For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Interpretation
Literature has historically been shared orally, connecting us to the creativity of everyday people.
Angela Carter's quote emphasizes the significant role of oral storytelling in human history, asserting that literature, including fairy tales and folk tales, is deeply rooted in the traditions of common people. By focusing on the oral tradition, Carter highlights how these narratives preserve the imaginations and experiences of those who shape our world, showcasing their importance in connecting us to our collective history and culture.
In practice
During a lecture on the importance of oral history, I will quote Carter to emphasize the value of storytelling.
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.
Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.
To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.
I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.
Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.
THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come. Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading. The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.
But everything of value about me is in my books.
If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.
There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.
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