things she does is a semi-regular post of ten tweets, so Ten Tweets on what it’s like to be a writer, or ten tweets on lots of other cool and random subjects, not always related to writing. A very recent “Ten Tweets on..” was all about Fairytales. It was all pretty much what I want to share about stories and fairytales, summed up what I deeply know and believe about stories and fairytales and sums up what I wanted to say (in a much better way than I could ever say it) for this year’s National Storytelling Week.
So, here in list form are Joanne’s Ten Tweets on Fairytales (with a couple of interjections and replies to tweets thrown in)
1. Fairytales have been around for many thousands of years, and exist in every culture
2. Jung believed they were an expression of the collective unconscious..
2 (b): …which would explain why so many stories are shared by cultures existing too far apart ever to have met
Ubiquitous wicked stepmothers a reminder that 1 in 5 women died in childbirth- reconstituted families common.
3. Nowadays, some people dismiss fairytales as childish or irrelevant. They are not; and never were.
4. Fairytales were originally meant for adults, not children. Their themes were often very dark
5. Fairytales were first designed for adults with bleak & challenging lives: they were a way of dealing with that
6. They were a means of expressing feelings that couldn’t be expressed in any way except through metaphor
6 (b): …the fear of death, the horrors of incest, abandonment, violence, hunger and the darkness inside us all
Life is always (potentially) worse. Stories give children (and adults) coping mechanisms, and the hope of a happy ending.
7. They were meant to give us hope that evil can be defeated; obstacles overcome; monsters redeemed by love
8. They don’t deal with “reality”, but as an expression of our subconscious selves, they reveal important truths.
9. They are the collective dreams of our race: through these stories, we tell our own
10. And by looking at the stories told by other cultures, we can understand how much we share.
Thanks.
That Story Girl 
Thank you so much for this. I guess my question is this, is there a conscious programme in fairy-tales or do they emerge from the collective unconscious? So are the great stories acts of discovery? I think that relates most to point 7 and the assertion that the stories were “meant” to give us hope. They do give me hope. I carry the story of the blinded prince in Rapunzel close to my heart. Not that I have been blinded but that his faithful waiting and Rapunzel’s faithful search are finally rewarded.
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A good question that deserves more than instinctual answer. I shall ponder it.
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Okay, this is what I think. Really it’s a bit of both. The collective unconscious, or genetic memory, or whatever you want to call it is, I believe, responsible for much of what we share in stories – to some extent, a shared dream if you will. They’re birthed from the instinctual things that tie us all together on a level we can’t truly understand without those shared metaphors that go back to a time when we were one clan, one family, one unit. I like your phrase there that stories are a discovery, though I might go as far as saying they’re more a re-discovery; a re-connection with our true selves, our selves we have a tendency to forget. And just as there are certain personality types that only discover what they think or believe when they first say it out loud, perhaps we only discover things about ourselves when we birth new stories and find them retold and reflected in others. It’s only when we share stories across boundaries and cultures that we see many that have similar themes and so could only have come from a common memory buried within the collective unconscious – the example in the post being the common theme of stepmothers, but one which strikes me as completely coming out of our genetic memory is the proliferation of flood stories and destruction by water the world over.
As for a design behind our stories, I would say that there is potentially a master storyteller weaving themes of redemption, hope, loyalty and love into all our stories – as a Christian I would say our ability to generate and tell stories comes from the imago dei in us all. I’m also pretty intrigued by the idea that God has intentionally sown stories within the collective unconscious and across cultures that reflect and point to the Grand story of Himself. Many Christians for example will have no trouble with saying that Old Testament stories such as Jonah, The Exodus or the character of Melchizideck (probably spelled wrong!) are all antecedents of the Christ story. But I would go further and say that God planted stories within all cultures to point the same way. For example, the Celtic tales of kings dying for the sake of the land, heroes sacrificed on a tree, priest kings who are maimed and so on.
One might also sense an element of design in many fairy-tales that are intended to warn (or control?) such ad red riding hood – a thinly veiled (in my opinion) attempt to ensure sexuality purity in girls.
But I like to think that elements such as your blind prince (who I also love to bits and I utterly relate to) who above all gives hope is indeed something that is from our eternal designer planted in our collective unconscious.
Hope that all makes some sort of sense and goes some way to answering your question.
Thanks for engaging 🙂
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I really like your idea of re-discovery. It reminds me of T.S Eliot’s wonderful words, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” It seems to me that what you do here is to to link our personal stories to the great stories. I think that C.S Lewis wrote about God leaving pictures in the popular imagination that transformed the society of the day. The impact of the Grail myth upon the medieval world would be one such. It is a sign of the poverty of the “modern” mind that it tries to reduce the myth to something historically banal.
I have thought more of the blinded prince in Rapunzel. It seems to me that before his wounding the prince is on a romantic adventure with a degree of difficulty but a lot of pleasure. The wounding transforms the story from romantic adventure to a truly great love story and the prince grows from a boy enjoying a lovely girl to a true man. The journey to manhood can only come through wounding and through faithfulness after the wounding. If only every boy was taught this story. I have two daughters and my prayer is that they will meet men for whom the Rapunzel story is real.
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