'She Began to Hate Stories'

What is your reaction to this title?: “How a Husband Weaned His Wife from Fairy Tales.” I thought it might be one of the late Oliver Sacks’ lesser-known case studies or a close-up look at addiction and family dynamics, but it’s something humbler and more interesting, a fairy tale. Or a fairy tale about fairy tales, if you want to get all meta- about it. Without dabbling in morphology or Freudian voodoo, and thus stifling all possible pleasure, I enjoy reading fairy tales. They are plot stripped to basics, pure narrative, and often profoundly weird. Nabokov claimed “great novels are above all great fairy tales,” and he was right. Think of Robinson Crusoe or The Portrait of a Lady.

I’m browsing in Russian Fairy Tales (Pantheon Books, 1945), translated by Aleksandr Afanas’ev. “How a Husband . . .” is only two-thirds of a page long. The first sentence seduces us into the story: “There was once an innkeeper whose wife loved fairy tales above all else and accepted as lodgers only those who could tell stories.” We sense a variation on Scheherazade is coming. “Of course the husband suffered loss because of this, and he wondered how he could wean his wife away from fairy tales.”

An old man shows up at the inn on a cold winter night. The innkeeper warns him of his wife’s rule: “The old man saw he had no choice; he was almost frozen to death. He said: ‘I can tell stories.’ ‘And you can tell them for a long time?’ ‘All night.’” And so, for the first time, we see a hint of cunning in the husband. He warns his wife she cannot interrupt or argue with the storyteller. If she does, the stories will cease. The old man begins:

“‘An owl flew by a garden, sat on a tree trunk, and drank some water. An owl flew into a garden, sat on a tree truck, and drank some water.”

He repeats the same sentence, like a Russian Gertrude Stein, the wife throws a tantrum, and the old man says: “Why do you interrupt me? I told you not to argue with me! That was only the beginning; it was going to change later.’” You can see where this is going. The husband upbraids his wife, perhaps for the first time, and reverts to Russian peasant form: “And he thrashed her and thrashed her, so that she began to hate stories and from that time on forswore listening to them.”   

There’s a postmodern moral in there somewhere, assuming such a thing exists.