Preserving the Spell: Basile's "The Tale of Tales" and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition

Preserving the Spell

Preserving the Spell

Basile’s The Tale of Tales and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition

ARMANDO MAGGI

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO AND LONDON

ARMANDO MAGGI is professor of romance languages and literatures and a member of the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including Satan’s Rhetoric and The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Sade to Saint Paul, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-24296-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-24301-6 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/Chicago/9780226243016.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maggi, Armando, author.

Preserving the spell : Basile’s The Tale of Tales and its afterlife in the fairy-tale tradition / Armando Maggi.

pages ; cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-226-24296-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-24301-6 (ebook) 1. Fairy tales—Western countries—History and criticism. 2. Fairy tales—Social aspects. 3. Basile, Giambattista, approximately 1575–1632—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

GR550.M33 2015

398.2—dc23

2015001106

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48—1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Dancing Backward: An Introduction

PART I CUPID AND PSYCHE, THE TALE OF TALES, AND THE BIRTH OF WESTERN FAIRY TALE

CHAPTER ONE

A Never Ending and Never Told Tale: Basile’s Undoing of Cupid and Psyche

CHAPTER TWO

Orpheus, the King of the Birds, Moves to Sicily with Cupid and Psyche: Laura Gonzenbach’s King Cardiddu

CHAPTER THREE

Melancholy Is the Best Storyteller: Oil, Water, and Blood from Gonzenbach back to Basile

PART II THE ITALIAN TALES AND GERMAN ROMANTICISM: THE BROTHERS GRIMM, CLEMENS BRENTANO, NOVALIS

CHAPTER FOUR

What We Leave Behind: Fairies, Letters, Rose Petals, and Sprigs of Myrtle

CHAPTER FIVE

The Fairy, the Myrtle, and the Myrtle-Maiden: From Basile to the Grimms and Brentano

CHAPTER SIX

How to Undo The Tale of Tales: Brentano and the End of Fairy Tales

CHAPTER SEVEN

Where Are the Ogresses of Yesteryear? The Neapolitan Cupids and Psyches in the Hands of the Brothers Grimm

CHAPTER EIGHT

Beauty, Zulima, and Aline: The Marvel Preceding and Following the World According to Novalis

PART III AMERICAN POSTMODERNISM, MEMOIRS, AND A NEW BEGINNING

CHAPTER NINE

You Will Never Awaken Because the Story You Were In No Longer Exists: Coover, Postmodernism, and the End of an Era

CHAPTER TEN

Disney World Has Become a Kind of Reverse Lourdes: From Stanley Elkin back to Basile

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Benign Fairy Tale out of the Brothers Grimm: Memoirs and the Magic of Reality

CHAPTER TWELVE

Everything Beautiful Is Gone: Beasts of the Southern Wild and a New Beginning

Appendix: The Grimms’ Adaptation of Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales

Notes

Index

Dancing Backward: An Introduction

I better remember the poorly composed fairy tales that my nurse used to recite when I was a child than the tales of poets that I read every day.

GIOVAN BATTISTA DELLA PORTA, The Art of Remembering (1566)

In Sickness unto Death, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard distinguishes between those who are aware of their despair and those who are not. To arrive at the truth, Kierkegaard writes, one has to pass through two negativities: despair and ignorance. He further explains that It is just as the old story says about breaking a certain spell: it won’t be broken unless the piece is played right through backward.¹ Kierkegaard borrows this allusion from the Brothers Grimm’s German translation of Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825). In their long introduction, the Grimms speak about an enchanting melody that forces everyone and everything to dance. According to this folk tale, the Grimms say, the player can’t stop the bewitching music unless he plays the melody backward or someone slashes the chords of the player’s violin.²

In early modern culture, reading a holy text or a prayer backward was seen as a perverse, demonic act, intended to upend the natural order of things. Witches and demon worshipers performed Christian rituals in reverse to celebrate their alliance to God’s Enemy.³ Witches, Jacob Grimm writes in German Mythology, used to gather in places where formerly justice was administered or sacrifices were offered, in order to turn those locations into their opposites, places of demonic meetings.⁴ A compulsory dance is also a familiar motif of European fairy tales, in which it is frequently used to punish an evil or greedy character. Remember the wicked queen dancing until she dies in the Grimms’ Snow White, but also the young girl in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes who can’t stop dancing as soon as she puts on a pair of beautiful red shoes. One night, in tears, she dances all the way to a little house where the official executioner lives. Chop off my feet with the red shoes! the girl begs the man, who complies with her wish.⁵

