The Poison of a Premise

There's a lot of hate going around these days for fairytales in their original rendition.  By that, we're talking about Cinderella, St. George and the Dragon, the Little Mermaid, etc.  Be it adult, YA, or even children's fiction, "too good" characters are to be shunned and happy endings to be scoffed at as unrealistic.  There are many reasons for this approach; we can surmise what they are and agree with many of them.  The original fairytales are cliché, idealistic, simplistic, etc.

There are paradoxes in this, however.  For one thing, the original fairytales weren't so sugary sweet, not all the way through.  The Brothers Grimm are famously grim.  Hans Christian Anderson is full of pathos.  And I remember once reading a particularly ghoulish collection of children's fairytales from Central/Eastern Europe, centered on the dragons and witches and other nice monsters which create nasty obstacles for the good characters (whom I don't remember, unsurprisingly).  Greek mythology, occasionally taking a fairytale tone, has also enough pain and sorrow to outweigh the (all too few) happy endings.

The second irony of the traditional fairytale is that most of them originate from time immemorial--that is to say, from the days of medieval and "modern" brutality, where most children lived unsheltered from harsh aspects of life.  Death, discrimination, and poor medical care were just a few of those elements.  Childhood was very short.  "Gritty realism" wasn't simply something children were taught about; they lived in it, because there was no choice about it.

Why, then, did fairytales become what they are?

In order to answer this question, we might consider the idea of an anti-fairytale, a story with a powerful anti-hero/heroine and a decidedly unhappily-ever-after conclusion.  You won't have to look far to find an example; the anti-fairytale, as a broad super-genre, has a dominant place in fiction today.  For whatever reason--sometimes good, sometimes bad--we avid, informed readers of the 20th and 21st centuries increasingly favor the anti-hero (or sometimes villain) and savor the unhappy ending.  It is the book we cannot put down, and the book we think about long after it's finished.

An anti-hero; well, there are at least three kinds of anti-hero.  They all begin as more troublesome than heroic.  They are further distinguished by the following:

1. Makes some good decisions and ultimately succeeds in life 
2. Makes mostly bad decisions and suffers the consequences.
3. Makes some life-changing bad decisions and, by some capricious bit of good luck, conquers all by the end of the volume(s). S/he either suffers no negative consequences, or overcomes them in the nick of time.  

This last type of anti-hero is very, very popular today, despite his/her lack of realism. 

Likewise, there are at least three kinds of unhappy, heartbreaking ending: 

1. Poetically just.
2. Poetically unjust.
3. Seems to have been written expressly to wring tears from your eyes and accomplish little else.  In that case, your emotional response was absolutely all the author wanted.

Emotional response!  Writing is an art, and art personifies emotion, but a book is capable of too many dimensions to hold emotion alone.  Pure emotion is closer to music, something heard and felt and diversely interpreted; but books convey very particular types of themes and attitudes, even if it is only the author telling you what emotion to feel, or, indeed, that you should feel any emotion for the story at all.  If it is a well-written book, the author usually succeeds.

What does "well-written" mean?  In this sense, it doesn't mean a good plot, or good characters, or lots of action.  Rather, it means the ability of the author to hold your interest through the sheer power of his/her style and word choice.  Newspapers are splendid examples of word choice--every journalist has studied the "right" kinds, until it becomes second nature to favor one synonym over another.  Effect or tone are sometimes given preference over accuracy.  Novelists are even better at this, in that they can use word choice more subtly, and the reader can only hope to read between the lines after many pages of lines.

The old fairytales, whatever their faults are, were more honest.  There is something so matter-of-fact in their style and format you'd think we intellectual readers of the 21st century would appreciate it.  They do not hide their meaning under word choice.  It's the premise that really matters, isn't it? 

Or is it?  If there is one strange thing about anti-fairytales, it is the concept that the premise is not nearly as important as the reader's ultimate opinion of the premise.  The author works to persuade the reader to feel a certain emotion(s) about a certain premise without allowing the reader the time/space to analyze the premise itself.  (I say analyze, not think about--you can have something on your mind for weeks without dissecting it.)  It is easy to find a novel which is precisely this kind of anti-fairytale: a twisted premise smoothed over by beautiful, brilliant prose which provokes your emotion and a certain train of conclusions the author wishes you to conclude.  A book centered on perverse, even criminal, actions that manipulates your emotions so carefully, so very carefully, turning them into toleration, acceptance, or even sympathy.

Such a book may even be considered a classic.  It's not a new idea.  But that would be the poisonous apple; that is why there is Snow White.