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Our magic kingdom

The supernatural is as British as fish and chips

Sarah Churchwell

Wednesday, 29th August 2007

We’re all accustomed to stories about credulous Americans; as an American living in Britain I am constantly asked to defend the 43 per cent of my compatriots who believe in creationism.

Unlike the ancient European oral folk tales from which these stories all ultimately derive, ours are intensely rational, and — for all our fears about the violence of the mass media — our folk tales today are actually far less violent than they used to be. Most of us only know the anodyne, domesticated fairly tales that were sanitised by the Brothers Grimm and Disney, but in the earliest stories the Prince rapes Sleeping Beauty, instead of kissing her; Cinderella kills her first stepmother by dropping the lid of a trunk on her head; the Wolf tricks Little Red Riding Hood into cannibalising her grandmother, and so on.

Unlike the ancient folk tales, ours always seem to concern the end of the world, and a messianic figure who will (usually) save it. The original folk tales, by contrast, tended to have far more lowly and mundane concerns, like how to complete an endless, frustrating task without getting beaten, or how to get out of your horrible brother’s house.

What they share with our stories is a structure in which wish-fulfilment is employed less as a fantasy of escape than as a story about survival: here’s how to escape the briars of the workaday world, or how to avoid cannibalising your grandmother. Here’s how to cope with feelings of powerlessness and rage without going off the deep end. Despite their emphasis on fantasy, all of these stories remain grounded in the real world, and their problems are familiar; it is their solutions that are magical. Tolkien’s famous taxonomy of the fundamental elements of the fairy story — ‘Fantasy, Recovery, Escape and Consolation’ — are in evidence all around us.

The tale, in other words, proves stronger than its telling; the arguments over variations in quality among these stories, whether they are derivative and debased, seem beside the point. What they show is the tenacity of old ways of understanding the world. Some of us may prefer Pullman to Potter, or Tolkien to either; others watch Heroes instead of Lost; some choose entirely different forms of fantasy (romance novels or video games or action movies). What emerge regardless of personal preference are the consistent emotional dynamics and mythic tenor of the stories: the endless need to reconcile power with goodness in a world that remains mysterious and dangerous.

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