Kevin McIlvoy
The About-to-be Moment: Imminence in the Grimm Fairy Tales
We readers have our schedules, our own and others’ labors. We have set our
preferences on You Tube. If we have Tivoed and Hulued too little, we ache from
insufficient liking or confirming or ignoring on Facebook. Our cells are on the silent
mode but we believe – don’t we? – they are humming with messages, with past calls that
must be returned and new calls that must not lest future calls result. We are rested and
already exhausted, potentially very present and very absent. Everything seems urgent but
nothing, because we live in the about-to-be moment, an imminence, a fairytale moment.
We read the words, “It is said…” and we already sense, in sadness, the future,
“…from that day to this, Frog and Snake have never played together again.” We hear the
words, “People say…” and we feel in our bodies the outcome, “…and The Black Grouper
vowed never to fall in love with a human girl again.” At the words, “There once was…”
we already wish for – and fear – the failure of all adult self-understanding and all adult
instruction realized in the story’s last words, “…and never again opened the door.”
The reader is always a child. And that child is always making a wish. To be a
reader is to be a wisher willing the next moment into being.
The writer trying to inhabit the moment the reader inhabits understands that the
first moment of the reading experience, the about-to-be moment is, after all, The Wishing
Moment whether it is the moment the narrator wishes to make a curse or wishes to bless
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or whether she makes a wish only because her mouth opened and out came the hidden
desire (the frog-like, snake-like, grouper-like desire swimming, slithering, croaking) that
makes a story the moment it is exhaled. No tale exists, after all, if desire is left unsaid.
We readers join the narrator in The Wishing Moment. We know it is time for this
moment because the words “Once upon a time” have been invoked: “There was once
upon a time a King, who had twelve daughters…” (“The Shoes Which Were Danced to
Pieces”); “There was once a Man whose family consisted of three sons…” (“The Three
Brothers”); “Once upon a time a poor Servant Girl…” (“The Old Woman in the Wood”)
(Grimm passim). The echo of the words “Once upon a time” is also present in a story that
begins, “A father had two sons…” (“A Tale of One Who Traveled”). Notice that no
overly self-conscious writer is second-guessing those four words, “Once upon a time,”
which are recapitulated in the oral tradition of almost every culture in the world.
“Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost,” writes Whitman in
his Preface to Leaves of Grass (198). The folk tale comes to us from someone who does
not underestimate in any way the significance of the tale, but who does not imagine great
artfulness for this spoken thing, this thing that has the unique value inherent in being
rough-hewn and without presumption. Neither at the beginning nor at the tale’s end does
the teller imagine anything but a reader in a state of fully engaged delight in the terrible
initiations, the dismemberments, the violations, the cruel punishments, the deceptions, the
exposures, the mercies, the tendernesses, the re-memberments, and the satisfying
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vengeances that follow that greeting, “Once upon a time.” The first-person plural
narrator of the Grimm stories will often say something akin to what she says at the end of
“Hansel and Grethel”: “My tale is done. There runs a mouse: whoever catches her may
make a great, great cap out of her fur” (63). The teller is saying, “I’ve only made a
mousefur cap, but, after all, it is a ‘great, great’ mousefur cap.”
It is a “mousefur cap” – a great one: if that was the final comment to you about
your own essay, poem, or story you’d be happy, right? Because the teller of the Grimm
stories assumes the imminent moment for the listener is not fraught with high artistic
expectations, the teller gets underway on a bluntly direct note: “A father had two sons,
the elder of whom was forward and clever enough to do almost any thing; but the
younger was so stupid that he could learn nothing, and when the people saw him, they
said, ‘Will thy father still keep thee as a burden to him?’” (“A Tale of One Who Traveled
to Learn What Shivering Meant”) (18).
“Once upon a time there lived a real old Witch who had two daughters, one ugly
and wicked, whom she loved very much, because she was her own child, and the other
fair and good, whom she hated, because she was her step-daughter” (“Roland”) (195). As
those of you who are princes and princesses know: wealth and beauty, at first, equals bad
luck, then worse luck, then good luck. As those of you who are impoverished toads and
goats understand: poor, ugly, wicked, stupid equals good luck, and then better – and then,
unless you eventually become wealthy, intelligent and beautiful -- really, really bad luck.
