Bronwyn Lloyd & Karl Chitham: One Brown Box (2010)]
A Short History of Fairy Tales
... memory once interrupted, is not be recalled. Written learning is a
fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed
away, is again bright in its proper station. Tradition is but a meteor,
which if once it falls, cannot be rekindled.
- Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775)
What do we actually know about fairy stories (or folktales, or
märchen, or
skazki,
or Mother Goose Tales, or any of the other terms that have been used to
describe these strange folk narratives)? Very little, to be honest.
That's
not to say that huge amounts of data haven't been gathered about them.
Collectors have scoured every corner of the globe in the relentless
quest for new stories and for variations on old ones; the publication
history of the three major canonical collections (Perrault, Grimm,
Andersen), not to mention their various national analogues, has been
charted in great - even obsessive - detail; the repetitive motifs and
structures that characterise them (stepmothers, youngest children, magic
wishes, helpful animals, the number three, the number seven, princes
and princesses, 'happy ending' formulae) have been analysed exhaustively
in the multi-volumed
Aarne-Thompson
motif index and its various offshoots. At the end of all this work,
after more than two centuries of concentrated scholarly endeavour, what
can we really feel sure about?
First of all, we know very little
about their origins and history. One of the unfortunate facts about oral
transmission is that it's virtually impossible to pin it down to
particular times and places. There's no concensus, to this day, on the
crucial question of whether major narrative story-clusters such as
"Cinderella" or "Sleeping Beauty" spread out originally from one centre -
Diffusionism - or whether
Relativism would be a better
model. That is to say, similar stories being generated in different
places by common cultural conditions: widespread hunger and poverty,
rigid systems of social caste, relics of ancient shamanistic or animist
belief systems, and so on.
Oceans of ink were spilt over this
controversy during the Nineteenth century. Modern scholars tend to
sidestep the whole argument by saying "a bit of both". The straight
answer is we just don't know.
To make matters worse, virtually all the major folktale collection efforts began long
after
the publication of the two most influential canonical compilations:
Perrault's collection of French fairy tales in 1697, and the Brothers
Grimm's
Kinder- und Hausmärchen [Children's and Household Tales] in 1812. No matter how remote the region, how illiterate and "traditional" the informant,
no
set of traditional stories gathered subsequently can be regarded as
free of the influence of these instantly infectious sets of stories,
translated into virtually every language on the globe, and available
through oral transmission almost everywhere else.
So, to put it
simply, when a folklorist speaks of an 'early' (ie pre-Perrault or
Grimm) variant on one of the canonical stories, the claim must be
regarded as purely conjectural. There
are no sources of 'pure'
folktales, uncontaminated by the written record. None that we can feel
confident of, at any rate. Which is not to say that these variants are
not intrinsically fascinating, and therefore well worth collecting: both
on their own merits, and because they offer invaluable clues about how a
common set of story motifs can take on the colouring of a particular
region or culture and yet retain a common core identity with its
original.
Folklorists, then, like to see themselves as a little
like Epidemiologists. They aspire to trace particular stories and
traditions out from a centre (like infectious diseases), and then to
evaluate their collision with other, local cultural patterns in each new
country or landscape they encounter. The trouble is that (to date) no
narrative "patient zero" has ever been identified. We don't know where
any
of the story-clusters that so fascinate us began, so it's therefore
impossible to identify the precise mixture of exotic, borrowed material
and local colour in any particular story.
Perhaps chaos theory
provides us with a better model. The folklorist's task could be seen as
more like attempting to measure the impact of the waves of the sea on
one another. Nineteenth-century physicists assumed that, however
complicated the task might be, the precise effects of each of these
different forces
could eventually be disentangled. In our
post-Heisenberg universe of quantum uncertainty, we know that this to be
a fallacy: beyond a certain level of complexity, some equations remain
intrinsically insoluble.
Bearing in mind, then, that we will probably
never
be able to answer most of our questions about these intrinsically
fascinating products of the human mind, these apparently 'spontaneous'
cultural phenomena which nevertheless encapsulate the efforts of
countless self-conscious individual storytellers and creators, I'd like
to devote the rest of this piece to talking about we
can know:
the fascinating saga of our quest to find out about this hidden world of
the folk-memory over the past three centuries. Far from being of
interest only to children and their parents and guardians, over most of
this period it's been taken for granted that they are of immense
significance to our understanding of
any of the processes of cultural transmission and (especially) cultural transformation.