In the Irish story reported by the Grimms and then appropriated by Kierkegaard, the way to stop the distressing music is to perform a diabolical action; that is, one can liberate people from their slavery to an unnatural dance only by perverting the natural flow of music. When they described their night encounters with demons, sixteenth-century witches often explained that the evil spirits appeared to them as men with feet looking like geese feet turned backward.⁶ It is not by chance that Kierkegaard associates the enchanting, but coercive and deadly, melody with a state of despair. What could be more despairing than dying while dancing to pleasant live music?

In this book, we will play a similar ‘evil’ game. We will question the natural character of our beloved classic fairy tales and their ineluctability, and we will play them backward by going back in time, often mixing them up with other tales. We will question whether the tales we usually label as Grimms’ fairy tales have always existed in nature, are intrinsic parts of who we are, and will never leave us because by departing from them we would depart from ourselves. How could we raise our children without these charming and undying stories? Have we perhaps forgotten Bruno Bettelheim? One could easily claim that the idea of reversing these stories and thus ceasing to dance at their magical and eternal melody is not just pretentious or even evil, but also stupid. Could it be really possible to delete the picture of Cinderella dancing with her prince charming in the royal ballroom as Disney immortalized it on the screen?

This project is based on the assumption that fairy tales, in their oral or literary form, are supposed to evoke an unexpected and exhilarating transformation, a magical turning into something completely different. In 1798–99, the great Romantic poet Novalis wrote that in a fairy tale everything must be marvelous—mysterious and unconnected.⁷ Such an optimistic definition couldn’t be more distant from our contemporary view of fairy tales. First of all, we don’t even know what unconnected means, and how unconnected could relate to something marvelous. For us, unconnected is usually a synonym for incomplete, imperfect, unsuccessful. Today, magic tales are meant to provide the reader or listener (whether young, adult, or elderly) with a tame sense of surprise, a reassuring déjà vu similar to the reaction we have to a Hollywood blockbuster, whose story line and ending we can predict even before it begins. Let us remember, however, that the Grimms’ book opens with the story of a prince who has changed into a frog that then changes into a prince. A fairy tale is the least presumptuous kind of storytelling, and yet it claims to call forth a mutation in the reader or listener. It can work its magic only if it is allowed to transform itself into something new (not just a new story, but with a new and unexpected context and a new artistic form), but this change doesn’t seem possible any longer. The very idea that these magic stories could be told in new formats, in visual and written texts that apparently have little to do with their traditional contents and forms of transmission, is ludicrous. We are not referring to comic books or film adaptations, which try to ‘subvert,’ ‘challenge,’ ‘undermine’ the traditional plot (as is sometimes said in praise of a retelling), but to truly different, truly new artistic stuff that succeeds in absorbing, digesting, and transcending the conventional (‘classical’) storytelling, as if no magic tale had ever been told before. When we speak of fairy tales today, we often implicitly allude to a handful of ‘classic’ literary tales (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, etc.) that, in our increasingly global culture, after centuries of unstable variations, seem to have finally reached their truest, most natural, and purest form. We vaguely associate these tales with the Brothers Grimm, even though, as Donald Haase points out, secondhand adaptations and retellings have usurped the place of the Grimms’ own texts.⁸ As a consequence, we can no longer speak of the longevity of Grimms’ tales, but at best of their reincarnation. What we consider a Grimms’ tale today is in fact a type, that is, the ideal form of a tale more or less arbitrarily derived from the multitude of its variants.⁹ Our tales are abstractions.