The teller of the Grimm story finds the wish-bewitchments of peasants and the
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bitch-bewishments of royalty all part of the same childlike wonder. The teller imagines a
highly suggestible audience in the figurative and literal dark, in a place of no persisting
light, in a condition of poverty or great wealth, in lostness or confusion or doom, and in
most cases, marked by their condition. In other words, the teller imagines an audience
sharing much in common with the folk tale’s characters who are marked by the caul, by
the crooked chin, by the crutches on which they hobble. These characters are not really
what we in our supreme creative writing court robes would readily call “characters,”
since instead of faces they have roles: the roles of kings, queens, of tailors, of spinsters,
of servant girls, of fisherman, fishermen’s wives, thieves, thumblings, poor mothers,
stepmothers, poor daughters, robbers, robbers’ sons, and soldiers (many soldiers in the
Grimm stories, soldiers just after war, and having no money and no skills but soldiering
skills). They have problems: the problem of surviving, the problem of abandonment, of
needing to escape the Evil One – and, in the case of the royal characters, the problem of
succession. They are marked. They have roles. They have problems. They are familiar
but they are in the faceless-about-to-have-face condition.
Why does the audience for the Grimm tales care about them? The audience is
invested in them because of making wishes for them to be miserable in countless ways,
because of willing them to have countless paths out of – or much, much deeper into –
their misery. This is a corrupt and corruptible, not a pure and redeemable reader the teller
is imagining. This is an irrecoverable reader the teller will not presume to recover, to
save. Baudelaire imagined this same reader. In our era, Angela Carter and Russell
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Edson and Yusunaro Kawabata have imagined this reader. How inviolate a reader, I
wonder, was E.B. White writing for in that opening passage of Charlotte’s Web: “Where
is Papa goin’ with that ax?” (1).
For my own part, I most fully appreciate reading John Berryman’s Dream Songs
when I have just read the Grimm Brothers’ tales and have been inside their delightful
mind-endangering deliriums.
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag. (27)
This poem feels created – attempting balance, then, failing, attempting better
failure; then, failing at better failure, attempting balance. Of course this poem is artful,
but see how its constructed bathos gives way to its created pathos? I would call it
created-constructed rather than constructed-created: that is, it seems to me only helped a
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little by Berryman into becoming what it really is. In his preface to Pickwick Papers,
G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The whole difference between construction and creation is this:
a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved
before it exists.”
The tales that come to us from Hans Christian Anderson and Charles Perreault
and from the Walt Disney “Kingdom” are great for us to read by contrast to the Grimm
Brothers’ tales, because the Disney, Perreault, and Anderson tales are more constructed
than created, more designed than crafted. I’m not diminishing their worth, I’m simply
saying they are different models from which we might learn. As writers, we study that set
of technical skills we call “craft”; we do this not in order that our work might finally be
more constructed than created but in order that those skills become so much our second
nature we are in readiness for the full set of possibilities between the created-constructed
fetish of a Zuni carver and the constructed-created fine object of a Warhol.
The teller in the Grimm stories lowers the bucket of her voice into the well of the
reader’s gut through the hypnosis and auto-hypnosis of the words “Once upon a time.”
She (scholars, incidentally, conjecture that women storytellers were the main source for
the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales) understands that the about-to-be moment for her
audience is like the dream and reverie threshold states in which we are upon time, not
before or past it. We are in Child Time. And children, so corruptible in their innocence,
so irrevocably vulnerable, are always at the threshold of the dream and reverie states. (No
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wonder we associate these folk tales with bedtime tales!) We – the children all adult and
all so-called children’s stories are written for – are helpless against the past time, the past
perfect progressive what-had-been time; and we wish for the passive future perfect
continuous, the what-will-have-been time – but…but…we are in a story, we are upon
time. We are upon time.
The Upon Time is a gift the reader desires beyond her or his understanding. It
might be true that the forms of exile most productive to artists recapitulate this
imminence. When Joyce wrote “The Dead” in 1906 he was in Rome, had been traveling
widely, and he wrote as a person who shall have been in Dublin. Every time we read
Dubliners, we feel again how much the stories owe to folk tales.