To begin at the beginning. In 1697, the French aristocrat
Charles Perrault published the book
Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé [Stories or Tales of Times Past], with the subtitle
Contes de ma Mère l'Oie, or "Tales of Mother Goose."
Or,
rather, he didn't, since the book's title-page actually attributes it
to his nineteen-year-old son Pierre (Perrault himself, a respected
historian, was 69 at the time). So who was the actual author? Nobody
knows. It's assumed that Charles was the author and his son was credited
instead simply because the tales had been told to him and his other
siblings over the years, but that's pure speculation.
And who was
Mother Goose, for that matter? Again, nobody knows. Since that time, of
course, she's been enshrined as a kind of folktale and
nursery-rhyme-reciting Scheherazade, but whatever traditions Perrault
was drawing on in his subtitle are now long lost.
Whoever its
author was, Perrault's collection, written (for the most part) in
impeccable classical French prose, included the following eight stories:
La belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty)
Le petit chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood)
La Barbe bleue (Bluebeard)
Le Maître Chat ou le Chat Botté (Puss in Boots)
Les Fées (Diamonds and Toads)
Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre (Cinderella)
Riquet à la houppe (Ricky of the Tuft)
Le petit Poucet (Hop o' My Thumb)
as well as three told more formally in verse:
Griselidis (Patient Griselda)
Peau d'Âne (Donkeyskin)
Les souhaits ridicules (The Ridiculous Wishes)
Perrault's
book had an immediate and lasting success, and helped to establish the
vogue for fairy stories, oriental tales and other types of fantasy
literature among the European public. Hot on its heels came the first
translation of the
Arabian Nights by Antoine Galland, which
appeared in 12 volumes between 1704 and 1717. A century of sequels,
imitations, supplements and continuations to both Galland and Perrault
culminated in Charles-Joseph de Mayer's immense 41-volume
Cabinet des Fées, which appeared just before the French revolution, in 1785-89.
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But
actually (of course) that wasn't really the beginning at all. One of
the consequences of the French revolution and the Romantic movement that
coincided with it was a renewed interest in the submerged oral and folk
literature of Europe. Particularly strong in Germany, this led to the
compilation of Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano's collection of
folksongs
Des Knaben Wunderhorn between 1805 and 1808, and then, in 1812, to the first edition of the Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's
Kinder- und Hausmärchen, or "Children's and Household Tales", now known more commonly as Grimm's Fairy Tales.
The
Brothers Grimm were scholars whose principal interest was in the
historical roots of German culture and language (their other works
included dictionaries, grammars and technical works on German mythology
and tradition). It would have greatly surprised them to find that they
are now generally thought of as children's authors, and that the
Kinder- und Hausmärchen, in its various editions, would go on to dwarf all their other achievements.
The
first edition of their collection contained a mere 156 stories; the
seventh, in 1857, included 211, together with an immense mass of notes
and variant versions (generally omitted from even the most "complete"
English translations). In between these two dates the two brothers did a
good deal of work on polishing and toning down the rawness of some of
the versions they had initially included.
By modern standards,
their fieldwork could be criticized for a lack of specificity. All of
their materials were sent to them from elsewhere. The Grimm brothers
themselves never collected a single tale. Luckily a fair amount of
information about when and where and how a particular tale was
transcribed can be reconstructed from their files of correspondence. And
since they were the first collectors of folk-stories even to realize
the
desirability of including dialectal and individual
peculiarities in the stories they printed, it's perhaps more appropriate
to concentrate on the strengths than the weaknesses of their work.
It
certainly opened up a floodgate of similar collecting efforts
throughout Europe, resulting in classic collections of folktales in
Russia, Norway, Ireland and many other countries. The Grimms' own
collection has remained the benchmark by which all other collections are
measured, though, and their book has been translated and read in
virtually every corner of the world - thus, paradoxically, entering the
oral record and destroying the integrity of many ancient cultural
traditions - those that had escaped the prior influence of Perrault and
his numerous successors, at any rate. The Grimms themselves found
themselves re-collecting certain of his stories, which had long since
entered the oral record in Germany.
The fascination with all
things "folk" did, however, inspire Nineteenth-century scholars to
attempt to go back past Perrault, to medieval and classical collections
of stories. Leaving to one side the fable tradition, which can be traced
from Ancient India and Persia, through Aesop's Fables, to the
Thousand and One Nights
and the wisdom literature of the middle ages, we can see clear echoes
of the traditional fairy tale, with its patterns of "Once upon a time"
and "They all lived happily ever after" in such Renaissance compilations
as Giovanni Straparola’s
Le piacevoli notti [Pleasant Nights] (1550-53) and Giambattista Basile’s
Pentamerone (1634-36).
