Are we lacking in stories about real kids?

Abigail makes a good point in Like a Real Life where she asks “why are children’s picture books hardly ever about children?” She raises the issue of anthropomorphism in a slightly different way: are real children really “soooo thirty years ago”?

I suspect I have an answer of some sorts, but before we go that way, I’d like to echo the idea that Like a Real Life explores: there are good books with animals standing in for humans, and there may well be some decline in humans as main characters – although I think a really effective bit of time-sampling would be needed to make this claim securely (just to play Devil’s Advocate, for example, I might cite Charlie and Lola, and the great Bear Hunt itself).

But no: alongside Charlie and Lola, as Like a Real Life suggests, are the Julia Donaldson brigade, great stories, massively well marketed and brilliantly produced, with frogs, and mice.

Where I think the animal stories succeed is in blurring limitations of time, space and culture. That’s not to say they are bad because of this, but that Room on the Broom, for example, may be “about” sibling rivalry or how people learn to get along but is not boundaried by portrayals of a period of time, class, ethnicity &c., as (perhaps) the work of Mary Hoffman or Shirkey Hughes might be. This might, the cynic in me argues, come down to marketing, although you could argue (see my post on Diversity) that this is a weakness: that a frog cannot ever really stand in for a marginsalised child, for example. If this comes down to identification then we have to develop a much more acute sense of what is being signified by this mouse, that badger, good and bad wolves, so that we can “leave in the magic, leave in the bizarre and the adventure” and still let the children be in on the game.

Black Dogs

I want to move away from “my” wolves and werewolves to their cousin, Black Shuck.

Black Shuck, the demon dog whose appearance heralds death, is a now-forgotten standard of English Folklore. He is well represented here, in what could be his homeland of East Anglia. Linked in Wikipedia and elsewhere with Viking tales of Odin (the creature’s other name, the Grim, who makes a guest appearance along with so many other mythic animals in Harry Potter, has cognate names in various Scandinvaian legends), this is a terrifying creature that has a lot in common – in shock value at least – with the werewolf, and with the hound-like aliens of Attack the Block. Somewhere in our catalogue of things we are frightened of is the sudden, vicious attack that the canine embodies. The Black Dog also makes another appearance, for example at the heels of Winston Churchill, and I’ll be coming back to that in a minute.

Jack Zipes’ still wonderful study of Red Riding Hood that I come back to again and again suggests that Red Riding Hood changes or is changed by storytellers to meet the concerns of the audience over the years. The wolf, too, alters appearance and character, and not just in RRH: sexually predatory, or gluttonous, a wargus and a killer like Robin Hood or Long Lankin, his defeat in most versions makes the story bearable: so too, we retell the story of the Black Dog, who becomes not a herald of death but a symbol of depression. Winston Churchill descried his depression as a black dog, and the image is taken up by the Black Dog Campaign. It is well worth a look at as a campaign in itself and its aims of reducing stigma, getting people to talk, &c., are really important.

The Black Dog has been used as a metaphor for depression from antiquity to the present day. To bring the campaign to life we have designed visually striking Black Dog statues. The physical presence of a Black Dog will help people to define their experience of the ‘invisible’ condition, which characterises mental illness, as well as promoting more open discussion, understanding and acceptance. In order to deliver a positive message of support, the black dogs will have a ‘collar of hope’ and wear ‘coats’ designed by celebrities, artists and members of the public.

It is also worth (in a small way) reflecting on how the wolf-dog creature we fear, perambulans in tenebris, transforms as we need it, reflecting our current concerns. The “catalogue of things we are frightened of” is also, because of its place in folklore, a catalogue of things story can help us make sense of, or warn us about.

Wolves, dogs, werewolves and stories

In a break from marking I was intrigued to find this image come up for me on Twitter (from Kathleen McCallum on Twitter but it’s on @nickswarb if you follow me). I am unsure – party because I don’t read Arabic – whether they are werewolves (predatory shape-shifters) or Dogsheads, Cynocephali, whose everyday shape ( and, according to this picture at least, behaviour) are a bit, well, dog-like. Are they from travellers’ tales or horror stories?

I think it’s time to look at wolves again – partly for a session I hope to be doing in Solihull (that birthplace of the Warg, at least, in my mind) on the BA in Early Childhood Studies and for my MA (Childhood Studies) module on Children’s Imaginative Worlds.

I’ll start from BBC’s Atlantis, the latest (as I write) dog/werewolf transformation (Hunger Pangs, Ser 1, Ep 11/13; this link is current, but iPlayer won’t last, of course). It’s a children’s programme, prime time Saturday evening Doctor Who/Merlin fare, with the requisite hair growth, (partial) nudity, crouching and of course the scary eyes followed by lycanthropic shadows. We are in TV Trope land; werewolf as humanoid dog-beast, more or less acceptable stuff for families- as is the now famous American Werewolf in London transformation or the Being Human transformation that is its more horrific descendant. This (partially successful) filming from a Manchester student, Katie Blagden, neatly illustrates the modern elements of transformation.

