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<\/p>\nBy Richard Marshall.<\/p>\n
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Jack Zipes (ed) The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm<\/a><\/em>, Princeton 2014<\/p>\n Jack Zipes, Grimm Legacies. The Magic Spell of the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy Tales<\/a><\/em>, Princeton 2014<\/p>\n Nabakov on Kafka (approximately):’Kafka’s private nightmare was that the central human character belongs to the same private fantastic world as the inhuman characters around him. Kafka’s tragedy was his struggle to climb out of that world and into the world of humans. This is what killed him.’<\/p>\n The tales given to the world by the Grimms read as correlatives of that Kafkaesque struggle. Their ugly beauty is hasped to pity facing charmless, evil days. They are tales with uncanny insect voices living at their boundaries, each an impression of terror, misery, hatred, logic, cancellation, prohibition, fertility, growth, illness, potential, animals, children, cellars, schools, swarms, sex, death, revenge, possession and known via a sort of telepathy nuanced into reading but expanding from the inside-outside of an open mouth to dust. Why pity? Because beauty dies. These tales are of a stranger life than the one that needs respectable sanities.<\/p>\n If there is an erstwhile hope that all would be physics and art it’s a hope that is a force from out some other place, one where faith healers, witches, magic and engineers of body-hair, frogs’ eyes and blood droplets conjugate verbs and kill victims to materialize it. What the open mouth tells is in a supercharged vernacular of spatial patterns of wholeness and simultaneity. This works like a language of divorce, one that includes everything in the very process of division and severance. Everything is hyphenated and so simultaneously conjoined and separated, or like Manley Hopkins’ word \u2018buckled’ from his \u2018The Windhover’, just a single world both \u2018joined up’ and \u2018broken apart’ braced at a poem’s spine. These doubled selves rip up and shape-shift to fathom themselves, like sigils of a daemon. The unforgettable equation that Ted Hughes calculates to reveal the device of Shake-speare’s own name \u2013 \u2018On the catastrophe and heel of pastime’ becoming \u2018The point and impact of the tempered word’ to \u2018The shock and spear of will’ enables Shakespeare, having \u2018converted the parts of his name to active images, as in the \u2018Sonnets’ and \u2018As You Like It’,’ to develop this heraldic device \u2018\u2026 as a structural means of expressing his antithetical selves as a dialectical \u2018system’ in iconic form\u2026’ which , as we hear in \u2018A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ gifts us; The Grimms have been appropriated by U.S. America because defying the inhuman is as urgent there as anywhere else and its unhinged power leaves behind the innocent and the beaten. What Zipes has done in these two books is remind us that there’s a need for the naked struggle of Kafka, where speech goes to extremes without strategy, without masks, without calculation. The tales of this first edition are as much a part of an old weird Americana as bluesman Howling Wolf singing ‘Going Down Slow’ where, as Greil Marcus notes; ‘… decent people they will have to conceal as much envy as delight…’:<\/p>\n ‘Go dig a hole in the meadow, good people The Grimms have become as ancient a part of this old weird America as the other folk songs and tales that ship around, and though Zipes is right to decry their banalisation and Disneyfication they still remain underneath or behind, ready to be reeled in by alert souls. Pope in the Dunciad writes: ‘ Suck the thread in, then yield it out again’. Even the seemingly impossibly kitch conservative versions of the struggle brings with it the chord that drags with it all the terror and beauty of the original yield.<\/p>\n Princeton’s advertising blurb guides us:<\/p>\n ‘When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their Children’s and Household Tales in 1812, followed by a second volume in 1815, they had no idea that such stories as \u201cRapunzel,” \u201cHansel and Gretel,” and \u201cCinderella” would become the most celebrated in the world. Yet few people today are familiar with the majority of tales from the two early volumes, since in the next four decades the Grimms would publish six other editions, each extensively revised in content and style. For the very first time, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm<\/em> makes available in English all 156 stories from the 1812 and 1815 editions. These narrative gems, newly translated and brought together in one beautiful book, are accompanied by sumptuous new illustrations from award-winning artist Andrea Dezs\u00c3\u00b6.