Zipes cites Simon Bronner:
‘… the Grimm connection to folklore in American cultural discourse is evident first in the popularity of the fairytale as a public reference for entertaining fantasy and wish-fulfillment. Second is the idea that folk traditions representing the character of nature provide renewing spiritual or poetic powers for modern existence. Third is the juxtaposition of folklore’s international spread with its use for building a romantic sense of nation of peoplehood. Each of these connections brings up the centrality of tradition taking organic form and drawing on the past in references to Grimms’ influence on American uses of folklore.’
He goes on:
‘The Grimms became recast toward the close of the twentieth century as literary artists and inspirations, who presented problems of cultural constructions. If folklorists mused about tales as experienced “narratives”, as socially real traditions of the informal and non-institutional, public rhetoric focused on therapeutic uses of fantasy in institutional settings. The difference in rhetoric reflected the need of a public to commodify the Grimm legacy as products for modern consumption, while academic practice called for recovering objective ways of knowing following tradition.’
Zipes is astute and quick-witted about this and reading the way the legacy has transmuted and been redirected is reminiscent of how Bob Dylan’s American legacy has been similarly complicated, fractured and rerouted. I think the Dylan reference is apt, given the way his own initial rerouting was received with such hostility and dismissal by those who had an agenda already written out for him. If there’s a warning in all this, it’s to be careful when thinking you can set such agendas for artists whose shamanic lore and magic can appear banal and trivial at a first glance. Pete Seeger was supposed to have taken an axe to the electric cables when Dylan plugged in. Later an English fan cried out ‘Judas’ to which Dylan retorted ‘I don’t believe you’ before instructing the Band to ‘play fucking loud.’ Legendary Dylanologist Greil Marcus first heard Dylan’s ‘Self Portrait‘ and infamously asked; ‘What is this crap?’These are warnings to anyone whose expertise and truthfulness supposes any kind of final word. Even the greatest crassness can inherit for a time the form of a sanctified betrothal Masque under which sits the Goddess of Hell. And resurrection, supernatural flight, hairs from sun gods and frog treasure may well lie at the secret heart of a game show, fairground show or even love at first sight. Some days the carnival’s all we’ve got.
William McCarthy in his ‘ Cinderella in America‘ writes about a ‘neglected and mistreated “Cinderella genre”, the European wonder tale in America…” where he aims ‘ …to demonstrate the scope of Old World repertoire as it settled into US American culture…’ The publication, dissemination and translation of the tales started at a provincial level and then led to globalization. Since the end of the nineteenth century there’s been a tendency to protect a supposed innocence of the American child but the sixties saw feminism and civil rights and this led to a revision of this legacy for a while. A Grimm for adults was produced. In literature we had several good examples: Barthelme’s ‘Snow White‘; Robert Coover ‘Pricksongs and Descants‘; ‘Briar Rose‘; Robin McKinely ‘Deerskin‘, ‘Spindle’s End‘; Nancy Springer ‘Fair Peril‘,; Gregory MaGuire ‘ Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister‘; Fransesca Lia Block ‘The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold‘; Kate Bernheimer ‘The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold‘, ‘The Complete Tales of Merry Gold‘; Kelly Link ‘Stranger Things Happen’, ‘Magic for beginners’; Lauren Slate ‘ Blue Beyond Blue: Extraordinary Tales for Ordinary Dilemmas‘; Catherynne Valente ‘The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden‘, ‘Six-Gun Snow White‘; Mercedes Lackey ‘The Sleeping Beauty‘; Erik Bergstrom ‘Grimmer Tales: A Wicked Collection of Happily Never After Tales‘ and Tom McNeal’s ‘ far far away‘ as choice examples. Artists too picked up on this transformation, returning them to the sort of lineage picked up by the Grimms’ in that first edition.
