Is it true?

One of the best responses a storyteller can hope for from a child listening to a tale, is for the child to ask, ‘is it true?’ Their question is an expression of enjoyment. I believe  it means  the child has gone deep inside the story, and the story has become real. The question is the child’s  way of pondering on the nature of that reality.

I am always secretly thrilled when a child asks this question, but how should I answer it? The world of  the story feels true and seems real, but how can that be? Do stories contain truths or lies? And what is the relationship between our real lives, and their fictional worlds?

Recent discussions in the media about whether fairytales are too violent, are just another one of the debates that seem to rise up about fairytales every few years. Arguments rage around issues such as, fairytales: encourage a false sense of reality; should not contain happy endings; contain negative images of women; are not relevant to modern lives.

But all the arguments forget to ask, how should we look at stories? What sort of truths do stories contain? The writer of ‘Mary Poppins‘, P.L. Travers, wrote many beautiful articles about ways of looking at stories. She understood that stories are metaphors, and that their meanings are symbolic. Her articles muse and meditate on the realities that fairytales depict, the inner and outer worlds they portray, and the dreams and desires they represent. In one article she says:

“People are always asking  – who invented myths? And do you think they are true? Well true? What is true? As far as I am concerned it doesn’t matter tuppence if the myths never happened. That does not make them any less true, for indeed in one way or another they’re happening all the time … life itself continually re-enacts them.” (Travers 195:1980)*

P. L. Travers understands there is a sense in which a story contains both truth and lies. That the story happened and didn’t happen. That it is truth in clothing,

So when a child asks ‘is it true?’ – what answer do I give? Yes, of course! Yes the story is true. That question is the potential in the child to engage with philosophy, and with it, they can start the journey into the world of meanings. Sometimes I might say that the story happened once, once only, once upon a time.  Or I might tell them how a story begins in Russia:

 “A fact is a fact

a tale is a tale

but where no one passed by

there runs no trail.

What was not planted

bears no seed,

What did not happen,   

no rumours breed.”

* Travers, P.L. “Only connect”(183 -206) In Egoff Sheila, Stubbs G. T. and Ashley L.F (ed) Only Connect – Readings on children’s literature. Oxford University Press, 1980.