<\/p>\n From \u201cThe Frog King” to \u201cThe Golden Key,” wondrous worlds unfold\u2014heroes and heroines are rewarded, weaker animals triumph over the strong, and simple bumpkins prove themselves not so simple after all. Esteemed fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes offers accessible translations that retain the spare description and engaging storytelling style of the originals. Indeed, this is what makes the tales from the 1812 and 1815 editions unique\u2014they reflect diverse voices, rooted in oral traditions, that are absent from the Grimms’ later, more embellished collections of tales. Zipes’s introduction gives important historical context, and the book includes the Grimms’ prefaces and notes.’<\/p>\n The original edition of Grimms’ tales read like once-familiar weirds, crossing the avalanche of time like hallucinatory figures, abrupt as thorns, troubling as a black hawthorn that won’t stop bleeding. They move in and out between long disconnected synapses, stirring up logics and memories that fill us up with dread and unease. Readers are Macbeth listening to the stories of the three weird women. Everything is laid out for us but we are dazzled by their dark intensity. What is needed to read them? Courage and an imminent doomsday.<\/p>\n Of the legacy, Princeton again gives a quick summary:<\/p>\n ‘In Grimm Legacies<\/em>, esteemed literary scholar Jack Zipes<\/a> explores the legacy of the Brothers Grimm in Europe and North America, from the nineteenth century to the present. Zipes reveals how the Grimms came to play a pivotal and unusual role in the evolution of Western folklore and in the history of the most significant cultural genre in the world\u2014the fairy tale.<\/p>\n Folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm sought to discover and preserve a rich abundance of stories emanating from an oral tradition, and encouraged friends, colleagues, and strangers to gather and share these tales. As a result, hundreds of thousands of wonderful folk and fairy tales poured into books throughout Europe and have kept coming. Zipes looks at the transformation of the Grimms’ tales into children’s literature, the Americanization of the tales, the \u201cGrimm” aspects of contemporary tales, and the tales’ utopian impulses. He shows that the Grimms were not the first scholars to turn their attention to folk tales, but were vital in expanding readership and setting the high standards for folk-tale collecting that continue through the current era. Zipes concludes with a look at contemporary adaptations of the tales and raises questions about authenticity, target audience, and consumerism.<\/p>\n With erudition and verve, Grimm Legacies<\/em> examines the lasting universal influence of two brothers and their collected tales on today’s storytelling world.’<\/p>\n In December 1812 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published \u2018Kinder und Hausmarchen<\/em>‘. A second volume was produced in 1815. Few people are aware of the tales in the original volume. Six more editions and immense changes were made as these editions were produced so the final 1857 version has little of the first edition in it. The Grimms deleted many of the first edition’s stories and replaced them with over fifty new ones. They withdrew footnotes and revised prefaces and introductions. Zipes argues that the first original volume is important because the tales retain what he calls the \u2018pungent and na\u00c3\u00afve flavour of the oral tradition.’ They are stunning, blunt, unpretentious and not vaccinated with Christian or puritanical ideals. They are stranger and more baffling than the later editions. In this they are like the Gospel of Mark <\/em>compared to the other synoptics. They impose a charter of weirdness that seems like they might be stories from the very heart of reality, were one to believe in such a thing. They are too distant from the refined and literary cultures that have prevailed then and since to be luminous. They amaze, baffle and disturb. Zipes sees the Grimms in this first edition as excavating fossil remains of a fundamental, almost-lost oral culture.<\/p>\n A change of editorial policy started with volume two. Wilhelm was the main editor from 1816 onwards so he was the main cuplrit. Both brilliant philologists, they did their work from their desks. They depended on different scholars to provide them with the oral tales. They sometimes did leave home to get tales from women in Kassel and Munster and the lower classes but most of the stories were handed in from middle class colleagues and friends. In the first edition many of the tales were unknown so perhaps they didn’t feel confident to change them, perhaps finding them too opaque and intimidating to fool around with.