For the Grimms, as Nicole Belmont explains, nature expresses a poetry that has no author. The poetry of nature is an organic being, like a tree or a fish, and evolves spontaneously, like oral language, without losing its immutable divine essence.¹⁰ The Grimms contended that natural poetry can manifest itself in different forms, such as myths, folk tales, legends, which suit nature’s diverse self-expression.¹¹ They borrowed the concept of ‘natural poetry’ (Naturpoesie) from Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who strongly emphasized the pedagogical power of fairy tales.¹² Herder himself had planned a collection of fairy tales to nourish the spirit and heart of children. Natural purity and moral purity were thus two sides of the same coin.¹³ The ‘pure’ and ‘original’ version of magic tales is what the Brothers Grimm sought to attain with their collection, and their endeavor was successful, even though adults and children today are often unfamiliar with their book.¹⁴ By adults and children I mean middle-class members of a Western or Westernized society. Even students of fairy tales often allude to these ‘classic’ stories without specifying their titles. A post-Grimm Western culture has created a two-level ranking: (1) fully-formed, classic, and immutable tales; (2) a myriad of inferior, imperfect, and opaque tales that haven’t attained their perfect form. Both kinds of tales can be either oral or literary. But we must bear in mind that oral and literary tales, in Jack Zipes’s words, form one immense and complex genre because they are inextricably dependent on one another.¹⁵ This mutual influence, Rudolf Schenda confirms, can be traced back to the Middle Ages.¹⁶

The term ‘classic’ is not incorrect if used for the seminal literary collections of Hans Christian Andersen, Perrault, or the Brothers Grimm. The problem is that ‘classic’ has acquired an all-encompassing meaning. ‘Classic’ implies natural, correct, and final. Today, even public performances of fairy tales are in essence oral repetitions of classic (and thus written) tales. The fact that a tale is told orally doesn’t mean that the tale is an oral tale. Today, the folklorist Giuseppe Gatto maintains, the oral tale in Europe and in the Western world doesn’t exist anymore.¹⁷ Jack Goody reminds us that the contemporary Western process of transmission differs greatly from that in a purely oral society, since with a written text the storyteller (the mother, for example) can always go back to the original and correct the story that she has told.¹⁸

It is worth remembering that, according to the Brothers Grimm, the mythic Dorothea Viehmann, their primary source of oral tales, introduced no variations in her stories.¹⁹ The Grimms held that she was able to repeat the same tale over and over again with no change. She knew the ‘right’ version and didn’t let it go. As Jens Sennewald points out, it was as if Dorothea read from a preexisting and invisible written text, which would become a real book thanks to the Grimms. Dorothea served as the sacred recipient of an immense corpus of immemorial tales that had been corrupted through their oral transmission, but could be restored (or, better yet, healed, like an infected body) through a careful work of philological reconstruction.²⁰ The pure and stable forms of the original tales, which were nowhere to be found, could be recreated. The Freudian folklorist Alan Dundes alleges that the Grimms disguised their actual sources and even destroy[ed] all of their original field notes.²¹ In Dundes’s view, although the Grimms are traditionally considered two pioneering figures in the study of folklore, to the extent that oral material are rewritten, embellished and elaborated, and then presented as if they were pure, authentic oral tradition, their Children’s and Household Tales is a prima facie case of fakelore.²²

The demonic spell mentioned by Kierkegaard and the Grimms is a cogent image of our contemporary condition. The spell is about a repetitive movement that can’t be stopped. What seems dynamic is in fact a static, and agonizing, condition. Our fairy tales, the tales we cherish and repeat to our children as a necessary element of their intellectual growth, speak of a change that is no more. Cultural oblivion, the lack of historical perspective, social conformity, and the end of oral storytelling are crucial facets of the problem. Emphasizing that these stories used to be something else seems pointless because, even if we are aware that these stories used to exist incognito in other stories, in an ocean of infinite other stories, or that they were significantly different from the ones we know, we can’t let go of the idea that there are right and wrong, perfect and flawed versions. As James Heising rightly points out, modern children subjected to 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.²³ Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) is the rare case of a ‘new’ classic tale, and only for the Anglo-American world.

