The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  And in a sense, this is necessary terrain. Its existence guards the existence of the safer lands of the imagination. You can make the argument purely on the conceptual level. Forbidden actions must be explored, by the logic of forbidding itself. To integrate a rule against something into a child’s mind, so that it becomes their own, part of their own values and perceptions – as nearly all adults are opposed to murder on their own account, individually – it has to be understood; and for a rule to be fully understood involves imagining what happens when you break it. Or a parallel argument is available out of the psychoanalytic tradition, as Bettelheim extended it to fairy stories. A person can only grow to full maturity if their ego is able to draw on and transform the dark but powerful energies of the id. You must come to terms with your unconscious, and at an age when it would be too disturbing to confront unconscious forces under their own names, the best way to begin is by dealing with them through the symbols of story.

  Either way, this is the fairy tale as a ‘thought experiment’. Its typecast kings, its identikit princesses, are representatives of elements in our inward dramas. They are devoid of individual characteristics so that they may be universal. They are wholly good, wholly beautiful, wholly cruel, because they embody the impulses of love, delight, rage in their primal, unalloyed form. They stand for pieces of us. The identifications are strong, but not blatant. For example, the wicked stepmother in a fairy tale, argued Bettelheim, embodies all the child’s fears of being rejected by their real mother, and gives play to all the child’s negative feelings about her, without disfiguring her necessarily loving image in the child’s mind. The good mother has conveniently died, ceding her space in the tale to the hateable monsters who degrade Cinderella, and drive Snow White and Hansel and Gretel out into the forest. There is never a wicked natural mother in a fairy tale.

  The fairy-tale cast may be limited, but Bettelheim’s readings assigned the symbolic roles of the characters in different ways in the different groups of stories. In the stories where the third child – son or daughter – wins through their trials with the help of animals, the interpretation is fairly simple. The child, of course, is the ego; the raven released from the trap who in return fetches the diamond from the inaccessible mountain, is a representative of the dark, instinctual id, just asking to be integrated into the personality; and the message is, do right by your unconscious, and your unconscious will do right by you. On the other hand, there are brother-and-sister stories where, with two of the psyche’s pilgrims to play with, there’s room to illustrate the dangers of the encounter with the bestial id, by having one be transformed into a creature of the wild. The brother drinks from a forbidden spring and shapeshifts into a stag or a swan, potent yet mute animals, emblems of a desire that has got out of hand. The sister – invariably the sister, nominated by her gender to play the role of the love that humanises desire – retrieves him by mighty sacrifices, brings him back to his human form. Finally, Bettelheim pointed out, there’s also a batch of stories in which the ego-portraying youngest child is (frankly) a twit, a twerp, a simpleton, a schlemiel, and yet conquers all by his foolishness, protected by the structure of the story in the same way that, as Bismarck joked, God protects ‘children, drunkards, and the United States of America’. This, said Bettelheim, was a story for those moments when the child looked at the difference between their own littleness and the tough, complicated adult world, and needed an elementary reassurance that somehow, someday, they’d win through to the ‘kingdom’ that signifies successful maturity.

  Bettelheim published The Uses of Enchantment in 1974. The criticisms followed immediately. He had assumed that fairy tales were exclusively devised for children, when many of them were folk literature told by adults to adults. He’d ignored the differences between the national traditions. He’d discounted the realistic aspects of fairy-tale incidents. (In pre-modern Europe, where disease and childbirth carried off many women before the age of forty, there were an awful lot of stepmothers.) He’d analysed the details of stories as if they had a fixed, authoritative existence, when in fact each version of a story only represented one momentary state of a fluid, combinatorial sea of possibilities. He didn’t distinguish between a peasant story and an elegant courtier’s retelling of it. These were the usual naiveties that result when psychoanalysis takes its search for the psyche’s permanent structures into the changing, particular, context-determined material of culture. Similar complaints had been made about Freud’s original use of Greek myths. But there has also been gradually strengthening criticism from within the constituency Bettelheim helped to form, which agrees with him that stories handle the deep material of the psyche.

  It centres on Bettelheim’s comfortable, even complacent sense that a fairy-tale plot is a wholly internal drama. If kings and queens, stepmothers and godmothers are all names for pieces of the one self hearing the story, then what happens between them is only the psyche’s own flow of transactions, wonderful at times, disturbing or savage at times, but with no reference beyond the child’s set of internal representations of mother, father, sister, brother. But it is not easy to believe that the events of a fairy story really offer no reflection of what happens between people, as well as within one person. The question that must be answered to determine all story’s moral status is: to whom are these things happening? Bettelheim replies, in effect: to symbols. A symbol dances in the red-hot iron shoes till she falls down dead. There is, however, an order in which a symbol creates its meanings, as feminists and others have pointed out. A character in a story exists in particular before it exists in general. A wicked stepmother is a woman before she is a symbol of what a child might fear in motherhood. The story of Snow White therefore says things about gender, and the encounters of daughter, stepmother, father and lover, before it can become a picture of a psychological process. The ostensible incidents of a story are more than screens, or the concrete analogies a young mind needs to deal with ideas. They are the means by which meaning arises at all. Every story has to be taken literally before it is taken any other way. Bettelheim’s determination to skip this stage in a story’s functioning could produce grotesque results.

