The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Since the characters in a fairy story are either good or bad, benevolent or malevolent—it is rare for a bad character to repent and unknown for a good one to become bad—they can­not be said to be tempted. There are occasions when the hero Cor heroine), though warned not to do something—not to pick up a wig or enter a particular room—ignores the warning and gets into trouble, but the prohibited act is never, in itself, immoral. There is only one fairy-tale motif, to my knowledge, that contains an element of inner conflict: the theme of Grimm's "Faithful John" and M. Delarue's "Father Roque- laure." The Prince's loyal servant leams by chance that, in order to save his master, he must do things which will appear to be evil, and that if he explains the reason he will be turned to stone. He does them and—under threat of death or because he cannot bear his master's displeasure—he tells and is turned to stone. The Prince then discovers that to restore his faithful servant he must sacrifice his own child.

In other kinds of fiction, the plot evolves through the clash between fate or chance on the one side and will and desire on the other; the fairy story is peculiar in that the main cause of any event is a wish. A desire is a real and given experience of a human individual in a particular historical context. I am not free to choose what desire I shall feel, nor can I choose the goal that will satisfy it; if the desire is real, it proposes its own satisfaction. When I desire, I know what I want. I am then free to choose either to remain in a state of unsatisfied desire by refusing to assent to its demands or to use my reason and will to satisfy it. A wish, on the other hand, is not given; I am free to wish anything I choose, but the cause of all wishes is the same—that which is should not be. If I say, "I desire to eat," I do not mean, "I desire not to be hungry," for if I were not hungry I should not desire to eat. When a scolded child says to a parent, "I wish you were dead," he does not mean what he actually says; he only means, "I wish I were not what I am, a child being scolded by you," and a hundred other wishes would have done equally well. If the young heir to the fortune of a disagreeable old aunt says, "I wish she were dead," he may really desire her death, but his wish does not express this desire; its real content is, "I wish that my conscience and the law did not, as they do, forbid murder." We can wish anything we choose precisely because all wishes are equally impossible, for all substitute an imaginary present for the real one. A world in which all wishes were magically granted would be a world without desire or will, for every moment of time would be disjunct and there would be no way of distinguishing between animate and inanimate beings, ani­mals and men.

Wishing is not the sole cause of events in the fairy tale but the license it is given prevents the fairy tale from arousing any strong emotions in the audience. This, however, is one of the peculiar pleasures the fairy story affords—that it can take images of beautiful maidens or cannibalistic ogres who, in our dreams, arouse violent emotions of desire or terror, or it can inflict horrible punishments on the wicked (like rolling them downhill in a barrel full of nails) which in real life would be acts of sadism, and make them all playful.

A game, of course, must have rules if it is not to be purely arbitrary and meaningless, and the characters in the fairy tale have a "fate" to which even their wishes must submit. They must obey, for instance, the laws of language. We can lie in language, that is to say, manipulate the world as we wish, but the lie must make sense as a grammatical proposition:

"What are you doing there, good woman?" he asked.

"I'd like to take some sunshine home, a whole wheel- barrowful, but it's difficult, for as soon as I get it in the shade it vanishes."

"What do you want a wheelbarrowful of sunshine for?"

"It's to warm my litde boy who is at home half dead from cold."

The other law, so often introduced in the fairy tale, which all must obey is the law of numerical series. The hero who is set three tasks cannot wish them into two or four.

It would be misleading to say that because the fairy tale world is a fantastic one, such literature is "escapist." A work may jusdy be condemned as escapist only if it claims to portray the real world when in fact its portrait is false. But the fairy story never pretends to be a picture of the real world, and even if its audience were to respond with the feeling, "How I wish we could live in this world instead of the world we have to live in" (and I very much doubt that any audience ever felt this way), it would always know that such a wish was impossible. The kind of enjoyment the fairy tale can provide is similar, I believe, to that provided by the poems of Mallarme or by abstract painting.