Breaking the Magic Spell

Radical Theories of Folk & Fairy Tales

Jack Zipes

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780813137803
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Folklore y crítica literaria mítica

"Zipes ably demonstrates that moral, political, religious, and other ideologies have shaped these apparently innocent narratives." — Lore and Language This revised, expanded, and updated edition of the 1979 landmark Breaking the Magic Spell examines the enduring power of fairy tales and the ways they invade our subjective world. In seven provocative essays, Zipes discusses the importance of investigating oral folk tales in their socio-political context and traces their evolution into literary fairy tales, a metamorphosis that often diminished the ideology of the original narrative. Zipes also looks at how folk tales influence our popular beliefs and the ways they have been exploited by a corporate media network intent on regulating the mystical elements of the stories. He examines a range of authors, including the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Ernst Bloch, Tolkien, Bettelheim, and J.K. Rowling to demonstrate the continuing symbiotic relationship between folklore and literature. "The name Jack Zipes is synonymous with highly regarded and widely read anthologies and critiques of fairy tales." — Choice "Fairy Tales are a highly fashionable study today for literary scholars as well as folklorists, and another new book shows what a range of interest can be evoked by them. This time in Jack Zipes' interesting and vigorous study." — Encounter "Places traditional tales in their socio-political, economic and cultural contexts." — Teacher Librarian "Zipes reveals the extraordinary breadth of his acquaintance with both recent and classic literature in the field of folk and fairytale research." — Fabula "Zipes manages the impressive trick of communicating both detail and overview without simplifying either... the serious folklorist should definitely have this on his bookshelf." — Fortean Times

CHAPTER ONE

Once There was a Time

An Introduction to the History and Ideology of Folk and Fairy Tales

To begin with a true story told in fairy-tale manner:

Once upon a time the famous physicist Albert Einstein was confronted by an overly concerned woman who sought advice on how to raise her small son to become a successful scientist. In particular she wanted to know what kinds of books she should read to her son.

“Fairy tales,” Einstein responded without hesitation.

“Fine, but what else should I read to him after that?” the mother asked.

“More fairy tales,” Einstein stated.

“And after that?”

“Even more fairy tales,” replied the great scientist, and he waved his pipe like a wizard pronouncing a happy end to a long adventure.

It now seems that the entire world has been following Einstein's advice. By 1979 a German literary critic could declare that fairy tales are “fantastically in.”¹ In fact, everywhere one turns today fairy tales and fairy-tale motifs pop up like magic. Bookshops are flooded with fairy tales by J.R.R. Tolkien, Hermann Hesse, the Grimm Brothers, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, a myriad of folk-tale adaptations, feminist and fractured fairy tales, and scores of sumptuously illustrated fantasy works such as The Narnia Chronicles by C.S. Lewis or the Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling. Schools and theaters perform a wide range of spectacular fairy-tale plays for the benefit of children. Operas and musical works are based on fairy-tale themes. Famous actors make fairy-tale recordings for the radio and other mass media outlets. Aside from the Disney vintage productions, numerous films incorporate fairy-tale motifs and plots. Even porno films make lascivious use of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Sleeping Beauty.” Fairy-tale scenes and figures are employed in advertisements, window decorations, TV commercials, restaurant signs, and club insignias. One can buy banners, posters, T-shirts, towels, bathing suits, stickers, ash trays, and other household goods plastered with fairy-tale designs. The internet is filled with all kinds of multi-media fairy tales, hypertexts, illustrations, reviews, bibliographies, and anthologies. One need only type in “fairy tale” on Yahoo, and there will be several thousand hits. Clearly, the fantastic projections of the fairy-tale world appear to have become “in,” consuming the reality of our everyday life and invading the inner sanctum of our subjective world.

