Category Archives: What is literature for?

When we hear a simple tale told by a grandparent in an unpretentious style, with a sort of humorous, or sad, or wry punchline attached to the end, we may make the mistake of assuming that it’s just a matter of another old country saying (or street-wise rejoinder, for that matter), that the punchline is something not really to be taken seriously.  But if we had lived that person’s life through, we might well think otherwise–in fact, that punchline or reduction of a piece of reality to what seems like a formulaic old saw might in that case be something to make us sit up and take notice, or mumble under our breaths, or sigh dramatically, or feel a shiver as if a “person just walked over our graves.”

Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist is all about the experience of attaining life wisdom through a sort of personal journey, paying attention to signs and omens along the way and always keeping one’s goal in sight even when it seems delayed by everything that happens to one.  And the book is full of teacher figures eager to share their principles with the right student and knowing more than he does himself about his dreams.  Signs and omens and pilgrimages to Mecca and belief in Jesus Christ and Allah and prophets and seers and Gypsy fortune tellers and scholars and merchants and even, yes, an alchemist all have their place.  Even encounters with rogues and thieves and people who threaten to murder one are or become learning experiences for an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago, who starts out only by having unusually troubling dreams.  When he asks a Gypsy woman to interpret, she tells him that if he goes to Egypt and visits the Pyramids, he will find a treasure that makes him a rich man.  It’s obvious that a kind of symbolic alchemy is going on in the text, however, because as Santiago is led on through the book by various prophesying and teaching figures, he accepts a spiritual sort of quest in place of a monetary one, and thus is in the process of refining himself and allowing himself to be refined by others.

Santiago learns that he is in search of living out his own “Personal Legend” and is being led by these others to perceive the “Soul of the World” in all living things.  Reading the signs and omens as he learns to do, he seems not ever actually to use or to use only once the two magic stones, one black and one white, Urim and Thummim, pronosticating stones given him by Melchizedek, a mysterious “king” with a Biblical name who says he is the “king of Salem” and wears (under a voluminous robe) a golden breastplate.  Santiago learns the importance of accepting his fate and learning to perceive it truly and follow it well because, as an Arabic crystal dealer for whom he works for a year says, “Maktub,” (“It is written”) by “the hand that writes all,” though the words used are always “Personal Legend” and never the less gentle and more dreaded word “Fate.”

What’s the most unusual is the combination in the book of an uncomplicated story line with what amounts almost to a treatise on belief, as Santiago goes from being a shepherd to a traveller to a temporary employee for a candy dealer in Tangier, then for a crystal merchant in Tangier, whom he so enriches by his merchandising concepts that he makes enough money to decide whether he wants to pay his passage back to Spain and forget the whole matter or go forward.  But he would have worked for neither of the two men had he not been robbed at a time in Tangier when he was unable to speak Arabic; what he later learns to speak fluently is known as “the universal language without words.”  He also learns that understanding and following one’s Personal Legend is a matter of not perceiving himself as a victim of the thief, but as someone following his own destiny.  After all, as he also knows by this time, “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation.”  (In my edition of this book, there are questions for discussion, and one of them is centered around whether this does not convey at least a hint of narcissism–but when one has covered the entire book and realizes that the doctrine taught throughout is that the main unifying force of the whole world is love, and that acting in line with love in fact helps one find one’s Personal Legend, the point is dismissible, I believe.)

Santiago in fact goes to the Sahara and, surrounded by dangers such as tribal warfare, makes his way with his caravan to an oasis, meeting an Englishman along the way who first introduces him to the idea of alchemy, carries a load of books along, and also has two prognosticating Urim and Thummim stones.  The Englishman is trying to learn from books what the shepherd is learning from life.  At the oasis, the Englishman seeks for knowledge of the alchemist who is said to live just to the south of there, and Santiago falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Fatima whom they have stopped to ask for information.  This later becomes a temptation to him also, to forget about the treasure near the Pyramids and stay with her.  But fate intervenes again:  the boy reads the omen of two hawks warring in the sky, and reports back to the oasis chieftains (who are at peace with each other in the oasis) that a warring tribe is about to descend.  He is threatened with death if this turns out to be a false prediction, but he has spoken truly, and the chieftains muster in time successfully to defend the oasis from attack.