Peter Stubbe, to whom I have referred before, is perhaps less so, and certainly the animation on LOL Manuscripts is quite creepy. Similarly, there are some werewolf stories that are either Bowdlerised into family form (see Red Riding Hood, passim) or are just not really OK (perhaps) for young modern audiences – too scary, too bloody. This blog is interesting. Sabine Baring-Gould also has some that may well have been repeated in families, or maybe in other meetings in the past, although I find them quite disturbing; the Book of Werewolves is linked in my blog side-bar. Look at Ch VI:

Gilles Gamier had attacked a little maiden of ten or twelve years old, and had slain her with his teeth and claws; he had then drawn her into the wood, stripped her, gnawed the flesh from her legs and arms, and had enjoyed his meal so much, that, inspired with conjugal affection, he had brought some of the flesh home for his wife Apolline.

Enough. Modern audiences at least would not consider this appropriate for children.

The only point so far to think about is who is the audience for the tales of Peter Stubbe and Gilles Gamier? Surely not really the children; I suspect they will have gone to bed before granny gets these out. But is this a 21st-Century judgement? Two other sources should be looked at here, however, one more recent and theoreical, the other somewhat oblique.

The first (and recommended to “my” MA students [I hate the possessive here; “my dog, my boots,” as C S Lewis puts it] this next semester) is from Zohar Shavit’s essay in Maria Tatar’s thoughtful collection The Classic Fairy Tales. And yes, both “classic” and “fairy” can be debated.

Up to the seventeenth century children were an integral part of adult society, sharing clothing, lodging, games and work. Unity prevailed between children and adults in regard to all physical and psychic needs…

Shavit goes on to suggest that the growing concept of childhood distinguishes in practice between child and adult in a great many spheres. I would contend that one of these is in storytelling. Both Shavit and Zipes explore how stories such as Red Riding Hood (we’ve met her before, of course!) are altered for new or differently defined audiences, but we have, in M R James, a fictionalised account of the storytelling context from someone who continued that tradition with his own material. In An Evening’s Entertainment, James records past occasions of storytelling as part of his framing for a story – but in doing so also salutes, wistfully, its passing. The story begins:

Nothing is more common form in old-fashioned books than the description of the winter fireside, where the aged grandam narrates to the circle of children that hangs on her lips story after story of ghosts and fairies, and inspires her audience with a pleasing terror. But we are never allowed to know what the stories were. We hear, indeed, of sheeted spectres with saucer eyes, and — still more intriguing — of ‘Rawhead and Bloody Bones’ (an expression which the Oxford Dictionary traces back to 1550), but the context of these striking images eludes us.

and a parody of the enlightened household follows, with the worthy, pushy parent explaining levers to his child, before we move to the old Squire and his parlour and the even older granny:

How different the scene in a household to which the beams of Science have not yet penetrated! The Squire, exhausted by a long day after the partridges, and replete with food and drink, is snoring on one side of the fireplace. His old mother sits opposite to him knitting, and the children (Charles and Fanny, not Harry and Lucy: they would never have stood it) are gathered about her knee.

Grandmother: Now, my dears, you must be very good and quiet, or you’ll wake your father, and you know what’ll happen then.

And we are into James’ horrific story of human sacrifice, which concludes:

There! Off to bed you go this minute. What’s that, Fanny? A light in your room? The idea of such a thing! You get yourself undressed at once and say your prayers, and perhaps if your father doesn’t want me when he wakes up, I’ll come and say good-night to you. And you, Charles, if I hear anything of you frightening your little sister on the way up to your bed, I shall tell your father that very moment, and you know what happened to you the last time.

The door closes, and granny, after listening intently for a minute or two, resumes her knitting. The Squire still slumbers.

We have here a context that is to James’ audience both as part of their own mythologised past and the recogniseable context of James’ own delivery – the oral story. But if we are to go back into Shavit’s reconstructed past, I think we have to ask:

When these stories were first told, were children present? And if so, were they the intended audience?

I do not think we can be sure about the first question (hence all my “perhaps”), but we can be a tad clearer about the second: folk tales were for adults, too.

Return of the Werewolves?

Sarah’s ever-inventive LOLManuscripts and ITV’s magnificent Broadchurch on the telly tonight made me make explicit some connections that are latent in a lot of thinking about werewolves.