The result is a paradox. What was meant to free is now used to conform. Products of the imagination, says Zipes, are set in a socio-economic context and are used ultimately to impose limitations on the imagination of the producers and the receivers. The mediation between the imagination of the producer and audience becomes instrumental in standardizing forms and images of the fantasy.²⁴ Not only classic tales, but all other modern magic tales, which look to the classic ones as their basic models (their images, their syntax, etc.), are parts of a consensual ideology that fosters in people the sense that the current system is right, that it is beneficial, that alternatives are threatening.²⁵ One could argue that our contemporary culture does offer alternatives: on the one hand, we are free to embrace and perpetuate traditional, conventional stories; on the other, we are also free to question or undermine them through infinite forms of parody. The former kind of storytelling may be good for our children, so that they grow up by absorbing the eternal magic of the Grimms’ or Perrault’s tales (more likely through their film versions or simplified texts); the latter is more suitable for an adult audience hoping to subvert the status quo. Contemporary animated cinema astutely blends tradition with innovation by presenting, for example, gutsy princesses and dumb princes, without substantially changing the format of the tale (see the most recent films based on Snow White or Brave). What is missing from this scheme is a third possibility: the belief that something truly new, a new form of storytelling, a new form of magic may exist. In The Culture of Conformism, Patrick Colm Hogan speaks of the structural exclusion that cuts off cultural alternatives presented as simply impossible, unhealthy, extreme, or ridiculous, so as to reinforce a sense of safety against the unknown.²⁶

A frequent misunderstanding is to associate new forms of narrative expressions, such as comic books or graphic novels, with originality and freedom from old cultural conformities. The reality is that a new medium does not necessarily translate into a more vital artistic message. Even the Japanese manga with overt fairy-tale tones often seek to emphasize their Western sources. The popular Princess Tutu, for example, tells the story of the young Ahiru, a schoolgirl who loves ballet and dreams about dancing with a prince. The manga opens with the image of the girl’s romantic dream, which is a clear allusion to a Disney film, because only Disney can bless Princess Tutu with a sense of magic (see figure 1). Surrounded by flowers, the Japanese (Disney-Grimm) Cinderella pirouettes with her young lover and confesses: "I have a dream. One day, a handsome prince and I will dance a pas de deux.²⁷ These booklets prove that conformity transcends age. Young consumers are not less conventional than middle-aged ones. Both reason along the lines of an ingroup and outgroup" mentality, according to which classic magic tales are charming, eternal, and healthy, either in their traditional forms or in their updated versions.²⁸

Like the food we eat, the fairy tales we (children, adults, young adults) read, watch, or listen to, are processed; that is, we approach them knowing that what we are absorbing is derivative. In most American supermarkets and drug stores, we consumers find ‘organic’ food, which is supposed to be more real and substantial than our regular food. But a general perception is that organic food is not sufficient. Perceiving that the food we eat lacks the nutrients it used to have, we add protein pills, vitamins, omega three, and all sorts of precious herbs from distant lands that preserve the secret key to our ailments and deficient edibles. Whereas our processed food can give us deadly diseases such as cancer, mysterious herbs or roots from non-Western cultures can save us. On Espacio en blanco, a popular night program about mysteries and other realities on Radio nacional de España, the ethno-botanist Juan González Simoneau recently spoke about the sacred plants of Amazonia, whose great powers (curing a paralyzed man, for example, or even certain forms of cancer) seem astonishing for us Westerns only because we, unlike the primitives of Amazonia, have walked away from nature. The Amazonian tribes keep their ancient knowledge alive in ancestral communal houses, where at night they tell the stories that constructed the quotidian life of their ancestors, along with the myths, legends, instructions necessary for their tribal existence. Medical remedies, myths, legends are facets of the same natural knowledge that we have lost.²⁹

FIGURE 1. Manga, Princess Tutu, 2003

We travel out there (Amazonia is only one example) to find what is missing here. With a similar attitude, the nineteenth-century collectors of folk tales visited those who were socially inferior, and literally or metaphorically lived outside the urban and civilized society. Those people (peasants, maids, etc.) were different from us (members of the middle class), yet held something crucial for us (our soul, the spirit of our national identity). In a like manner, the Grimms insisted that their beloved storyteller Dorothea Viehmann was a peasant woman, even though, as Maria Tatar points out, she "was neither a peasant nor a representative of the Volk."³⁰ She was a tailor’s wife, and her tales had a strong French background. It is difficult to comprehend the enormous success of the Grimms’ book unless we recall the profound spiritual meaning that their tales seemed to convey, their sacred and ‘magical’ quality. ‘Primitive’ people hold the key to our identity, and their ‘ancestral’ folk tales were their modest way of expressing the wisdom that we have forgotten.