<\/p>\n The changes they did make after the first edition were drastic. They deleted their notes about beliefs about children. The Grimms’ had spent their childhoods in Hanau and Steinau in Hesse and were classically trained in Greek and Latin. When their father died suddenly he left them in a financial mess. Social disadvantage led the brothers to excel at the Lyzeum at Kassel to compensate. They studied law at Marburg. Between 1802 to 1806 Friederich Carl von Savigny inspired them to study the historical, philological and philosophical aspects of literature. Savigny’s historical approach to jurisprudence inspired the Grimm’s to take the same approach to literature. They developed a thesis about the organic connection between the volk and the historical development of volk. They worked on the thesis that the present was only grasped through acquaintance with the past. They saw culture as the property of everyone rather than just an educated elite. It followed that religion, law and literature etc all needed to be treated holistically through historical investigation. Contrary to Savigny’s approach, however, the brothers thought it was language not law that bound people together in a common culture.<\/p>\n They wanted to be librarians and began collecting old books, tracts, calanders and made a pact to work together for the rest of their lives. They wrote about old sagas and legends with a view to recover the true poesie<\/em> of Germanic and Nordic literature. The Napoloeonic war caused issues. Jacob served in the Hessian War Commission of 1806. Wilhelm passed his law exams and became a civil servant and librarian in Kassel. Jacob lost his job in 1807 when the French occupied the city and became librarian for new King Jerome, Napoleon’s brother, who ruled Westphalia. When their mother died in 1808 they became responsible for their younger brother and sister.<\/p>\n Of enormous importance for them both were their meetings first with Clemens Brentano, the German Romantic poet, and then in 1806, Achim von Arnim the German Romantic novelist. Together they published \u2018The Boy’s Wonder Horn<\/em>‘ in 1805 which was a collection of folk songs. The Grimms were asked to help further volumes. The Grimms collected for them all sorts of tales and not just fairy tales. Arnim had a \u2018.. pronounced romantic urge to excavate and preserve German cultural contributions made by the common people before the stories became extinct’ and positioned this as \u2018a gesture of protest against the French occupation and a gesture of solidarity with those people who wanted to forge a unified German nation.’ Of course they were tales from Hesse and Wetphalia not Germany. No German state existed at the time!<\/p>\n What ran through all this work was the belief that it was linguistic culture that held communities together. For the Grimms such a culture was an organic emanation of the people. They argued that \u2018cultivated literature’ was parasitical on an oral folk tradition and that the cultivated literature had forced the oral and mythic to recede during the Renaissance. They wrote:<\/p>\n \u2018Wherever the tales still exist, they continue to live in such a way that nobody ponders whether they are good or bad, poetic or crude. People know them and love them because they have simply absorbed them in a habitual way. And they take pleasure in them without having any reason. This is exactly why the custom of storytelling is so marvelous, and it is just what this poetic art has in common with everything eternal: people are obliged to be disposed toward it despite the objections of others. Incidentally, it is easy to observe that the custom of storytelling has stuck only where poetry has enjoyed a lively reception and where the imagination has not yet been obliterated by the perversities of life. In that same regard we don’t want to praise the tales or even defend them against a contrary opinion: their mere existence suffices to defend them. That which has managed to provide so much pleasure time and again has moved people and taught them something carries its own necessity in itself and has certainly emanated from that eternal source that moistens all life, and even if it were only a single drop that a folded leaf embraces , it will nevertheless glitter in the early dawn.’<\/p>\n By 1809 they had collected 54 tales , legends and animal stories and sent them to Brentano who was working in the Olenberg Monastery. These were like Dylan’s Basement Tapes<\/em>, being skeletons of stories, rough and fragmentary but finished as such, needing neither repair nor patchwork. They had two models that they kept in mind; \u2018The Juniper Tree<\/em>‘ and \u2018The Fisherman and his Wife<\/em>‘ written down by the painter Philipp Otto Runge and published in dialect form in the first to last editions. These stories they’d collected for Brentano he wasn’t able to use. Arnim encouraged them to publish them themselves. What they recognized in these wonder tales was a \u2018natural poetry’ and they understood the power they had:<\/p>\n \u2018We have tried to grasp and interpret these tales as purely as possibly. In many of them one will find the narrative is interrupted by rhymes and verses that even posses clear alliteration at times but are never sung during the telling of a tale, and these are precisely the oldest and best tales. No incident has been added or embellished and changed, for we would have shied away from expanding tales already so rich in and of themselves with their own analogies and similarities. They cannot be invented. In this regard no collection like this one has yet to appear in Germany.’