What the Stories Encode

Accuracy and folktales

I recently read Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (by Heather Fawcett). Fantasy, to me, is not an ‘escape’ as much as it is a way to bring in the tilted horizons of realities other than those compatible with the scientific rationality of the west.

The central conceit of book is that dryadology, the study of different species of the Folk, is an academic discipline taught and researched in prestigious universities such as Cambridge—it has an active scholarly community engaging in a range of debates about theories and methods, academic publications and conferences, and is rooted in a tradition of fieldwork where the researcher gathers not only folklore about faerie but also oral accounts, and further accrues knowledge about faerie through such “hands-on investigation” as may lead to her meeting the Folk.

As a scholar, I delighted in this alternative academic world. At the school where I teach, fairy tales are taught as stories that express structures within the human psyche—not, as in this book, fundamental to the Folk and their world. Emily Wilde, the book’s eponymous protagonist, notes that a story is, crucially, “a pattern that shapes their [the Folk’s] behaviour and predicts future events. The Folk have no system of laws, and while I am not saying stories are as law to them, they are the closest thing their world has to some form of order.” (p. 13)

In the Ritual and the Embodied Mythic Imagination course I am teaching this quarter, we discussed Dagara Elder Malidoma Somé’s The Healing Wisdom of Africa, in which he retells his encounters, as a child, with kontomblé, and as a young adult, with the green lady who appeared to him in the place of a tree during initiation rituals. He calls these experiences “windows to the Other World.” For modernist rationality, they would only be hallucinations, visions. Oral and indigenous epistemologies insist these are to be classified under the umbrella of ‘reality,’ insist that there is a spectrum of reality.

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia makes a nod to the Enlightenment “regimes of truth” (which have, in our world, led to the dismissal of indigenous and nonwestern ways of knowing). A footnote tells us that the thinking within dryadology has evolved on the subject of faerie stories, “from the scepticism of the Enlightenment, in which faerie stories were viewed as secondary to empirical evidence in understanding the Folk . . . to the modern view of such tales as elemental to Faerie itself.” (ibid.) In our world, of course, enlightenment scientific rationality and research methods borne under it reject outright frameworks of reality in which these stories have any standing beyond their fictional value, and, peoples for whom stories may offer other knowledges are pathologized and labelled as deficient.

I suppose among the questions I am asking the students in my course to consider are these:

What if the oral, animist, nonwestern accounts of reality do indeed broaden what we know about reality?

What if, in slipping out of the chokehold of limited rational consciousness, we become participants of a world that is sentient, alive, and sensuous—that is willfully insisting we remember our purpose and place in the world?

What if, in giving up control over the world, we are remembering something essential about ourselves?