The Fairy Tale World

Andrew Teverson, Andrew Teverson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351609944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Fairy Tale World is a definitive volume on this ever-evolving field. The book draws on recent critical attention, contesting romantic ideas about timeless tales of good and evil, and arguing that fairy tales are culturally astute narratives that reflect the historical and material circumstances of the societies in which they are produced. The Fairy Tale World takes a uniquely global perspective and broadens the international, cultural, and critical scope of fairy-tale studies. Throughout the five parts, the volume challenges the previously Eurocentric focus of fairy-tale studies, with contributors looking at:

• the contrast between traditional, canonical fairy tales and more modern reinterpretations;

• responses to the fairy tale around the world, including works from every continent;

• applications of the fairy tale in diverse media, from oral tradition to the commercialized films of Hollywood and Bollywood;

• debates concerning the global and local ownership of fairy tales, and the impact the digital age and an exponentially globalized world have on traditional narratives;

• the fairy tale as told through art, dance, theatre, fan fiction, and film.

This volume brings together a selection of the most respected voices in the field, offering ground-breaking analysis of the fairy tale in relation to ethnicity, colonialism, feminism, disability, sexuality, the environment, and class. An indispensable resource for students and scholars alike, The Fairy Tale World seeks to discover how such a traditional area of literature has remained so enduringly relevant in the modern world.

PART I

THE FORMATION OF THE CANON

CHAPTER ONE

GLOBAL OR LOCAL? WHERE DO FAIRY TALES BELONG?

Donald Haase

The sleeping girl was carried far from her people and away from those whom she loved into the lands of strangers.

(The Foreign Wife)

O my lord, there was neither here nor there.

(Allāh’s Dispensation)

Like their heroes and heroines, folktales and fairy tales are wanderers. As “fiction’s natural migrants” (Teverson 2008: 54), fairy tales are famous for their journeys abroad, whether as cultural cargo carried by émigrés and travelers or as captives transported by colonizers, conquerors, and scholars “into the lands of strangers” (Bushnaq 1986: 20). That stories travel through time and space, across geographical and cultural boundaries, from teller to teller, has been a core tenet of folktale and fairy-tale studies for over 200 years, despite scholars’ use of diverse methods, theories, and terminology. Whether viewed through the lens of adaptation, appropriation, duplication, revision, retelling, remediation, remixing, relocation, intertextuality, variants and versions, or other critical terms used to explain transfer and transformation, fairy tales seem to be always already in transit, testing our understanding of their place in the world, a place that may seem “neither here nor there” (Patai 1998: 37), but everywhere, anywhere, or even – to borrow Homi Bhabha’s phrase – “in-between” (2004 [1994]).

In this essay, I consider the dislocation of folktales and fairy tales by asking: “Where do fairy tales belong?” To address that question and its corollary – “Global or local?” – I will: (1) initially discuss questions of “belonging” as they relate to folktales and fairy tales; (2) examine paratextual strategies that three late twentieth-century translations of Arab tales use to position themselves for what Robert Escarpit has called an “alien public,” an audience comprised of readers (like me in this case) who “do not have direct access to the work” or its “community of assumptions” (Escarpit 1971: 84, 78); and (3) consider how the constructedness of these English-language collections helps us negotiate the dichotomy of global and local belonging and conceptualize what globalization requires of contemporary folktale and fairy-tale scholarship.

Questions of belonging

As framed here, the question “Where do fairy tales belong” understands belonging, at least initially, in the sense of being “rightfully or fittingly placed in a specified location or position” (OED Online 2017). In spatial and geographical terms, then, this question asks whether fairy tales are most appropriately understood as being “rightfully or fittingly” situated globally or locally? “To belong” also resonates with etymologically and semantically linked verbs – such as “to pertain to,” “to be characteristic of,” and “to originate in” (OED Online 2017) – which enrich the question by bringing identity and a relational sense of belonging into play.

“Where do fairy tales belong?” is also a question bearing a relationship to the study of cultural property (Anderson and Geismar 2017) and to another question of belonging: “To whom do fairy tales belong?” When I posed that latter question in 1993, I argued that fairy tales were common property (Haase 1993b). Influenced by reader-response criticism and sociohistorical research documenting the appropriation of folktales by nineteenth-century collectors for a new audience, my essay expressed not only enthusiastic approval of the individual’s freedom to take ownership by adapting and subjectively responding to tales, but also equally enthusiastic disapproval of the ideological appropriation of folktales by the privileged and powerful. Privileging the individual reader’s response and resistance to institutional appropriation, I asserted: “It is no heresy to re-appropriate the tales from either tradition or the culture industry” (1993b: 399; see also Haase 1993a).

