Theodora Goss's Blog, page 31

Meaning in Fairy Tales

Elmore Leonard famously said about his writing, “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”

Fairy tales do that, of course. They leave out all the boring parts. Because they started as oral tales, they are almost pure plot. That’s one reason they are so much fun to read, although when we read them, there are also things we miss: character development, descriptions of setting. For those, we go to other kinds of stories.

I was thinking about this today as I was walking to the grocery store. I thought, what does it really mean to live life as though it were a fairy tale? Do you try to leave out all the boring parts? Well, of course in life we can’t do that. There are always going to be boring parts. And in fact, those boring parts are represented in fairy tales as well: Cinderella has to spend a long time cleaning the kitchen. Fairy tales can mention those parts briefly, but the fairy tale characters, if we imagine them to be real, have to live through sweeping the hearth, and being a goose girl, and climbing the glass mountain. They have to deal with wearing a catskin day after day.

But what fairy tale characters get, in compensation, is meaning. All those things have a greater meaning that will become clear by the end of the tale. They are the ordeals the fairy tale characters have to go through to prove that they are worthy of the happy ending.

So I thought, perhaps living life as though it were a fairy tale doesn’t mean never being bored. Perhaps it means finding meaning even in things that seem meaningless.

Now that I’ve returned from the grocery store, and I’m sitting here eating soup and consolidating my thoughts, this is what I’ve come up with. If you want to live a fairy tale life, you need to start with the following.

1. Minimize the boring parts as much as you can: either get rid of them or, if you can’t, try to make them more interesting. I find doing dishes boring, and I can’t not do dishes, because I wouldn’t have anything to eat on. But I’ve bought myself very pretty dishes, so I like to see them emerging all clean from the soapy water. That turns doing dishes into a kind of sensual pleasure. And finding dishes that go together, usually at Goodwill, is an adventure — each dish has its own story.

2. Fill the remaining boring parts with meaning. Find the meaning in them. I’m very lucky to be doing work I love, but there are certainly boring parts, as there are in every job. I remind myself that my work supports my writing, and that I’m climbing the glass hill because on the other side is the ogre’s castle, and I need to get to the castle to find and free what I love. (This is an elaborate metaphor of some sort, although I’m not entirely sure how it’s working. What is the ogre? The publishing industry? Have I mentioned that it’s Friday and I’m very tired?)

That’s what fairy tales offer us: meaning. And if we want to have fairy tale lives, we have to find or create the meaning of them.

These, by the way, are some of my dishes:

The Value of Reading

Here I am, trying to write a blog post! Even though I’m tired and I have a lot of reading to do tonight for the classes I’m teaching tomorrow. But it’s so easy for me to focus on everything that needs doing, and neglect the things I want to do. (Although, I have to tell you, I’m working on the novel! I’m very happy about that.)

Tonight, I thought I would write about a quotation I found on Facebook. It was posted by Jonathan Carroll, who is always a wonderful source of quotations. It goes like this:

“We are, if not exactly ‘saved’ by reading, at least partially ‘repaired’ by it: made the better morally and existentially. To those who find that idea fanciful I would put the question: when were you last mugged on the Underground by someone carrying Middlemarch in his pocket? We read to extend our sympathies, to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves, to educate our imaginations, to find liberation from the prison of the self, to be made whole where we are broken, to be reconciled to the absurdity of existence, in short to be redeemed from flesh, the ego and despair.” –Howard Jacobson

Doesn’t that sound wonderful? The problem is, I don’t agree with it. We try so hard to justify reading, in a society in which many people simply don’t read, that we assign it some sort of moral value. We say that reading will make us moral. It will save us from becoming the sorts of people who mug others on the subway. And I think that’s absurd. The sorts of people who carry around Middlemarch in their pockets have generally received an expensive enough education that they don’t want to jeopardize it by having a criminal record. But also, perhaps they haven’t read Middlemarch carefully enough. Because if you read it, really read it, you might become the sort of person who mugs people on the subway in sheer despair. You might realize that you live in a society that limits your choices, in which love and authenticity are difficult to achieve. You might identify with Dr. Lydgate.

