On Fairy Tales
excerpts from the writings of Christina Campo
THIS BOOK collects writings from various periods, and there can be no doubt that some of these are rather youthful.
Yet, under different pretexts and with various colors, it seems to me that the book addresses the same subject, from beginning to end, time and again. It is or would like to be, from beginning to end, a humble attempt to dissent from the game of forces, “a profession of disbelief in the omnipotence of the visible.”
For this reason, I have not even eliminated repetitions. In the “painted rooms” created by our old artists, it was common for dissimilar figures, on the different walls, to allude with the same gesture to a single center, a single guest—absent or present.
A Rose
“Whosoever shall lose his life shall save it.” Madame Leprince de Beaumont, in “Beauty and the Beast,” takes the same theme to still subtler and more secret zones. Like any perfect fairy tale, this one is about the loving reeducation of a soul—an attention—which is elevated from sight to perception. To perceive is to recognize what alone has value, what alone truly exists. And what else truly exists in this world if not what is not of this world? The Beast’s relationship with Belle is a long, tender, very cruel struggle against terror, superstition, judgments made by the flesh, vain nostalgia. Cinderella’s lingering at the ball is not dissimilar from Belle’s return home, which nearly costs the Beast his life. For both girls, there is the risk of falling back into the magic circle of the past, which can devastate, like an unseasonable frost, what has so long been waiting to bloom: the present. This is Belle’s ordeal, but Belle does not know it. In fact, in essence, it is the Beast’s ordeal.
And when does the Beast transform into a Prince? When the miracle has become superfluous. When the transformation has already imperceptibly occurred in Belle: washing her of every adolescent regret and every stain of fantasy, leaving her only an attentive soul stripped bare (“He no longer seems like a Beast, and even if he were one I would marry him anyway, for he is so perfectly good and I could never love anyone but him”).
The Beast’s transformation is in reality Belle’s transformation, and it is only reasonable the Beast becomes a Prince at this point as well. Reasonable because no longer necessary. Now that Belle is no longer looking with the eyes of the flesh, the Prince’s elegance is purely superfluous. It is the surplus of happiness promised to those who sought the kingdom of heaven first of all. “For unto every one that hath shall be given,” says the verse that so intrigues those faithful to the letter.
To lead Belle to this triumph, the Beast came very close to death and despair. Night after night, with perfectly insane tenacity, he labored, appearing to the recluse girl, resigned and unafraid at the ceremonial hour: the hour of dinner and music. Girded in the aegis of horror and ridicule (“As well as being ugly, unfortunately I am also stupid”), he risked hatred and execration of what was dear to him: he descended into the Underworld and made her descend there too.
God does no less for us, and no less madly, night after night, day after day. It should not be forgotten, however, that it was Belle who elicited her Prince, from afar and unaware. This was when she asked her father, whose foot was already in the stirrup, to bring her, not a jewel or a sumptuous gown, but that mad gift of hers: “a rose, only a rose,” in the dead of winter.
In Medio Coeli (In Midheaven)
EVERYBODY knows the very old, though they forget a large part of the life they have led, remember their childhoods with increasing clarity. It has been said that only children may enter the kingdom of heaven, and it seems only right that we should have to give up every other thing we own in exchange for that one possession, which will be had, perhaps, with death.
The most befuddled old man assumes the mystery of an augur the moment he starts telling stories about his childhood. Life will slow its pace around him, strange silences will enshroud him, and even the most impatient child will be unable to resist him. He seems endowed at such moments with auspicious powers. Indeed, he is pointing the child toward a destination: not his own past but the child’s future, the future of his memory as an adult. Neither one is aware of it, unless they notice the numinous quality of the language which envelops them both in the same rapture. The old man’s words could not be simpler. And yet you often hear the child interrupt, wanting to know more, insisting on the shape of that focaccia, the size of that garden, the color of the dress his great-grandmother was wearing during that afternoon stroll or at that party. And if such questions fail the child, if he is not gifted with poetic attention, he will still ask the old man, furrowing his brow, “How old were you then?” Such is his attempt to conquer the bewildering distance, the unimaginable journey, that lies between him and the child of the past, who waits at the far end of his future. An ageless child — an old man in disguise — like the black children in icons. “Six or seven,” the old man will say. And almost as though reciting a secret responsory, he will add, “Like you, more or less.” Such is the perfect, impartial kabbalah that holds the thread of the hours, the order of the days and years, suspended around them both, as around Proust’s bed.
See how slowly the child blinks his eyes, as if he were hypnotized by the old man’s reminiscences; see how feverishly he parts his lips and how heavily he gulps as he swallows his saliva. His expression betrays no trace of amusement; his whole body is taut against the old man’s knees. He has the motionless tension of an animal in motion or an insect undergoing metamorphosis. Perhaps he is a little like the nightingale in full-throated song, when its temperature rises and its fragile feathers ruffle. In these moments, he is growing; he is drinking with great gulps and fear at the fountain of memory: the dark, flashing water that brings the subtleties of perception to life.