Yet, one could ask whether fairy tales were ever “out.” Haven't fairy tales been with us for centuries as a necessary part of our culture? Was there ever a time when people did not tell fairy tales? Just a superficial glance back into history will tell us that fairy tales have been in existence as oral folk tales for thousands of years and first became what we call literary fairy tales during the seventeenth century.² Both the oral and the literary traditions continue to exist side by side today, interact, and influence one another, but there is a difference in the roles they now play compared to their function in the past. This difference can be seen in the manner in which they are produced, distributed and marketed. Profit mars their stories and their cultural heritage. Folk and fairy tales as products of the imagination are in danger of becoming instrumentalized and commercialized. All this has been accomplished within the framework of the modern culture industry. As Theodor Adorno has remarked:

The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. The individual branches are similar in structure or at least fit into each other, ordering themselves into a system almost without a gap. This is made possible by contemporary technical capabilities as well as by economic and administrative concentration. The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total. Thus, although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery.³

It would be an exaggeration to argue that the culture industry in the Western world has total control over cultural production and reception, but it certainly has grown in power and has a vast influence on the consciousness of consumers through the ideology carried by its products. Thus, the emancipatory potential aesthetically conceived in the folk and fairy tales is rarely translated into social action, nor can the tales nurture sufficient discontent to make their effects reasonably certain. This is not to say that folk and fairy tales were always developed with “revolution” or “emancipation” in mind. But, insofar as they have tended to project other and better worlds, they have often been considered subversive, or, to put it more positively, they have provided the critical measure of how far we are from taking history into our own hands and creating more just societies. Folk and fairy tales have always spread word through their fantastic images about the feasibility of Utopian alternatives, and this is exactly why the dominant social classes have been vexed by them, or have tried to dismiss them as “Mother Goose” tales, amusing but not to be taken seriously.⁴ Beginning with the period of the Enlightenment, folk and fairy tales were regarded as useless for the bourgeois rationalization process. However, the persistence and popularity of the tales, oral and printed, suggested that their imaginative power might be more useful than previously realized. So it is not by chance that the culture industry has sought to tame, regulate and instrumentalize the fantastic projections of these tales.

As I have stated above, it is best not to exaggerate the hold that the culture industry has maintained over its products and our consciousness. However, it is only within the context of the culture industry that we can learn something about the history of the folk and fairy tales, or rather, why we are so little aware of the history of the folk and fairy tales. In a recent reconsideration of Adorno's culture industry thesis, Shane Gunster has concretely demonstrated how we cannot avoid a commodified understanding of popular and high culture today because we cannot avoid the market conditions of exchange.

Participation in the act of exchange becomes a direct source of pleasure itself, rather than simply an instrument to be used in its acquisition. Conversely, we become incapable of achieving pleasure the practices and activities from which it is derived are mediated through the market: the exchange process becomes the gatekeeper for any and all forms of satisfaction, extracting our half-conscious loyalties as its toll. One is left with a broad collective libidinal investment in the core economic structures of modern society, buttressing the staying power of capitalism beyond anything Marx might have once envisaged.⁵

This double-bind situation has become more and more apparent to critics troubled about the wave of commercialization and commodification sweeping over both the folk and fairy tales. Here are three good examples of concern expressed by perceptive writers worried about the fate of the folk and fairy-tale tradition and narrative in general:

Like so many folk crafts whose means of production have been expropriated by technology, the folktale in most of its traditional genres has become a marketable commodity, ripped untimely from the socio-cultural setting in which it once flourished. And, to complete the process, what is left of the tales returns to contribute to the epidemic self-depreciation infecting the modern conscience. Children subjected to the biases of standardized schooling and mass modes of entertainment no longer want to be “told” stories that might depart from the “correct” versions printed in books or on film. And their educators, wary of offending the complex psychology of the child's development, learn to trust modernized editions of folktales, if indeed they tell them at all. The stories grow too heavy to be sung. They lose the right to roam about from mouth to mouth and be transformed each time they come to rest in a storyteller's heart.⁶

In this century at least, so many people know fairy tales only through badly truncated and modernized versions that it is no longer really fairy tales they know. The enemy, thus, is historical provincialism, the attitude that pretends one's native latter-day eyes and instincts are bound to be enough to gain an understanding of fairy-tale literature. Of course our eyes and instincts are all we have to work with, but they can become more alert and better attuned just by reading many fairy tales, from many different places, with as much slowness and patience as can be mustered. Some sense of historical change can help here.⁷

