Stephen Alexander (1994) [1]
'It is time to speak of the fairies. In order to escape from the intrepid melancholy
of expectation, it is time to create new worlds.' [2]
I.
My friend Jennifer has written a fairy tale about a young woman and an enchanted fish.
Reading it reminded me that, once upon a time, I too wrote a short collection of tales to which I gave the title Genocide in Fairyland ...
II.
Motivated by my deep green ecological concerns, my enthusiastic reading of Jack Zipes, and my love for the stories of Angela Carter - not to mention my abiding hatred of Disney - I decided, in the words of Borges, that it was time to speak of the fairies in order not simply to create new worlds of the imagination, but voice support for this world and the creatures that inhabit it.
And so, I set about writing a collection of stories (numbering eight in all) and an introduction that began:
"Fairies symbolise the frailty of the flesh as well as the beauty and magic of the natural world. Their plight dramatises the struggle of peoples the world over to retain a traditional way of life when confronted by modernity (i.e., the world of money and machines).
Further, the destruction of Fairyland parallels the destruction of our own environment and our ability to dream and envision a different way of relating to one another and to the Earth."
And concluded:
"What I've attempted with this short collection of stories is not new; the fairy tale has long lent itself as a genre to those interested in political issues and philosophical concerns to do with identity, otherness, sexuality, interspecies relations, etc.
Unlike realist narratives that attempt to tell it as it is, or didactic moral fables that instruct us how it should be, folk and fairy tales, at their best - which is to say, at their most violent, most anarchic, most crude, and most comical - give a glimpse of how things might have been (once upon a time), or could possibly be (in a time to come that is already now/here)."
Genocide in Fairyland, then, was a book of dysfunctional creatures in a disenchanted land. Little people looking, just like the rest of us, to build up new little habitats and have new little hopes (no matter how many skies have fallen) [3].
III.
Unfortunately, I don't have copies of the eight stories (nor do I have the rejection letters from the handful of publishers I sent a proposal to) [4].
However, I do have short outlines of each tale that expose my thinking at the time and which I would like to share here:
Come Not with Kisses
A tale set in the land of the Great White Swan concerning a young princess's attempt to preserve an egg entrusted to her by a dying swan and which, she is told, contains the future.
Discovered by her swan-hating soon-to-be husband attending to the bird, the princess in a moment of panic hides the egg in the safest place she can think of, inserting it into her vagina.
Time passes: her wedding to Prince Renée goes ahead as planned, but all the while she thinks of the swan and his promise that he would one day return to her. Shortly after their honeymoon, she announces her pregnancy and he is delighted with the news.
However, he has a surpise awaiting him:
"Won't it be strange, when the nurse brings the new
- born infant
to the proud father, and shows its little, webbed
greenish feet
made to smite the waters behind it?" [5]
The Tower of Love
We all know that, in the name of love, there was once a king who locked his only daugter in a tower without a door on the day she began to menstruate, so that she would never wed and be lost to him.
The princess, however, had other ideas and let down her long hair, thereby allowing any passing stranger to climb up to her room in the tower, should he so please.
Less well known, however, was that in the fomer Soviet Union tales were told of a group of female inmates in a high security prison who, in order to be transferred to jails with less brutal conditions, would impregnate themselves with sperm obtained from the single male prisoner confined below.
Using a long piece of thread, they would lower a condom to him from their cell window and sing a song of encouragement as he jerked off into it. Once he had finished, they would then retrieve the condom and attempt to self-inseminate.
As the prison guards were deeply religious - despite years of communism - they regarded any pregnancies that resulted as miraculous events.
Curdled Milk
This is the story of a simple-minded giant accused of inappropriate conduct when playing with a group of children. What concerns here is exactly what concerned Michel Foucault with reference to the 1867 case of Charles Jouy in the village of Lapcourt, France:
"The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become [...] the object not only of collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration." [6]
Home Sweet Home (Revenge of the Unhappy House-Spirit)
A house-spirit is a bit like a hob; very hairy, but fully clothed and a wee bit more human looking. Usually, a house-spirit will live on the top shelf above the stove, where it is nice and warm and he can enjoy the smell of the cooking.
In the middle of the night, long after the people of the house have retired to their beds, a house-spirit will clean and tidy up the kitchen and help himself to some milk and cheese. The house-spirit also regards child minding as one of his duties and the thing he likes to do above all else is to rock a baby in its cradle.
