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THE FAIRY-TALE AS TEACHER

HE WORD fairy-tale, because it has so often been misused, isT owadays a little misleading . Yet it is impossible to dispense with

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Gretel. How it beguiles the child with its lollipop house and the pep-permint doorstep! For us, however, this is only the lure. The trap, thereal secret, is the journey through the wood. If you want to find yourway home, it says (back to beginnings, becoming as little children), youmust scatter something less ephemeral than peas or rose-leaves. Birdswill eat one, and the wind blow the other away. Only by marking thepath with pebbles-enduring, hardly found, indestructible-can youpick up the trail and escape the witchs oven which is extinction.

Take On e-E ye , Two-Eyes and Three-Eyes. Their mother loved One-Eyeand Three-Eyes-they were so unique and rare. Two-Eyes was just likeeveryone else, so she had to fend for herself. Yet it was for Two-Eyesthat the fairy feast was spread; Two-Eyes who alone could pluck thegold-and-silver fruit, and Two-Eyes also, whom the Prince so conven-tionally fancied. Away with oddity cries the storys inner voice.Subhuman and superhuman are both monstrosities. Only the com-pletely normal has a chance to escape the daily bondage and eat thespirits food.

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T h e two elder brothers snore at t he crossroads wh ile the youngest passesthem by and arrives first at the kings palace.

The theme of these Three Brothers bound on a single quest con-tinually recurs. Tak en literally, they can be considered as separateentities-Prince To m , Prin ce Dick , and Prin ce Harry. B ut they can alsobe regarded as a triple whole, a composite picture of mans inner self.As the first brother, he lives solely by instinct; in the second stage hefeels the need for something more but cannot find his direction; onlythe third brother grown young in acceptance and submission, un-ashamed to cry Help! to the humblest creature, can claim the brightPrincess. T h e fairy-tales are like water-flowers; they lie so lightly o n thesurface, bu t their roots go do w n deep in to a dark and ancient past. T he yare, in fact, a remnant of that Orphic art whose function it was toinstruct th e generations in the inn er meanings of things. Th ey were n otintended to be literature, as such, though the fact that they have, as aby-product, a high literary value is an indication of their Orphic ori-

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of an eye which Odin willingly paid to Mimir in return for the giftsof memory and premonition, was a cut price. He got a bargain and heknew it. In that world nothing is given for nothing and wishing takesyou nowhere. Look what happened to Dame Isobel when she becameinvolved with the Flounder! There is no easy way out in the fairy-tale.The characters must jump through every hoop. Princes are sent notmerely to the end of the world but beyond. But how is that achieved?When you have got to the end of the world what beyond is there?Inwards, answers the hero as he turns in his tracks. Only in this direc-tion can he continue his quest. And that he must do for a traditionalfairy-tale term-for ever and a day. Here, as with beyond, it is the daythat contains the secret. For ever is time. But the day is Time turningupon itself; it is every moment, the Now that goes in and out withbreath, the ultimate ever-Eternity. Not once, and good riddance, mustthe dragon be slain, but always, second by second. One can think ofeasier ways of thinking in wishes!

Again, like flowers, the same fairy-tales spring up in different coun-

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Instructive fire! This, surely, this efAuent and ceaseless light, is whatman hankers for when he thinks of the Golden Age. Not lost time per-fected, not Eden silted over, but this old knowledge that knocks a t hisinner ear and makes him long for something he does not know heknows. Hurled about the world we can see its action over the centuriesand where it fell upon good ground.This fire was Lao Tses candle. Byits light he formulated his Wordless Doctrine which can never really betold, any more than Buddhas Flower Sermon. Fairy-tale took him too,by the hand, forestalling him, as he was about to die, by setting him ona buffalo and taking him off to Heaven.There he goes, the Old One,forever riding up the sky on his rugged steed; reposeful, neither sur-prised nor pleased; and ceremoniously bowing, perhaps to Elijah on hiscloud.

Again, in India, a fire-bolt fell and brought to light theVedas, theUpanishads, the Buddhist legends, the Panchatantra stories, and thatgreat well-spring of fairy-tales, the confluence of the Ramayana and theMahabharata. This latter pair tell the truths with minstrel voices, deck-ing them out in the most sylvan beauty. Animals and men are completeentities; the forests themselves are living beings. In all fairy-tale wherewill you find such a figure as Hanuman, such an apotheosis of sim-plicity and self-surrender as that noble monkey in his role of servantto Rama (Vishnu)? Only the instructive fire could have bracketed sosignificantly the impulsive ape and the eternal preserver.

