"Happily Ever After"

Oral storytelling necessitates a framework. Anyone who’s tried singing or storytelling, or any kind of performing in a crowded public space, knows that you have to call for attention before you can begin. That’s why Shakespeare’s plays often begin with a prologue – a man standing on the stage to deliver a speech about the background to the drama, or a couple of minor characters loudly joking and quarrelling, or a shipwreck with lots of dramatic sound effects  – something that won’t matter if you miss half of it, something to shut the audience up and make them settle down and pay attention. 

A song will begin with a chord or a run of notes upon the harp or guitar, and the beginning of a story is signalled by a stock phrase: ‘Once upon a time’. It’s a device to arrest the listener and locate the story in a place and past that never was, yet is still relevant. ‘Il était une fois’, or ‘Es war einmal…’or ‘It wasn’t in my time, or in your time, but once upon a time, and a very good time it was…’

The device is common to so many languages, I think people must have been beginning stories in this way since paleolithic times.  I'm told classical Arabic stories begin: There was, oh, what there was or what there wasn’t, in the oldest of days and ages and times…’  North American Mi’kmaq stories begin, ‘Long ago, in the time of the Old Ones…’  Czech and Hungarian stories begin, ‘Once there was, once there wasn’t…’

And this sort of opening phrase sends a subtle but distinct message to listeners.  It says: ‘Pay attention!’; but it also says: ‘Though this is going to be amusing or stirring or exciting, it’s probably not true.’  It says, ‘This is a story.  Sit back and listen.’

And so the room hushes, the people attend, the storyteller spins her tale. There’s a real physical element to listening to a story. It’s like going on a roller coaster. It’s not like reading, where everything happens at exactly your own pace, and you can glance ahead, or turn back to check on something, or put the whole book down for ten minutes to make a cup of coffee.  Listening to a story, you are in the power of the storyteller.  You must keep still and listen carefully not to miss a word.  You watch her face as she frowns or smiles.  The flash of her eyes, her gesturing hands.  You don’t know what is coming next, or even how long the story is going to be. For she on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise.  Everything is a surprise. 

Some stories are very short.  Some are very long.  Some divide into almost separate segments, picaresque narratives in which one thing follows upon another with the most tenuous of links.  The princess and the prince are married, they become king and queen.  The audience draws breath - but that’s not the end.  The storyteller is still speaking.  The king goes to war, leaving the young queen in the care of his old mother.  But the old woman hates her, and so, when the queen gives birth to her first child, the old woman orders it to be killed and the blood smeared over the queen’s clothes so that everyone will think she has killed her own child…

No, it’s not the end yet!

And so, when the end does come, it is often signalled with another stock phrase, to show that the show is over.  Puck delivers the epilogue, Rosalind steps out of the framework of the play to flirt with the audience about their beards. Fairytales conclude with the words ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ – or sometimes, ‘they all lived happily till they died’ – or even, ‘if they haven’t died yet, they are living there still’…

It’s getting more conscious and ironic, isn’t it? 

Fairytales, contrary to what people suppose, are not naïve. Their very existence floats in the relationship between narrator and audience. Indeed it is naïve to imagine that ‘happy ever after’ – much derided as a banal or smug or thoughtless conclusion – was ever intended as much more than the signal that the story is over.  The bite of narrative has been chewed and swallowed: the show is done. The listeners can get on with drinking beer, eating, bargaining, gossiping, telling rude jokes, or heading off outside for a piss, or trudging home to their own difficult wife, husband or parent.

Beginnings are important, endings less so, because the stock phrases that signal the end of a fairytale do not call for attention, but dismiss it.  They don’t place the story in the mythic past, they undermine it.  ‘If they haven’t died yet, they are living there still’ (but how likely is that?).  And so fairytale endings are far more varied than beginnings: in fact they can be purposely surreal and disconnected.  

‘They found the ford, I the stepping stones.  They were drowned, and I came safe.’

‘This is a true story.  They are all lies but this one.’

‘There runs a little mouse.  Anyone who catches it can make himself a fine fur cap!’

‘Snip, snap, snout – this is the end of the adventure.’

‘And when the wedding was over, they sent me home in little paper shoes over a causeway covered in broken glass’.

Storytelling is for everyone

Since the last entry, I've been on a school visit.  And talking to 200 Year 7s (twelve years old, approximately) has made me think further on the whole connectedness of folklore, story telling and story writing, so here's a postscript.

The children were a great, lively bunch, in a school that doesn't get many author visits. I do a lot of  interactive stuff: some riddles, some drama - and I tell stories from the viking sagas, stories from medieval chronicles. By the time children are in Year 7, any visiting author has to prove him or herself worthy of being listened to.  You cannot just waltz in and start talking about elves. Or I don't anyway.  Even though my last book, 'Dark Angels' ('The Shadow Hunt' in the US) is all about elves.  Because English twelve year olds think of elves as little green-stockinged things with red hats dancing around a Christmas tree and making toys. And why would they want to hear about that?

So I start off by talking about aliens and UFO's, instead, and about people who think they've been abducted by aliens and operated on and even had their brains removed (rather like Spock in the old Startrek episode) - and then I tell them a (genuine) story from the 13th century about someone being abducted by elves and having his brain removed - and I try to show them how people have been telling the same sorts of stories for hundreds and hundreds of years.  And how some of these stories then end up becoming woven into the books I write.

A book itself is an alien thing to some of these children.  An intimidating, unpleasurable thing, and reading itself a difficult struggle that gets you nowhere slowly and makes you feel a fool.  Yet we all tell stories, all the time.  I said to them, "I'll tell you this, I've never been into a school that didn't have a ghost story.  When I was at school,  we had a disused railway station just along the road, and there was supposed to be a severed hand that crawled around the platform in the broken glass.  Nobody ever saw it, of course, but the story was there.  All schools have ghosts."

Hands went up.  "We have Bloody Mary in the toilets," two girls remarked.  (Who is Bloody Mary, in this context?  Who knows?  She's obviously some frightening supernatural, half believed in, half delighted in...)  A boy told me, 'There was a ghost at my mum's school - the ghost of a cleaner who got locked in."

And so I was saying, "There you are!  These are the stories people tell because, though nobody knows who makes them up, they are fun to tell and fun to hear.  And sometimes they do get put into books: but - and THIS is the important thing - they don't COME from books.  They come from the real world and from real people."

Anybody can make up a story; anybody can tell one.  It's a tragedy for children to feel disempowered and divorced from the process of storytelling, because it's one of the things we were all born to do.  Why should the tales children tell have value when collected by adults and printed in the Journal of the Folklore Society, yet no value in the playground?  I want children to know that the tales they tell each other are just as real, just as 'important' as the ones that get caught (by lurking academics) and shut up in books. 

And if they know that, perhaps they'll lose their fear of reading them and writing them down.