But where does a house-spirit fit into a fitted kitchen? Into a world of dish-washers and microwaves and baby monitors and disinfectants that kill 99.9% of all known germs?
The answer, of course, is that he doesn't.
Angry and plunged into depression, the house-spirit in this story decides to extract a terrible revenge upon the modern couple who have robbed his life of purpose and the tale develops into a tragic one involving domestic violence and cot-death.
Night of the Moon-Beam Folk
This is the story of the moon-beam folk and their revenge upon modern city-dwellers, whom they blame for polluting the clean fresh air that they provide [7].
As the latter sleep in their beds in rooms kept artificially warm in winter and artificially cool in summer, the moon-beam folk visit and weave a web of moon-beams across their faces, covering their mouths and nostrils, and thereby ensuring that they go on breathing the same stale air all night long and wake feeling drowsy and fatigued.
Aware of his own increasing lack-lustreness, Jack sets out to discover its cause. Medical science providing no satisfactory answer, he consults a gypsy woman from the old country, and it is she who tells him of the moon-beam folk and how he might appease them.
Hob
Acculturation refers to the way in which one group of people is obliged by another group of people - usually dominant, but not necessarily superior - to assimilate and surrender their beliefs, habits, customs etc. Often this is done in the name of some grand ideal, such as material and moral progress,
Loosely based on the story of the Yanomami - the so-called fierce people of the Amazon rainforest bordering Venezuela and Brazil - this is the tale of the Hob; a horrible, ungodly, unwashed, uneducated race of hairy little people living in the last great forest of Fairyland.
When Jack Went Back Up the Beanstalk
The story of Jack - the poor boy who, with only a handful of beans, makes good by slaying a giant - is the quintessential English folk tale.
But surely it's wrong to steal and murder; even if one is stealing from and murdering a being regarded as a cannibalistic monster or ogre ...? And surely there are social consequences of rewarding such a youth as Jack - lazy, dishonest, violent - with wealth and celebrity ...?
In this tale, I pick up Jack's story several years after his initial adventure and reimagine what happened atop the beanstalk.
Bait
One of the more shameful methods employed by hunters to trap and kill wolves was to tie a female dog in heat to a tree in the forest and then wait for a male wolf to pick up her scent, locate her position, then mount her. Once inside the dog, and having ejaculated, the wolf's penis swells up and is gripped by the contracting muscles of the female dog's vagina (effectively acting as a plug to trap the semen).
This results in what is known as a copulatory bond (or breeding tie), locking the the two animals together for a period up to 30 minutes and, during this time, the hunter will come out from his hide and club the defenceless wolf to death.
With this in mind, here is my version of La Belle et la Bête, involving a cruel hunter who plans to use his own adolescent daughter as bait in order to trap
and kill the Beast. Unfortunately for him, however, Beauty falls in love with the Beast after discovering that she rather enjoys his sexual embrace and so the two of them turn the tables on her father and it is he who falls victim to them.
Notes
[1] Proposed design for book cover incorporating a black and white version of William Blake's frontispiece for Songs of Experience (1794).
[2] Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero, Book of Imaginary Beings, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (E.P. Dutton, 1969).
[3] The last line borrows from the famous opening passage to D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) - a passage which may well have influenced my thinking more than any other passage in any other novel.
[4] And nor, sadly, do I have the letter from Tony Juniper, then at Friends of the Earth, who agreed to write a foreword to the book, after I had promised that a percentage of any monies that it might make from sales would be donated to FoE and/or other green organisations and causes.
[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Won't it be Strange -?, Pansies (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1929), p. 23.
[6] Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Pengun Books, 1998), p. 31.
Probably I would be a little more cautious about writing this tale today, in light of what we now know concerning Foucault and the sexual exploitation of minors. See the post dated 9 January 2021 in which I discuss this problematic issue with reference to Foucault and Gabriel Matzneff: click here.
And see the post of 11 June 2021 on child sexual abuse accomodation syndrome with reference to the case of Norman Douglas and Eric Wolton: click here.
[7] A tale inspired by a scene in D. H. Lawrence's novella St. Mawr (1925); see p. 108 of the Cambridge University Press edition - published as St. Mawr and Other Stories - ed. Brian Finney (1983).
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