Magical and Mythical—Two Hundred Years of the Brothers Grimm

pvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvq PrefACe Magical and Mythical—Two Hundred Years of the Brothers Grimm ardly a day goes by without a reminder from Hollywood and other sites of cultural production that fairy tales are here to stay, especially the stories collected two hundred years ago by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” and “Snow White”: these are the cultural myths we ritu- ally repeat, reinvent, and remediate, today with undiminished narrative vigor. J. R. R. Tolkien once described “the cauldron of Story” as a con- stantly bubbling brew, with fresh, new ingredients added in every season to build up the flavors and zest. That cauldron, like Salman Rushdie’s sea of stories or Angela Carter’s potato soup (with its multiple recipes), is capacious and contains multitudes, both global master-narratives and colorful local variants that reveal just how up close and personal these stories remain. It is something of an open secret that fairies rarely make an appearance in fairy tales. Those spritely creatures may be rarity in what the Brothers Grimm called Märchen, but magic remains in the form of gold and silver cascading down from trees, singing bones that indict murderers, tables that set themselves, cudgels that beat on command, or any number of other wonders, as well as horrors. Many folklorists prefer the term wonder tale to xv preface fairy tale, since it better captures the distinctive feature of the genre—magic in all its kaleidoscopic variation. Wonder tales are not only suffused with magic but also often structured by transformations—the leap from human to beast, the switch from scarcity to plenty, and the storied move from rags to riches. For a good part of the last century, Disney Studios kept fairy tales alive and breathing. Many of those films began by nodding to the authority of the story as it was written down. They remained remarkably faithful to stories collected by Charles Perrault in France and the Brothers Grimm in Germany. In each case, a short sequence featuring storybook characters plunges us into the action, and, as pages turn, we are reminded of the written sources for the tale that will unfold. Even with the trademark additions of helpful mice in Cinderella or named dwarves in Snow White, the Grimm tale still shines through. But for several decades, the fairy-tale franchise came to be known by the name of Disney rather than Grimm, and the films became our portal to “tales as old as time,” as Mrs. Potts puts it in Beauty and the Beast. It took iconoclasts to remind us that the tales had a history. Beginning in the 1960s, writers with many different agendas rediscovered fairy tales, and they soon recognized that the stories were not written in granite. They were so elastic, malleable, and resilient that they could be stretched and molded into quirky new shapes without losing their narrative mass. Why not turn the wolf into a victim of porcine greed, the witch into a hospi- table loner exploited by predatory children, and Rumpelstiltskin into an honest laborer, cheated of his contractual rights? Poets like Anne Sexton, writers like Roald Dahl, and films like Shrek demonstrated that you could radically change the terms and dramatically reconfigure fairy-tale plots, yet the story still shines through. Rewriting resurrected and revived the old story, calling attention to the original source material in the Grimms’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales, as much as it created playful new versions. It is, ironically, the fate of iconoclasts to keep alive the very myths they seek to demolish. These days fairy tales are passed on to us through what the media gurus call multiple “delivery systems,” and the stories have reclaimed their multi- xvi preface generational appeal. Children can read versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” by the Brothers Grimm, but also by Jon Sczieska; adolescents can watch Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, featuring Amanda Seyfried, or take in the camp version of her story in Freeway, with Reese Witherspoon; and adults can get their dose of that same story from Angela Carter’s “Company of Wolves” or Anne Sexton’s poem in Transformations. And now we have new versions like ABC’s Once Upon a Time that aim not only to tell the story but also to draw viewers into the glow of a virtual reality constructed around fairy-tale narratives. Just tune in some day to the Magic Mirror on the Web site for the series. Still, many of the most revered experts have insisted on a strict typological divide between fairy tales, banished to the culture of childhood, and myth, part of the childhood of culture. “Fairy tales are told for entertainment,” Joseph Campbell declared in The Power of Myth. “You’ve got to distinguish between the myths that have to do with the serious matter of living life in terms of society and of nature, and stories with some of those same motifs that are told for entertainment.” Campbell correctly recognized the shared repertoire of motifs in fairy