Further
back even than that, though, we can see vestiges of the European
folktale tradition beginning to appear in the written record in the
12th-century Breton Lais of Marie de France and the 13th-century Latin
Gesta Romanorum.
Charles
Perrault and the Brothers Grimm will never lost their primacy in
discussions of the origins of the European folktale, but it's clear that
the oral traditions they drew on long predated them, and may reach back
deep into the dark ages between the fall of classical antiquity and the
growth of modern nation states.
There's little prospect that
we'll ever be able to do much more than speculate about the details of
this process of cultural transmission, but that doesn't mean it didn't
happen, and that the
ways in which it happened haven't left strong traces on the stories we read today. They are, after all, so very
peculiar in so many ways, so full of curious fossils from a now almost irrecoverable past.
Linguistic
scholars such as the Grimms hoped to reconstruct some of this process
by appropriating the methodologies of Indo-European philology -
exemplified by
Grimm's law of consonantal shift, which enables us to chart fairly precisely the evolution of Latin
pater to German
vater to English
father
and so on - but their efforts were hampered by a lack of reliable
written material for the period of most interest to us, the (so-called)
"Barbarian" invasions which accompanied the fall of the Roman empire.
What's more, the excesses of this method, which resulted in
Max Müller's
bizarre attempts to derive all European folktale and mythological lore
from the alleged relics of Aryan solar myths, were thoroughly debunked
by pioneering Anthropologists such as
Andrew Lang (in
Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887), among others).
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We're on somewhat surer ground when we come to the next great name in our history of the fairytale.
Hans Christian Andersen
always described himself as the author, rather than the mere collector,
of the stories he published and collected in a variety of forms over
three decades.
Though he never made any attempt to deny that a
number of them are based on Danish folktales he heard in his youth, the
strong impress of his somewhat masochistic personality lay increasingly
over his collections as a whole, and has led perhaps to a slight eclipse
of their popularity beside the Grimm and Perrault fairytales.
Andersen
was a very great writer, though, and while he clearly drew on the
inspiration of earlier authors of "art-stories", such as the Germans
Tieck and Novalis, one should never forget that his own collection
includes such classics as "The Little Mermaid", "The Ugly Duckling",
"The Snow Queen", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "The Princess and the
Pea".
More didactic and Victorian than the Grimms (or even
Perrault), there's nevertheless a vein of pure fantasy in his stories
which inspired such influential writers as George MacDonald and William
Morris, and which might be said to have culminated in the works of J. R.
R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.
Mention
of J. R. R. Tolkien brings me to his classic essay "On Fairy-stories",
first delivered as the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St.
Andrews University in 1939, it was expanded for publication in a
festschrift collection in 1947, and then again for the book
Tree and Leaf in 1966. Tolkien's argument might be said to apply more accurately to his own practice in works such as
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings
than to more traditional fantasy literature, but along the way he makes
some very perceptive comments about previous critics and theorists in
the field.
There are, to be sure, as many ways of understanding
and interpreting fairytales and folk literature as there are readers of
them. It would be hard, however, to take seriously any discussion of
this field which did not include the Aarne-Thompson motif classification
system. First published by the Finn Anti Aarne in 1910, it was greatly
expanded by the American Stith Thompson into the six-volume
Motif-Index of Folk-Literature
(1932–37). The idea of this system is to group stories according to
their central motifs, each of which has an “AT” classification number,
now (after successive revisions) numbering in the thousands. While this
has certainly become the standard method of classification of these
stories and the motifs within them, of course it largely begs the
question of
why these recurrent features have arisen in so many independent cultures at so many different times.
The Russian Formalist critic Vladimir Propp, whose
Morphology of the Folktale (1928) has become a classic, attempted to reduce the complex yet intensely repetitive plots of Russian fairytales (or
skazki)
to a series of essential narrative elements. The thirty-one narrative
functions and eight basic character types identified by him greatly
influenced the rise of structuralist narratology, but have been
criticised since for their lack of social and historical context.
Nevertheless, his work is more interpretive than Aarne and Thompson's,
and it's doubtful whether the critiques of it by Claude Lévi-Strauss, in
particular, have stood the test of time any better.
Joseph
Campbell's Jungian syncretism has, at times, incurred the similar
criticism that it tends to block out the social and historical
specificities of particular cultures. His analyses of the
Arabian Nights
and Grimm's fairytales, as well as the roots of mythology and folk
literature in general, remain suggestive attempts to go beyond mere
motif-counting, however.