Don’t tell me that reading The Stranger or The Metamorphosis or 1984 is going to keep you from mugging people! Or even The Hobbit.

Reading is just as likely to wound you, to make you hate other people or the society you live in. To long for something else, to reject the absurdity of at least contemporary existence. The people who ban books are wrong about banning books, but right about why one would ban them: because they are a bad influence. They make us discontented with our lives. They are subversive. They do not reconcile us; they encourage us to rebel. Writers understand that: Flaubert warned us in Madame Bovary.

Books are not spinach. They are brownies. (Coincidentally, I just ate brownies. They were desert, after a dinner of a ham omelet with buttered toast.) If they were spinach, do you think we would want to read them?

The justification for reading, the importance of reading, is that it damns us, wounds us, makes us thought criminals who reject the status quo. But in the process, it opens us up to new possibilities, which include the possibility of changing the world we live in. Or rejecting it.

I am sorely tempted to write a short story about a man who mugs people on the subway specifically because he has read Middlemarch. Because I can see exactly why he would.

George Eliot by Alexandre Louis François d’Albert Durade

The Fairy Tale Life

I know that I’ve been terrible about updating. I’m going to try to do better. The reason I’ve been terrible is that it’s been an incredibly busy month, and in the middle of that business, I’ve become introspective. I’ve turned inward rather than outward. I take walks, I look at the river. I think a lot.

Do you remember that about a year ago, I kept posting about caterpillars? In their chrysalis — is there a plural for chrysalis? — waiting to emerge. That’s how I felt at the time, like a caterpillar in its chrysalis, not entirely sure what was going to happen to me. Now I feel like the butterfly that has emerged and is waiting for its wings to dry. I’m trying to figure out where to fly next, where my wings will carry me. I’m not sure, and so I’m waiting for some sort of sign from the universe, something to tell me, yes, there.

In the meantime, I work and write and make apple crisp (which is what I’m doing right now).

This blog post is about living the fairy tale life, by which I probably mean something different than you think. It was originally inspired by part of an interview that a student of mine posted in the Facebook group for my class on Fairy Tales and Literature. The interview was with Christian Louboutin (yes, the shoe designer). He said that his life was a fairy tale and added, “But it’s because I choose to make it one. It’s very simple: You make up your mind about what kind of life you want to live. I choose to live in a fairy tale.” When I read that, I wondered if it really was that simple. Do we get to choose the kind of life we live? If we live AS IF we are in a fairy tale, will it work?

And then I started wondering what it would mean to live in a fairy tale anyway. Because the truth is, fairy tales can be fairly unpleasant places — like the real world, actually. But I thought of two things fairy tales give us that the real world doesn’t: magic and meaning.

In the real world, things don’t happen by magic. Or most people believe they don’t, but I have often felt magic in my own life. It has felt as though a good fairy is looking out for me, helping me. Living in a fairy tale is often difficult — there are ogres — but there is also help, there are also speaking animals that will tell you the way, good fairies that will show you what to do. And in fairy tales, your actions have meaning. Sharing your food with an old woman will eventually save you. To be honest, I believe that’s true in our world as well. Perhaps what really happens is that in our world, which is not a fairy tale world, we act as though there is no magic, and no meaning, and so they disappear. After all, our perceptions shape, if not reality (and I believe they do, to a certain extent), then our experience of it.

I’m going to write about this more in the coming days, but for the moment, I will leave you with a graphic that I asked a friend to design for me. It’s about living in a fairy tale, and it says that living a fairy tale life is not easy, or for the faint of heart. But I think what you get at the end is magic, meaning, and maybe even happily ever after.

Making Adjustments

This is going to be a fairly quick post, because I want to attend a concert tonight:

I couldn’t have done that — attended a concert at night — last year. It would have meant staying in the city late, trying to find dinner before the concert, and then afterward driving another hour out to the suburbs. But this year it’s a short walk away. I’m eating dinner as I’m writing this: cream of zucchini soup that I just made on the ancient stove. I’m doing well with that stove. Whenever you move into a new place and start learning a new stove, it takes a while. So much of cooking is instinct, and I’m developing an instinct as to how long I can leave something to brown before it burns — that sort of thing. Last night, I used the oven for the first time.