tales and myth, just as he understood that both genres engaged with the nature/culture divide. Just how robust is that shared repertoire and the commitment to work- ing out cultural conflicts? If we turn to Greek mythology, we discover that one tale begins with a girl, a basket from mother, a meadow of flowers, and—a god disguised as a bull. Instead of the marauding wolf in fairy tales recorded by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, we find a bull, less ferocious than tame, playful, and seductive. The ancient tale about Zeus and Europa, which has, of course, been read by generations of schoolchildren raised on Bulfinch’s Mythology and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, informs not only “Little Red Riding Hood” but also “Beauty and the Beast,” two tales that circulate comfortably in adult popular culture. For the Greeks, as for us today, the story of Europa’s abduction challenges us to think hard about the line dividing rape from seduction. Both myth and fairy tale about a girl, a wolf, and an encounter in the woods take up powerful questions about innocence and predatory behavior through the optic of the nature/culture divide. xvii preface That it is possible to miniaturize myths and dilute their “seriousness” and sacred energy becomes evident when we read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s version of the Zeus/Europa encounter in his Tanglewood Tales. In that recasting, the girl (and I use that term advisedly) meets the god, who has disguised himself as a remarkably beautiful bull. Seduced by the scent of ambrosia and the sounds of sweet music, Europa climbs on the bull’s back and is carried off to the sea. “Was there ever such a gentle, sweet, pretty, and amiable creature as this bull, and ever such a nice playmate for a little girl?” Hawthorne asks. By the same token, I would argue, fairy tales can be enlarged and made to rise to the “seriousness” that Campbell demands, as Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, Catherine Breillat, and others have vividly demonstrated. In Anne Sexton’s Transformations, the story of Hansel and Gretel becomes a rich opportunity for meditations on hunger, appetite, and feasting, as well as on fritters, goose liver, and chocolate chimneys. Sex- ton’s Gretel, inspired by the tale told by the Brothers Grimm, famously becomes a trickster as well as something of a cultural hero. She “sees her moment in history” and “fast as Houdini,” she shuts the oven and locks the door. The girl who once wept in the woods when she and her brother lost their way seems an unlikely candidate for a role that has been occupied by such mythical luminaries as the Greek Hermes, the African Anansi, the Native American Coyote and Hare, the African American Brer Rabbit, or the Scandinavian Loki, but in fact she fits right in—despite her gender—with those world-making tricksters by lying, cheating, stealing, and challenging property rights, as well as by speaking poetry and using enchantments to find a way back home. Gretel serves as role model for a new female trickster in popular culture, a hunger artist who derives her creative intelligence from appetite, one that first emerges in children’s literature through Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Long- stocking and Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games and flourishes now in the adult entertainments of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and the Hollywood construction of Lisbeth Salander, that skinny hacker in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Fairy tales, as the simple expression of complex thought, have a strange xviii preface double aspect. As Arthur Frank, the author of Letting Stories Breathe, puts it about narratives in general: “First stories simplify complexity for humans . but then stories turn around and complicate reality.” With a stunning economy of means, they manage to create thunderous effects, taking up matters primal and pertinent—the paradoxes and contradictions on which culture itself is based and with which we wrestle on a daily basis. In “Little Red Riding Hood,” we saw that it was innocence and seduction; in “Beauty and the Beast,” monstrosity and compassion; in “Hansel and Gretel,” hos- tility and hospitality—or hostipitality as Jacques Derrida called it for phi- losophers and anthropologists. As cultural taboos and prohibitions are made or undone, our stories are refashioned. They remain relevant even as they preserve a whiff of the archaic. It was Claude Lévi-Strauss who taught us that myths are made through a logic that resembles the workings of a kaleidoscope, “an instrument which also contains bits and pieces by means of which structural pat- terns are realized.” His understanding of myth was far more capacious than Campbell’s, and it was he who famously declared in “The Structural Analysis of Myth,” “All versions belong to the myth.” The mythmaker, or bricoleur, reassembles fragments—those bits and pieces of the old—to form models of intelligibility with new symbolic functions.

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