The boy’s fate takes another turn when the real alchemist seeks him out and challenges him because he read the signs of the desert accurately.  Because the boy shows courage at this meeting at swordpoint (said to be the most necessary thing to have in order to stand up to one’s Personal Legend), the alchemist leads him further into the desert, within a short distance of the Pyramids, to an old Coptic monastery.  There the alchemist shows the boy how to transmute lead into gold, but when the boy asks if he himself will ever be able to do so, the alchemist responds that it is his own Personal Legend to have done so, not the boy’s.

When Santiago is actually standing in front of the Pyramids, he is remembering that his heart earlier told him to be aware of the place where his tears fall, because there is where his heart is and his treasure also.  At this point, he weeps at the beauty of the Pyramids and the desert night, and so takes the command literally and begins to dig with his hand in the desert soil beneath him, hoping to unearth a literal treasure.  But at the next moment, he is set upon by refugees who take his only remaining gold from him and beat him nearly senseless.  They have asked, though, what he is doing there, and when he tells them he is digging for treasure because he twice dreamed of it there, they scoff at him and prepare to depart.  One of them in mocking him, however, goes go far as to tell him that he had fallen asleep on just that spot on the desert two years before and had dreamed something about a treasure buried in an old sycamore tree near a ruined church on the field of Spain where the shepherds and their flocks sometimes stayed, but that he himself is not so stupid as to cross the whole desert and into another country to follow a dream.  They leave, and suddenly Santiago realizes that he is now rich beyond his dreams, because he does have that kind of belief, and he can get his way back again somehow and claim the treasure.

Lest one assume that this story ends with the usual lessons about alchemy being only a means of transforming a metal or only truly being about changing people from one state to another morally or spiritually, it is for Santiago both:  it is this complexity which means that if he is a wise man and a rich man, he will never confuse the two, but will always pay his debts of teaching and learning and of wealth in the proper coin.  It also is not a tale which rewards us only with the unadventurous thought that “happiness is best found in your own backyard.”  That would be a truly unrewarding moral to the story.  Luckily, Coelho provides an Epilogue in which Santiago goes back to Spain, retrieves his treasure, and feels the kiss in the wind of his desert woman, Fatima, waiting for him.  The optimism of the text leads us to believe that he will go back to the oasis, too.  Thus, though he has achieved his Personal Legend, he will never have to reproach himself, as others in the story do, with not having had the courage to act on their dreams.  He is both materially and spiritually successful, but it took the second to bring about the first, and it is the second which will ensure that he does not misuse his material goods.

The 1993 English edition of the text translated by Alan R. Clarke and published by HarperCollins has a brief biographic sketch of the author and tells how he himself was repressed first by his parents from following his dream to be a writer, and then imprisoned and tortured by a repressive political regime for defending free expression.  When he was freed, he first decided to live what he regarded as a more “normal” life.  But then he had “an encounter with a stranger,” whom he had first met in a dream.  “The stranger suggested that Paulo should return to Catholicism and study the benign side of magic.  He also encouraged Paulo to walk the Road of Santiago de Compostela, the medieval pilgrim’s route.”  After that pilgrimage, Coelho’s writing career took off.  As of the 1993 printing, “The Alchemist went on to sell more copies than any other book in Brazilian literary history.”  It just goes to show that what to one person might be a tall tale or a moralistic fantasy chockful of truisms is for another a guide to true wisdom, and that discovering one’s own Personal Legend means listening sometimes to older, wiser voices that speak of their own experience of things, so that one doesn’t have to find everything out through trial and error.  And Paulo Coelho is one of those voices who speak truly of life’s tribulations, though he disguises them ever so well as simple learning exercises, perhaps so that we can learn to resist discouragement as well as his character Santiago did, and as he himself obviously had to do.  This book, though, is a delight as a literary experience as well, with its simple style and clear explanations of complicated states of mind.  I predict that it is the fate of Santiago the shepherd boy in The Alchemist to continue to please readers for many years to come.

