Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale

3. “Ancient Forms”: Myth, Fairy Tale, and Narrative in A. S. Byatt’s Fiction

I had thought of writing on Ibsen myself, at one point. His use of the folktale. I was deflected. A. S. Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale Writers have always used the forms of the fairy tale—if my idea that they form, or until recently formed, the narrative grammar of our minds is correct, writers must have done. A. S. Byatt, Introduction to The Annotated Brothers Grimm “Ancient Forms” Myth, Fairy Tale, and Narrative in A. S. Byatt’s Fiction    I A. S. Byatt’s fiction is shot through with allusions to well-known fairy tales. Hardly a chapter goes by without a prick on the finger, an impenetrable hedge, or an enchanted tower. When her characters aren’t meditating on the significance of fairy tales in their lives, her narrators are commenting on it. One strand in the complex tangle of her imagery always comes from the European fairy-tale tradition. It would be quite easy to pick your way through her work, collecting references to “classic” fairy tales and teasing out their local implications.1 You could also look specifically at the short fairy tales she has written recently, from stories like “The Eldest Princess”and“Dragons’Breath”inThe Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye() to the tales in The Little Black Book of Stories ().2 Byatt’s recent short fiction often swerves into the fantastic and the legendary. But here I want to do something a little different. Rather than catalogue Byatt’s many returns to and reworkings of this charged material, I want to concentrate on its significance for her overall conception of narrative and 3 her fictional strategies. As she says in one of her conversations with Ignês Sodré in Imagining Characters: We have discussed the accidents and the particularities and the realism of the characters first, then we’ve moved on to the conscious meanings , and then we have moved on to the bit we always most enjoy, which is the structuring with forms like Oedipusness, or here suddenly the Medea myth bobs its head up, or the myth of the fairy and the needle pricking. . . . That is what it is about the archetypal stories which we tell ourselves, and I think all these novels have known how to evoke and stir up in us those ancient forms which we then clothe as one does in one’s life, with flesh and blood. ()3 Byatt is deeply interested in these “ancient forms” and the way they form a substratum of meaning in later narrative. In her conversations with Sodré she focuses on their presence in novels in English by women, from Mansfield Park on, but she also is sharply aware of the ways these old stories—not just fairy tales, but classical myths, Bible stories, and other well-known legends —inform her own fiction. She calls them a “structuring” element, and I think we need to take the specificity of that word carefully into account. Byatt returns more and more frequently to the structures of older narratives: the frame tale, the embedded tale, a multiplicity of narrating voices. As she says in her recent On Histories and Stories, “I found myself wanting to write tales and stories, having described myself in my early days as a ‘selfconscious realist’”(). She now alternates between—and sometimes tries to integrate—what she sees as an “alternative tradition” of fantastic tales (Hoffman,Dinesen,Borges,Calvino)andthetraditionof the“realist”novel (George Eliot, Iris Murdoch). In an early essay () on Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris, Byatt quotes one of Bowen’s characters, Mme. Fisher, on the “truth” of the fairy tale: “No doubt you do not care for fairy tales, Leopold? An enchanted wood full of dumb people would offend you; you are not the young man with the sword who goes jumping his way through. Fairy-tales always made me impatient , also. But unfortunately there is no doubt that in life such things exist ” (Passions ). Mme. Fisher, like Byatt herself, sees that the fairy tale, however improbable and even irritating in its assumptions, is not only part of our inherited “narrative grammar” but also in some sense reflects the world. Its plots and metaphors suggest another way of approaching reality. Byatt seems to imagine her work as bringing together what Murdoch, in Myth, Fairy Tale, and Narrative in A. S. Byatt’s Fiction  her well-known essay...