Finite and Infinite

I read the Carse book about infinite and finite games and created a project for my 6th grade group about heroes and heroines in folk tales. We compared three different kinds of Cinderella tales:

Walt Disney, Baba Yaga (Russian) and Rash’n Coatie (Scottish). 

I introduced the concepts of infinite and finite i.e. being opposites, operating within a given set of parameters (a folk tale in this case) as well as convergent and divergent behaviors and thinking. 

Each of these stories has the heroine act differently, but sticks to the script of the abused girl having a supposedly happy ending when she marries the prince. This group of students is all girls, so the idea of sticking to social roles, or not, is an important one for them to consider: how much passivity is acceptable to them? What behaviors might decrease their self-advocacy? Is their behavior already scripted and finite?

I made them a Venn diagram of three circles and we decided which Cinderellas had unique actions, and which actions were common to all three. 

The group noticed:

That a similar set of circumstances befell young girls in separate places in the world, and broadly, the response of the Cinderella character was the same.

Walt Disney Cinderella makes no decisions for herself, is good natured and unquestioning, though sad that she is hungry and shabbily dressed. Her beauty is external as well as internal. She is finite in her actions, and passive, puppet-like in the context of the story.

All Cinderellas have small, dainty feet as befits undisclosed noble people.

All have evil older women in their families, and magical kind ones. The older evil women think nothing of eating small children, mutilating feet to fit them in slippers, or being cruel in general. They are making decisions of an evil kind, whereas the good magical guides such as fairy god mothers, or the red calf, make decisions that perpetuate the finite game as we expect it to turn out.

All Cinderellas are beautiful

Rash’n Coatie kills a calf to survive, she is cunning and tough, but still marries the prince. The girls thought she was a bit more practical.

The cinderella in Baba Yaga commits murder by killing Baba Yaga, but is helped to do this by a kindly aunt who gives her magical tools to do the job. It is not certain that this Cinderella will be safe, but since it is a folk tale, the girls assumed she would be. They noticed that there are not folk tales about girls who are socially unsuccessful, or ugly, or individuals who are done in by magic. Defeated people, or victims of magic are in stories as warnings to listeners to behave, or as props in the drama of the story.

In contrast, we compared Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games to Cinderella. She is, the group decided, also a Cinderella figure with limited options. However, her choices in the story included decisive actions, rather than passive, uncontroversial ones. It is a shock when we realize she must kill or be killed. Katniss, they knew, would suffer, but would triumph eventually. She too, is a finite game player.

Looking for a male counterpart to Cinderella, a 6th grade boy chose Batman: an orphan, lonely, sad, always becoming a bat, always fighting villains (from the same range of villains) and always winning, and compared him to Loki.  The rules Batman follows are decency in fair fighting, protecting the weak, and destroying or routing the villain. There is no deviation from this core plot. We considered the role of Anansi and Coyote who are Loki-like trickster figures who throw a wrench in to the stability of story lines. Both boys and girls preferred the mischief and unpredictability of trickster tales to the stolidity and finiteness of traditional roles.

In consideration of a Judeo-Christian equivalent to the trickster, could the idea of original sin apply? As I see it, this is the human necessity to do cunning things in order to survive. In a mythological world, the bad-actor or Trickster always receives poetic justice: dictators get their bad endings eventually, Baba Yaga gets killed, Loki and Prometheus are eventually unbound etc. Trickster tales have a humorous aspect that soften the horrific actions that humans are capable of, or gods and fate deliver. 

Biblical tales are full of atrocities, yet the perpetrators are enmeshed in a history that moves towards a savior being born (although on a Pagan festival day) so perhaps acknowledging the horribleness of actions in the Bible, unless it is something like the Massacre of the Innocents which nearly prevents Christ’s birth, could not occur because it would interfere with the perceived ultimate good of Jesus’ birthday, life and Crucifixion. Finding any humor in this seems off limits!

• These mica sheets are each about 1inch across, and were part of one mica pebble on a path near my house. The edges of the pebble had been worn away by weather and have deviations in the outline of the basic shape, which looks a bit like the African continent. The grain of individual sheets is not in the same direction. Breaking up something that had been locked together since the Earth was made (well, maybe!) felt very Trickster like.