In the fascinating The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), the ecologist and philosopher David Abram rephrases the fundamental dichotomy between the world of the written word and processed stories, and the primitive world of orality: It is likely that the ‘inner world’ of our Western psychological experience, like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief, originates in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth . . . The sense of being immersed in a sentient world is preserved in the oral stories and songs of indigenous people—in the belief that sensible phenomena are all alive and aware, in the assumption that all things have the capacity of speech. Language, for oral people, is not a human invention but a gift of the land itself.³¹ In this context we are less interested in assessing the accuracy of Abram’s statement than in acknowledging that contemporary Western culture is indeed based on its perceived distance from the source of its identity. Abram sees human life as a living dream that we share with the soaring hawk, the spider, and the stone silently sprouting lichens on its course surface.³² Our task, Abram contends at the end of his significant book, "is that of taking up the written word . . . and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land . . . It is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local sound-scape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told."³³ We could read the conclusion of The Spell of the Sensuous as a manifesto, a compelling invitation to transform ourselves through a radical renovation of our storytelling. Abram’s insistence on going back to the land is in essence an invitation to move our storytelling back to nature, as the Grimms advocated also, even though Abram does not believe in the existence of an original, pure narrative form that needs to be preserved from the passing of time. Whereas the Grimms intended to preserve the past, Abram looks to the future, to a new way of spinning our living dream.

Living in nature and outside the boundaries of a civilized lifestyle makes the ‘primitives’ less clean and unaccustomed to the practice of writing. But dirt, a recent New York Times article suggests, is good for you: In a world of hand sanitizer and wet wipes we scarcely imagine the pre-industrial lifestyle that resulted in the daily intake of trillions of helpful organisms . . . Our rotting and fermenting food has been chilled.³⁴ However, our post-modern era of squeaky-clean food has deprived us of the benefits of what used to be unfiltered and unprocessed: Increasing evidence suggests that the alarming rise in allergic and autoimmune disorders during the past few decades is at least partly attributable to our lack of exposure to microorganisms that once covered our food and us. As a result, we should probably hug our local farmers’ markets a little tighter, because they are our only connector to the natural food of yesteryear. Many of the retellings of classical fairy tales try to smudge these pure tales with the mud of reality. An extreme case are the stories dealing with the horrors of Nazism, such as Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992) or Louise Murphy’s The True Story of Hansel and Gretel: A Novel of War and Survival (2003). Murphy’s adaptation opens with the image of a man and a stepmother driving a motorcycle in a desolate and snowy landscape in Poland. His two children sit in the sidecar. Since three Nazi motorcycles are about to catch up with them, the woman insists that they abandon the two children at the border of a forest because the kids are slowing them down. She also reminds the children not to disclose their Jewish names. You are Hansel and Gretel. Remember, she yells at them while they enter the dark wood.³⁵ If we usually associate a fairy-tale narrative with an abstract and atemporal place, a widespread tendency in contemporary literature and visual arts is to contaminate them by setting them in brutally realistic, un-fairy-tale settings.³⁶ The irruption of reality into the realm of classical fairy tales is a form of parody.

