from cees nooteboom, "in the dutch mountains" chapter 24

the good thing about fairy tales, thought anna, who, according to anderson's law, should have exploded at that moment, is that everything is dictated by the outcome. that is why you not only had a simpler character than ordinary people, but why there was also no need to worry yourself about the tedious logic that makes life so difficult for characters in a novel. it spared you much doubt and gloomy reflection. moreover, as fairy tales always begin with the idea of their outcome, they often follow and explosive chronology, and this appealed to her. a situation that might just as well have continued indefinitely is, by virtue of the outcome, interrupted in the most brutal, arbitrary manner: most fairy tales, after all, are no more than a few pages long. that within these closed circuits an entire, independent theory of relativity can arise and, among other things, result in animals and candles being able to speak, may seem strange, but isn't. the fairy tale is a province of the realm of the imagination... you might compare it with a pressure cooker. the compression of a large mass of time within such a small span distorts the sound in the animal's mouth (and at extreme temperatures the same happens to the waxen silence of the candle) into that highly differentiated form of quacking, chirping, roaring and bellowing which we in our arrogance call language and which we usually, that is to say when our narratives are synchronised with our lives, reserve exclusively for ourselves. by the same token howerver it can be argued that hte novel has only barely escaped from the talking animals. anyone who really wants to record the drama of someone's life would have to write a novel as long as life itself. this has proved impracticable. because of the necessary compression that takes place in a novel, people with perfect pitch may observe that the tone of what is said in novels doesn't usually correspond with reality as we perceive it. if it does, it is often a bad novel. in fairy tales the story is contracted still further, with the result that animals can be heard to speak...if the fairy tale characters were given a complex psychology or if they were made to reflect upopn themselves, they would probably become totally inaudible or unreadable, as the case may be. this is meant literally, of course.