on fairy stories
Oct. 12th, 2009 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI heard A.S. Byatt speak at the University this afternoon, which was just unspeakbly lovely - she's absolutely charming, and from the excerpt that she read, I think her new novel The Children's Book sounds fantastic.
The following is something she said at the Q&A preceding the reading, which I liked so much that I recorded it on my little camera and then transcribed:
When I was a child it was the fairy stories I liked reading, it was the stories about things that were not real but were more real than real. And so it gives you in a sense the possibility of telling - I don't like the word spiritual but cosmic - truths, or truths about the nature of things which is harder to do when you're writing about men and women cooking lunch for each other - or even making love to each other. It's a different world; I like that. I like the rules that there are to fairy story worlds.
The English Writer Angela Carter said in the 1970s that she'd been trying to write realist novels about social behaviors for years and suddenly realized that actually she wrote because she had lived in this other world of fairy stories. And what I've found is that I'm happy putting the one world into the other world and juxtaposing them, because that's how you actually live - the things that you read are both more real and more unreal than your daily life. And there was a point particularly when I got to writing possession when I couldn't go on writing and then he sat down at the table and took up his knife and fork without also writing there were two little girls who went through the forest like Hansel and Gretel. But if I combine them, for me, I can make the knife and fork look more interesting because it's next to the forest, if you see what I mean.
le sigh. Now I am off to make spinach and feta pie for dinner. Maybe with a little bit of pesto?
The following is something she said at the Q&A preceding the reading, which I liked so much that I recorded it on my little camera and then transcribed:
When I was a child it was the fairy stories I liked reading, it was the stories about things that were not real but were more real than real. And so it gives you in a sense the possibility of telling - I don't like the word spiritual but cosmic - truths, or truths about the nature of things which is harder to do when you're writing about men and women cooking lunch for each other - or even making love to each other. It's a different world; I like that. I like the rules that there are to fairy story worlds.
The English Writer Angela Carter said in the 1970s that she'd been trying to write realist novels about social behaviors for years and suddenly realized that actually she wrote because she had lived in this other world of fairy stories. And what I've found is that I'm happy putting the one world into the other world and juxtaposing them, because that's how you actually live - the things that you read are both more real and more unreal than your daily life. And there was a point particularly when I got to writing possession when I couldn't go on writing and then he sat down at the table and took up his knife and fork without also writing there were two little girls who went through the forest like Hansel and Gretel. But if I combine them, for me, I can make the knife and fork look more interesting because it's next to the forest, if you see what I mean.
le sigh. Now I am off to make spinach and feta pie for dinner. Maybe with a little bit of pesto?
no subject
Date: 2009-10-13 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-13 02:02 am (UTC)No, I know, right? Byatt was amazing - she has this incredibly wonderful presence, where she's like your grandmother and the smartest person in the world all at once.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-13 06:20 am (UTC)i wish i could have been there.
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Date: 2009-10-13 05:05 pm (UTC)