A ‘dirty,’ unrefined kind of storytelling is a central topic of this book. Despite the Grimms’ questionable statement about Dorothea Viehmann, oral folk tales used to be dirty. Please remember Novalis’s emphasis on the link between marvelous and unconnected in a genuine fairy tale. Dirty, immoral, obscene, disjointed are some of the adjectives used to characterize Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales) the first collection of European literary fairy tales (1634–36). These tales are dirty also because they are unpolished and resemble rushed transcriptions of oral stories. Recall the citation at the beginning of this introduction. It comes from The Art of Remembering (L’arte del ricordare, 1566), a popular Renaissance treatise on the art of memory, a set of rhetorical techniques that meant to revitalize the Latin tradition of oratory. Its author, Giovan Battista della Porta (Naples 1535–1615), was one of the most famous philosophers and scientists of sixteenth-century Europe. Quintilian and Cicero wrote famous books that explained how a public speaker could memorize a long and complex speech and then deliver it in the most effective way. In The Art of Remembering, Della Porta fondly recalls the marvel arising from the poorly composed fairy tales (mal composte favole) that his nurse used to tell him as a child.³⁷ Unlike Dorothea Viehmann, Della Porta’s nurse did not recite stories by heart from an imaginary book that was yet to be written; the Italian tales had something spontaneous and unscripted, which contributed to an effect of marvel (maraviglia) that marked the child’s imagination forever. The ‘dirt’ of the Italian nurse’s tales has become unfamiliar to us. Commenting on his fairy-tale film Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno, 2006), the director Guillermo del Toro laments the audience’s resistance to all forms of storytelling that defy full explanation.³⁸ Every moment in a magic tale must make sense, del Toro complains.

Contemporary Western literary culture is firmly rooted in parody. We live in a postclassical time reminiscent of a late-antiquity or post-Renaissance, baroque environment, in which ‘classical’ texts were perceived as supreme models with which readers and writers conversed and tried to imitate, without questioning their fundamental superiority and immutability. In Zipes’s words, a community may still think in terms of a previous time or behave according to thought patterns and traditions of a past society while living in the present.³⁹ This paradoxical situation takes place when the social development does not fully work out the contradictions of the past society. Resorting to parody is a way of maintaining a solid link to the past while implicitly acknowledging the discomfort of this dependence. Parody, Simon Dentith points out, includes any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice.⁴⁰ This general definition is effective if by polemical we also include all forms of texts that try to improve or update the original. Bowdlerized versions of the Grimms’ tales, all the rewritings considered more suitable for present-day children, are also, from this perspective, forms of parody, because parody depends for its effect upon recognition of the parodied original, or at least, upon some knowledge of the style or discourse to which allusion is being made.⁴¹ In her introduction to The Fairies Return, or New Tales for Old, Maria Tatar stresses that both satire and fairy tale are driven by a lack, by a sense that something vital is missing.⁴² I would argue that the lack in modern takes on classic literary tales is not only the longing for a more humane world, which is a fundamental constituent of this narrative genre (fairy tales express hope for a better life), but also the frustration with a narrative language that is derivative and insufficient. Today the genre of fairy tales, Claudio Marazzini rightly contends, is not as vital as it was in an archaic agricultural society in which oral performance triumphed.⁴³

Speaking about the great impact that Ovid’s Metamorphoses had on his poetics, in a 1973 interview the great American postmodern novelist Robert Coover, whose books often mock and subvert the most famous classic fairy tales, stated that Ovid’s poem helped him understand how strongly we resist change: The Ovidian stories all concern transformation . . . I suddenly realized that the basic, constant struggle for all of us is against metamorphosis.⁴⁴ A fundamental tenet of modern consumerist society is that consumers be given a predictable version of what they already know or have. The stories of Cinderella and Snow White can certainly be varied, since variations make them appear alive, but not transformed to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Consumers buy a novel or a children’s book with the same attitude they approach the purchase of a car or a dishwasher. The pictures on the book cover, the blurbs on its back, but also the previews of upcoming films, interviews on talk shows with their protagonists are only some of the possible paratextual techniques used to titillate consumers’ desire and reassure them that the product they are about to purchase is safe because it is well known to them. The most frequent adjective used to dismiss a failed product is ‘weird,’ whereas what is successful, because it looks both new and familiar, is ‘cool.’ Cool is a matter of things, Michael Taussig writes in Beauty and the Beast, yet it is also, and because of that, predominantly image, predominantly the occasion of looking and being looked at, of display.⁴⁵