In his amazing arriving-nowhere poems, the 8th century Chinese poet Tu Fu offers
his own iterations of the exile’s experiences of imminence. His titles, in fact, sound like
they name The Wishing Moment: “Alone, Looking for Blossoms Along the River,” and
“Through Censor Ts’ui I Send a Quatrain to Kao Shih,” and “After Three or Four Years
Without News from My Fifth Younger Brother, Feng, Who Is Living Alone on the East
Coast, I Look for Someone to Carry This to Him.”
This imminence is a part of the early language listening experiences that never
disappear from the later reading experiences. In recollecting the power of Italian folk
tales and fairy tales on his development as an artist, Italo Calvino stresses how much he
learned from the “delaying, cyclic, motionless” quality of narrative time in them (xvi).
The child reader is the nest holding the adolescent and adult reader; it’s not the other way
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around.
Do not fail the childlike, innocent reader, writers. Do not fail to be childlike and
innocent yourself as you write.
When I am trying to remember this – trying to remember to not fail the childlike,
innocent reader – to not fail to be childlike and innocent as I write – it helps me to return
to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” as an example. In her essay about that famous story
she tells about how the fiction editor of The New Yorker wanted to buy “The Lottery,”
but, Jackson writes, “He asked, hesitantly, if I had any particular interpretation of my
own for the story; Mr. Harold Ross, then the editor of The New Yorker, was not
altogether sure that he understood the story, and wondered if I cared to enlarge upon its
meaning. I said no. Mr. Ross, he said, thought that the story might be puzzling to some
people, and in case anyone telephoned the magazine, as sometimes happened, or wrote in
asking about the story, was there anything in particular I wanted them to say? No, I said,
nothing in particular; it was just a story I wrote” (72).
Jackson adds this regarding the huge batches of letters she received about “The
Lottery”: “Judging from these letters, people who read stories are gullible, rude,
frequently illiterate, and horribly afraid of being laughed at….The general tone of the
early letters…was a kind of wide-eyed shocked innocence. People at first were not so
much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these
lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch” (76).
In order to write from inside a sense of Child Time, it also helps me to reread the
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work of Agha Shahid Ali. Here is a little of his remarkable poem, “The Last Saffron,” in
which the poem’s speaker expresses the wish to have been (that is, to die), and the wish
to be (that is, to live), and the wish, in the same moment, to “remember” persisting and
perishing.
I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir,
and the shadowed routine of each vein
will almost be news, the blood censored,
for the Saffron Sun and the Times of Rain
will be sold in black, then destroyed,
invisibly at Zero Taxi Stand.
There will be men nailing tabloids
to the fence of Grindlay’s Bank
…
I will die that day in late October, it will be long ago…
….
Yes, I remember it,
the day I’ll die… (19)
The renunciations of poets are astounding, aren’t they? How lucky we are to have
been in their company at the moment they are grasping life and renouncing grasping.
My point here is that the writer who hurries us past the imminent moment
mistakenly assumes the reader wants to quickly be done with the hypnotic sense of
ending inside beginning. The result of this hurrying is that both beginning and ending are
unsatisfying or only satiating. (Side note here: it is possible that what most often causes
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Writer’s Block is what causes Reader’s Block: impatience with imminence.)
If as we write, we assume the reader wishes to experience the story or poem in
this childlike about-to-be dream state (including the states of reverie, the states of
unimpeded, uncensored euphoria, the states of persisting and deforming anxiety, the
states of abiding, emptying calm), we more readily set aside our assumptions about
stabilizing the first moments of the reading experience. The Grimm tales remind us of the
immediacy achieved in shifting temporality.
At the same moment we are adjusting to the uncertainties of “upon time” – at that
same moment that the Grimm tales give us an opportunity to learn presence, they distract
us with the threat of the future. At every turn that the tales impart or enact virtue they
subvert it or explode it; it is an understandable but unfortunate misreading of the Grimm
tales that they are morality tales; they are oral tales coming from an “I” teller with no real
sense of ownership since the tale arises from the “we” of the tribe, of the community, of
the fellowship in a group that is unstable: violent, full of thieves and witches, of
devolving mysterious contracts between the natural and the human world. These plural
first-person narrators are the embodiment of the permeable child psyche in which the
I/mother, I/family, I/dog, I/doll, I/friend are so irreducibly the same - I am my doll, I am
my scary, marvelous mother who intentionally cuts herself, and I am my marvelous
exuberant friend who has given first and last names to her lips and teeth. And because I
am multitudes (thank you Buddha, thank you Whitman, thank you Artist Formerly
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Known as Prince) – because I am multitudes, if my “fair and good” stepsister, whom I
am, has a “very pretty apron” (“Roland”), she should die, she deserves to die by having
her head cut off when she is asleep. That very pretty apron is motive enough.