Sabine Baring-Gould’s Book of Werewolves is full of relished detail, picking out bits of folklore from all over the place with Baring-Gould tenacity. The werewolf as outsider, cannibal, predator: “the younger they were, esteemed them the mair tender and delicious…” Outside the bounds of the villlage, a monster, Long Lankin. I’ve written about these before, for example, here. Sensational stuff, sensationalised stuff, too.

In Broadchurch we are confronted with a very rare sight: a man lost, confused, unable to deal with his own feelings, one minute a stupid, failure of a man, the next a killer trying hard to conceal his crime, and in a few moments reduced to a penitent, frightened prisoner. There is no werewolf here, no monster. A real life example, whereas fable demands a diametric opposite, some binary to be defeated. If anything, the wholly believable fury of the murderer’s wife and the rage of the victim’s father made them for a moment less human – or at least, less covered by a veneer of politeness. It is a tribute to the writers and cast of Broadchurch that they sustained that ambiguity, maintained such sympathy for all those flawed and suffering characters.

But what of the Fairy Tale? What of sympathy for the Big Bad Wolf? We don’t want to reduce the wolf to a nothing. The numerous rewrites of Red Riding Hood attempt some sort of reconciliation, whereby the wolf comes back to life and reforms, and retellings such as The True Story of the Three Little Pigs or The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig turn the wolf in turns into someone misunderstood, or victim of his own mauvaise foi, or victim of another (better, funnier) monster.

Only once have I seen something approaching genuine understanding. As part of a writing project in a school, the teacher (writing as the wolf from prison) sent a letter a day to the children and the children responded. They asked all sorts of questions, such as “Are you real?” and “Did you mean to eat the Granny?” One little girl, however, wrote in some detail, asking what life was like “inside,” asking if he was “on remand” – and ending “And have you met my dad?”

Wolves and humans

There are plenty of organizations concerned with wolves in the UK. This link takes us to a site selling hybrids very close to wolves not so much as pets as companions (the site warns) and this organisation is working to reintroduce
I visited these people, the UK Wolf Conservation Trust last nght. They see themsleves as principally concerned with education about wolves; their wolves act “as ambassadors” fulfilling the trust’s founder’s ambition “to dispel the myths and misconceptions that surround them.” It might be said therefore that by looking at long-term conservation through education they hold a middle way between the re-introduction approach and (if I can say this without sounding too damning) the “tamer nature” approach of domesticated wolf hybrids. Of course, taming, living with and breeding from wolves can’t just be dismissed as a modern fad; it could be argued it is one of our oldest animal-human relationships. I like to imagine the symbiosis of human hunters and wolf packs listening for and watching one another’s hunting movements (and maybe a long period where ‘we’ scavenged off ‘them’ and maybe vice versa – and the even longer period [which we are still in] where we compete for space and food, and then at some point in one of those periods, that first time a wolf stood cautiously to one side and some human threw her or him a piece of offal… Pure mythology on my part.

But if that’s my aetiological myth, I felt close to it at Howl Night last night. Hearing wolves howl spontaneously as the twilight deepened was wonderful; managing to tune my voice into howling with a wolf – specifically this wolf – got me thinking about why our voices can be so alike. A sort of convergent evolution suggests itself – the need to communicate in similar terrains for similar tasks with similar groups – and this leads me to the big question I want to explore,one I’m always exploring really: what is this relationship founded on, and what are its characteristics?

It strikes me there are two elements that I can explore – two interrelated issues I’ve already touched on in this post, but which I need to come back to: competition and symbiosis.

Do we fear and love the wolf because it competes – or competed at least – with us, especially when we moved to raising livestock which it took? It might be argued that we developed, perhaps, a respect, an understanding of it – but at the same time a rivalry, even a fear that occasional confrontations will have done nothing to dispel. Perhaps Steven Mithen’s fascinating book the Singing Neanderthals (an interesting critique is here) might have some insight – I must have a look back at this. I also wonder whether we fear and love the wolf because we have lived close to it, tamed and shaped it, and the pure wolf seems somehow to remind of this process? Is the former what gives us the werewolf, the predatory danger, and the latter gives us the named and befriended ambassadors we met and howled with last night?

The landscape of traditional tales

I am writing this when any sensible, diurnal person would be long in bed – where, as a penitential exercise, the monks of La Grande Chartreuse are about to perform the ‘reclaim the night’ they have done since their inception. But with a conference bid to complete tomorrow, and with Mark Rowlands’ enjoyable The Philosopher and the Wolf just finished, it’s time, I feel, to move into a more reasoned look at a question I’ve been mulling over for years, the question of where, exactly, is the landscape of traditional tales?