In Krishna and the Pandav brotherss ilver-helmed Arjuna and tiger-waisted Bhima (Tiger-waisted! Homer had nothing better!) the fairy-taleconcentrates the essence of the Mahabharata. But the lesser jewels arealmost as beautiful-Nala and Damayanti, for instance, and Savitri andSatyavana. Here, in these Indian legends, we find the source that even-tually fed the springs of all the Marchen3 of Europe, Scandinavia andRussia. But we are not to be blamed for knowing so little of our fairy-tale origins; for it is not for much more than a hundred years that theWest has had general direct access to the wisdom of the East and theNear East. Did Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm realize, I wonder, that everyone of their legendary princes has as his hidden name Rama or Arjuna?Or that Ahmed and Mustapha from T h e Arabian Nights mingle their

dark locks with the flaven curls of Western heroes? For the Thousandand One also derivedthir heritage from India, though only in part.The other branch of the family came from Persia. There, the instruc-tive fire fell upon theSuT poets. In the Mathnam of Jalauuddin Rumi,a brimming cup of paraie and story, you may find many a brotherlylikeness to the tales ohheherezade and those we tell our own chil-dren at bed-time.

Inevitably, if we go looking for roots, the tracks lead eastwards. Thesun of wisdom, like the sun of light, has its rising there. But luckily forus the movement of boti is in a westerly direction. As they journeywestwards, they adapt thc riches they bring with them to each placeand age. In the largest sense, therefore, we too have our fairy-tales andallegories and parablesthx are peculiarly our own.The American Indianshave a mine of legendsci profise and varied that it will take genera-tions to collect and digest it. Bunyans Pilgrims Progress comes into mycategory-not for thertory only but also for the grand simplicity ofthe writing. The architemre and resonance of the telling are an intrin-sic part of the allegoq. And think of Blake and his Arabesqueinventions-angels, demms, children on clouds, and all the world ofspirits. The whole body of his work is fairy-tale, a strong, pliant net setby a cunning fowler to citch the truth.

And still, though we heed it less and less, the wheel turns and thelight falls. Never was theinstructive fire more needed than it is today.And, as though need, y iome universal law, brought forth its own ful-fillment, we have a portion of the instructive fire at hand. AIf andEverything4 by G.I. Gurdjieff seems to me to come under that heading,since its object is to tellman, by means of fairy-tale, parable-call itwhat you will-the truth about himself. Perhaps I should say re-tell,for it gathers up fromthe past stray strands of knowledge and plaitsthem into a powerful wrbof contemporary exposit ion.This is a strange,exciting, disturbing book,unique of its kind; occasionally shot throughwith poetry, continually provocative; alive as a live wire is alive andcapable of giving shock! of a very high voltage. Properly to experienceit, one must go to it naked, shorn of all preconceived notions of whata book should be. It ir anew sort of book. Its difference from other

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books is in kind, not degree, in the same sense as a camel is differentfrom an ostrich.

Intimately relating opposites to one another (as the fairy-tale neverfails to do), this story purports to be told by Beelzebub to his grand-son Hassein, a child of twelve years, as they sail through the universefrom planet to planet. And the subject of his discourse is the race ofthree-brained beings who inhabit the planet earth. Seated in theirspaceship, the storyteller, the child, and their old servant-the intellec-tual, emotional, and instinctive centers-brood like three Fates upon therace of men.The contrast between the moving ship-a new version ofthe magic carpet?-and the stillness of those three figures is effectivelyachieved and very moving. Motionless, wrapped in their tails, theirhorned heads bowed upon their palms, they seem to gaze with imper-sonal pity upon the creatures of earth. Here is a fairy-tale for our owntime, a piece of objective writing that we cannot read without in somesense experiencing it. The symbolism is accessible to anyone who reallywants to understand it and if there are no palpable dragons, there areinvisible terrors enough to set the doughtiest hero trembling.

Properly to appreciate this story, one must first hear it read aloud.Only so, I found, can one clarify for oneself the involved rhythms ofthe writing, and catch, behind the deliberately invented nouns andverbs, their inner meaning ringing. It is necessary, too, for the under-standing of the book-the Zen stories make the same demand-tojettison the usual interpretations of certain words and phrases. Anyoneused to thinking and feeling in clichts will get nowhere unless hethrows over his accumulated ballast. Such words as Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, Hope, Work, Love--all have to be re-learnedin order to understand Beelzebub. Come to that, Beelzebub himself hasto be plucked out of his accustomed context. We must here, in effect,give the Devil his due. As for the new words, so full of portent andcontent, the only way to deal with them is to take them in as childrentake in grown-up words they do not understand.These act as grains ofsand round which the pearl of feeling grows.Without analysis or inter-pretation, children let a story become part of them and themselves partof it.

