I’ve seen several articles over the last couple months about
how oral traditions are dying out, and taking some stories with them. I’ve also
been thinking a lot about comic books lately. These things are related.
I’ve never relied on oral tradition, because I read whatever
I can get my hands on, and after the first time I got my hands on some fairy
tales, there was really no going back. But sometimes I’ll be talking to other
people, and say things like, “Oh, it’s like that part of the Twelve Dancing
Princesses where,” or “what if we tried that thing from the Russian version
of,” and they have no idea what I’m talking about. And it’s happened countless
times, but somehow I never expect it—these stories are such a major part of my
life that I struggle to imagine people living without them.
So maybe these people I talk to don’t know about The Pied
Piper or The Princess and the Pea because their parents never told them
stories, and maybe in a couple generations those stories will only be known by
people like me who happen to find fairy tale collections at the library.
But oral traditions have been on the way out for a good
hundred years now, and they’re probably not coming back.
So here’s where the comics come into it: there’s a Thor
movie coming out soon. We just got the trailer for the Justice League movie.
Everyone is still freaking out about Wonder Woman, a new season of Young
Justice is on the way, and between Marvel and DC we have, like, a dozen live
action TVs shows based on comic books. So everyone on the internet is talking
about this stuff, arguing about this stuff. That’s not canon, that’s not canon,
that’s not canon anymore, those
characters hate each other, those characters love each other, they used to be married
but in the reboot they’ve never even met.
I’ve talked before about folklore and fanfiction, and I
think comics fall into basically the same realm. Batman’s been around for
nearly eighty years, guys. He’s been written by dozens of writers. There isn't,
as far as I’m concerned, such a thing as canon Batman. You can’t say that any
particular version of Batman is wrong, because Batman’s already been written,
and even legitimately published, in all of those different versions. Christian
Bale Batman and Adam West Batman hold the exact same weight.
The Justice League, the Avengers? Those are the American
equivalent of fairy tales. Everyone knows them, at least a little, somewhere in the back of their minds. They’re the same stories told over and over again,
slightly different in each telling, no longer belonging to one person but to
the entire world that they’re a part of.
Yeah, oral traditions are dying. It sucks, but hey, if it
bugs you so much, find an audience and start telling stories. Personally, I’m pretty
glad that isn't the main method of storytelling anymore.
I will never, ever know where my favorite fairy tale
started. No one will. The earliest version of Cinderella is lost to time
because it spread by word-of-mouth; there is no record of the first time someone
told it. You can trace it back to Greek mythology, you can trace it back to
ancient China, but you can never say, definitively, this is the place where
this story started, this is how it was told the first time it was told.
Any version of Cinderella from the last few centuries? All
the different details are perfectly preserved. We know exactly how Superman’s
origin story was told the first time it was told, and we can watch the changes
unfold over the decades. I can watch the original pilot of Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, then I can watch the pilot that actually aired, and then I can read
thousands of fanfics that tell that story slightly differently, and I know
where all of those things are. I know where to find them. I know where they
started. I can begin with the earliest version of a story ever told, and I can
watch how different variants branch off, and trace the changes over time, the
places people were in when they changed things, why they made things different,
whether it was because they forgot or heard it secondhand, whether they hated
something about the original or just really, really wanted something important
to them incorporated.
I can do all of that with Beauty and the Beast, but never
from the beginning. I can take you back to the novel, and work my way through
history from there. I can take you back to earlier French stories about
enchanted bridegrooms, to The Pig King or The Golden Root in Italy, to Cupid
and Psyche or Hades and Persephone in ancient Greece. But I can never go to the
original. And that means I’ll never know the full story of Beauty and the
Beast, the true depth of its significance, the farthest reaches of its
potential.
Because a story is more than the words that make it up. A
single story is also an entire world, encompassing the people who’ve told it,
the people who’ve heard it, the places where it’s been told—a story has a
beginning and an end, but it is also infinite, and I can never have it in its
entirety. The beginnings of my favorite fairy tales are lost forever.
But not Batman. Not Buffy. They didn’t start until oral
traditions started to die, and that means I can have it all. And so can someone
a hundred years from now, because everything is documented. So keep telling
stories. Don’t let that tradition die; don’t lose the power of words rolling
out of your mouth and into something eternal. But please, please, write them
down as well.