The objects that the child is so anxious to see, after all, surround him too. They are within his reach. And yet he seems unable to establish the connection; there appears to be no relationship between the things he is being told about, such as his grandmother — things so simple they scare him, and so appealing as they elude his grasp — and the things he touches and sees every day, the things he will go back to touching and seeing very soon, once the old man’s stories are finished or broken off.
There is something brutal, or perhaps only animal, in the abruptness with which a child goes back to his games after one of these moments that have held the motion of the spheres in suspension overhead. As long as the story lasted, it was impossible to imagine him coming out of his trance without tears or tantrums. But almost like someone awakened from a dream, like an animal or one of those people who, after a miraculous cure, awake with an appetite, he, too, will immediately say, “I’m hungry,” and greedily snatching up a slice of bread, hop off on one foot to go and eat it somewhere else. He is almost arrogant — almost flaunts his independence by shouting or singing at the top of his lungs. He will then, if he has his way, turn toward the animal world. He will drag off the dog or scoop up the cat and go running with them through the garden.
Not that the child doesn’t normally live in perfect harmony with the objects around him. On the contrary. Immersed in the grace of unsullied sensuality, his hands grasp an orange or plunge into the luxuriance of fur or water with angelic speed and aplomb. But he does not know it. Only when his memory closes like a circle over his own beginnings will he know. The old man knows, however. Their dialogue transpires between a garden where everyone is naked without being aware of it and an antechamber where everyone has been stripped bare.
That is why an old man’s simplest story assumes a parabolic pace. In the past, the old preferred to express themselves in parables, and the traditional teller of fairy tales — those gospels that discourse so casually on morality — was the grandmother: the doyenne of the house, the woman of good counsel, no matter whether she was a lady or a peasant. “An old man by the fireside is worth more than a young man in the field,” says an Italian proverb. The truth of this is plain if we consider the image of the storyteller (whose voice my father could still hear): a mysterious man invited to the house after dinner on long winter nights, like a celebrant or haruspex, an old man with a clay pipe who lived off his tongue and around whom the whole room or kitchen divided like a chapel, with the gynoecium of spinners and embroiderers on one side and the androecium of smokers on the other.
In Tuscany, fairy tales were always called “the stories,” just as the Gospels used to be. With the hearth at its center — an ancient locus of communion with the dead and with ancestral spirits — the house was reserved for the storyteller. The square was where you went to hear the balladeer, the chronicler of secular deeds. And since public spaces have always been secular spaces as far as the people are concerned, “balladeer” also took on the meaning of “fire-eater” and “charlatan.” Whereas the storyteller, disdainful of end rhymes and pitiful patter, traveled mysteriously from house to house like a bearer of treasures. The children liked to picture him with a sack full of words very much like the sack of dreams parceled out by Sleep. For centuries, legends circulated about those who were no longer able to tell (or no longer wished to tell) fairy tales. For they were a gift from heaven, and always revocable.
Even as he tells his own story, the artless old man may be unaware of his secret role as a hierophant. The artful old man is well aware, and prefers parable to history. The former will say: “When I was little, they used to take us to see a certain holy cripple...” (or, in the worst case: “In that year of famine, we had to eat mice...”). The latter will begin: “On the island of the Children of Kaledan, there lived a blind king who did not believe in death...” Both of them, however, keep faith with a consignment of silence that is the very law of life.
The first man surrounds this silence with the most familiar, everyday objects of memory, reminiscent of rustic phylacteries or treasured talismans. The other weaves it into complex, recurring figurations connected with magic numbers and symbols apposite to the secret of the story: like the reverse side of a carpet, whose design will not reveal itself until it has been unrolled.
It is no coincidence that so many fairy tales — those figurations of the journey — end like a ring right where they began. At the end of it all, beyond the seven mountains and the seven seas, there is the paternal house, the family park or garden, where, in the meantime, the grass has grown tall and the gray-haired king has been waiting to give the crown to his son, the prodigal prince. There is one fairy tale, and not even a very old one, in which the journey extends beyond the world:
A little girl sets out in search of her dead mother. Beyond the forests and the oceans, the labyrinthine cities and the thunderous mountains, after crossing the cadaverous plain of the moon, the girl is led into the garden of paradise. It is the first pleasant place she has been. But then she recognizes the tall oaks and whirlwinds of purplish leaves. For this is the forest near her house, where she had first decided to stray at the start of her pilgrimage. And it comes as no great shock, a few moments later, when she finds her mother sitting in a little antrum, a cave, near the spring where she loved to play as a child.
