So I'm on the
treadmill, re-reading Andrew Lang’s collection of color-titled “Fairy” books (The
Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book and so on, through the rainbow and more), which were the staple of
children's libraries decades ago. On the
TV screen, a cheesy sitcom progresses, and as my attention jumps from one to
the other, I realize they’re both alike in a way. They’re both designed for sheer entertainment
and they’re both superficial. The main ingredients
of TV sitcoms are: marriage, love, jealousy and riches. The main ingredients of fairy tales are:
marriage, love, jealousy and riches. Both
have a dash of moral content; the main characters eventually learn some lesson,
such as the importance of friendship or of being nice to other people. Fairy tales aren’t necessarily more
“literary” than TV sitcoms; for one, we read only the versions that were
written down. It’s not likely that the grandmas
and grandpas who narrated them by the fire were as articulate as Lang. In
fact, the dialogue in fairy tales is as stilted as the one-liners on the TV
shows, and the plots are as predictable.
Perhaps there is one
significant difference: how do TV sitcoms inspire? Lang’s collections fired the childhood imaginations
of (by now) two generations of sword-and-sorcery readers and writers. Presumably, TV sitcoms are inspiring future
generations of writers -- but what will be their products?
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