While I still hold that view, my focus on the fairy tale as a creative or emancipatory experience for the reader was based on the production and reception of Anglo–European texts and ignored the complexity inherent in taking ownership of culturally situated texts and re-presenting and responding to them in new cultural contexts. Questions of belonging become more acute when stories from marginalized and indigenous cultures or from outside the Anglo–European canon are appropriated for an alien public by collectors, editors, and translators. The geographical and cultural displacement of indigenous tales is especially evident in systems of material – and not just metaphorical – colonialism (see Bacchilega in this volume, Chapter 2), which produced problematic translations and collections that obscured the role of local scholars (Naithani 2006 and 2010) or edited tales and reframed them paratextually to “construct foreignness” (Schacker 2003: 149) and justify the colonizer’s “imperial ambitions” (Teverson 2016: 17). As a question of belonging, that displacement is captured well by Sara Hines’s assessment of Andrew Lang’s series of colored fairy books: “They may contain stories of other places, other peoples, and other cultures, but the stories have been collected, translated, and edited specifically so that white people will like them and are meant to be read from the safety and security of the British home” (Hines 2010: 54).

The postcolonial perspective has sensitized us to the infringement, distortions, and disrespect that can occur when tales of marginalized creators and cultures are displaced and framed for the benefit of new readers. Jill Terry Rudy’s study of paratexts in collections of indigenous Native American tales published between 1892 and 1929 leads her to conclude that folklore scholarship taking “its own positions as the gauge of a community and its traditions … produces works that are diminished by skipping the connections of traditions, lands, and peoples” (Rudy 2013: 25). Encouraging a relational approach that does not privilege the outside observers’ own position, she advises contemporary folklorists to “produce and receive tale collections in ways that better evaluate how stories relate storytellers with lands and communities” (3). Understanding how compilers position that relationship and negotiate the question of belonging is critical to what I have described as “decolonizing fairy-tale studies” and developing a “responsible form of transcultural fairy-tale research” (Haase 2010: 29).

Positioning tales in translation

The three Arab folktale collections I draw on here were issued by North American publishers between 1986 and 1998 for an English-speaking audience: Inea Bushnaq’s Pantheon edition of Arab Folktales (1986); Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana’s Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales (1989); and Raphael Patai’s Arab Folktales from Palestine and Israel (1998). My decision to consider collections of Arab tales in translation, despite having no specific expertise in Arab folklore or competence in Arabic, reflects my interest in positioning myself as part of the intended audience outside the tales’ linguistic, geographical, and sociocultural settings. So situated, I do not focus on translation itself but on paratextual commentary and framing to understand how collectors, editors, and translators (who may inhabit more than one of these roles) position folktales for English-speaking readers and address the question of where they belong.

To ask where Arab tales belong may seem a tall order, given the widespread locations, many local cultures, and vernaculars involved (see Marzolph 2016: 57–8). The publisher of Inea Bushnaq’s Arab Folktales maps that collection’s coverage of “the sprawling Arab world” by describing the settings and widespread geographical locations from which the tales hail:

Out of the alleys of Cairo and Bedouin camps comes a brand-new selection of one hundred and thirty tales of the desert, palace, village, and bazaar: a vibrant tapestry as huge and exotic as the sprawling Arab world it covers, from North Africa to the Holy Land.

(Bushnaq 1986: dust jacket, front flap)

While calling the far-flung corpus of Arab folktales “exotic” might seem to signal that the collection is framed by an Orientalist fantasy, it is not. Instead, this description establishes that place is paramount for these tales, which, having been taken “out of” urban alleys and nomadic camps, are “of the desert, palace, village, and bazaar.” The apprehension of folktales as locally situated – be it in a landscape or terrain, community, social setting, or some other physical site – is evident in the paratextual framing of all three collections, whose editors respect the connection among stories, place, and community by reconstructing for readers a sense of place, so that they can apprehend and appreciate its significance.

Anthropologists have written about the constructedness of place (Basso 1996) and the production of locality (Appadurai 1995), which allow the apprehension of belonging to a geographical space or identifying with it. That apprehension of belonging – and its connection to place and a sense of identity – is explained by Keith H. Basso, using an organic metaphor, in this way:

Fueled by sentiments of inclusion, belonging, and connectedness to the past, sense of place roots individuals in the social and cultural soils from which they have sprung together, holding them there in the grip of a shared identity, a localized version of selfhood.

