A Naïve View

 “But man lives in two worlds, the world of nature and the world of art that he is trying to build out of nature” (Frye 58)

When I was six years old, my favorite stories were The Hobbit, the Chronicles of Narnia, Through the Looking Glass (but not Alice in Wonderland, which frightened me), Perloo the Bold, Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, Dinotopia, and my dad’s old collection of Spiderman comic books from the early 70s. I didn’t like stories that were set in “the real world” because I already lived in “the real world” and knew enough about what that was like, thank you very much. Fantasy books which lingered in the real world a little too long were less beloved to me. I didn’t really care about what the children were doing in the Professor’s house; I just wanted to enter the wardrobe and see the Faun carrying his parcels in the snow. These books had to include animals that talked, magic, epic journeys, prophecies, characters that were like me but also impossibly noble and self sacrificing (and characters that were so irredeemably nasty that one couldn’t possibly find a single saving quality), and legendary battles of good and evil where evil always succumbed to the forces of good. When I was six, happy endings were mandatory. If a book didn’t have a happy ending, I would take the offending item off my bookshelf and hide it in the back of my closet. It was a zero tolerance policy.

(I’m ashamed to admit this, but I once tearfully begged my Grandpa to throw away a movie that ended so sadly that I couldn’t bear its continuing existence in my house. Poor Papa had rented it…he pretended to throw it in the trash and retrieved it later when he thought I wasn’t looking).

Six year old Breanna would have loved Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I don’t think my six year old self would have cared for the Ephesian Tales very much.

Some examples of naïve storytelling in the Ephesian Tales include: characters who undergo little character development (if any at all), characters who see one aspect of life (love) as salvation rather than a more complex and realistic view, and the occurrence of love that is both simultaneous, mutual, and overwhelmingly dominate over all other life events. But perhaps I’m confusing naïve storytelling with examples of unrealistic plot…the storyteller does, as the introduction points out, use repetitive language perhaps in a reflection of his limited abilities or careless story crafting. He also achieves a light kind of suspense that appears to haphazardly introduce small amounts of tension—but this is without the protracted conflicts and resulting pleasure of solution after buildup that a more seasoned storyteller may employ. However, as Frye points out, this very early and very formulaic example of a romance is a more obvious illustration of the underlying archetypes and formulas that romantic fiction typically follows.

 But while romance follows set formulas, there are always worlds of possibilities contained within these streams of stories. “’But why do you hate stories so much?’ Haroun blurted, feeling stunned. ‘Stories are fun…’” And Kattam-Shud responds: “’The world however, is not for Fun…the world is for Controlling’” (Rushdie 161). Because he cannot rule all the worlds contained inside every stream of story in the Ocean, Kattam-Shud must destroy it. For myself at age six, the world of fantasy and its stories were fun because it felt removed from the constraints of reality. The differences between good and evil were as easy to recognize as the difference between black and white, and the good characters always got their happy ending.

And if they didn’t, it wasn’t a story worth reading and rereading. Let the closet have it.