<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not everyone understood nor liked what the tales were, but the Grimms held their line. To Arnim Jacob wrote: \u2018 Contrary to your viewpoint, I am firmly convinced that all the tales in our collection without exception had always been told with all their particulars centuries ago. Many beautiful things were only gradually left out. In this sense all the tales have long since been fixed., while they continue to move around in endless variations. That is, they do not fix themselves. Such variations are similar to the manifold dialects that should not suffer any violation either.’ Throughout the Grimms mounted a defence of the oral vernacular against those who would discount it in favour of a written literary state culture.<\/p>\n Supporting Wilhelm, Jacob wrote: \u2018 The difference between children’s and household tales and the reproach we have received for using the combination in our title is more hairsplitting than true. Otherwise we would literally have to bring the children out of the house where they have belonged forever and confine them in a room. Have children’s tales really been conceived and invented for children? I don’t believe this at all just as I don’t affirm the general question, whether we must set up something specific at all for them. What we possess in publicized and traditional teachings and precepts is accepted by old and young, and what children do not grasp about them, all that glides away from their minds, they will do so when they are ready to learn it. This is the case with all true teachings that ignite and illuminate everything that was already present and known, not teaching that brings both wood and fire with it.’<\/p>\n They pointed out that there was a difference between a book for children and an educational primer, a lesson modern educational secretaries should be forced to heed:<\/p>\n \u2018 In publishing our collection we wanted to do more than just perform a service for the history of Poesie. We intended at the same time to enable Poesie itself, which is alive in this collection to have an effect: it was to give pleasure to anyone who could take pleasure in it, and therefore, our collection was also to become an intrinsic educational primer. Some people have complained about this latter intention and asserted that there are things here and there \u2026 that cause embarrassment and are unsuitable for children or offensive (such as references to certain incidents and conditions, and they also think children should not hear about the devil and anything evil). Accordingly parents should not offer the collection to children. In individual cases this concern may be correct, and this one can easily choose which tales are to be read. On the whole it is certainly not necessary. Nothing can better defend us than nature itself, which has let certain flowers and leaves grow in a particular colour or shape. People who do not find them beneficial, suitable for the special needs, which cannot be known, can easily walk right by them. But they cannot demand that the flowers and leaves be coloured and cut in another way.’<\/p>\n What the Grimms returned was a knowledge and culture the Parnassian renaissance had tried to forget, knowledge as parochially insane as the secret art of herbals now seems to us. These are the inherited unwritten equations of what went wrong long ago when reparations were promised, left unpaid, threatened and pondered long after the days had passed. What was left lies hidden behind and within each performance. There’s a sense of improvised sketching in them, as if the torso of some earlier attempt is being hinted at, some failed draft to get further. But that is just an illusion. The tales refuse the fixture of print, its authorities and policemen and prefer the threads and cobwebs of speech that become theophanies of an unwritten and ever-long tragedy fit for laughter and sacrifice. These are tales from the undercurrents of shamanic crazies, the terrifying anonymous oddness of women from the family tree of Sycorax.<\/p>\n Andre Jolles catches what’s happening in them. It is the infernalised monstrousness of reality that the tales assault, a kind of Promethean raid on sources of power and life. Jolles writes : \u2018 The miraculous is here the only possible guarantee that the immorality of reality has stopped.’ The collection comprises animal tales, legends, tall tales, nonsense stories, fables, anecdotes, jokes, magic. It’s that part of a European civilising process cannibalizing itself to survive, where all conduct is a Virgillian current running through into open mawed Caliban and Grendel. We remind ourselves that the cannibal cave-giant is also the one-eyed sun, is also a High God, and those animals are the solar beasts, golden creatures of fire, an Argosy bestiary of sea Gods, mother earths, queens of hell, sea monsters, harpies, Circe’s enchanted crowd all appearing with their \u2018yelps’ and Caliban’s \u2018puppy heads.’ The tales are on this wavelength, so \u2018\u2026 the tune of our catch\u2026 [is]\u2026 played by the picture of Nobody.’ They rise out of the self-regulating undergrowth of anonymous free speech, a card game’where there was no-one left to bluff’, an international species of wimmin-talk from underwater, all crimes and their judgments wrapped and warped in mysteriously-arriving \u2018freedom of thought’, the three Norns talking, the jabber of the three weird women on Macbeth’s heath, of Cundrie’s, Kali’s, Hecate’s, Scylla’s, of whatever was scratched at the bottom of the Buddha’s stone begging bowl which was also the Grail cauldron of Bran who was Lud who was Lear who was the man god hanged on a tree. As if they suspected Persephone was their informer using all her disguises, the Grimms depended on women to tell them the tales \u2013 mostly middle class and aristocratic \u2013 but the most consummate storyteller was Dorothea Viehmann a tailor’s wife, lower middle class, poor but not a peasant. Not just wimmin though: Johann Friedrich Krause was a retired soldier who told revenge stories of mistreated soldiers, a reminder of the thigh-wounded hero overcoming bestializing images of the great witch and queen of hell, an old man directing the greater show like a washed up Adonis murmuring wild stretches of fantastic shamanic flight against swine-crows, animalized men, and all the while looking for a heavenly marriage through flower magic and rude vicious inside-out jokes.<\/p>\n The Grimms knew the Italian works of Giovan Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile and the French works of Charles Perrault, Mme Catherine d’Aulnoy and Mme de la Force. The tales in this first edition are raw and often about \u2018wounded’ young people. These protagonists are children fighting brutal parents, soldiers in need, young women in peril, and against them are dangerous predators and spiteful rulers. In them death is a miraculous trophy, punishing greedy people and rewarding innocence and kindness. They are tales more about children than for them. \u2018How Children Played Slaughtering’, \u2018Death and the Goose Boy’, The Stubborn Child’, are dark disturbing tales. The beginning of \u2018Good Bowling and Card Playing’ goes:<\/p>\n \u2018 Now, there was a young man from a poor family who thought to himself, \u201cWhy not risk my life? I’ve got nothing to lose and a lot to win. What’s there to think about?’ This is as true, as abandoned and as high a moment of speech as any to be found anywhere.<\/p>\n Their \u2018underdog’ perspective presents a complex sympathy for innocence and simple-mindedness mediated via diabolical savagery as the inherited speech of a shamanic, supernaturally dangerous Medea transposed as Circe, whose men were all bewitched and transformed into wild beats. Throughout the first edition is a violent hostility towards abusive kings, cannibals, witches, giants, nasty people and cruel animals. Most of the innocents are farmers, tailors, servants, smiths, fishermen, soldiers, shoemakers, spinners, poor children, little animals. Innocence, of course, is never enough to be taken at face value. It has to be tested and its integrity proved. Only then can the reward of marriage, riches or bliss and peace be sanctified. Simpletons are often smarter than they appear, and courageous, bringing out a healing mana that fuses with the source of their powers. Protagonists win through innocence and kindness, as in the women of \u2018The Three Little Men in the Forest’, \u2018Maiden without hands’, \u2018The Robber Bridesgroom’, \u2018Princess Mousekin’ and \u2018The Clever Farmer’s Daughter.’ Patriarchal values are there but underneath them are older and subversive tendencies that push through. These young women are not content with their positions in life and the dialogues are curt, actions swift. These tales pull the ground from under their feet so they might reach a better place.<\/p>\n Later editions deleted some stories \u2013 some because they were grotesque, others because they were French or Italian, others because of personal tastes of the Grimms. Some changes were made on ideological and aesthetic grounds : Rapunzel originally was a story about pregnancy but this element was deleted in later versions, and in \u2018Little Snow White’ and \u2018Hansel and Gretel’ the mothers were changed into stepmothers because for the Grimms mothers were sacred. After that magical first edition a process of editing began which Christianised and softened them by rooting out the pre-Christian mythic and folk prototypes that deepened and complicated, via this underground pagan lineage, Christianity’s official state controlled version.<\/p>\n Later versions of the Grimm tales had more florid descriptions with smooth transitions and explanations. Some deleted stories were anti-patriarchal and anti-monarchy, such as \u2018The Tablecloth, the Knapsack, the Cannon’, and \u2018The Horn’ where a common man beats a king and takes his daughter for a wife. But the animal stories always show the weak defeating the strong and cooperation between underdogs is still a key to many of the stories even in the later editions.