Blah

I've been feeling really bleh today. I have no energy and don't want to do anything, even the things I like much less the things I need to do. I'm very grumpy, too. I'm either PMSing or about to come down sick. Maybe I caught the cold bug via the internet from Chera and JC.

So, since I'm lazy and grumpy I won't keep whining at y'all. Here, per Samuel's request, is the research paper I did two weeks ago for Literary Traditions. It's not the most stunning piece of work ever, but it was really fun to write because I really liked my sources. I would suggest googling Kipling's Just-So Stories and reading the Taffy stories first. You will probably understand it better if you've read Tolkien's essay "On Fairy Stories", but you could probably muddle through it anyway. I don't have my works cited page on this computer, I'll post it later.

The Categorization of Kipling’s Taffy Stories

In 1902 Rudyard Kipling published a collection of fifteen stories written for his late daughter Josephine called The Just-so Stories. The eleventh and twelfth stories, “How the First Letter Was Written” and “How the Alphabet Was Made”, are about the little primitive Neolithic girl “Taffimai Metallumai, and that means ‘Small-person-without-any-manners-who-ought-to-be-spanked’” (Kipling 1), Taffy for short. These two stories are distinctly different from the other stories in The Just-so Stories. Ever since Taffy and her father, Tegumai Bopsulai, gave us the skills to write letters using the alphabet, we’ve been endlessly categorizing what we write and then arguing with each other about how we categorized them. Taffy’s stories are not only hard to group with the fourteen other Just-so stories, but defy any hard and fast classification. Are they a fairy tale or a tale of the fantastical or just a children’s story? Using J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic essay “On Fairy Stories” and Yin Liu’s analysis of the Taffy stories, “Text as Image”, we will try the three frames one at a time to Kipling’s Taffy stories and see which one they fit into best.

Firstly, are Taffy’s adventures a tale of fantasy? It might be easy to collectively call The Just-so Stories tales of fantasy. Turtles and hedgehogs morphing themselves into a new kind of creature and kings wielding magical rings that call up djinns are not everyday happenings. However, if we let the Taffy stories stand on their own, we realize that they do not require the same level of imagination as the rest of Kipling’s stories. We are told that the characters are primitive humans, but that is more of a joke than an element foreign to the readers. Taffy and her family and their tribe go about their caveman activities in a very modern way, in a completely non-fantastical manner.

Kipling addresses the Just-so stories to his “best beloved” (‘First Letter” 1), oldest daughter Josephine and would use them for her and her playmates’ (and his own) amusement and to get Josephine to sleep. Kipling described them as “stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. They had to be told just so.” (qutd. In Liu 230), perhaps thus explaining the collection’s strange title. The question of whom the stories were written for is not as difficult as the question of what else they can be. Tolkien takes a very firm stance on this. “In my opinion fairy-stories should not be specially associated with children. They are associated with them: naturally, because children are human and fairy-stories are a natural human taste.” (Tolkien 42) Tolkien, as we will see further on, means something very specific by fairy-stories, but his point still applies. There are certain elements and techniques of narrative and story-telling that can be combined in a hundred different ways to make good literature, and these characteristics are to be found in both stories intended for children and stories intended for adults. Perhaps if a child likes a story it is for reasons similar to why adults like certain stories.

Fairy tales are often told as a way to explain an event that is not understood or to explain the origins of something important. Thus there are fables of the Norse God Thor and Native American tales of trickster animals that both protect and deceive man. Most of the stories from The Just-so Stories can easily fall into this category. The first ten explain how various animals got their unique characteristics and are conveniently summed up in their titles: “How the Whale Got His Throat” and “How the Camel Got His Hump”, for example. In the Taffy stories Kipling explains how the human animal got the distinct characteristic of a written language. Kipling took as a basis a theory common then and still discussed today. “The invention of an alphabet involves two mental leaps: one by which images are used for communication…and one by which graphemes are used to represent speech sounds. The first mental leap makes writing possible; the second makes the alphabet possible.” (Liu 242) Liu points out that Kipling is not just offering an explanation for the origins of writing, but presenting it to an audience that quite possibly hasn’t yet discovered Taffy’s “little secret s’prise.” (“Alphabet” 1) This gives the Taffy stories another characteristic in common with other fairy tales—the passing on of culture. There are few more important to a group of people than how their culture allows them to express themselves.

