On the counterintuitive in everyday life (7)

7. In fairy tales

In Religion Explained’s chapter two, Boyer, on the basis of research led by psychologists Frank Keil and Michael Kelly, offers the example of the famous folk tale theme of the prince who is turned into a toad in order to show that such stories often contain counterintuitive elements, and that these counterintuitive elements always remain circumscribed. Actually the prince, despite his (temporary) animal form, continues to act as a human with specific thoughts and goals, and that is precisely what makes the story cognitively efficient.

It is tempting to continue this examination of fairy tales from a counterintuitive point of view, because such stories, just as supernatural and religious concepts, are very popular, widespread and easily passed on in human cultures. I will  therefore offer in this post a short analysis of a Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale, namely The Five Servants, which constitutes a variation on another common theme that one can find in such stories.

Brothers Grimm’s Five Servants

In The Five Servants, an old wicked queen subjects suitors wanting to marry her beautiful daughter to a series of tasks which are practically impossible to achieve, and who are sentenced to death by beheading in case of failure. Things are going well for her, until the day that another prince, the hero of the tale, decides to try his luck. During his journey to the princess’s castle, the hero meets and recruits five people endowed with very special features: the first one is an incredibly fat man, the second has an outstandingly keen hearing, the third is the tallest man on earth, the fourth has a reverse sensation of temperature (the more it is warm, the more he is cold, and vice versa), and the fifth has such sharp eyes that he can see as far as he wants. Once he arrives at the castle with his five servants, the prince is given three tasks by the queen. He must first find and bring back to her a ring which is hidden at the bottom of the sea. In order to achieve this, he uses three of his servants: the sharp-sighted servant determines the position of the ring, the fat servant sucks up all the water from the sea, and the tall servant pulls out the ring. The second task consists of eating a hundred oxen and of drinking the same number of wine casks. The prince, who is authorized to share the feast with one friend only, invites his fat servant, who eats and drinks everything heartily. For the third task, the princess is led by her mother to the suitor, who must preserve her from a possible kidnapping until midnight. That evening, the hero and his five servants keep a close watch on the princess, but the queen casts a charm over them; they all fall asleep and the princess vanishes. When they wake up, at fifteen minutes to twelve, the servants once again join their forces in order to recover the princess: the servant with keen ears hears her wailing far away, the sharp-sighted one locates her precise position, and the tall man reaches her in two steps and carries her back. Terribly angry and dreading her defeat, the old queen finally puts the prince in charge of one last impossible task: he or one of his friends must sit on a burning pile of wood and bear the heat for three days. So the man with the reverse sensation of temperature is given the task and successfully achieves it, stating, when he comes out unharmed from the fire, that he never shivered so much in his life. Beaten but still unwilling to accept it, the queen then tries to kill the prince and his servants in secret; one more time, the band is saved thanks to one of them, the servant with the keen hearing having heard the queen plotting. Then the five servants leave their master who finally obtains the princess and marries her with great pomp.

Grimm’s fairy tales have been approached and interpreted from many point of views (symbolism, moralism, formalism, initiation/esotericism, psychoanalysis, popular wisdom, gender studies, and so on), but what seems to be the most noticeable in the Five Servants is the resort to the counterintuitive as defined by Boyer. Each of the five servants actually has a special characteristic which violates our expectations about the person concept. But as we have seen in the previous posts, the violation of an ontological category must be limited in order to be successful, and the Five Servants is not an exception, since each of the prince’s companions enjoys only one special characteristic. In addition, amazing as each one of these special characteristics may be, the characteristic would be useless in the story if it were not combined with others. In isolation, each of the servants would be of little help to the prince, who has to determine to which of them he resorts according to the specificities of each task (and two of these tasks requires more than one servant). So the counterintuitive is not only limited in the Five Servants, it is also distributed. If this were not the case, for example, if all of these special characteristics would have been concentrated in a single servant, we can imagine that the story would not be as captivating, because the tasks would be too easy to achieve successfully. In addition, one must note that this counterintuitive approach to this tale does not prevent a more classical reading of it, because, from the moralistic point of view, it is the limitation and the distribution of the counterintuitive which allows one to conclude that unity is strength.

The Five Servants is not an isolated case; it constitutes a variation on a classical theme that one can find in Grimm’s fairy tales. For example, the sons of a poor man in The Four Clever Brothers are each endowed with an exceptional skill, but it is only by joining their forces that they are successful in freeing a princess from a dragon. And one can find many variations of what we can call the distribution of the counterintuitive in Grimm’s fairy tales.

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A short parallel with modern American superheroes

Superman, Batman, X-Men and all of the popular American comic book superheroes constitute typically counterintuitive characters. They are actually endowed with special powers, but these powers are always limited. Superman is a person who can fly, which is obviously counterintuitive, but he is also very vulnerable to Kryptonites. This is very important, because if Superman were totally invulnerable, the story would stop there (he would eliminate all the bad guys in the twinkling of an eye from his sofa). And the X-Men, just as the Grimm’s five servants, must often join their forces in order to be victorious. These superheroes, although clearly different from usual persons because of their (limited) special powers, also share the usual characteristics of any other item in the person category (they can be killed, they fall in love, and so on).