October 2021
Sharon Sliwinski: Dr. Jacobs, thank you for agreeing to speak with me. Perhaps as a way to begin our conversation, you could say a little about how you became interested in fairy tales and myth?
Amber Jacobs: It all started when I was 7. I went to an average primary school in suburban London but my teacher was brilliant. She loved Greek myth and decided to teach the class the story of Demeter and Persephone. I was really quite shy at that age, but she chose me to play the part of Demeter. It was a bit of a shock, but I suddenly got very involved in the story in order to learn the lines. The myth centres on a mother-daughter relationship and I had to inhabit Demeter, this warrior-mother who becomes enraged when the god of the Underworld, Hades, steals her daughter away to be his wife. Demeter threatens to end the world if he doesn’t return her. Playing that part put me in touch with some big feelings: rage, revenge, ruination. It was really formative for me.
SS: You recently started a YouTube series called Telling Tales in which you narrate fairy tales and ancient myths, peppered with some amazing commentary. The series is purposely low-tech—just you in your garden with your computer. What made you decide to start telling tales this way?
AJ: I work in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck. Myth is hugely important to the psychosocial terrain. We live amongst a collective backdrop of shared stories that come in and out of our consciousness and saturate the whole realm of being. Like dreams, we don’t really have control over these narratives; they have a way of speaking through the storyteller. That’s what makes them so exciting—and like dreams—inexhaustible.
I felt it was important to do these videos all in one take because it preserves the liveness of telling a story spontaneously. In a simple way this relates to the origin of these tales — they belong to an oral tradition — and every time you tell them, they change. That’s also why I chose the garden as my location. It’s the same setting, but it changes with the seasons. It mirrors the telling of these stories, which stay the same, but also change with each telling. So it’s about mutability and permanence at the same time. I loved, for instance, that my poppies were in bloom when I filmed The Princess and the Pea, because of the association with opium and sleep and insomnia, which is so much a part of that tale.
SS: This reminds me of the Jewish-German writer, Walter Benjamin, who suggested that the art of storytelling has been in slow decline in the West, and indeed, came to an end around the time of the First World War. The demise was partly to do with the rise of modern forms of communication (like the newspaper) that aim to rapidly circulate information. For Benjamin, these new forms of communication were utterly incompatible with storytelling, which is about passing on experience from mouth to mouth. While information lives in the moment, storytelling concentrates experience in a way that preserves it, making it available for much longer periods of time.
Benjamin focuses on what we might today call “the platform”—how the medium of a newspaper is different from stories that circulate mouth to mouth. But he’s also interested in how this affects the deeper levels of structure and psychology. Does this resonate with your project?
AJ: Yes! But what I find so powerful about Greek tragedy and ancient myth is precisely the lack of psychology. These stories are not interested in internal life. It’s strange for me to say that, because of course I am very interested in inner life and the unconscious, but when it comes to storytelling, what makes these stories so powerful is what Benjamin describes as their “chaste compactness.” That’s why they last, why they’re so eternal. It’s about structure, not psychology.
Some people might describe this as archetypal, but that term carries all sorts of assumptions (about universality, for example). I prefer to think of them as very compressed versions of our most extreme emotions: love and hate, power, violence, kinship. This might seem to suggest these tales are about internal life, but what actually draws me to them is the fact that there is no individual psychology. If you think about Snow White or Thumbelina, for instance, they don’t have feelings. There’s no internal monologue. They don’t have a mental life that identifies them as anything other than a position in the constellation of the story. That’s why these tales last. They are like armature that contains the most profound emotions we are capable of – but without explaining them. The chaste compactness of the narrative is precisely what allows you to feel an intimacy with the characters, which are really structural positions, rather than characters.
These stories persist because of this passionate detachment, which is to say, they deal with our most primitive conflicts, so they’re passionate by definition, but they’re not personal. They strip away all the detail of individual psychology in favour of offering a structural portrait of emotional life.