Film adaptations were made almost from the very start of cinema. Between 1926 and 1934 there were no less than 12 adaptations of Cinderella. They reflected the establishment of the women’s vote. Betty Boop by Max Fleisher in 1930 was sexy, smart and spoke her mind until forces of conservatism and reaction brought in the 1934 National Prodiuction Code and with it censorship. Fleischer’s ‘Snow White‘ is a minor masterpiece about generation conflict between women with a sensational Boop as Snow-White. This is no passive virgin but a New Woman ‘ … who struts and shows off her wares…’ No sweetners here!
Sadly, Disney’s approach was conservative. His Little Red Riding Hood is ‘a sweet simpleton’ and when you look at Fleisher’s Boop and Tex Avery’s versions – ‘Swing Shift Cinderella‘ of 1945 and ‘Red Hot Riding Hood‘ of 1943 where the Cinderella’s are cunning, strong, feisty and sexy as hell you have to wonder where we might have gone.
Disney’s are the well-made sexist stories of ‘Barbie-doll virgins who need to be rescued by prince-like dolls’. Zipes points to the fact that there have always been challenges to the Disney approach but regrets that in the process begun way back when they were trying to grab a more respectable middle class audience the tales have been dumbed down. The fracturing of Grimms tales is ‘ the major American characteristic of their appropriation in the United States.’ How should this be assessed? Asks Zipes.
From the very start Americans published anglicized versions only. They became branded as children’s literature and culture. They were outside copyright so were returned to ‘the people’ but nevertheless publishers and film companies did copyright their versions. They have become part of the blockbuster format where, for Zipes, art is abandoned for commerce. They are more at home now in America than in Germany.
He quotes David Grewal with some approval:
‘ What we are experiencing now, in “globalization”, is the creation of an international in-group that welcomes the entire globe on settled terms: a new world order in which we clamor for connection to one another using standards that are offered up for universal use. Yet, while we may all come to share these new global standards – to the extent, at least, that we desire access to the activities that they mediate – we may not have much influence over their establishment.’
And for Louis Marin, Disney creates a ‘ … utopic degeneration that exploits genuine utopian language.’
Nevertheless, it’s possible to read against the grain, to find a different nerve and story inside the obvious. Despite itself, Disney preserves the faint traces of more troubling versions. For example, that there’s magic and witchcraft in them is in these most lethal American times strangely corrosive of certain conservative Republican religious sensibilities. The films can be watched as keen wish-fulfilment and abandonment whilst still embodying crimes immoveable as verdicts but losing their intent.The difference this makes is that they’re unclean birds – not shallow even though faked.
Zipes is brilliantly tenacious and expansive in his investigations. In the chapter ‘Two Hundred Years after Once Upon a Time : The Legacy of the Brothers Grimm and Their Tales in Germany’ Zipes tells us that Germans since 1945 have tended to turn them to kitsch or lionized them. In the Early 20th century and late 19th century German national identity was linked to Grimm, and WWII and the Nazis has meant that scholars take a nuanced look at the legacy.
In ‘How Superheroes Made Their Way into the World of Fairy tales: The Appeal of Cooperation and Collective Action from the Greek Myths to the Grimm’s Tales and Beyond,’ Zipes examines variants of ‘The Extraordinary Companions’ – Greek Gods, Japanese samurai, folk heroes, superheroes who all share a common purpose and how the Grimm story ‘How Six Made Their Way in the World’ sticks across the world. Zipes finds in this, and throughout the Grimm oeuvre, an asserion of an innate capacity to cooperate that survives even modern banalisation.
‘The Grimness of Contemporary Fairy Tales: Exploring the Legacy of the Brothers Grimm in the Twenty-first Century’ is about how numerous English writers have adapted the tales and asks: what is an authentic adaptation? Who does and doesn’t take them seriously? Have the tales become mere merchandise? Can there be a genuine legacy when the Grimms themselves made them ambivalent? As always, Zipes is nuanced and knowledgable as he treads carefully. But what can be taken from this is Emily Dickinson’s insight that the heart is ‘… like a cage of unclean birds’ and there’s the possibility of revelation and amazement even in the less than pristine and pure.