Although we have accomplished our goal of finding a category that the tribe of Tegumai’s linguistic adventures fits into, there is much that these two stories can still do. Tolkien took the classification of stories to extreme lengths in his essay “On Fairy Stories”, to the point that few stories can actually meet his requirements to be a fairy-story. For simplicity’s sake, I will use fairy tale as a general term and fairy-story for what Tolkien would consider a true story of the land of Faerie. Taffy’s tale does not meet all the prerequisites for a fairy-story, but there is still much to discover about Taffy’s stories by looking at what checkpoints she does reach.

Tolkien starts off with some simpler qualifications. A fairy-story must be presented as true fact without attempts to excuse itself as a dream or illusion. (Tolkien 14) In this case, all of The Just-so Stories qualify. Tolkien goes on to stipulate that fairy-stories must be about humans. A fairy-story, according to Tolkien, never has humans just to compliment the animals or is exclusively about fairies. Here we lose all of The Just-so Stories except for our dear Taffy.

Tolkien believes all fairy-stories deal with and work off of deep desires common to all humans, such as the desire to communicate with other beings “and in proportion as it succeeds it will…have the flavor of fairy-story.” (Tolkien 13) Both Taffy stories obviously achieve this flavor. Taffy and Tegumai want to be able to communicate with people over a distance. The problem, the crisis that must be resolved, in “How the First Letter Was Written” arises precisely because no one can communicate with the Stranger-man of Tewar. Another desire Tolkien lists is the desire “to survey time and space.” (Tolkien 13) The Tribe of Tegumai remains bound by time, but discover the power the written language has over the confines of space. When Taffy discovers the message Tegumai left for her, she says “Daddy’s just as good as come here himself and told me to get more water for Mummy to cook with.” (“The Alphabet” 7)

Tolkien uses the word recovery to signify a rather abstract notion. He says that recovery “is a regaining of a clear view…as things apart from ourselves. We need in any case, to clean our windows; so that the seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity.” (Tolkien 57) When something is used over and over, used poorly or for evil, we lose sight of its charm. We become disenchanted with it. Fairy-stories take these magnificent things and make them new for us. We once again see them “as we are…meant to see them.” (Tolkien 57) In our modern society, the written word is terribly familiar, drab even. Taffy and Tegumai’s terrible problems because of the lack of a written language and their great delight in their invention of the alphabet, helps us discover anew the joy of the written word.

There is a negative association between fiction and escapism. Tolkien argues that these naysayers are confusing a prisoner’s escape with a deserter’s flight (Tolkien 60). Certainly there are terrible things in this world and it is not a fault to wish to escape from them. Escape does not appear as a theme in the Taffy stories until the poem at the end of “How the Alphabet Was Made” as a heart-breaking desire for the dead. Kipling’s Best-beloved Josephine died in 1899 of pneumonia at six years of age, three years before The Just-so Stories were published. Kipling was very ill with pneumonia at the same time, so the news of Josephine’s death was held from him until he was stronger. By the time he was told, Josephine had already been cremated. (Dillingham 36) The accompanying poem for “The Alphabet” struck me as sad the first time I read it, without knowing Kipling’s background. With that knowledge, the poem is terribly tragic. “For far—oh very far behind, so far she cannot call to him, comes Tegumai alone to find the daughter that was all to him.” (“The Alphabet” 10)

So at the end, we discover that Taffy’s stories are not fantasy, not quite fairy-story, but easily fairy tale. We have several ways to describe these two tales, but have found that one category never quite describes them fully. Perhaps Josephine and her father were right in giving them their own name: they’re just-so stories and that’s all that can be said.