In a fairy tale, there are no roads. You start out walking, as if in a straight line, and eventually that line reveals itself to be a labyrinth, a perfect circle, a spiral, or even a star — or a motionless point the soul never leaves, even as body and mind take what appears to be an arduous journey. You seldom know where you are traveling, or even what you are traveling toward, for you cannot know, in reality, what the water ballerina, or the singing apple, or the fortune-telling bird may be. Or the word to conjure with: the abstract, culminating word that is stronger than any certainty. As for the Moirai (who may take the form of decrepit beggars or talking beasts), they will never be able to give you more than three or four negative rules as viaticum, rules on which everything depends and which will promptly be broken, because it is impossible to follow rules that stand for other rules that have not yet been revealed: “Do not buy meat from a condemned man,” “Do not sit on the lip of a fountain.” So it goes. Since the thing you start out looking for cannot and must not have a face, how can you recognize the means to reach it until you’ve reached it? How can the destination ever be anything but an apparent destination?
An Eastern teacher expresses himself very similarly when he says that his disciple must start walking if he wants to get anywhere — that he must set forth with all the strength of his spirit if he wants to receive his enlightenment. The dawning of enlightenment is like a lotus opening or a dreamer awakening. It isn’t possible to predict the end of a dream; when the dream is over, we wake up spontaneously. Flowers don’t open when they are expected to open; it will happen when the time is right. No one arrives at the enlightenment he sets out to seek. It will come to him in its own sweet time.
Thus the destination walks side by side with the traveler like the Archangel Raphael with Tobias. Or it hovers behind him as with Tobit the Elder. In truth, the traveler has always had it within him and is only moving toward the motionless center of his life: the antrum near the spring, the cave — where childhood and death, in one another’s arms, confide the secret they share.
The idea of travel, effort, and patience is paradoxical, yes, but it is also exact. For in this paradox, we stumble on the intersection of eternity and time: the form must willingly destroy itself, but it cannot do so until it has achieved perfection.
Miscellaneous Excerpts
Small children have mysterious organs, sensitive to omens and correspondences. At the age of six, I used to read fairy tales all day long.
But why did I always return, fascinated, to certain images that later on I would recognize were almost recurring emblems for me, almost heraldic devices. The dialogue, under the dark city gate, between the goose girl and the severed head of a horse. "Farewell, Falada, who hangs up above! / Farewell, young queen, who passes down below..." A story that I discover in every corner of my life, ready to be reinterpreted on new levels and opened with new keys.
Thus, in poetry, the image preexists the idea that will slowly seep into it. For years, it can haunt the poet, whatever it may be: fabulous or domestic, dismaying or familiar, often an image from early childhood, the strange name of a tree, the insistence of a gesture. It patiently waits for revelation to come and fill it. In Proust, this mystery of the image suddenly flooded with torrents of meaning and then reappear-ing, time and again, as though seen from switchbacks still higher than a mountain, is the very essence of his poetry.
It is no coincidence that reading fairy tales, the secret language of the old, is so often one of the indelible events of childhood. For the child who has read them in a living landscape, they will already be a first initiation, if not to the meaning, at least to the power of symbols.
Corrado Alvaro, a writer graced with mystery, has likened the fairy tale to the childhood of the world, when journeys were made on foot or on the backs of animals. What were the caves, the woods, the underground worlds if not places glimpsed along difficult paths? The means of travel magnified the landscape, made for a more intimate and, at the same time, more mysterious knowledge of things and the very animals that carried us on their backs added to the mystery with their unforeseen fears, their refusals to continue, their attention to certain paths and places, their sudden gallops and starts. In those days, the road was animated by obscure presences, horrors, hazards, happy deliverances...
It is worth noting that a writer who attempts a fairy tale unfailingly produces his best prose, becoming a writer even if he has never been one before: almost as if language, when it comes into contact with symbols so universal and particular, so sublime and palpable, cannot help but distill its purest flavor.
The impossible awaits the hero of a fairy tale. But how is a person to reach the impossible if not, precisely, by means of the impossible?
A hero starts down the path of the fairy tale without any earthly hope. The impossible is at first represented by the mountain, and with the simple decision to confront the mountain comes a feeling that serves as an Archimedean point outside the world. "There's nothing I wouldn't do to save my mother" is a symbolic formula, opening the gates to the fourth dimension. Its effect is comparable to what a mystic claims of prayer: it yanks up the mountain by the roots, so to speak, and turns it upside down on its summit. From this moment forward, the hero of the fairy tale is a fool in the eyes of the world
The inexorable, inexhaustible moral of the fairy tale is thus victory over the law of necessity, the constant transition to a new order of relationships, and absolutely nothing else, for there is absolutely nothing else to learn on this earth.