For example, in the story of Demeter and Persephone, there’s this strange interlude after Demeter has lost her daughter, when she goes and looks after this baby boy, Demophon. Most people ignore this bit, but when they don’t, they often psychologize Demeter, interpreting this act as a kind of consolation-compensation thing. The suggestion here is that she nurses the baby because of her loss and desire for another child.
AJ: I’ve always thought that’s just wrong. These myths aren’t that sort of story. It almost feels offensive to think that you could psychologize Demeter! Her preoccupation with the baby is not about her feelings. I think she’s actually trying to produce a new masculinity. She puts the baby into the fire as a way to shift the structure of patriarchy and create something new. But she gets interrupted—the mother of the boy comes and says, “‘what are you doing with my child?”—and so she just chucks the baby on the floor and leaves. It’s an amazing moment and I regard it as evidence for the fact that these stories are not about individual psychology, or attachment, or feelings. They’re about the larger emotional conflicts that have a structuring force in human life. And that’s what makes them lasting.
SS: Can you say a little more about how you tell the tales — the way you spontaneously interpret them alongside relaying the narrative?
AJ: There is something incredibly important about the telling of the tale that leads to the interpretation. In Hansel and Gretel, for instance, it wasn’t until I found myself describing the old woman’s home as a “sweet house” that I realized the resonance with the phrase “home sweet home.” In fact, it was really only during the telling that I came to realize the whole structure of the tale speaks to the cyclical nature of abusive relationships. Making that video was really intense because I really only came to recognize this resonance during the telling of the tale.
I think about the tale a lot in advance of filming, but the videos are not preconceived. I never really know what’s going to come out. It’s performative in that respect, but not in the practiced sense. I’m not performing a set text. I’m trying to highlight the power of the oral tradition. Something happens in the moment of the telling and you’ve made an interpretation whether you know it or not, just by the way you’ve told the story. I am trying to work alongside these unconscious resonances and allow all the layers to come through me, so to speak.
SS: You manage to make connections between fairy tales, Biblical narratives, and Greek myth. Can you speak about the influences of all these different traditions on each other?
AJ: I’d perhaps first want to make a distinction between myth and fairy tale. Fairy tales tend to have an association to childhood. We are often told them by an adult when we’re young — or sometimes they’re read to us. So you first encounter them as a listener, which is important.
With myth it’s a little different. We tend to pick up myth through culture, but often in a fragmented, haphazard way. We rarely encounter myths whole, but the shards of them get passed down. Somehow these pieces get into us.
All the stories manage carry and transmit information in ways we aren’t always aware of. Like dreams, we have to think about them as unconscious communications. Or we could call this a form of transgenerational haunting. Sharing stories, like sharing a dream, is a way to transmit these enigmatic messages, which change into something else as soon as you utter them. It’s a bit like the movement of the octopus—that beautiful, deeply intelligent and elusive creature, which is never in our grasp, constantly shifting and turning into something else. This ceaselessly shifting movement drives syncretism, so that seemingly conflicting belief systems or symbolic orders are always, and by definition, inhabiting one another.
In the act of telling, these tales mutate into infinite variants. There is a cunning intelligence inherently built into their form. They are inexhaustible and unpredictable.
SS: You’ve written about this form of cunning intelligence, what the Ancient Greeks called mêtis, which you define as a transformative force “not grounded in any telos, identity, or subject but free of ground altogether: an agency under erasure if you like, that is to say, a movement of subversive action that has no affiliation to project goal or ‘molar politics’ but nevertheless is a way of operating whose movement will perpetually undo any logic of control.” Does this spirit animate your project?
AJ: First of all, as a proper name, Mêtis refers to a goddess, Zeus’s first wife. And as soon as she becomes pregnant with their child, Athena, Zeus swallows Mêtis in order to absorb her power. It’s amazing how people think of Athena as a motherless figure, bursting forth, fully-formed from Zeus’s forehead. It’s almost as if the myth performs the repression it describes.