This fall, I’m adjusting to living in the city again, and you know, so far it’s been rather wonderful. Oh, there are all the problems one has living in the city. It can be harder to find things than it was in the suburbs. But there are also so many advantages. For one thing, I can walk just about everywhere. And if I can’t, I take the subway. That has created one problem: I’m walking so much more now that I’m hungry all the time! I have to figure out a way to eat more, healthily. I’m working on recipes: tonight, I’m hoping to make the perfect apple crisp. (The one I made last night was almost but not quite right.)

But the biggest adjustment I need to make has to do with my work habits. I tend to be a bit of a workaholic. I couldn’t be, last year. I had a long commute each day, and I was very tired at the end of it, so I couldn’t work the way I can here, where I’m around a computer most of the time. I need to make sure that I don’t overwork myself. I also need to make sure that I leave plenty of time for writing, that I don’t spend all my time on teaching. That’s difficult, because I love teaching and it’s so demanding anyway that it’s easy to spend all my time simply doing that. But I have a novel to work on. I want to make sure that I block out at least two hours each weekday to work on it. That’s not a lot, but then, I have to much to do that I don’t know how I could find more.

I feel very strongly that this is an interim period, that this is the time during which I create the work that will take me through the rest of my life. In which I create the professional and personal life that is to be. I’m looking forward to it. I just need to make sure that I get enough food and sleep! And of course take advantage of all the wonderful opportunities in the city.

Your Secret Story

Do you have a secret story?

A secret story is a story you tell about yourself, as you’re going through your daily life. We probably all had secret stories when we were children. I know I did. I was in disguise as an ordinary student, but I had actually come from fairyland, or the future, or somewhere else, and I was just observing the people around me. I would eventually have to report back to my superiors, or turn all the people I had been observing into the animals they most resembled, or I would simply go back to where I came from — which was of course much more magical than where I was. Having a secret story made life more interesting.

I know, I know, you’re thinking of Walter Mitty. I hated that story. If he was able to tell secret stories about himself, couldn’t they have been interesting? Why did they have to be as horribly clichéd as his actual life? For me, the lesson of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” was that if you have a lame imagination, your life is going to be lame as well. But then, for me, James Thurber is particularly of his time. I’ve found him amusing, but not very satisfying.

A secret story should be yours alone: about who you are, who you want to be. Who you believe yourself to be, under all the social conventions and expectations. Are you secretly a sorceress? A priestess? A charmer of animals or teller of fortunes? Are the trees your friends? There is something wonderful about having a secret identity, something that no one knows about you. (When I was a child, I had a secret name. No, I won’t tell you what it is.)

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, your secret story can come true, in certain ways. You can become the person you wanted to be, have the life you wanted. It took me a while to realize that being a writer was like being a sorceress — that writing was a type of spell, an enchantment, and that I was learning to cast it. So I get to be a sorceress of sorts in my daily life. We’ll see if the other parts of my secret story come true. (I’ve met the fairy queen. I’ve made friends with trees.  I’m still looking for Avalon.)

What is your secret story? I bet you have one. You don’t have to tell me; you just have to tell yourself.

Julia in France

As you may be able to tell from this blog, I’m a bit of a workaholic. The important difference for me is not between work and leisure, but between work I want to do and work I don’t particularly want to do. If I have free time, I write . . . Which is my work, of course. (If you’re paid for it, it’s work.)

But I’ve created a rule for myself, which is that I’m not allowed to work in the bath. Go ahead, laugh, but I have a tendency to take books that I have to read, because they’re research or I’m teaching the contents, into the bath. (Where, yes, they sometimes get bubbles on them. Of course one needs bubbles in a bath, or what’s the point?) But I am no longer allowed to take work into the bath, so I have to find other reading material. Lately, I’ve been reading Julia Child’s My Life in France.

The book is ridiculously entertaining, I think partly because you can hear Julia’s voice all through it, and she had a sense that life was fun and an adventure. So everything becomes an adventure — even plumbing problems. I thought I would include a few quotations here, just to show you what she sounds like.

