A few years ago, when I participated in the designation of the Man Booker Prize literary prize, a disagreement regularly pitted me against another member of the jury. We got along well and shared many tastes. But a subject opposed us: the question of realism. “It’s a fairy tale” was perhaps the worst my colleague could reproach for a book. What I objected to:And then, where is the problem? ”
These exchanges were only pleasant jokes between colleagues, but I meant it seriously all the same. Take opera, dance, classical music, theatre, poetry – just about any form of artistic expression – and you’ll find plenty of stories that don’t claim an ounce of realism. Engelbert Humperdinck and his opera Hansel et Gretelle Bluebeard’s Castle by Bela Bartok Fire Bird de Stravinsky, The Nutcracker or The Sleeping Beauty by Tchaikovsky, The Fairy Queen d’Edmund Spenser, Storm et A Midsummer Night’s dream the Shakespeare. So why on earth should only authors of children’s literature be allowed to talk about fairies and magic?
There are a few exceptions, but as a general rule, any work about witches, magicians, ghosts, spirits and fairies is seen as fanciful, not to say absurd. Why ? Why are these themes, once considered intangible but respectable aspects of existence, now ignored or despised?
“Lord, how mad these mortals are! ”
I believe that the loss of these fictions reveals an even greater loss, resulting from the undeniable consolidation of the reign of this infernal couple. “Of isms” : reductionism and materialism. There was a time when we lived in an inhabited world, where humans were creatures who perceived things, but were also perceived by others. To live in this world meant to live alongside vital forces beyond our control, resisting all human will, resistant to all prediction as well as confinement.
It doesn’t matter whether Shakespeare believed in the existence of fairies. He had in his repertoire an idea of the fairy that allowed him to stage the irreducible madness of the human condition. “Lord, how mad these mortals are! ” exclaims