AJ: But mêtis also refers to a particular kind of intelligence in ancient Greece. It’s in the Homeric cycle. Various characters display a cunning wiliness, like when Odysseus escapes the cyclops. And Athena herself, is endowed with it, of course. But it’s also a philosophical system that was marginalized by Platonic distrust with anything elusive, deceptive, or shifting. There’s an incredible book about mêtis called Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant. They describe it as a type of cognition that is distinct from Platonic truth and separate from épistémè, a principled system of knowledge.
Mêtis is a radically anti-teleological way of knowing. It’s also attributed to non-humans: the branching fungal colonies of mycelium, the wily mind of the fox, the undulating movement of the octopus, the snake’s disarming coils. In this way, it’s also used to describe a certain kind of deceptive appearance. It’s about camouflage and trickery, things which turn into other things as soon as you touch them.
What’s really fascinating is that it can be radically amoral, too. Mêtis can be used in a free-market laisse-faire type way: no regulation, no taking a stand, no centre. It’s about tactics and ruses; spontaneity and play. There is a part of this that Jacques Derrida picks up in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” with his notion of différance and the idea of a structure without a centre.
But because of the Enlightenment, with its insistence on very rational ways of knowing, it’s really hard to even grasp the movement of mêtis, as a kind of meaning that is not interested in arriving at a definitive truth, that never had a centre in the first place. It’s not about direction, progress, telos, identity, or argument – all the things that structure our routine ways of being today.
Myth and fairy tale are closer to this form of intelligence. Although these stories often appear very structured—with a beginning, middle, and end—they are really about variation, repetition, and change. Myth is as inexhaustible as the movement of mêtis. They resist definitive interpretation. Just as you think you’ve got them in your hand, they turn into something else. I love this radical open-endedness, this polymorphic quality. It seems to me that this is the kind of intelligence that we need today.
SS: You’ve described Telling Tales as a long-term project without end, and you’re currently developing a series of videos on the Epic of Gilgamesh, a 4000-year-old story from Mesopotamia that is often described as the earliest human narrative on record (at least in written form).
The epic begins with a series of dreams: Gilgamesh, the ruler of Uruk, dreams of the wild man, Enkidu, who will become his companion. Can you say a little bit about what fascinates you about this story?
AJ: Gilgamesh has two dreams at the beginning of this story, and yes, these are probably the earliest written dreams we have in human history. Gilgamesh tells the dreams to his mother, Ninsun, who interprets them for him. In the first dream, Gilgamesh sees one of the stars fall out of the sky like a rock. It lands at his feet and he tries to lift it, but it’s too heavy. He tries to roll it, but he can’t dislodge it. All the people of Uruk gather around and Gilgamesh embraces the rock, caressing it “like a wife” — the phrasing here is significant. Gilgamesh’s mother, Ninsun, tells him the dream is about a friend whom she will make into his equal. She says: “like a wife you will love him, caress and embrace him.” This is Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s companion for much of the tale. I don’t want to spoil what happens—it’s such a beautiful, sad, and complex story—but it is inaugurated by these dreams and built around the intense, passionate love affair between these two men. This story is one of the origins of literature — and it turns on a remarkable love affair between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Scholars of the epic have not really reckoned with this relationship. They usually describe it as a “friendship” but the erotic passion of the attachment is clearly described in these ancient clay tablets, which were re-discovered in the 1850s.
SS: It’s amazing that Gilgamesh’s dreams are interpreted by his mother.
AJ: Yes! Ninsun plays an important part in recognizing and affirming Gilgamesh’s relationship with Enkidu. And she is a dream interpreter. So many of the ancient stories feature this kind of figure. In the Abrahamic tradition, there is Joseph (Yusuf) of course, but I love that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, it’s a maternal figure. So much of my work focuses on these figures as active agents that shape the very structure of law and symbolic organization. Ninsun is one of them. This underlies the whole project of Telling Tales: returning to and re-telling these ancient stories in a way that reveals the structuring power of the maternal figure. There has been plenty of work that accounts for paternal power—the law of the father and whatnot—but I am interested in finding ways to reveal this other, structuring force, which is perhaps even more radical and powerful.
SS: Thank you, Dr. Jacobs — and best of luck with the series!
—Amber Jacobs is Head of the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.
“The Storyteller” © October 2021