“My father was pained by his daughters’ liberal leanings. He had assumed I would marry a republican banker and settle in Pasadena to live a conventional life. But if I’d done that I’d probably have turned into an alcoholic, as a number of my friends had. Instead, I had married Paul Child, a painter, photographer, poet, and mid-level diplomat who had taken me to live in dirty, dreaded France. I couldn’t have been happier!”

One of the most wonderful things about the book is reading about the relationship she had with her husband. It was a true partnership: he always encouraged her and supported her career, and they went off on adventures together, across Europe. You can tell how much affection they had for each other in every line she writes. The other most wonderful thing about the book is watching a woman find her passion — food and cooking, in this case. She’s ambitious, she perseveres, she triumphs — it’s lovely to see.

And they spent time with all sorts of people in Paris, even meeting Alice B. Toklas. Julia describes one Thanksgiving dinner when they “went to a cocktail party at Paul and Hadley Mowrer’s apartment”:

“He wrote a column for the New York Post and did broadcasts for the Voice of America. She was a former Mrs. Ernest Hemingway, whom Paul had first met in Paris in the 1920s. Hadley was extremely warm, not very intellectual, and the mother of Jack Hemingway, who had been in the OSS during the war and was called Bumby.”

It’s funny that she talks about Hadley Mowrer being a former Mrs. Hemingway as though it were a job. I suppose in some sense it must have been! From the book, I get the sense (perhaps false) that life was both more difficult (plumbing! strikes that would mean you had no power for days! Paris after the war!) and more vivid. Julia and Paul seem to have so much fun, and to eat so much wonderful food. I find myself a bit envious.

The last quotation I’ll include is her description of Simone Beck, who was one of her co-authoresses.

“For Simca and Jean, the subject of food was a precious and meaningful thing. During the war, they have faced terrible deprivations: Jean had been captured by the Nazis, and Simca sent him messages sewn inside prunes that were delivered to his prison camp.”

Messages inside prunes! I consider myself a good writer, but I don’t think I could have made that one up.

The Other Side of Fear

I’m still trying to figure out how to fit everything into my ridiculously busy life, so please forgive my falling behind on things like blogging and responding to comments. I’m going to try to keep up, but I have a feeling that this is going to be an exceptionally busy year for me. There’s just so much to do!

Tonight’s blog post was inspired by a couple of things. The first was a quotation posted by the wonderful writer Jonathan Carroll:

“Everything that you want is on the other side of fear.”

The second was an exchange on Facebook: one of my Facebook friends said that surely, with my accomplishments, I no longer had fears. I told him that I had plenty! And the third was a conversation I had this week with a friend who is thinking about whether or not to go to graduate school. She’s in the middle of dealing with her own fears.

I actually posted the quotation over my desk, on my cork board. It’s written on a sticky.

It’s right under the stickies that say “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”, which I originally read on Terri Windling‘s blog, and “Do what I do: hold tight and pretend it’s a plan.” That one I attribute to the Doctor. (If you don’t know who that is, you may not be sufficiently nerdy to read this blog!) I think it goes very well with both of them. Terri’s asks you to think about what you would do if you weren’t afraid of what might happen: it asks you to imagine. The Doctor’s tells you how to get there: hold tight, pretend it’s a plan, and go! And the one I just pinned up says, what you want is on the other side. It’s a promise.

I have done many things in my life, and they have taken a certain amount of courage. Even writing this blog takes a certain amount of courage, because what if people disagree, what if they take offense? After all, I wrote yesterday that J.K. Rowling was not a writer. She is an instinctive storyteller, and I have a great deal of respect for her, and for her intellect: I read her graduation speech at Harvard, and she is a smart, wonderful woman. But I have not seen her wrestling with the act of writing itself, the way I see Le Guin doing it. The way people who are writers to their core wrestle with their craft. She might become one: we’ll see what her adult novel is like. Who knows.