Today’s post is not so much about a specific story or stories as about a now 14 year old collection of stories about heroines from around the world collected by Kathleen Ragan, with a foreword by Jane Yolen.  The collection is entitled, Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters:  Heroines in Folktales from Around the World.  These folktales are not, however, so-called “chick lit,” and are opposed in every way to that concept.  They do not deal with women in reference to men, except as it is necessary not to leave out the other half of the human race:  the women are not gossipy gal pals seeking for husbands or passive ladies in castles waiting to be rescued, but are instead active instigators of their own future actions and constructors of their own fates.

As Jane Yolen points out in the “Foreword”:  “Hero is a masculine noun.  It means an illustrious warrior, a man admired for his achievements and qualities, the central male figure in a great epic or drama.  A heroine, on the other hand, is the female equivalent.  Or is she really his equal…?  We might as well have called her a hero-ess or a hero-ette, some kind of diminuitive subset of real heroes….Or so the Victorian folk tale anthologists would have had us believe.  They regularly subverted and subsumed the stories that starred strong and illustrious female heroes, promoting instead those stories that showed women as weak or witless or, at the very best, waiting prettily and with infinite patience to be rescued.  And the bowdlerizers did it for all the very best of reasons–for the edification and moral education of their presumed audiences.”  The enduring yet submissive model of womankind was of course the Victorian ideal, one which demanded that women leave to men all the decisive action.  These versions of womankind were passed down to women even as late as the 1950’s, when they appeared in some Disney cartoons in which the main drift of the heroine’s effort–and I use the word “drift” deliberately here– was to be rescued from a victimized status and fall into the arms of the rescuing prince.

In the “Introduction,” Kathleen Ragan tells how her search for books for her young daughter which featured true female heroes went (and in some quarters the term “heroine” has gone the way of “stewardess” and other words which are deemed antiquated).  They were reading a lot of Dr. Seuss at the time, but disturbingly in this great author’s works for children, Ragan began to find that there were almost no female role models, or at least none which were positive in nature.  She started by changing the pronouns when reading to her daughter, but this presented problems of its own, because with the astounding memory of children her daughter caught every mistake and slip-up.

Ragan then resorted to her local library, but had trouble there, too.  As she relates, “Although there were five to ten editions of ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ‘Snow White,’ and ‘Cinderella,’ each illustrated by a different person, there was a very limited depth to the stock of heroines in the library picture book collection….The current selection of fairy tales presented to children makes a sharp differentiation in the treatment of boys and girls.  The female role models are beautiful, passive, and helpless victims….Male role models include a range of active characteristics:  adventurous Jack the Giant Killer, resourceful Puss in Boots, the underestimated third son who makes the princess laugh, and the gallant knight who rides up the glass mountain.”  And when she did resort to anthologies of folktales, she found that “many of the women were negative characters:  a nagging mother-in-law who makes life intolerable even for the devil, a woman who personifies the misery in the world, or women who allow themselves to be mutilated by loved ones.”  There were also wicked witches and wicked stepmothers.  Ragan, taking her mission quite seriously, considered that it was time to fulfill a need, “the need for an anthology of folktales with positive women as the main characters.”

Ragan reviewed over 30,000 stories, and found positive heroines in tales from all over the world.  They had just become submerged.  “These forgotten heroines are courageous mothers, clever young girls, and warrior women; they rescue their villages from monsters, rule wisely over kingdoms, and outwit judges, thieves, and tigers….[A] female Prometheus brings navigation to Micronesia.  Seven Thai women, after severing the head of a monster, carry it for seven years to free their country of the monster’s curse.  A Cheyenne woman gallops into the thick of battle to rescue her brother.”  Ragan also mentions the original German edition of Grimms’ fairy tales (Kinder und Hausmärchen, published in 1812).  Among the tales in this collection, there is a Little Red Riding Hood who goes through the woods another time, encounters a second wolf, and “vanquishes this wolf herself.”