A BRIEF HISTORICAL SURVEY OF THE MOST IMPORTANT APPROACHES TO FOLK AND FAIRY TALES

Consumers also make use of legitimate critical findings to reinforce the idea that what the Grimms, and later Disney, accomplished is the last step in a natural, and immemorial, evolution toward clarity and perfection, in other words, written documents. The notion that those cherished and reassuring tales are literary constructions and not natural phenomena is hard to accept. We are immediately reminded that in reality these tales have an extremely ancient origin and are present in diverse cultures (Cinderella first appeared in China in the ninth century!), and that in reality they are ancient myths in disguise. They are thus eternal. In other words, classic literary magic tales have acquired a theological depth; they must be taken as articles of faith. They are sacred narratives of Western spirituality. Like the differing stories in the four Gospels, these tales do accept variations, as long as their existence is not called into question. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the study and growing knowledge of the ancient languages of India and of the texts, Jan de Vries explains, made a path far deeper into the past than the Greek or Germanic sources.⁴⁶ The Vedas, the most ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism, were rich in mythic allusions and powerful descriptions of nature. Also inspired by the Brothers Grimm (Jacob published German Mythology in 1835), Adalbert Kuhn, the founder of Indo-European archeology, became interested in popular traditions and collections of folk tales, which led him to the study of mythology. In The Descent of Fire and of the Divine Drink (1859), which can be seen as the first example of comparative mythology, Kuhn offers a mythic interpretation of natural phenomena. Prometheus, for example, is an old god of fire, who, in Kuhn’s hypothesis, should be connected to the Sanskrit word pramantha, which indicates the sticks that priests used to light a fire.⁴⁷

Max Müller in England and his follower Angelo de Gubernatis in Italy looked to India as the primordial source of all folk and fairy tales.⁴⁸ For these scholars, Indian myths were behind the tales collected in the Grimms’ book.⁴⁹ De Gubernatis dedicates the first chapter of his History of Folk Tales (1883) to the tale of Cinderella, which he connects to the image of the dawn interpreted according to Indian mythology:

The dawn walks ahead of the sun, but neither she (lei) touches him nor does he touch her. The sun follows her; she dances before him, but when they seem to get closer, they depart from each other. The Vedic dawn always flees on a luminous, extremely fast chariot, which the two celestial knights, the dioscuri, perhaps brothers of hers, lent her. In a like manner, when the ball is over, i.e., the celebration of light, she flees on the same large chariot that took her there.⁵⁰

The Christianized Cinderella tales we hear in Northern Italy, de Gubernatis holds, are variants of the original Vedic story.⁵¹ Despite its far-fetched conclusions, de Gubernatis’s detailed interpretation of the most famous motifs of the Grimms’ Cinderella is a pleasure to read as another form of independent literary product inspired by the literary tale. In de Gubernatis’s accounts, the clear-cut differences between mythic and fairy-tale stories become blurry. More importantly, this kind of (scientifically questionable) approach can be seen as an attempt to remythologize nature, if we bear in mind that, as Laurence Coupe contends, "myth is a living force when it is understood as imaginative exploration; it becomes sterile and oppressive when it is read as literal explanation."⁵² This, in my view, is the major flaw of numerous psychoanalytic readings, which use fairy-tale motifs to prove Freud’s or Jung’s theories; that is, to confirm an already established and literal explanation of magic tales. Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1976), based on a Freudian approach, or Marie-Louise von Franz’s The Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1970), reproducing a Jungian mindset, are two well-known, albeit controversial, examples.⁵³

All the above approaches share a view of folk and fairy tales as narrative ‘types,’ with infinite and essentially inconsequential, variations. It is worth citing, at this point, a key passage from J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous essay On Fairy-Stories, in which the author of The Lord of the Rings tackles this important issue. Students of folklore, he writes,

are inclined to say that any two stories that are built round the same folk-lore motive, or are made up of a generally similar combination of such motives, are the same stories. We read that Beowulf "is only a version of Dat Erdmänneken; that The Black Bull of Norroway is Beauty and the Beast, or is the same story as Eros and Psyche" . . . Statements of this kind may express (in undue abbreviation) some element of truth; but they are not true in a fairy-story sense, they are not true in art or literature. It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count.⁵⁴