But I think I’ve created a life for myself that involves constantly overcoming fear. After all, three days a week I stand up in front of college students and try to both inform and entertain them. I send my work out there, to be either accepted or rejected. I am constantly out in the world doing things, despite the fact that I’m a fairly intense introvert. I’m perfectly happy sitting in a room by myself and reading for most of a day. And I am, like many writers, thin-skinned. I hate conflict and criticism.

The secret is that I also need the fear. I know that if I’m not doing something that scares me, at least a little, I’m not really living. What I told my friend was, you and I are the sorts of people who need to stare into the abyss. We’re not happy unless we’re pushing ourselves, unless we’re testing our own limits. I certainly do that in my writing.

So I like the quotation: what I want is on the other side. Life is not about overcoming fear, but about being afraid and doing what you want anyway. About using the fear to let you know that what you’re doing is worthwhile. After all, anything worth doing is difficult.

Boy Wizards

I’ve been thinking a lot about why books like Harry Potter, Twilight, and yes, even Fifty Shades of Gray, are so popular. (I’ve read all the Harry Potter books, I made it through the first Twilight book, and I’m not going to read Fifty Shades of Gray for the same reason I don’t eat McDonald’s hamburgers. Which is that I’ve had real hamburgers, and I see no reason to try fake ones that are inevitably going to taste bad and leave me feeling sick. Meaning, just in case you didn’t get that metaphor, that I’ve read real books, and I have no desire to read fake ones.)

I was thinking about this specifically because in an interview, some time ago, Ursula Le Guin compared her Earthsea books to Harry Potter. I grew up on A Wizard of Earthsea, and the Earthsea books were among those that created my perception of fantasy, and of the world I lived in. I have enough invested in them that I was really, genuinely angry at Le Guin for writing Tehanu, which felt like a betrayal.

But the question I’m most interested in right now is, why are the Harry Potter books so much more popular? Le Guin is by far the better writer. She is a writer: for me, J.K. Rowling is someone who happens to have written a popular series, but someone who is not, at heart, a writer. I know that’s a controversial statement, and I don’t mean it in a negative way. But I would say the same about Stephenie Meyer. Le Guin has written novels, short stories, poems. She has written essays on writing, on her own writing practice and on genre. She is, in a deep and complete way, a professional writer.  I have no desire to read Rowling’s adult novel, which is supposed to come out soon.  Whereas I will seek out most of what Le Guin writes.

So what does Harry Potter have that her books don’t? What makes them so popular?

Honestly, I think it’s that they come directly from our deepest desires. We all want to be Harry: the boy selected for greatness, the boy who comes into his own without having to wonder whether or not he will ever be great. The boy who is immediately recognized for what he is. Ged is not Harry Potter. He is also a wizard by instinct, he also gets into a wizarding school, but his time there is so much more difficult. He has to earn his later fame through a series of trials, in which he realizes that his own worst enemy is himself. His own talent and ambition hold him back. He is tempted, as we are all tempted but as Harry is not truly tempted. Harry never wants to be Voldemort. The fact that they are doubles is always implicit, but Harry does not want to go over to the dark side. Ged discovers that the darkness is in himself.

The Earthsea books are so much more complex, so much less comfortable to read. In a sense, they are less entertaining. They are more work. They are about us.  (I would add that Ged’s suffering is internal, whereas Harry’s suffering is largely external.  He has to fight an external enemy, not his own impulses.)

I suppose I draw two lessons from this, which may not be what you expect. The first comes from having studied Victorian literature and knowing that what is popular, even wildly popular, in one era is often forgotten in the next. Who now reads Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop? So we should write what we are drawn to write, knowing that popularity at any given time means very little. But the second is that books like Harry Potter have something to teach us: they give us pleasure because they give us part of what we want. They fulfill our dreams and desires. And that can be an important technique for a writer: making a book entertaining is itself a technique we can use. Even if we want to do the more difficult stuff.

(I should add that the Earthsea books are of course entertaining, although in a different way. They give us wizards and dragons and Le Guin’s beautiful language. I read them for that, but I did rebel when the later books became less like that, and more about her philosophical message. Still, I have to read Tales from Earthsea, which I saw in the bookstore recently.)