<\/p>\n So what’s left of their legacy? Was it betrayed? And were they responsible for any betrayal? Did they start the betrayal? In \u2018Grimm Legacies’ Zipes shows how any judgment about these matters of legacy is complicated. It’s clear that from the start they intended the collection to preserve an ancient tradition of storytelling but it’s equally clear that over time that particular strand of the legacy is just one of several, and surely not the dominant one anymore.<\/p>\n Their German Popular Stories<\/em> was a revolutionary book but Zipes argues that the legacy was changing even in their own lifetimes. Edgar Taylor translated German Popular Stories<\/em> into English very early on and made three claims that stuck: that they were intended for children (they weren’t); that they came from peasants and that they were German (they weren’t). The success of this translation persuaded the Grimms (especially Wilhem) to change their original format to get a bigger buy-in from middle classes.<\/p>\n In his chapter \u2018Hyping the Grimms’ Fairy Tales’ Zipes looks at what Taylor’s influence did. In 1825 they brought out their Smaller Edition<\/em> with illustrations. This wasn’t driven by a desire for money and profit but rather a desire to create a greater respect for German folk culture. The Grimms themselves maintained a scholarly approach. But through the 20th and 21st century this marketing strategy led to a trivialization and banalisation of the tales and what our hyperglobalised cultures have is far removed from what the Grimms actually found and wrote out.<\/p>\n The USA is the villain in this process, if villainous the process really is. In \u2018Americanisation of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales: Twists and Turns of History’ Zipes points out that by now Americans (and other people from other countries) are more likely to think of the tales as Disney’s rather than belonging to the Grimms’. He says there’s little information in the USA about the Grimms anywhere and this distorted memory of a Globalised Disneyfication began in England in the nineteenth century via the translations that begin from 1823 onwards and the beginning of film adaptation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Zipes cites Simon Bronner<\/a>: \u2018The 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 \u201cnarratives”, 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.’<\/p>\n 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<\/em>‘ 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.<\/p>\n William McCarthy in his \u2018 Cinderella in America<\/a><\/em>‘ writes about a \u2018neglected and mistreated \u201cCinderella genre”, the European wonder tale in America\u2026” where he aims \u2018 \u2026to demonstrate the scope of Old World repertoire as it settled into US American culture\u2026’ 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 \u2018Snow White<\/em>‘; Robert Coover \u2018Pricksongs and Descants<\/em>‘; \u2018Briar Rose<\/em>‘; Robin McKinely \u2018Deerskin<\/em>‘, \u2018Spindle’s End<\/em>‘; Nancy Springer \u2018Fair Peril<\/em>‘,; Gregory MaGuire \u2018 Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister<\/em>‘; Fransesca Lia Block \u2018The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold<\/em>‘; Kate Bernheimer \u2018The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold<\/em>‘, \u2018The Complete Tales of Merry Gold<\/em>‘; Kelly Link \u2018Stranger Things Happen’, \u2018Magic for beginners’; Lauren Slate \u2018 Blue Beyond Blue: Extraordinary Tales for Ordinary Dilemmas<\/em>‘; Catherynne Valente \u2018The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden<\/em>‘, \u2018Six-Gun Snow White<\/em>‘; Mercedes Lackey \u2018The Sleeping Beauty<\/em>‘; Erik Bergstrom \u2018Grimmer Tales: A Wicked Collection of Happily Never After Tales<\/em>‘ and Tom McNeal’s \u2018 far far away<\/em>‘ 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018Snow White<\/em>‘ 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 \u2018 … who struts and shows off her wares\u2026’ No sweetners here!<\/p>\n Sadly, Disney’s approach was conservative. His Little Red Riding Hood is \u2018a sweet simpleton’ and when you look at Fleisher’s Boop and Tex Avery’s versions – \u2018Swing Shift Cinderella<\/em>‘ of 1945 and \u2018Red Hot Riding Hood<\/em>‘ of 1943 where the Cinderella’s are cunning, strong, feisty and sexy as hell you have to wonder where we might have gone.<\/p>\n Disney’s are the well-made sexist stories of \u2018Barbie-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 \u2018 the major American characteristic of their appropriation in the United States.’ How should this be assessed? Asks Zipes.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018the 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.<\/p>\n He quotes David Grewal with some approval: 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.