The fact thatAll and Everything is told to a child seems to me a hintfrom the author along the lines of all fairy-tale clues-that the doorinto the story can only be unlocked by the same key as opens theKingdom of Heaven. Through Hassein, the grave child, the unfalteringlistener, half-grown creature full of the passionate compassion of youthand containing in himself the fructive seed of wisdom, the reader isenabled to look upon himself as in a mirror. In spite of all the poetry,the invention and the flashes of comedy, it is not a pretty picture.Cosmically, man is made to appear a t once smaller and larger than hehas hitherto conceived himself to be: smaller, because he no longerstands at the center of creation, as the flung stone from which the uni-verse widens ring on ring; larger, because, (though there is a catch init) he still has, in spite of all he has wasted, the possibility of change.The past may be redeemed and a nobler future prepared. But this pos-sibility-here is the catch-must be used now, worked for at thismoment: not after luncheon or tomorrow, but Now. Do you catch thefairy-tale echo?

The cosmology of the book is tremendous. We are shown, as froma height, the worlds harmoniously rising from, or descending into, eachother like notes in a universal octave. The cosmic law of Three andSeven are unfolded, recalling us again to the Three Brothers and SevenBrothers of the fairy-tales. Great images abound; the reciprocal feedingof all created things, for instance-which seems miraculous until onerealizes it must be true and therefore inevitable. Everything at everymoment partakes of something else.What we eat and what we are eatenby is the subject of a large part of the story. The ancients instructedman in his inter-relation with the planets. Paracelsus gave the samereminder when he said we are stars with our bread. And this bookrepeats the me ss ag ew it h one proviso. That proviso is the core andcrux (coeur et Croix would be truer) of Beelzebubs discourse, as it isthe underlying implication of all fairy-tales. It is that man must work.His bread he may get by physical sweat; but to eat of the substance ofArcturus and Orion-or nearer home, Jupiter and Venus-he must per-form other and harder labors. The provisions for these are explicitly setdown in the story. Man must be at every second. He must live his life

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as though it were his death; not turning from the world but, on thecontrary, living in the world alive. Not just breathing in and out andthe years passing.

All and everything the book offers. The fairy-tale word for it wasHappy-Ever-After. No fairy-tale, however, ever failed to send in a billand neither does Beelzebub. In return for all and everything, nothingshort of all and everything is demanded. Existence, we are warned, issomething that has to be paid for (the plea I never asked to be born!would get short shrift here) and time is running out. Dream on, criesthe tale, at your peril!

Are we all, then, sleeping beauties, hidden in forests of habit? Ifshame shakes us and we are honest, the answer must be Yes. Would theearth be where it is if we were not asleep? But there are other atombombs to be discovered than those that ruin and kill. Every fairy-talefrom the beginning of time has been a small explosion, full of healingif man would be healed.The great truths are still to be heard, if manwills to listen, for it is not in his power to silence them.They are objec-tive and outside him.

Many such thunderbolts, many bombs of warning and healing areto be found in this allegory of All an d Everything. Each chapter throwsa new light upon mans condition. The one on America, almost thelongest, is also one of the most significant. For it was in America, eventhough he arraigns it, that Beelzebub found more of that brotherli-ness necessary for mans happier life than in any other country visited.The whole book is, in fact, a brotherly pronouncement. It is as thoughan elder brother-or, according to the fairy-tale that youngest brother-out of his own deep experience were noting down for us the wisdomhe had learned. Reading it is like being wrought upon by a great win-nowing fan. On e is caught up, small, shamed and shaken, dizzily turningin the air, not knowing whether one will drop among the chaff or thegrain. But a large calm falls on the story in the end as the grandson,ever compassionate, asks of his grandfather some comfort for the beingsof earth. The answer comes swiftly, cold and bitter, but it lifts up onthe wings of poetry because it is true and because it springs from love.And it seems, as we close the book that there is a stir in the enchanted

castle and a falling back of those embracing thorns. Stepping throughthem, the grave child Hassein comes and, lightly touching each uponthe shoulder, summons us with the oldest of fairy-tale admonitions-Awake, sleeper, awake!

NOTES

1.An enchanted prince who has the form of a flounder, on being spared bythe fisherman, promises him anything he wishes. Th e foolish fisherman sharesthis offer with his greedy wife. Again and again she sends him back to theflounder with her demands, first for a nice cottage instead of a hovel, thenfor a castle instead of a cottage, then she asks to be lung, then emperor, andso on until she asks for the power that belongs to God alone.There is thena terrible tempest, and the fisherman and his wife find themselves back wherethey started, in their pitiful hovel. (Grimm)

2. George Chapman (1559-1634), Elizabethan poet and the translator of Homerreferred to in John Keats sonnet On First Looking into Chapmans Homer.

3 . German word meaning folk-tales4.BeelzebubsTales to His Grandson:An Objectively Impartial Criticism o f the L$e

o f Man (All and Everything : First Series) New York: Harcourt, Brace andCompany, 1950.

First published in World Review,July 1950Reprinted by permission of the Estate of P L. Travers