It freaks out really adult adults. Those adult adults are not our readers, dear poets
and fiction writers. I say give the adult adults what they ask for: bad nonfiction. If you
want them freaked (an honorable goal) give them nonfiction with the unbounded mind of
great poems and stories in which the about-to-be moment is not a “teachable moment.”
We should not write The Teachable. And we should revise in such a way that we
scrutinize the value of The Teachable. That is the wisdom of the Grimm tales. They are
re-told and re-told and re-told tales. The best of the retellings constitute processes of
revision in which most or all of the original intent is lost, perhaps forever. And what
accumulates in its place is wonder.
Sherwood Anderson’s first-person story, “Death in the Woods,” is a re-told
narrative. The narrator’s brother has told it to their mother and sister. Restless with how
his brother told it, the narrator retells the story of Mrs. Grimes’ death in the woods. There
is no clear “point” to the story: she is a figure who can be contemplated but not
comprehended. We are told the could-be, might-be mystery of her impels the narrator.
Here is a small part of the closing of the story:
The whole thing, the story of the old woman’s death, was to me as I grew older
like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up slowly one at a
time…
The woman who died was one destined to feed animal life. Anyway, that is all
she ever did….she fed animal life in cows, in chickens, in pigs, in horses, in
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dogs, in men… On the night when she died she was hurrying homeward, bearing
on her body food for animal life.
…I am only explaining why I was dissatisfied then and have been ever since.
I speak of that only that you may understand why I have been impelled to try to
tell the simple story over again. (548)
That single word, “impelled,” matters. As at the beginning, at the story’s end, the
narrator has been impelled and agitated by Mrs. Grimes’ life, the unanswerable
substructures (the smallest and most enigmatic cohesive elements) of it; he has not been
compelled and calmed by the reasons for her death, the superstructures (the big timbers
of plot, theme, symbology, etc.) of it. Since so much of folk tale resembles the short
short story, I can’t help opining about this: I believe good short short stories arise from
full presence to the substructural mysteries; great short short stories arise from radical
presence to those substructural mysteries. The masterpieces of short short fiction arise
from radical presence to the rhythms of these substructural mysteries; when they almost
achieve this radical presence they should be called prose poems; when they truly achieve
this, they ought to be called poem proses. All literary art of the highest order asks that –
within it – we enact the habits of presence; it does not ask us, above all else, to impart
those habits; it does not ask us to identify a single use for them.
Sorry for that excursion, but, after all, this is an about-to-be essay. I had been
trying to say that meaning does not accumulate in the retellings – magic does; and magic
has the effect of undoing clarity regarding cause and effect, of disrupting logical plot
progression.
The story will be unsatisfying to us if it does not carry us past and again into
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another and another and another about-to-be-mystery. A good tale offers imminence first,
imminence last, an upon-ness that is unimaginable stillness. Rainer Marie Rilke, trying to
describe the mind’s impossible place of stillness called it “the World inner-space,” the
“Weltinnenraum.”
The Grimm Brothers’ story “The Shoes Which Were Danced to Pieces” is a good
example of one that ends on imminence. To summarize it simply: a group of people
dance their shoes to pieces, all their shoes; the oldest and most experienced dancers
ignore the youngest; people lose their heads in their earnest tasks, and the survivors, so
we are told, “were again bewitched in as many days as they had danced.”