<\/p>\n Zipes is brilliantly tenacious and expansive in his investigations. In the chapter \u2018Two 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.<\/p>\n In \u2018How 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 \u2018The Extraordinary Companions’ \u2013 Greek Gods, Japanese samurai, folk heroes, superheroes who all share a common purpose and how the Grimm story \u2018How 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.<\/p>\n \u2018The 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.<\/p>\n In \u2018A 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.<\/p>\n Bloch has suggestive things to say: Adorno too: \u2018 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 \u2018roses’ with \u2018moonlight’ 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 \u201ctoday”‘.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Bloch wrote in \u2018The Fairy Tale Moves in Its Own Time’ : He points out that:\u2018it is always cunning in the way it overcomes difficulties’ (not magic!’ and; For Bloch fairytales brought alongside the country fair and circuses. He wrote:<\/p>\n \u2018 \u2026 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\u2026 it is that \u201coddity”, 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.<\/p>\n He links them with Schiller’s \u2018The Robbers<\/em>‘ and Beethoven’s \u2018Fidelio<\/em>‘ where the key issues are rescue and liberation: The Grimms never actually called their tales \u2018fairy’ 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But imagine an American Zarathrustra saying;<\/p>\n \u2018What returns, what finally comes home to me, is my own self and what of myself has long been in strange lands and scattered among all things and accidents’. This would be the voice of the poor innocent American, those far off from the centre, and there’d be a presence in the voice, beyond the hollow and incomprehensible pile of things usually heard in the usual voice saying the usual things, a voice that unchains itself like a slow rainbow, an allusive bridge tempting a sense of eternity that is irreconcilable and sad. In it are differences that fall on the other side of reasonable memory and reasonable hope. This is the voice from the hinterlands and nighthawk bars, fairgrounds and lonesome places where snake-oil songs and tales of hope and despair rise to demonstrate another reality of the starkest contrast. Here the songs and tales soothe the pain, bring hope and solace out of the irreversible succession of moments traipsing towards nothingness. This is the territory of Dave Macon at the start of singing ‘Way Down The Old Plank Road’ where he cracks his whip and shouts ‘Kill Yourself’. Dylan’s Basement Tapes<\/em> hum out of this weirdness. Grimms’ tales are an easy fit too.<\/p>\n There are traces of hidden traditions that criss-cross this American land. There are sounds that become repeatable, recognizable, recalled at one end which is like the very start. In this respect the uniqueness of each identity is erased through repeatability and everything that seems to be passing is simultaneously re-recognised as returning. This is of course, alongside all else, Biblical: as in Acts<\/em>: \u2018Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began,’ and in Noah’s defiant, \u2018 While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease\u2026’ When anthropologist Mercia Eliade writes of this eternal return, it: \u2018 \u2026 has the meaning of a supreme attempt toward the \u2018staticization’ of becoming, toward annulling the irreversibility of time. If all moments and all situations of the cosmos are repeated ad infinitum, their evanescence is, in the last analysis, patent; sub specie infinitatis, all moments and their situations remain stationary.’ The Grimm legacy speaks easily to this as well where in these tales for a moment there’s no movement and everything is sucked up and laid bare.<\/p>\n What America is is also is a species of utopian thinking, the rough hewn, jim-crack type we get in its fairgrounds and circus tents, where weird and off kilter figures throw in baroque dreams and tales that hover all strange and thin above deep still waters and silent, bleeding lands. Fog lifts an inch and odd shadows shimmer at impossible angles from cryptic buildings robbing lights and blending different depths of dark. What this utopianism feels like is a brutal retelling at a reduced price where the value nevertheless stays high and everything is kept miraculously intact.