The world is becoming with accelerating swiftness a single culture, and narrative has always been rooted in localisms—the personal, the family, the tribe, even the nation. In a unitary worldwide civilization perhaps narrative discourse has little or no significant function. Walter Benjamin thought that story was obsolete in societies in which mechanical reproduction is popular as well as feasible. But even he did not foresee the extent and rapidity with which reproductive technologies would spread. In a world capable of instant electronic transmissions and rapid and inexpensive reproduction of images, for example, the patience required of a narrative audience, its willingness to let a story unfold at its pace, may not be a valuable attribute.⁸

Over the last three centuries our historical reception of folk and fairy tales has been so negatively twisted by aesthetic norms, educational standards and market conditions that we can no longer distinguish folk tales from fairy tales nor recognize that the impact of these narratives stems from their imaginative grasp and symbolic depiction of social realities. Folk and fairy tales are generally confused with one another and taken as make-believe stories with no direct reference to a particular community or historical tradition. Their own specific ideology and aesthetics are rarely seen in the light of a diachronic historical development which has great bearing on our cultural self-understanding.

Once there was a time when this was not the case. Once there was a time when folk tales were part of communal property and told with original and fantastic insights by gifted storytellers who gave vent to the frustration of the common people and embodied their needs and wishes in the folk narratives. Not only did the tales serve to unite the people of a community and help bridge a gap in their understanding of social problems in a language and narrative mode familiar to the listeners' experiences, but their aura illuminated the possible fulfillment of Utopian longings and wishes which did not preclude social integration. According to Walter Benjamin, the aura of a work of art consists of those symbolical properties which constitute its autonomy.⁹ In fact, folk tales were autonomous reflectors of actual and possible normative behavior which could strengthen social bonds or create more viable ones. Their aura depended on the degree to which they could express the needs of the group of people who cultivated them and transformed them through imaginative play and composition in “socially symbolical acts,” to borrow a term from Fredric Jameson.¹⁰ In many respects the aura of the folk tale was linked to a community of interests which has long since disintegrated in the Western world. Today the folk tale as an oral art form has lost its aura for the most part and has given way to the literary fairy tale and other mass-mediated forms of storytelling. Of course, it is important to bear in mind that storytelling in many different forms is still alive and that there has been a significant renascence of storytelling within the last twenty years, as Joseph Sobol has pointed out in The Storytellers' Journey: An American Revival.¹¹ But this revival and clearly all forms of talk and storytelling are subject to the exchange conditions of the marketplace.

Very little has been written about the transition of the folk tale to the fairy tale, why this occurred, and how. Since the development is so complex and has its unique tradition in different countries, I shall limit myself in this introduction to broad remarks about the general history and ideology of folk and fairy tales in the Western world. The theses introduced here should be considered tentative; they are endeavors to grasp the social meaning of transformation. They are intended more to stimulate further thought about the subject and to provide a framework from which more thorough historical accounts of the transition of the folk tale to the fairy tale may be written. The essays which follow this introduction will substantiate my general arguments and focus on specific topics which have a direct bearing on how we read the tales today.

Originally the folk tale was (and still is) an oral narrative form cultivated by non-literate and literate people to express the manner in which they perceived and perceive nature and their social order and their wish to satisfy their needs and wants. Historical, sociological and anthropological studies have shown that the folk tale originated as far back as the Megalithic period and that both nonliterate and literate people have been the carriers and transformers of the tales. As August Nitschke has demonstrated, the tales are reflections of the social order in a given historical epoch, and, as such, they symbolize the aspirations, needs, dreams and wishes of common people in a tribe, community, or society, either affirming the dominant social values and norms or revealing the necessity to change them.¹² According to the evidence we have, gifted narrators told the tales to audiences who actively participated in their transmission by posing questions, suggesting changes and circulating the tales among themselves. The key to comprehending the folk tale and its volatile quality is an understanding of the audience and reception aesthetics.