So often the hero’s journey is precipitated by the simple wish that is, after all, the
reader’s wish: to be in the about-to-dance state, to feel something not just reactive, but
convulsive. “A Tale of One Who Traveled to Learn What Shivering Meant,” one of my
favorites, reminds me of how the reader wishes to shiver. Here is the opening passage –
note, by the way, that word “art” in this translation:
A father had two sons, the elder of whom was forward and clever enough to do
almost any thing; but the younger was so stupid that he could learn nothing, and
when the people saw him they said: “Will thy father still keep thee as a burden
to him?” So if any thing was to be done, the elder had at all times to do it; but
sometimes the father would call him to fetch something in the dead of night, and
perhaps the way led through the churchyard or by a dismal place, and then he
used to answer, “No, father, I cannot go there. I am afraid,” for he was a
coward. Or sometimes, of an evening, tales were told by the fireside which made
one shudder, and the listeners exclaimed, “Oh, it makes me shiver!” In one
corner, meanwhile, sat the younger son listening, but he could not comprehend
what was said, and he thought, “They say continually, ‘Oh, it makes us shiver, it
makes us shiver!’ but perhaps shivering is an art I cannot comprehend.” One
day, however, his father said to him, “Do you hear, you there in the corner? You
are growing stout and big; you must learn some trade to get our living by. Do
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you see how your brother works? But as for you, you are not worth malt and
hops.”
“Ah, father!” answered he, “I would willingly learn something. What shall I
begin? I want to know what shivering means, for of that I can understand
nothing.” (18-19)
In a bell tower, at a gallows, in the company of card-shark bad cats (a regular cat
is bad luck, but a card-shark cat, well, that should make him shiver, right?), and then cat
and dog ghouls, and finally an axe-bearing ugly old man, our hero has a number of aboutto-shiver experiences – but he does not shiver. He is in the peculiar state of graduality in
which he is discovering the things that should cause a response in him, but haven’t yet.
He cannot yet become. He must be. We, then, experience the kind of immediacy that
makes us feel more and more sensitive to our experiences upon time. The tale suspends
the experiences of the body and mind and invites the reader to feel the strange goodness
of that suspension.
Here is the final part of “A Tale of One Who Traveled to Learn What Shivering
Meant”:
Then the King said, “You have won the castle, and shall marry my
daughter.”
“This is all very fine,” replied the youth, “but still I don’t know what
shivering means.”
So the gold was fetched, and the wedding was celebrated, but the young
Prince (for the youth was a Prince now), notwithstanding his love for his bride,
and his great contentment, was still continually crying, “If I could but shiver! If
I could but shiver!” At last it fell out in this wise: one of the chambermaids said
to the Princess, “Let me bring in my aid to teach him what shivering is.” So she
went to the brook which flowed through the garden, and drew up a pail of water
full of little fish; and, at night, when the young Prince was asleep, his bride drew
away the covering and poured the pail of cold water and the little fish over him,
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so that they slipped all about him. Then the Prince woke up directly, calling out,
“Oh! That makes me shiver! Dear wife, that makes me shiver! Yes now I know
what shivering means!” (26)
What is the teachable moment here?
This? Reader, in the end you will still want what you can’t have, including the
weird thing you can’t have.
This? Reader, you will at last marry, and your love for and contentment with your
bride will leave you wanting the weird thing.
Or? Reader, you will have a husband wanting the weird thing. It is best to have a
chambermaid more perverse than you. It is good to have a pail.
Or? Reader, it is not the cold water you throw on the one you love that matters. It
is the little fishes. Remember to put the little fishes in, with their scales and sharp fins.
There is no teachable moment here. Here is a new imminence, a new about-to-be
moment.
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Works Cited
Ali, Agha Shahid. “The Last Saffron.” The Country Without a Post Office. New York:
W.W. Norton, 1997.
Gregory, Horace, ed. “Sherwood Anderson, ‘A Death in the Woods.’” The Portable
Sherwood Anderson. New York: Viking, 1946.
Berryman, John. “Dream Song 14.” Dream Songs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1969.
Calvino, Italo. “Introduction.” Italian Folk Tales. New York: Harvest Books, 1992.
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Trans., Elizabeth Dalton. New York:
Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.
Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. “Shirley Jackson, ‘The Lottery.’”
Understanding Fiction. New York: Appleton-Crofts, 1959.
White, E.B. Charlotte’s Web. New York: Harper & Row, 1952.
Matthews, Brander. “Walt Whitman, ‘Preface to Leaves of Grass,’” New York: Oxford
University Press, 1914.