In ‘A Curious Legacy: Ernst Bloch’s Enlightened View of the Fairy Tale and Utopian Longing’ Zipes picks up a philosophical discussion of the utopian quality of the tales and what place utopian longing has for the legacy, and its essential role in the magical appeal of the fairy tales in general. In it he recounts an interview between Ernst Bloch and Adorno.
Bloch has suggestive things to say:
‘ Certainly good dreams can go too far. On the other hand, don’t the simple fairy-tale dreams remain too far behind? Of course, the fairy-tale world, especially as a magical one, no longer belongs to the present. How can it mirror our wish projections against a background that has long since disappeared? Or to put it a better way: How can the fairy tale mirror our wish projections other than in a totally obsolete way? Real kings no longer even exist. The atavistic and simultaneously feudal-transcendental world from which the fairy tale stems and to which it seems to be tied has most certainly vanished. However, the mirror of the fairy-tale has not become opaque, and the manner of wish-fulfillment that peers forth from it is not entirely without a home. It all adds up to this: the fairy tale narrates a wish-fulfillment that is not bound by its own time and the apparel of its contents. In contrast to the legend, which is always tied to a particular locale, the fairy-tale remains unbound.’
Adorno too: ‘ The fulfillment of the wishes takes something away from the substance of the wishes, as in the fairy-tale where the farmer is granted three wishes, and, I believe, he wishes his wife to have a sausage on her nose and then must use the second wish to have the sausage removed from her nose. In other words, I mean that one an watch tv today, look at the things that are far away, but instead of the wish-image providing access to the erotic utopia, one sees in the best of circumstances some kind of more or less pretty pop singer, who continues to deceive the spectator in regard to her prettiness insofar she sings some kind of nonsense instead of showing it, and this song generally consists in bringing together ‘roses’ with ‘moonlight’ in harmony. Above and beyond this, one could perhaps say in general that the fulfillment of utopia consists largely only in a repetition of the continually same “today”‘.
Bloch disagreed with Adorno that all utopias had been banalised. In arguing for this he drew on older levels of utopias claiming that the fairy tale is not just a social utopia but also, for example, a technological utopia too.
Bloch wrote in ‘The Fairy Tale Moves in Its Own Time’ :
‘…consider yourself as born free and entitled to be totally happy, dare to make use of your power of reasoning, look upon the outcome of things as friendly. These are the genuine maxims of fairy tales… Unfortunately we must equally contend with the smoke of witches and the blows of ogres habitually faced by the fairy-tale hero in the now.’
He points out that:‘it is always cunning in the way it overcomes difficulties’ (not magic!’ and;
‘the fairy tale does not allow itself to be fooled by the present owners of paradise.’
For Bloch fairytales brought alongside the country fair and circuses. He wrote:
‘ … The age-old pleasure of people, in no way simple and no way decadent, is preserved in the fair, wanders within and outside. There is a piece of frontier here, set at reduced admission, but with preserved meanings, with strange utopian meanings, conserved in a brutal show, in vulgar crypticness… it is that “oddity”, the kind that was last called such during the baroque period, that keeps itself above water here, above land.’ This is quite brilliant I think.
He links them with Schiller’s ‘The Robbers‘ and Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio‘ where the key issues are rescue and liberation:
‘These things produce one of the deepest tensions available: that between night and light. Accordingly , a reevaluation of this genre is especially evident on the strength of its highly legitimate wish-image in its mirror. Here missing meanings are fresh everywhere, and those that are not missing are waiting, as in a fairy tale…’
The Grimms never actually called their tales ‘fairy’ tales. They weren’t for children and they weren’t German. That they now have a weird double life as US American is clearly something that Zipes is ambivalent about. America is strangely monstrous across the world now, an emblem of something that is both night and day to the world, its indubitable seductive modernity enshrined in its undeviating insatiability. But any desire of the world for that American soul, that American future, is crushed by awareness of the grim lavishness of its war machines, its greed, its vile inequalities, cruelties and tyrannies. Zipes is right to be appalled.