  Take his reading of Bluebeard. It’s the most famously horrible story in the European folk-canon, condensing in extreme form either women’s fears of what marriage may do to them, or male hatred of women, or both. The items on the flow chart common to all versions of the story are these. A young woman marries a lord, powerful, mysterious and mysteriously alone despite a sequence of previous weddings. He goes away, leaving her a key, or an egg. He tells her she may look in every room of his castle except one. Since a prohibition in a fairy tale has exactly the same effect as an order, she does enter the forbidden room, which contains the dismembered bodies of all his other wives. This room is the heart of horror, with its revelation of atrocity concealed within normality, its terrible lack of explanation. It is the central symbol of male violence in folklore; because it can also be seen as womb-like, a ‘bloody chamber’ in a different sense, it was audaciously adopted by Angela Carter as a symbol for a female subjectivity aware of the danger in desire. I’ve never read it without feeling implicated. In the story Bluebeard’s wife, appalled, lets slip the precious egg or key, and blood marks it indelibly with her knowledge. Bluebeard returns. She escapes. Or she doesn’t: pick your version. Angela Carter had her mother ride up on a horse and shoot Bluebeard straight between the eyes with a cavalry pistol. Astonishingly, the moral traditionally tacked on to the story was that curiosity is dangerous – as if Bluebeard’s murderous rage were the wife’s fault for looking inside the chamber. Can anyone really have believed that if she hadn’t, they would have lived happily ever after, the plot flipping over into Beauty and the Beast despite the butchery in the basement? Even more astonishingly, Bruno Bettelheim, concentration-camp survivor, effectively concurred. Leaping past the issue of who did what to whom in the chamber, and taking it as a symbol of forbidden knowledge in a general, sexual sense, he inte
rpreted Bluebeard as a story about a woman’s infidelity and – twisting time strangely – her husband’s anger over it. Bettelheim’s moral: ‘Women, don’t give in to your sexual curiosity; men, don’t permit yourself to be carried away by your anger at being sexually betrayed.’

  The movement for the reform of fairy tales that began in the 1970s was partly a response to this kind of thing – to readings that cheerfully saw villains as sympathetic embodiments of inner drives (if they were male) and blamed the victims (if they were female). Bettelheim had assumed that the roles of men and women, children and parents in pre-feminist America effectively corresponded with psychological truth. When the roles changed, the idea that the female players of Faery (queen, witch, godmother) embodied the eternally defined aspects of Mom seemed less probable. Likewise, when child abuse imprinted itself on public consciousness, it no longer seemed tenable to suppose that the dark forest represented a territory that was safely separated from reality in every child’s experience. The attempts to correct these things sometimes had a naivety mirroring the complacency they opposed. The first collections of feminist fairy tales – now much parodied – simply substituted ideally assertive heroines in place of ideally submissive ones: instead of Sleeping Beauty, the Biker Princess. Elsewhere, an attempt developed to sign up the terrible things that happen to children in fairy tales as the treasury of wounds without which no constituency can make its claim in the world of identity politics. ‘There is hardly a tale in the Grimms’ collection’ – argued the Grimm scholar and fairy-tale activist Jack Zipes, in 1995 – ‘that does not raise the issue of parental oppression.’ And yet, ‘we rarely talk about how the miller’s daughter is forced by her father into a terrible situation of spinning straw into gold, or how Rapunzel is locked up by her foster mother and maltreated just as children are often locked up in closets and abused today’. Often: as if you could scarcely open a cupboard door these days without a corpse-white little starveling falling out, blinking furiously in the unaccustomed daylight. This is a mere inversion of Bettelheim’s model of the child as perfectly safe and perfectly loved in his (always ‘his’) suburban dream home.

  The deeper risk of these insistences on the pure virtue, or pure victimhood, of the person in the tale with whom the child would most identify, was that they operated as a kind of exorcism, driving evil entirely away from the subject, and therefore allowing no scope at all for its exploration. If evil appeared at all, the only place left for it was as an inexplicable quality of a cruel Them, as a tireless, persecuting force aimed at the heroine. Forever munched by adult wolves, she never ever felt wolfish herself. With the best intentions, the reformers had re-invented the plot of de Sade’s Justine. But though the attempts to make stories prescribe desirable outcomes were naive, the reformers were right to recognise that prescription, laying down the law, is an inevitable part of what fairy tales do, and are. Every description, in a fairy story, of how people behave towards each other, with justice or injustice, is faintly, complicatedly, an endorsement. The certainty of story that allows a child to add it – with delight – to the category of ‘things that are so’, also lends to its content the slight implication that this is how things ought to be. We cannot be told ‘Once there was a prince’ without also being told (on some level and in some part) that it was right that there was a prince. What knits together out of nothing, and yet is solid enough to declare that it is so, recommends itself to us, although we don’t receive the recommendation straightforwardly. In this lies the power, and the danger, of stories.

