The uses of enchantment

“All great novels are also great fairy-tales,” said Nabokov, the author of Lolita. Many critics and academics usually ignore this observation. For the past hundred years, ever since EM Forster’s sneer that “Yes, alas, the novel, tells a story,” telling a story, let alone a fairy story is still seen as something fit only for children. Although you may, as readers, value novels such as Jane Eyre, Mansfield Park and Great Expectations partly because of the wonderful tales they tell, as intelligent readers you are only supposed to praise their author’s style, or their characterisation, or their use of symbols. Style is an art: plot, or storytelling, only a craft. To call someone a storyteller has become tantamount to saying they are the sort of low-brow writer sold with gold foil on the cover at airports.

To very many women writers and readers, however, plot is just as important as style. If you understand that Jane Eyre is a conscious variation on the fairy-tale of Bluebeard, Mansfield Park a version of Cinderella, and Pride & Prejudice a reworking of Beauty & the Beast, your understanding and appreciation of their author’s genius is deepened, not lessened. Using fairy-tale plots, and the expectations they set up is something that is a unique characteristic of the woman novelist. From Margaret Atwood to Angela Carter, and from AS Byatt to Helen Fielding, women novelists find themselves using the archetypes and structures of the fairy-tale to address not only our deepest fears and desires, but also to explore the act of story-telling itself.

Fairy tales seem to answer a deep need in all of us to find stories with which to identify particular problems, and find hope despite them. Every country in the world, from China to Africa, has a variant of the Cinderella tale: perhaps because we all know what it’s like to suffer from the feeling that we aren’t appreciated as we should be. Every country has a variation of Beowulf, in which a lone hero repeatedly goes out to fight a terrible monster, and eventually defeats it. I’m sure those of you who have recently sat exams will know what that feels like, too. The very fact that so many fairy-tales were anonymous, or ‘old wives tales’ – collected and bowdlerised by men such as Perrault, Andrew Lang and the brothers Grimm, - suggests they were invented by women. Of course, this may not be the case with all of them. Some of our greatest writers - Chaucer, Boccacio and Malory - are all credited with having created the fairy tales found in, respectively, The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron and The Morte d’Arthur. However, the very few new ones that we know to be original were all created by women – such as Madame d’Aulnoy, a French aristocrat, who wrote The White Cat, The Frog Princess and other wonderful tales which you may know and love. The Arabian Nights which Sir Richard Burton translated for the West, were recounted by Scheherazade – who, to save all women in Arabia from being forcibly married to a King maddened by jealousy, and executed at the end of her wedding-night, agreed to marry him herself. She told him such wonderful stories that every night, her life was spared in order that she might finish a new tale; but the most wonderful tale is of all is her own, because when she finally ran out of stories, her husband had fallen in love with her and regained his sanity. In our own time there is Joan Aiken, author not just of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but of extraordinary stories like those in A Necklace of Raindrops and A Harp of Fishbones. There are Margaret Atwood and A.S. Byatt, both of whom have won the Booker Prize with novels that employ and encapsulate the structures and paradigms of fairy tales – if not their happy endings.

Fairy-tales are not real, or even realistic; yet they are not, as many people still believe, an escape from reality. They are another way of getting you to think about real difficulties. You may find, if you have a wicked step-mother (or mother) that your miserable existence will be transformed, like Cinderella’s, once you make the best of your looks, and fall in love with the right man. Alternatively, you may discover that a man you dismiss as a Frog or a Beast will, upon closer acquaintance, prove to be a Prince of a husband – something that happens to the heroine of Trollope’s enchanting novel, Ayala’s Angel. If you are poor but brave and quick-witted you can, like Jack, climb the beanstalk of a career and outwit a Giant. The individual interpretation of these tales can be a lot subtler than that, but the essential movement is from sorrow to joy, from oppression to freedom. My own interest in them as a form came when I was reading English at Cambridge, and discovered a remarkable book called The Uses of Enchantment. Its author, Bruno Bettelheim, survived the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. As a children’s psychoanalyst he knew better than most of mankind’s need for stories. “Our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives,” he wrote. “It is well known how many have lost the will to live, and have stopped trying, because such meaning has evaded them.” Bettelheim was a survivor partly through luck, but also partly through his utter determination to never give up this will to live and hope. He found this in his deep knowledge of fairy-tales – from understanding the irrational. His study, which I strongly recommend, is an analysis of famous fairy-tales, and how they help children to find meaning in life, to develop inner resources and, paradoxically, develop the rational as well as the irrational sides to our personalities.

I expect all of you have at some point suffered from depression. There are some lucky people who have what amounts to a talent for happiness, but far, far more who lack it. Depression, like the Dementors in Harry Potter or the Spectres in His Dark Materials, is something that sucks all joy and curiosity and colour out of life. Very bad episodes make you feel you can see no point in living. This, too, is something that Bruno Bettelheim explores as one of the uses of fairy-tales. They always start off with something dreadful happening. The hero or heroine’s parents die, or perhaps just their mother. They get a wicked stepmother, or are forced out of the family home. They are under a curse - something you certainly feel when depressed – or need to save somebody else from one.

