Eshtine

fairy tales redux

Ursula K. LeGuin wrote a piece entitled "On Despising Genres." Go read it, then come back here.
Are you back? Good. Did you enjoy it? For me it clarified a prejudice I hadn't really noticed before. Once she showed it for what it is--a simple and simpleminded prejudice, an easy habit of thought--I began to see it in many places.
I picked up a Salman Rushdie book, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," last night in preparation to see him at a reading this evening. The lady at the checkout smiled at my choice. "Oh, this is very good. It has a lot of magic realism."
"Magic realism" is one of those phrases I think differently about now that I've read the LeGuin piece. I thought to myself, "It's a fairy tale. Call it for what it is."
But of course, it's never called a fairy tale. It's called "A Novel" on the cover, it's shelved with Fiction. Now if you start reading it, you may think of "The Wizard of Oz" or "Alice in Wonderland" or "One Thousand and One Arabian Nights." It reads like a kids' book to me, but I don't think I've ever seen it shelved in a kiddie aisle. I suppose that is because Salman Rushdie is a Literary Person, and wow that's such a shame because ordinary folk tend to be in awe of Literary People and will thus miss out on the chance to read their kids this book and enjoy together its terrible, terrible puns (like there's a sort of fish Rushdie describes as sharklike, with many mouths, and is thus called the Plentimaw Fish, which a character sees and thinks "So there really are Plentimaw Fish in the sea!").
Tonight I was in line for the Rushdie reading and I had open my copy of "Haroun and the Sea of Stories." A girl behind me, standing with some friends, remarked that she had read it when she was little. I told her my anecdote of buying it and thinking "Don't say it's magic realism, just call it a fairy tale!"
There was this odd pause. "A fairy tale of a sort," one of the girls in her group allowed, and that conversation died out.
"Well, yes," I wanted to say but didn't. "It's a fairy tale of a sort. All fairy tales are of a sort. Why is the word making you so uncomfortable?"