  Rage being an important part of the three-year-old and four-year-old human condition, picture books for the age-group find ways of telling stories about it, if they want to be true to experience. David McKee’s Not Now, Bernard, for example: poor Bernard can’t get his parents to notice the monster that’s after him, and when the monster eats him up, leaving just a training shoe behind, it can’t draw their attention either. Very much Bernard-shaped and Bernard-sized, though with horns and scales, it has to have his supper of fishfingers and go to bed in his bed. ‘“But I’m a monster!” said the monster. “Not now, Bernard,” said his parents.’

  The granddaddy of this school was Maurice Sendak’s great Where the Wild Things Are, one of the few picture books to make an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger. It’s a book of few, rhythmically inevitable words; and it has great visual authority too. Sendak’s drawing has the stylised line and cross-hatched high definition of the German illustrations he admired as a child, while the reds and yellows and greens are the slightly faded colours of a 1940s toy theatre, so that the book takes you to a sensory world somewhere between reality and play. Sendak knows exactly where. His hero Max, rampaging in a wolf suit, an id rampant, ‘made mischief of one kind/ and another’, until his mother sends him to bed supperless. But: ‘That night in Max’s room a forest grew/ and grew/ and grew, until the walls became the wide world all around.’ I remember the impulse of delight I felt, strengthening each time, at the repetitions of ‘grew’. Max dances. The uprights of Max’s bed turn into trees and vines, every bedroom object staying in its place yet fading into vegetation within its outlines. This is the private forest of fantasy and the unconscious, from which Max journeys (in ‘a private boat’) to meet the Wild Things of his anger. Yet he is travelling out too, to an encounter that the walls of his family cannot contain, which gives a real solitude to the events of the story, and makes his success substantial when he tames the Wild Things – his ramping, snorting, monstrous wishes – ‘by the magic trick of gazing deep into their yellow eyes without blinking once’. Because he learns to have the energy of ‘the wild rumpus’ without being devoured, when he grows lonely he can return to his bedroom where (after all) his supper is waiting for him. ‘And it was still hot,’ ends the story. But it isn’t the family’s love that kept him safe among the Wild Things. That’s Max’s own achievement. Although one reason for the story’s emotional truthfulness is that the egotism of a small child still plainly frames the author as well (‘Couldn’t take the competition,’ Sendak said when asked why he had no children himself), Where the Wild Things Are is more than a transaction between symbols. It’s about behaviour as well as psychology, and the final reassurance is hardwon: not entirely straightforward.

  When Where the Wild Things Are was first published in the 1960s, it was seen as potentially disturbing. Bettelheim briefly condemned it. I had it, my parents being good liberals, and it didn’t frighten me at all. It didn’t occur to me to fear the bedposts bursting into leaf, or the terrible teeth the Wild Things gnash, or the terrible eyes they roll. I thought the end took away the risk from it all. Now I wish I had worried more.

  *

  One January day when I was four, the au pair from Denmark who was helping out my parents while my sister was in hospital, took me for a walk in the woods. She’d been reading me the chapter in Winnie the Pooh where Pooh and Piglet go round and round the spinney in the snow, trying to catch the Woozle. ‘Let’s go and find Piglet,’ she said. The Keele woods were under snow as well, that day. The snow was deep and powdery on the paths, and the trees were smoothed, white masses bowed under the weight of winter, like melted candles. We passed through a zone of little fir trees near the bottom of the steps down into the woods, leaving behind a trail of big footprints and a trail of little ones. (It’s not a coincidence that Pooh and Piglet walking together in Ernest Shepard’s illustrations have exactly the relative sizes of an adult and child going hand in hand.) And there, perched on the hollow stump of an oak, was Piglet, wearing a small red scarf exactly as in the pictures. The soft toy versions of the Disney characters did not exist yet. She had sewn him herself from grey and white cotton ticking. It was wonderful.

  Looking back, I see that moment almost as the first step in a seduction. As a ten-year-old, as a teenager, as an adult, I’ve always wanted life to be more storylike; I’ve always reached out for treats, set-ups, situations that can be coaxed by charm a
nd by the right kind of suggestively narrative talk into yielding something like the deliberate richness of an invented scene. Friends and lovers have known me as someone willing to say aloud sentences they thought could only exist on the page, in the hope that real time could be arranged and embroidered. I’d like words to be magic; or magnetic, attracting the events they name. Perhaps I first saw the chance of that when we found Piglet in the snow.

  But at four I was only a hearer of stories. It isn’t until we’re reading stories privately, on our own account, that story’s full seducing power can be felt. For the voice that tells us a story aloud is always more than a carrier wave bringing us the meaning; it’s a companion through the events of the story, ensuring that the feelings it stirs in us are held within the circle of attachment connecting the adult reading, and the child listening. To hear a story is a social act. Social rules, social promises, social bonds sustain us during it. Which is a kind of defence, when defence has been needed in reading. Yeshiva students turning the dangerous pages of the Kabbala would do so in groups, around their rabbi, so that the authority of the rabbi entered into the reading, and each was protected from the intensity of a solitary encounter with wild knowledge.