The Politics of Fairytales

by Maniscalco Riccardo

"Fairytales, heritage and identity in Europe"

Once upon a time, in a far away piece of land called Europe, lived a very special animal. It couldn’t run faster than its fellow living beings, nor was it particularly strong or intelligent. Similarly it couldn’t soar free in the skies and the marine depths remained a mystery to it. However, it possessed a characteristic that made it unique: it told stories. From the cuddle to the grave, its life was filled with big and small tales. The adventures of Gilgamesh, Pinocchio and Angela Merkel punctuated its days together with the newest gossips about the neighbour’s children or some gruesome news story. Of all those narratives that imbued its life there was however one like no other. It was called fairytale. Here, the storytelling animal used all its imaginative power to form and perform small narrative accounts where witches, speaking animals and other wondrous figures could interact with human beings and influence their fate. But fairytales still remained only a small part of all the tales it told. And words weren’t the only mean. At first came the paper, later radio and finally television and digital media. As time went by fewer and fewer members of the species liked to listen to the good old fairytales. It came a point when the fairytale storytellers in Europe were so few that they could be almost all put in the same room and not fill it. This fact scared some of the animals. They didn’t know how to solve this situation, till one day, around the time when The Beatles still used to perform live, they finally decided to meet and discuss this situation.

Famous buildings, like the fabulous German castle of Neuschwanstein, are often used as marker for specific national identities and so charged with symbolic power

© Pixabay

“ What happened? Why are we not telling fairytales anymore? We are losing all the knowledge that our fathers and mothers gave us. An invaluable treasure! We have to do something.” It was the dawn of the European Storytelling Revival. Years passed and the original group of people became bigger and bigger. Festivals and events marked now the fairytale calendar each year. Yet the storytelling they wanted to save wasn’t the same anymore. Indeed, nobody ever before told fairytales that way. How could Bavarian maids or Attican farmers find microphones and lights to liven up their stories? Who would have allowed them to access a theatre stage and perform in front of an audience? Why would somebody pay to listen to such tales? It was clear: the new storytelling movement distanced itself from the local and familiar environments where fairytales used to be “traditionally” told. Could those thus still be considered fairytales? Was this still storytelling?

“Μέρες Παραμυθιών”, the storytelling festival in Thessaloniki, might be considered as an example of the European Storytelling Revival

© Action Art

Yes and no. The stories themselves didn’t change much. The members of the European Storytelling Revival were indeed extremely attentive in preserving the original plots. But this very attention affected a major characteristics of fairytales: their adaptability. Oral narration is as a matter of fact defined from the interplay of tellers and listeners, from fluidity, from how something is constantly added or subtracted to fill the specific setting where the telling event is happening. Like people don’t bathe twice in the same river, so stories are never told the same. The fixation of the story in a fixed storyline risks to remove this element. But why does this happen? Why is it so important to have a fixed repertoire? The reasons are mainly historical and political. The world surrounding fairytales indeed changed a lot and very quickly. Especially one specific process could be deemed accountable for most changings: the rise of national states. In the course of the 19th century the idea that a people (a Volk, for all the German lovers) is historically and inextricably connected to a piece of land became pervasive in all European countries. In order to prove the eternal conjunction of those two elements and the pre-historical existence of the nation it was necessary to look for symbols. Flags, anthems, famous personalities of the past and local dishes and costumes were all used to implement and legitimize a sense of identity and belonging. In this process some of those phenomena got labelled as a shared “heritage”. “ Heritage” is however a vague word. The original meaning was used to hint that something, mostly some physical landmark, was inherited from the ancestors and as such worthy of safeguard. Since the claim of ancestrality and immutability over time legitimized the existence of the nation, the same principles had to be applied to the heritage that gave to the nation its sense of existence. However, dances, dishes, clothing, folk celebrations and similar phenomena are not the same as churches and monuments. They know nothing of physical national borders and are far away from static phenomena. Neighbours constantly influenced each other changing and adjusting “heritage” to fit the local taste of the time. Greek ouzo and Turkish raki are not so different from each other after all. Also, phenomena that we are used to think of as typical of some place are for instance extremely new.

Take the pizza for example, one of the landmarks of Italian identity. Actually, the way we know it today is an invention of 19th century Neapolitan chefs. As a matter of fact the very name of the most famous pizza, Margherita, refers to that of the very beloved first Italian queen. So why is the European Union striving for the identification and tutelage of a European heritage? It is once again a political intent. Massimo D’Azeglio said after Italy’s unification:

The mediterranean diet is an example of an immaterial heritage that has been claimed from many countries as fundamental to define themselves and their people.

© Pixabay

“We have made Italy. Now we must make the Italians.”

Queen Margherita of Savoia, eponym of the most famous pizza

© Wikicommons

Similarly EU would now like to create the Europeans. Exactly like the fathers (and very few mothers) of nation states envisioned in heritage promotion a tool for the creation of a sense of community, so too since the ‘90s the EU is involved in an effort to promote material and immaterial heritage as community-bonding and identity engendering. And fairytales are in the middle of this process. Many storytelling festivals happening around Europe benefit indeed from EU funding, mainly because European Union policymakers envisioned in them a moment where encounter and sharing of stories can help foster a mutual sense of belonging and shared identity. Storytellers of course seized the new opportunities that granted them income and validation for the work they do. In addition sometimes storytellers and policymakers, like many laypeople, consider fairytales similarly adopting the perspective of heritage preservation. Folktales are envisioned here as an unaltered static product inherited from the past and to be preserved in its original and authentic form. Fairytales get here stuck and reified.

But things are changing. Like fairytales adapt to their setting so the storytellers adjust themselves to the spirit of the time. New questions about appropriate representation and pertinence with the original context of telling are provoking big discussions in the world of fairytales storytellers. We should ask ourselves too what is the place of fairytales in our life, why do we tell them. Are they an heritage for us? A landmark of our identity? Why do we think it is important to tell and preserve them? Couldn’t we after all tell other stories? There are so many others around us... Any way we answer all those very political questions, whether we would like fairytales to become a fundamental step of a shared Europe or not, the “happy ever after” at the end of this story is yet far away to come.