Gerhard Kahlo has shown that most of the folk-tale motifs can be traced back to rituals, habits, customs and laws of primitive of precapitalist societies. Just a knowledge of the etymology of the words “king” and “queen” can help us grasp how the folk tales were directly representative of familial relations and tribal rites. “The kings in the ancient folk tales were the oldest of the clan according to the genuine, original meaning of the word, nothing else. The word, König Old High German kunig comes from kuni-race, which corresponds to the Latin gens and designates the head of the primordial family.”¹³ This is also true of the word queen or Königin, who was the dominant figure in matriarchal societies. Moreover, such acts which occur in folk tales as cannibalism, human sacrifices, primogeniture and ultrageniture, the stealing and selling of a bride, the banishment of a young princess or prince, the transformation of people into animals and plants, the intervention of beasts and strange figures were all based on the social reality and beliefs of different primitive societies. Characters, too, such as water nymphs, elves, fairies, giants, dwarfs, ghosts were real in the minds of primitive and civilized peoples, as Diane Purkiss has shown in At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things¹⁴ and they had a direct bearing on social behavior, world views, and legal codification.

Each historical epoch and each community altered the original folk tales according to its needs as they were handed down over the centuries. By the time they were recorded in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as literary texts, they contained many primeval motifs but essentially reflected late feudal conditions in their aesthetic composition and symbolic referential system. The folk tales and fairy tales collected by the Grimm Brothers can serve as an example here. The initial ontological situations in the tales generally deal with exploitation, hunger and injustice familiar to the lower classes in pre-capitalist societies. And the magic of the tales can be equated to the wish-fulfillment and Utopian projections of the people, i.e., of the folk, who preserved and cultivated these tales. Here the notion of the folk should not be glamorized or mystified as an abstract concept representing goodness or revolutionary forces. Sociologically speaking the folk were the great majority of people, generally agrarian workers, who were non-literate and nurtured their own forms of culture in opposition to that of the ruling classes and yet often reflecting the same ideology, even if from a different class perspective. In addition, the upper classes cannot and should not be separated from the folk because they intermingled with the lower classes and were also carriers of the oral tales. Often they retold tales they heard from peasants and workers without altering the social class perspective very much. It is difficult to document exactly what transpired within the oral tradition between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries because we lack records, but one thing is certain: the folk tales were widespread, told by all classes of people, and very much bound by the material conditions of their existence.

If we take some of the folk tales gathered by the Grimm Brothers such as “Rapunzel,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “The Bremen Town Musicians,” “Snow White,” “Mother Holle,” and “The Seven Ravens,” we can readily see that each narrative begins with a seemingly hopeless situation and that the narrative perspective is sympathetic to the exploited protagonist of the tale. This aspect has been elaborated by Dieter Richter and Johannes Merkel: “The basic structure of most folk tales is connected to the social situation of the agrarian lower classes. By this we mean that the passivity of the hero is to be seen in relation to the objectively hopeless situation of the folk-tale audiences. These classes had practically no opportunity to resist the increasing exploitation since they were isolated in their work, geographically spread out, and always stood as mere individuals in opposition to their lords and exploiters. Thus they could only conceive a Utopian image of a better life for themselves. This historical meaning of folk tales becomes even more evident if one compares the folk tales with the stories of the urban lower classes at the beginning of this new epoch. These stories were incorporated like the folk tales into bourgeois children's literature and were placed side by side with the folk tales in the Grimms' collection.”¹⁵ As short farcical tales (Schwank-Märchen), these narratives reveal a more optimistic point of view in keeping with the more active journeymen and workers who told them and altered older versions to fit their own experiences. Clearly all folk tales take their departure from a point in history which it is necessary to relocate if we are to grasp their unusual power in the present and their unique influence at all levels of culture and art.

When we look at more refined and subtle forms of cultural expression, it becomes obvious that folk tales and folk-tale motifs have played a major role in their development. For example, Shakespeare's plays were enriched by folk tales,¹⁶ and one could return to Homer and the Greek dramatists to trace the importance of folk-tale motifs in the formation of enduring cultural creations. However, what is most interesting about the historical development of the folk tale is the manner in which it was appropriated in its entirety by the aristocratic and bourgeois writers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries wi...