Fairytale blues

I was having this inexplicable craving for fairy tales for some days. “After the finals” I kept telling myself. So last Monday I combed through Hayden’s catalogs and managed to lay my hands on folk tales from Russia, Israel and Africa. I also picked up, as an afterthought, the ‘Legends of Greece and Rome.’ I needed to re-socialize myself in to the world of valiant gods and gorgeous goddesses.
Folk Tales from Israel disappointed me a bit. Here was a book that was more or less an academic rendition of the tales, with lengthy footnotes and endless references. The front cover had an interesting three-color illustration of what looked like a group of really evil women. But inside the book, there were no pictures. The tales were too short, too simplistic. The talking animals talked stupid. The kings and queens lacked their emblematic élan. The commoners seemed endlessly cunning.
The Russian Folk Tales were better, more flamboyant, more dramatic. The fair Vassilissa and Baba-Yaga the witch, were as enthralling as they were fifteen-twenty years back. But what is a Russian fairy tale without rich, vibrant, colorful pictures? I really missed my collection of fairy tale books with their silky pages and pretty pictures. I remember this book of Estonian folk tales, which had such beautiful oil painting plates that I wanted to make watercolor copies. A book of Russian fairy tales in black and white is no fun.
Yet, I was overwhelmed by Déjà vu, as I read about Apollo and Eros, Ivan and Marya. I remembered those sweltering days in Calcutta of my childhood; when the lazy vacation afternoons stretched into breezy summer evenings as I lay on my grandpa’s gigantic mahogany cot, book in hand, under a noisy ceiling fan. The legends were so outlandish and so broodingly sexual that they left me mentally gasping for breath.
I also constructed my image of the ‘hero’ based on the qualities of Zeus and Apollo, a construct I carried in my head until Howard Roark took over. But I think even Ayn Rand’s conceptualization of the hero, both male and the female was heavily influenced by Hellenic mythology.
Reading these stories as an adult made me question the value systems integrated in the stories, made me wonder about the nature of politics then. I also wondered what the feminist take on the gender roles portrayed in the legends would be.
And the violence!! It appalled me how gruesome some of these stories were. One Israeli tale talked about a king making ‘mincemeat’ out of one of his disobedient subjects. Put me off my kebabs at Copper Kettle Express tonight. Then there’s this Russian one where the evil step mother and her daughters are charred alive. Somehow the violence never bothered me as a kid. I just accepted it, unquestioningly as a part of the fairytalish excitement. Those were the days before the walling of my consciousness, the structuring of my thought processes. As a kid, the world seemed too beautiful and promising, and violence seemed to be tucked away in illustrated fairytale volumes. It was never really real enough to be disturbing.
Things change. I changed too……not so much perhaps, but with every passing year I’m becoming more wary, more skeptical. I prefer peace to excitement, satisfaction over ecstasy. I am learning to accept reality, I am learning to compromise. The fairytales have not come true; the heroes never did quite materialize. The violence crept out of the multicolor pages and invaded my consciousness and my life. The colors diffused away.

~ by feistyfeline on May 7, 2007.