Now, in a modern “realistic” novel – the kind of thing that wins the Booker Prize, for example – would have no solution to this kind of problem. Except, perhaps, that of grim acceptance or perhaps getting out a gun and killing something - in the case of Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dog that is the only living creature to have shown you love. The fairy tale options of leaving home, and changing your luck, never seems to be explored. Yet when you yourselves have a problem, do you just immediately curl up and die? Or do you start to mentally explore lots of different options, and usually find yourselves choosing what seems to be the best? If you do, this is something that you probably learnt from fairy-tales, and the constructive daydreaming they encourage. Fairy-tales don’t pretend to describe the world as it is. What they do is to free the dreaming part of your mind that helps you to find your own solution. Fairy-tales tell children that, contrary to what grown-ups would have them believe that the world is neither a safe place, nor all the people in it good. They tell you that life is struggle, but that courage, kindness, humility and luck will triumph. They don’t ask, Do I want to be good? (a question people only ever ask in tragedies) but, Who do I want to be like? This seems to me to be one of the most profound questions anyone can ask of themselves. It is also one of the most essential things you can get from reading fiction.

When I came to write In a Dark Wood, I was particularly pre-occupied with this question, because I had two small children. I noticed that an awful lot of the picture-books I was reading to them told stories about characters who got lost in dark woods – the very woods that, as I knew from Bruno Bettelheim and Dante, symbolise confusion, fear, danger and yet also the possibility of change, adventure and the discovery of hope. Dante’s journey in The Divine Comedy, starts, famously, when he finds himself lost in a dark wood, and although. Everybody knows the first seven lines about how horrible and fearful this being lost feels: but hardly anyone notices that he follows it with the words that therein he also found good. His journey takes him down into all the circles of Hell, but then it leads him up to Heaven, where his beloved Beatrice waits. It is, really, one of the great fairy tales of our culture.

Now this interested me very much. In Shakespeare’s time, the word “wood” means, as students of A Midsummer Nights Dream will know, not just a collection of trees but madness. (I should add that another novel, Love in Idleness, which is an update of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, grew out of this, which is a very different exploration of woods.) So I began to think of a character who suffers from loss of hope, ostensibly from personal and professional failure but in reality because he suffers from a mental illness called manic depression, a condition which it struck me had many parallels with the fairy tale world.

This illness, also called “bi-polar disorder” may be familiar to those of you who watch ER. It currently affect an estimated 600,000 people in Britain. Put simply, it produces violent mood-swings, in which episodes of mania, or elation, are followed by a low mood or depression. Each of these periods can last weeks, months or even years. Nobody knows what triggers its onset, though it is thought to be genetic because it tends to run in families. It can come and go like the ‘flu, but its victims tend to be people who are highly creative, sensitive and have a tendency towards perfectionism. At a certain point in the swing, it can make you feel, and do things that seem literally super-human. You can become super-strong, super-sexy, super-clever and super-creative. Mania can give you energies to make your every wish come – temporarily – true. Tennyson, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Schumann, Blake, Coleridge, TS Eliot, Tchaikovsky, van Gogh, Georgia O’Keefe and Edward Lear are just some of those who were almost certainly among its sufferers. But it is a mental illness that not infrequently ends in suicide. Often, an artist’s family contains numerous close members who either killed themselves or died insane.

Mania is as seductive and delusional as those visions of fairyland that fairy-tale heroes and heroines get sucked into. Manic depressives lose touch with reality, and fall under an extraordinary spell in which everything they see and feel is out of its proper proportion. They believe they have telepathic communication with extraterrestrials, God or the President; they run up huge debts and do crazy things like making twenty-four egg sandwiches and washing their hair in tomato ketchup. They fall truly, madly, deeply in love. They behave in a way that is totally “out of character”– as if they were under an enchantment. Those of you who have seen the film The Mask, with Jim Carrey, will see that it’s a perfect metaphor for manic depression. If one of the things you are most interested in exploring is that question fairy-tales ask – who and what do I choose to be? – then you can see why the subject was irresistible to me as a writer.

Benedick Hunter is very nearly ruined by his mother’s suicide, and he almost succeeds in killing himself. He is however saved – saved partly by the stories he tells his children, and the simple word-game of hangman he tells plays with his son. Like the hero of a fairy tale he finds new life in the dark wood he gets drawn into. His salvation is partly medical (he does, after all have an illness that can be kept under control) but it is equally due to the healing power of story, and of fairy-tales in particular. In writing it, I did not want to lay down any prescriptions about leading our lives – apart, perhaps, from the idea that it is better to choose life, and sanity, rather than death and madness. For it is not only novels that tell stories. We tell them to ourselves, all the time; and it is when we stop doing this, when we have, as the saying goes, lost the plot, that we are most in danger.

October 2003

People tend to associate fairy tales with female passivity – with Sleeping Beauty waiting for her prince, or Red Riding Hood being stalked by the wolf. But fairy tales, if you look carefully at them, are much more slippery than this. They are tales that encourage subversion and foster ambition. Not only are they on the side of the poor, the small, the young and the defenceless – they have heroines as strong as resourceful as any feminist could wish. My own favourite fairy story, Molly Whuppie, is the female version of Jack and the Beanstalk (and appears in my novel, In a Dark Wood). Molly is clever, brave, loyal to her sisters. When cast out with them into the wood, she is their protector, even when they find themselves in the house of a terrifying giant, who wants to kill and eat them while they are asleep. Unlike Jack, she does not kill the giant but gradually strips him of his power and by the end has chosen her own husband and become ruler of the country.