(Basso 1996: 145–6)

Basso’s view seems to describe place, identity, and geographical belonging as they are represented in Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana’s Palestinian folktale collection, Speak Bird, Speak Again. In her exemplary analyses of Speak Bird, Speak Again, Farah Aboubakr has demonstrated how the discourse of peasant storytellers and the compilers’ paratextual commentaries reconstruct geographical places and settings, reaffirming sites of cultural memory essential to the national and cultural identity of Palestinians (Aboubakr 2014, 2017). When Aboubakr writes that “the folktale can represent a folkloric landmark for Palestinians’ cultural memory” (Aboubakr 2017: 226), and that, “[l]ike maps, the folktales help Palestinian readers and listeners to recreate and mobilize their memory of geographic locations” (234), she uses cartographical instead of organic metaphors; but she confirms nonetheless that Muhawi and Kanaana’s commentaries, as well as the folktales they compiled in Speak Bird, Speak Again, validate the view that the folktale’s construction of place allows for the reader’s apprehension of local belonging.

The view that Palestinian folktales belong in Palestine and to Palestinians reflects the significance of land to a people who live in exile and under occupation. “As a result of displacement and persistent struggle over land,” writes Aboubakr, “Palestinians are conscious of the necessity to reaffirm sites of memory and recreate maps of memory” (Aboubakr 2017: 228). The folktales translated by Muhawi and Kanaana constitute such “maps of memory,” and through them “knowledge of the land demonstrates the authority of Palestinians in general and Palestinian storytellers in particular over their identity and belonging despite their situation” (Aboubakr 2017: 229). Who may authoritatively lay claim to folktales clearly parallels the question of where folktales belong. Moreover, the displacement of the Palestinians from their homeland parallels the potential displacement of the tales as well, leading Aboubakr to observe that

Muhawi and Kanaana’s work is not simply a disinterested record of Palestinian culture, society, and folklore but rather a scholarly and potentially subversive attempt to document, safeguard, and give voice to Palestinian oral culture before Western, Arab, and Palestinian readers.

(Aboubakr 2017: 223)

In other words, by foregrounding the local pertinence of the tales compiled in their English translation and its Arabic counterpart, Muhawi and Kanaana have tried to inoculate readers – Western, Arab, and Palestinian – against non-authoritative or, better, less locally informed appropriations that might disrupt, to echo the terms of Rudy’s relational argument above, the connection among the folktales, the land, and the community.

Indeed, Palestinian scholars Muhawi and Kanaana are knowledgeable specialists in literature and anthropology, respectively; and they equip readers with an extensive paratextual apparatus to convey social, cultural, and literary information pertinent to the tales they collected from Palestinian storytellers between 1978 and 1980. In their introduction, the compilers explain that in their footnotes and in afterwords following each grouping of stories, their “concern … is to present the general features of Palestinian culture that inform the tales – that is, the common assumptions that hold narrators, audience, and material together” (Muhawi and Kanaana 1989: 12). In this context, Muhawi and Kanaana seek to give English-language readers an understanding of the relation among stories, storytellers, Palestinian listeners, their culture, and their land.

Similarly, the paratextual frames of Inea Bushnaq’s Arab Folktales and Raphael Patai’s Arab Folktales from Palestine and Israel give readers pertinent information about the tales’ social and cultural settings to reinforce this understanding of the tales’ local belonging. The strategies used in all three collections to situate the tales for English-language readers are telling, not only in the way they affirm the stories’ relation to their place of origin, but also because they ultimately – even inevitably – position the tales beyond the local in relation to their English-speaking audience.

A Palestinian–American born in Jerusalem and educated in classics at Cambridge University, Bushnaq presents 128 tales, drawing with few exceptions on Arabic texts from editions of oral tales published between 1868 and 1979, as well as on recordings she herself had collected (Bushnaq 1986: 380–3). Acknowledging that she is “unwilling to encumber this collection with annotation in the back,” Bushnaq opts instead to provide the “information necessary to understanding the stories either in the introductions to each section or the narratives themselves” (382). Because the collected tales represent the diversity of the “sprawling Arab world,” that cultural information ranges widely, from the values of generosity and hospitality pervading Bedouin tales to the culture of honor “that has resulted in the severe seclusion of Moslem women” (312) and motivated subversive tales told by and about “wily women” (309–13).

Hungarian–Jewish anthropologist and folklorist Raphael Patai’s Arab Folktales from Palestine and Israel also uses paratexts to position the 28 tales he has translated and annotated in 1998, based on existing sources. Focusing on “Arab folktales recorded...