The most immediate answer is that I know where it used to be; it used to be on the doorstep of the storyteller. But of course it doesn’t stay where we left it, not least because we, the audience, have moved off. We moved off from clearings to common land to enclosed fields, and then to the towns, with our stories as cultural baggage in the handcart. We moved into a wolf-free country, then into a country where there is less darkness. We might argue that the stories we brought with us retained their currency because we brought the darkness with us too – but maybe this is a little fanciful, and while it might take us some way to an answer to a spiritual question, it doesn’t help me answer my research question much.

More on this when I can, in the research pages.

Correction and addition

I am no longer sure that the wolves were what was A l’envers in my previous post. What often moves around I this story is not, of course, the wolf, who remains the familiar predatory, possibly sexual bzou (this link has a lot of detail but I’m unsure about all the content!), but the girl. Is she little? Is she dressed in red, or grey, or what?

Why this should have struck me in the bath while reading Mark Rowlands‘ book on living with his wolf, I don’t really know, but perhaps I need to think more about the figures of the wild if I’m going to write about the outdoors, than about the children who go into the woods. More weasels, fewer moles.

Or at least, it’s a separate section – what one meets in the (fictional) outdoors.

Like this Cynocephalus.

More wolves – this time, a l’envers

I have two books in front of me as I write. One is the book I was going to write about – Sandra Beckett’s Recycling Red Riding Hood – the other (Rosa’s) is the movie companion for New Moon

It strikes me that the relationship between Bella and the Native American werewolves is in some ways a Conte a l’envers, as Beckett describes them.

Working from the writings of Gianni Rodari (who has more than seventeen entries in the Beckett index), she explores how Red Riding Hood has become such a universal tale that it is possible to play with the plot (including the Perrault text and images) as a tale told “Upside Down, Inside Out and Backwards.” And in finding a heroine like Bella Swan, and placing her in the situation she does, Stephanie Meyer effectively creates a Conte a L’Envers, a mixed-up version where a young woman in the woods is the one who holds the power over the wolves who are her friends, her would-be lovers. Bella smacks a werewolf on the nose as if he were a boy stepping out of line in a soap-opera prom; we are somewhere Angela Carter might recognise.

As something of a footnote, it is interesting to see this reversal taken even further in the movie book I have in front of me, where the wolves, however terrifying they are as wolves, are, in human form, mostly young and lacking in much body hair, exemplified in the website a – very far from the older, predatory wolves in so much of the Red Riding Hood iconography, yet drawing on the idea of the wargus (see this entry) as on the margins of society.

Beckett takes the wonderful Zipes exploration of Red Riding Hood to a new stage. She uses a European overview – rather she uses an understanding of countless retellings in Europe – to look at what Rodari calls A sbagliare le storie, Getting Stories Wrong, and what other contemporary writers identify as Upside-down stories. Ths method is exemplary; it allows Beckett to explore the variety of Riding Hood stories (if Zipes removes the ‘little,’ Beckett presents a rainbow of different coloured hoods!), and in doing so to look again at what makes this story so special. Hats off to her – hoods down, whatever – for updating the critical literature to include exploration of two lacunae in Zipes’ book: The wolves in the Ahlbergs, notably in Jeremiah in the Dark Woods and the Jolly Postman, and the RRH tales of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes.

Outside Over There: The story of the Grandmother

It was interesting reciting the edgy DeLaRue/Zipes’ reconstruction of the Story of the Grandmother to PGCE students in the woods today, those lovely dappled woods where the magpies chatter and one group saw a deer and we all felt at ease with children in the outdoors. In some ways it felt rather like the side-by-side comparison of Red Riding Hood stories on Katherine Harris’ site or rather the student project on the site

And it set me in mind of the power and transferability of Sendak’s Outside Over There, represented in Labyrinth , where themes such as burgeoning sexuality, sibling rivalry – not to mention the more complex issues of siblings and new babies in reconstituted families – are dealt with so openly. Is OOT more menacing because of the subtler treatment of the themes? Or is it merely ambiguous to the point of being open to any interpretation?

George

Not “Don’t do that” but a link to the Being Human BBC3 blog that explains why there’s a link to the show on my work blog – apart from the quality of the drama, of course.

This link takes us to a series of clips on werewolves. Timid, high-voiced and nervy, George is the antithesis of the monstrous werewolf or even the ordinary, opportunist carnivore, canis lupus, the grey wolf. Or is he? He is – as are all three protagonists – without hope, one of Agamben’s criteria for the wargus (see my post from November of last year). And at a deeper level, this is what makes the ghost, the vampire and the werewolf essentially human in the post-modern world: they muddle through, ineffectual and without an aim, hopeless.

And rather than characterise this by a link to Richard Dawkins, I’ll link this to another anti-religious polemicist (although perhaps with more of a sense of purpose, and to my mind a better writer anyway), Tony Grayling.

He would probably chastise me for not distinguishing between aimless and hopeless. But they both sound like cows from Cold Comfort Farm…