<\/p>\n This is the way a solitary agony is approached in Bob Dylan’s \u2018Nettie More’, for example, where the doomed and condemned killer of his own true love, on his way to his own execution, tells us of his eternal love in a tale that’s a body immersed in his own temporal, finite circumstance. It takes up the voice of the guy who sings of his feelings for the woman he has murdered. It’s a narrative that attempts to face down doom with unforeseeable possibilities. It breaks the difference between the past and the future and hopes the swollen thrumming beat of the gallows drum is heralding a miraculous turn whilst the whistful refrain signals the futility of any hope that he \u2018might make it home alive’. He draws down the blackness of his execution and extinction, having no innocence or cunning left : Here the apocatastasis \u2013 the technical term for eternal return myths \u2013 is tempered with a bleak and moving satirical edge where we’re left wondering at the delusion of the criminal whose story and song is as willful as god’s. It’s brutal and rough with his tenderness which we know he can’t properly understand. America has a certain genius for that sound, one painfully aware of the time that will come inevitably permeated with nothingness. Famously when Dylan was asked about the crucifixion he quipped in serious play that it happened last Tuesday. He could equally have said next Tuesday. This event isn’t one that happens in the same time as 1066 or 1776 or 1798 or whatever. Passing and becoming are not successive events. Eschatological time \u2018\u2026 has two faces, one that of passing, the other of becoming.’<\/p>\n Two voices of Americana becoming: Roy Orbison has a voice that is forever becoming, a voice at midnight going to noon, when it is neither this day nor the next, or the last, but is uncanny and at risk of never ceasing, never starting. It is the voice of the Queen of Hell reincarnated in Americana’s Circean grove. Brandon Flowers of \u2018The Killers’ has a voice that sounds as if on the perpetual edge of breaking into tears that will sweep up all the confusion and terrors. These two voices \u2013 Orbison’s and Flowers’ \u2013 seem to capture the sense that life’s very reason, virtue, purpose, happiness, its very urge and passion is deep down nauseating and apocalyptic, like a thaumaturgic God sniffing a magical flower. Listening to \u2018This River is Wild’ Flowers voice expresses a sense of a superhuman effort to exceed what he knows are the limits of being human. The catastrophe of the bands’ arrangements, which ought to be alienating and bombastic right through, are freed into his expressive cries that launch heroically across the abyss of the final note and silence. The wonky sounds and over-hard drum beats work as metaphors complementing the abysmal Gothic beauty of Flowers’ voice that passes over everything it touches like doomed affirmation. It’s pure Grimm curious.<\/p>\n In 1971 Dylan wrote: What Zipes continues to do with his investigations into these tales is draw us back into these vital mysterious undercurrents. He is one of the essential critics working today who knows how to swim with his eyes wide open.He reminds us of the question we’re all struggling with: ‘What language do you speak when you speak of such secretive things?’ and presents the first edition of Grimms’ tales as an answer.<\/p>\n
\n\u2018union in partition;
\nTwo lovely berries moulded on one stem;
\nSo, with two seeming bodies, but one heart;
\nTwo of the first, like coats in heraldry,
\nDue but to one, and crowned with one crest.’<\/p>\n
\nGo dig a hole in the ground
\nCome around all you good people
\nAnd see this poor rounder go down.’<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/The_Juniper_TreeszyDetail.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Picture-1.png\")
<\/p>\n
\n\u2018\u2026 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.’
\nHe goes on:<\/p>\n
\n\u2018 What we are experiencing now, in \u201cglobalization”, 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 \u2013 to the extent, at least, that we desire access to the activities that they mediate \u2013 we may not have much influence over their establishment.’
\nAnd for Louis Marin, Disney creates a \u2018 \u2026 utopic degeneration that exploits genuine utopian language.’<\/p>\n
\n\u2018 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.’<\/p>\n
\n\u2018\u2026consider 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\u2026 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.’<\/p>\n
\n\u2018the fairy tale does not allow itself to be fooled by the present owners of paradise.’<\/p>\n
\n\u2018These 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\u2026’<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/f086dc2f.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
\n\u2018Oh, I miss you, Nettie Moore
\nAnd my happiness is o’er
\nWinter’s gone, the river’s on the rise
\nI loved you then and ever shall
\nBut there’s no one left here to tell
\nThe world has gone black before my eyes’<\/p>\n
\n‘where i live now the only thing that keeps the area going is tradition – as you can figure out – it doesn’t count very much – everything around me rots… i don’t know how long it has been this way, but if it keeps up, soon i will be an old man – & i am only 15 – the only job around here is mining – but jesus, who wants to be a miner… i refuse to be part of such a shallow death.’<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/DSC013261.jpg\")
\nABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nRichard Marshall<\/strong><\/a> is still biding his time.<\/p>\n