Visiting the Dead

Last weekend, I went to the cemetery in Concord where prominent families used to be buried, back in the 1700s and 1800s. There’s a narrow path there called Writer’s Row. It goes up a hill, and as you walk along it, this is what you pass:

The grave of Henry David Thoreau.

Can you see the things people have left? Including letters about how much his writing has meant to them. (Of course I didn’t read his private correspondence. But some of the letters had been left open, and you could see what people had written him.)

The grave of Louisa May Alcott.

Among the things left for her were an orange, a kazoo, and a lifesaver. (Yes, the small candy. I wonder if it was meant to be a metaphor? It was still in its plastic wrapper, as though someone had wanted it to be preserved.)

The grave of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This one was the grandest, but not my favorite. I liked the smaller gravestones better, and there were more things left at them. I think it’s easy to respect Emerson, but easier perhaps to love Thoreau, Alcott, and Hawthorne.

The grave of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I mention this one last although it was not the last in sequence, because this was the one I went back to. I sat by the grave, tore a sheet of paper out of my Moleskine notebook, and wrote him a letter. (I always travel with pen and paper, of course. Doesn’t every writer?) I tried to make it relatively formal, so he wouldn’t be shocked by my modern tone. I called him “Dear Mr. Hawthorne.” I thanked him for creating Beatrice Rappaccini, told him that I had written a story about her and that she was a character in my novel, and said that I hoped he wouldn’t mind. I hope he doesn’t . . .

We’re always in conversation with other writers, aren’t we? And some of them, perhaps most of them, are dead. It’s nice, sometimes, to write them a letter. (In case you were wondering, my letter is the one on the left.)

Contentment and Joy

I’ve been reading a lot recently about happiness — not because I’m researching the topic, but because a lot of people seem to be writing about it, and I run across the articles. For example, the Mayo Clinic has a page called How to be Happy, subtitled “Tips for Cultivating Contentment.” There are books being written about happiness, TED talks being given about it.

These articles bother me, I suppose in part because they seem to confuse what I think are two distinct feelings: contentment and joy. The Mayo Clinic article uses the terms interchangeably. But I think they really are quite different, and happiness is a sort of general category that can encompass both.

Contentment is the feeling of being peaceful, satisfied with your circumstances. I feel content when I lie in bed on a Saturday morning and look out my window at the sky, knowing that I have a whole weekend ahead of me. It’s the feeling of not wanting things to change, because the present moment is enough. It’s the feeling of living in the present, which is what Buddhism teaches us to do. Of not desiring anything else. Contentment is essentially static.

I was wondering what pictures to include with this blog post, and I decided to take photographs of the two front corners of my apartment. This is the left corner. You can see a drawing of a tree in a field, by my grandmother. Above it is a fantasy print. And hanging from a bracket is my birdcage, with two birds (not real, of course, although they have real feathers) on the outside. I don’t put birds in cages — not even artificial ones!

In the right front corner you can see the prints I’ve put up recently — one matches the print on the left, and I just remembered that they are by Amy Brown. The watercolors are by my grandmother, and I bought the print of the green girl at Wiscon. It’s by Samantha Haney. If you want a copy of it yourself, you can find it right here: “Green Girl.” The artist’s contact information is on her website. You can also see the bed curtain I created, which I’m very happy with! (Every bed should have curtains, no matter how rudimentary.)

Living in spaces like this makes me content. Creating spaces like this gives me joy.

Joy is not contentment. It’s caused by action, change. Joy can be the result of dissatisfaction: indeed, perhaps it requires dissatisfaction. I am dissatisfied, I change something, I create — and then I feel a sense of joy. Unlike contentment, joy does not stay. It is fleeting, but it can come back. Contentment feels like swimming in a warm lake. Joy feels like standing on top of a high mountain, breathing clear, cold air. Joy is exhilarating, like a sweet, strong wine — like a Tokay. It makes you feel sharper, more aware. It can be almost painful.

If I had to choose between contentment and joy, I would take joy. But of course I want both. All the articles I’ve read on happiness seem to focus on contentment. I think it’s time they started talking about joy as well.