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1. The need for stories
After some years of reading and taking an interest in everything to do with fairy tales and classic stories, I thought it would be a good idea to put it all into a book and share it with parents and educators.
Looking back is not false nostalgia. I have a sincere interest in knowing how these stories and symbols fit into today’s culture.
Human beings have always needed to tell stories to understand themselves. As Yuval Noah Harari states in his book Sapiens, our evolution, cooperation and development begin with stories. Models of the world that include things such as emotions, actions or interactions are generally represented in stories rather than in scientific theories. Tales, myths and fables, whether told orally or written down, have been a fundamental part of this indirect transmission of knowledge.
Indirect knowledge, because the abstraction of stories does not always have a direct equivalent in practical language or rational thought, and they are not always easy to understand and decipher.
Stories speak to us in a cognitive language very different from the logical, practical thinking of everyday life. Like dreams, they have a specific language that develops and gives visual form to the subconscious. And just as we need dreams to be awake and able to function, we need stories to know how to live, how to act, how to think. They are essential. They are our raw material for interpreting the world and, through a view that moves from within to without, being able to interact with it.
Dreams can be interpreted, and stories can be interpreted. In the same way, the way we conceive dreams and stories can be very similar, but we need to know that when we interpret or translate stories into rational logic, we are also losing much of that language that cannot be translated.
That is why I insist so much on not setting rules or goals based on a direct moral translation, but on letting ourselves be carried along. As in a dream, we do not choose. The story chooses.
Stories have merged, shed what is not essential and become condensed, sometimes down to archetypes. That is why it is so hard to shake off old myths, legends and ancient stories.
Those stories change and adapt to the times because they are the result of communication between generations. They are archetypes, not by-products of a culture.
Stories have an identifiable structure, even a grammar that makes them understandable. Even the simplest stories have an incredibly deep meaning on other levels, and this can be seen above all in stories and tales for children.
If a story absorbs you and is believable, it has something within it, in its structure, in its imagery, that is worth telling. And if, when we hear it, we think that the story is familiar, it means it lies deep within our collective consciousness.
The question might be: why did they not say what the stories meant directly? Simply because they did not know, and there is more in stories than we consciously understand. They could only express themselves in that sophisticated way, through stories, even without fully understanding them. They tell us things on every level, not only on the moral, social or practical level, as we expect of rational beings. The subconscious uses a specific language in dreams, and stories have a specific language in waking life.
We can recognize the hero and the villain in a story, but we would not be able to name all the reasons, or every single element that a hero or a villain must have. It is too complex on a logical level, but simple in a story.
A child’s way of thinking
Magic is at the heart of fairy tales. It is the symbolic element that comes closest to a child’s way of thinking. We adults know how it works through its figures of speech, its symbols and its connections with our reality, but what truly matters in stories is that children know and are aware of its real existence. They do not simply believe in magic. They know it exists because it is part of their thinking, part of their emotional reality.
There is a great difference between the way a child thinks and handles emotions and the way a teenager or an adult does. Adult realism and rationalism do not fully match a child’s inner experiences. That does not mean realistic stories have no meaning. They do. But they do not address a fundamental part of emotional development, or the child’s unconscious world.
A story does not stimulate a child’s imagination. What it does is match the child’s thinking: the two worlds coincide for a few moments. A child’s thinking, as Bruno Bettelheim rightly pointed out, is animistic. In other words, it gives a soul to objects, animals and events that, in adult thinking, have settled into passive elements that now form part of the surroundings. To a child, the sun has life and a soul. It is very much like them: it gets up in the morning, has changes of mood, hides, and goes to sleep at night. You can tell a child that it is a ball of fire, millions of years old and thousands of degrees hot, that it floats in space and is a shining star at the center of the solar system, and they will accept it. They will accept it because it is another adult thing to be respected and accepted, but it does not match their inner world. Nothing in the scientific explanation will make sense within their way of seeing the world, their way of living their emotional reality.
For a child, there is no difference between the inanimate world and the living world: they belong to the same universe, and that is why stories have many answers to their questions. Animals, objects and wizards are alive because they speak of the child’s world as the child sees it. This does not mean that children are unclear about the differences between those realities when finding their way in the world. They act as shamans of the unknown. They have the key that lets them open doors to the mystery of life. And I think that is the wonder of stories for children, and also the wonder of having been a child.
When we grow up, we keep that intuition, but no longer the certainty. We adults carry traces of that world, and sometimes we remember it, as when we tell the door not to hit the child again, or remember our childhood stuffed animal with affection. We remember that animistic thinking because it was there for a time, and we know of its existence through what remains of it. Sometimes we draw on it to talk to a child without realizing it, unaware that this way of thinking is more real than we imagine.
J. K. Rowling, who I think understands magic well, also says that a child is powerless, with no control over any aspect of life, and that the magic of stories is the universe where they are given power, even superpowers.
The beauty of language
Let us take, for example, the opening of Snow White, in the version collected by the Brothers Grimm:
“Once upon a time, in the middle of winter, when snowflakes fell from the sky like feathers, a queen sat sewing at her window, which had a frame of black ebony wood. As she sewed, she looked out at the snow and pricked her finger with the needle. Three drops of blood fell onto the snow. The red against the white looked so beautiful that she thought to herself: ‘If only I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood in this frame.’”
As we can see, not a single word is wasted, and the story has also been given a rhythm and beauty that make it wonderful. In a few sentences, a story is defined and condensed that was surely once much longer in its telling and its decoration. The Brothers Grimm gather the essence of all this and, by condensing the language, and certainly through beauty, turn it into a lovely tale.
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