The final "classical" critic of the fairytale I'd like to mention here is Bruno Bettelheim, whose 1976 book
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales revolutionised understanding of the influence of storytelling on early childhood development.
Bettelheim,
a Freudian child psychologist who specialised in treating the child
survivors of the holocaust, published this intensely controversial book
towards the end of his long and distinguished career. Rejecting
contemporary condemnation of Grimm's fairytales for their violence and
lack of social conscience, he argued for their precise and carefully
ordered role in formulating a child's view of the realities of the
culture he or she will grow up to inhabit. Bettelheim’s Freudianism can
sound a little doctrinaire and reductionist at times, but the central
argument of his book remains perhaps the most considered defence of the
value of traditional storytelling ever mounted.
Among the many,
many critics, folklorists and literary historians who have worked in
this area, the approaches represented by these four would have to be
said to be inescapably relevant and cogent even today, despite
everything that's happened in the years since they were put forward.
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The
beginning of the Women’s Movement and the growth of Feminist literary
criticism in the 1970s opened the door to some startlingly original new
readings of the fairytale canon. A. S. Byatt, Joanna Russ, Marina Warner
and Ursula K. Le Guin are just a few of the authors who have published
interesting collections of modern fairytales, placing new emphases on
traditional society’s ingrained assumptions about gender and politics.
Some
of the highlights from the past forty years of reading against the
grain include English novelist Angela Carter’s anthologies and
rewritings of classic fairytales, as well as the attempts of scholars
such as Marina Warner, Jack Zipes, and Maria Tatar to re-evaluate the
entire history of the folktale in Europe.
Taking them in order, Angela Carter's 1979 collection
The Bloody Chamber (which also inspired Neil Jordan's 1987 film
The Company of Wolves),
is probably the most influential revisionist retelling of classic
fairytales to date. Carter had previously published a complete
translation of Perrault (1977), and went on to edit two volumes of Fairy
Tales (modern and traditional) for British Feminist publisher Virago,
but the stories in
The Bloody Chamber retain their bite after thirty years.
Marina
Warner's blend of wide reading and infectious enthusiasm has inspired
her to write a number of books on folklore and popular culture.
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994), together with its sequel
No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998), attempts to cram the whole gamut of oral folk culture into one breathless ride.
For
German scholar Jack Zipes, by contrast, nothing about fairytales is
ever simple and straightforward. His Marxist analyses of the societies
that produced these tales, together with his constant sniping at the
patriarchal values of late modernity, make books such as
The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context (1983) and
Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North American and England (1986) a minefield of provocations against the traditional pieties.
Harvard Professor Maria Tatar has edited a number of volumes of illustrated fairytales (
The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (2002),
The Annotated Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales (2004) and
The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen
(2008)) alongside more serious works of biography and history. Her
approach is somewhat gentler than Zipes', but retains his revisionist
focus - she was, after all, one of the principal contributors to his
2000
Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales.
So, in conclusion, what
do
we know about fairytales, homegrown or traditional? We know that
they're very old, that they've been passed on by word of mouth for many
generations. We know that they're a way of passing on worldly wisdom
from generation to generation - it's no accident that storytellers are
often grandmothers or grandfathers, using this method to communicate
with their children's children. We know that they tend to use violent
and subversive motifs: death, abandonment, devouring by wild animals. We
know that they tend to promote cunning above strength, trusting
simplicity above arrogant pride, practicality above inherited wealth.
We also know how infinitely adaptable they are. Polish-American writer Jon Scieszka's
The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales
(1992) is just one example of the new, postmodern versions of
traditional fairytales which now appear on a fairly regular basis.
Scieszka is a tireless campaigner for children’s literacy, and is
concerned to provide modern kids with the kinds of books that break down
rather than reinforcing cultural and socio-economic divisions.
Fairytales
can be turned into feminist parables, revolutionary slogans,
multicultural sermons. Finally, though, they work because children want
to hear them. That familiar phrase "Once upon a time" can triumph over
the shortest attention span: but there has to be something pretty
impressive coming right after it.
[One Brown Box (2010)]
(28/6-18/11/10)
One Brown Box: A Storybook Exhibition for Children, by Bronwyn Lloyd & Karl Chitham (6 November – 18 December 2010). ISBN-13: 978-0-9582811-8-8 (Auckland: Objectspace, 2010): 27-37.
[3538 wds]
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