Ragan recounts how some people argue that gender doesn’t matter in a story, because the child reader will empathize with the hero or heroine.  But her anecdotal research suggested that the case was far otherwise:  regardless how gripping the story, both girls and boys identified with characters of their own sexes, no matter how miniscule a part that character or characters played in the action.  So, she kept up her search, assigning fairy tales a key role in her adult reading too, “because I felt that somehow they were meant to answer questions and fulfill a need.”  After reading through story after story, she finally concluded that characters didn’t have to be perfect in order the meet the readers’ empathetic needs:  “[I]t seemed to me that the heroines I chose no longer had to be perfect.  I found I could smile at a cantankerous character and admire her perseverance….I could even forgive myself for not becoming as patient or as beautiful as Cinderella.”

In choosing the tales, Ragan went for “source books” that were in English or had been translated into English.  This automatically meant that there were more stories available from countries that either still have or at some time in the past have had connections colonial or otherwise with England or North America.  She notes a certain “dearth” thus among the stories collected from “South American Indian” stories.  Nevertheless, the overall drive of the collection was to go for multiculturalism in the stories.  She has also tried to stick closely to the oral form the stories take, following the words and word choices of their tellers rather than tidying them up for a literary audience.  She followed several criteria relating to the choice of the stories themselves, one of which was quite interesting from a “victorious heroine” point of view:  her eldest daughter begged her not to include any stories in this collection in which the heroine dies at the end of the tale.  Though this may seem at first like an unfair limitation, ask yourself just how many heroes’ tales end with the hero dying without his subsequent being going on to grace the heavens, or figure as some important element in the biosphere, atmosphere, or other “heavenly” location, and chances are you won’t be able to think of many.

Ragan started out by observing heroines for a standard who were parallel in qualities to heroes, but soon at least some of her emphasis had changed.  “[A] whole new class of heroines emerged.  Some ‘heroines’ did things that resonated with my innermost feelings but that refused to be classified as heroic:  a woman who sensed the importance of an insignificant looking coin, a girl who loved to dance, or a woman who told a story.  A simple conversation between two women when taken at face value could elicit a shrug of the shoulders.  Yet underneath this ordinary conversation, the effort that women make to keep relationships alive in a family or community swells like the incoming tide.”

In quoting so extensively from this book’s “Foreword” and “Introduction,” I realize that I’ve done a lot for you of what you are perfectly capable of doing for yourself, assuming you have the book in hand.  Yet because it has been out since 1998 (published by W. W. Norton and Co.), and there is still sometimes a noticeable dearth of good collections of stories featuring strong women and girls as role models, I feel it’s important to let as wide an audience as possible know of this valuable effort in folklore research.  True, in the field of children’s books there has been a boom since 2000 in the more gender-free language and roles assigned characters in books, so that it’s easier for boys to admire girl characters as well as the tough-guy heroes they historically have admired; there are also more leading female and male role models which girls can imitate and still “feel like Mommy,” and thus not odd in any way (I’ve often thought that though children are credited usually with being highly creative and innovative, which they are, they are also nature’s conservatives in their views of which parent they want to imitate, and in a certain sense of individuals perhaps this is right, but in some ways it’s a shame.  A girl with an admirable, strong, outgoing father figure should be as free to imitate him as to imitate her shyer more reclusive mother; likewise, a boy who likes to tidy house or cook should be free to imitate whichever parent does this the most, without feeling peculiar).

You may wonder–or you may not, but I’m going to tell you anyway, I hope you won’t mind–which folktale was my favorite as I was growing up.  It was “Clever Gretel,” I think from the Grimms’ Brothers collection, though I’m not entirely sure.  It’s the story in which a servant girl manages not only to eat portions from the chicken her master, due to arrive any moment, is saving for a guest, but manages to persuade the guest due to the continuing of an initial misunderstanding that the host is going to chop off his limbs (she does this as she trims off each limb of the bird and eats it in the kitchen).  When the master comes home, she cleverly lets him think that the guest stole the bird, whereupon the master begins to pursue the already terrified and fleeing guest, and Gretel settles herself in the kitchen and finishes off the bird.  Another thing about children–their moral sense is still in development, so Gretel’s cleverness is far more appealing than her dishonesty is significant.  And another thing about me–I still consider the story my favorite!

Do you have a favorite folktale, about hero or heroine?  Feel free to mention it here, I’m not prejudiced!