Tolkien rightly emphasizes that a motif is not a story, and that even when two stories share some easily recognizable motifs, they may differ in substance. Tolkien explains that dissecting a tale into a sequence of motifs (its bones) ends up depriving the tale of its uniqueness and its life. But dissecting was in fact the prevalent scientific approach to oral magic tales throughout the twentieth century. Instead of acknowledging that, regardless of its form of transmission (oral, semiliterary, or literary), a tale exists as an independent organism, albeit in dialogue with a multitude of other tales, the overwhelming majority of scholarship dedicated to this genre has operated according to a series of distinctions: written versus oral; eternal and classic tales versus transient, unstable, and thus inferior written versions; written tales with or without an author. The fundamental and justified impulse to organize the countless number of oral tales has exerted a long-lasting influence on how we, the general public and experts, read them. We see an oral, authorless tale as a reservoir of motifs. Within this critical frame, we can also draw some conclusions about the overall cultural message of a given collection (how it defies or reaffirms the social credo in which its tales were told).

Salman Rushdie lampoons the motif-driven analysis of folk and fairy tales in Haroun and the Sea Stories, an original interpretation of the Arabian Nights. Haroun, the hero of Rushdie’s book, suddenly finds himself standing in a landscape that looked exactly like a giant chessboard . . . He was, so to speak, looking out through the eyes of the young hero of the story.⁵⁵ The hero of this postmodern magic tale sees a tower with a window, out of which gazed a captive princess. Haroun, however, doesn’t know that what he is experiencing is Princess Rescue Story Number S/1001/ZHT/420/41(r)xi; and because the princess in this particular story had recently had a haircut and therefore had no long tresses to let down (unlike the heroine of Princess Rescue Story G/1001/RIM/777/M(w)I, better known as ‘Rapunzel’), Haroun as the hero was required to climb up the outside of the tower by clinging to the cracks between the stones with his bare hands and feet. By cutting her hair, Rushdie’s princess disrupts the patterned format of her own tale, according to which she is supposed to act as an Arabian Rapunzel. Rushdie mocks two of the most pervasive modern approaches to folk and fairy tales. The first is based on a catalogue of universal types and motifs originated from the so-called Finnish School in the first decades of the twentieth century. Antti Aarne’s and Stith Thompson’s immensely influential The Types of Folk-Tale (published in 1928 and 1961), and Thompson’s Motif-Index (1932–36) are the two pillars of the Finnish school, whose central position in the study of folklore and fairy-tale literature is so crucial that, according to Alan Dundes, anyone who writes about Indo-European fairy tales without reference to the Aarne-Thompson (AT) classification system is almost certainly an amateur or dilettante from the folklorist’s point of view.⁵⁶

The second fundamental approach teased in the passage from Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea Stories is Propp’s emphasis on the structure of the tale, seen as a sequence of a limited number of possible actions. Contemporary to the Finnish school’s method of analysis, Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928) represents the other seminal work of the twentieth century in the field of folklore studies, even though it became known in Western Europe only three decades later. Propp’s dissection of the Russian magic tale, the main focus of his research, looks to its composition, which he divides into a series of functions. A function, in Propp’s own words, is an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action.⁵⁷

The motif-based analysis originating in the Finnish school and Propp’s structural approach are necessary attempts to systematize the ocean of folk and fairy tales of the Western tradition. Both result, however, in an abstract approach, which risks denaturalizing the tale itself. By looking at the tale as a conglomerate of universal units (motifs, types, functions, etc.), these approaches emphasize what makes a tale similar to a myriad of others, and not what makes it unique.⁵⁸ In Jack Goody’s view, for example, Propp doesn’t seem to realize that changes in a recitation can be very radical, in a generative way, leading to something ‘other.⁵⁹ In The Cinderella Story, an anthology of twenty-two versions of the famous tale, Neil Philip remarks that using such tools as The Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, it is fatally easy to get bogged down in classification and comparison . . . Each version should stand and be considered on its own.⁶⁰ Several folklore and literary studies point out the limits of Aarne-Thompson’s and Propp’s approaches, but their overall influence on how we read folk and fairy tales has been much more subtle and pervasive than we are willing to acknowledge.

The widespread identification between classic fairy tales and types, as we said earlier, and some fundamental critical approaches highlighting the universality of this form of storytelling (structuralism, motif-inventory, but also psychoanalysis) have led to a generalized weakening of the tales themselves. By weakening I mean a significant reduction in the potential ‘magic’ of the tale itself. We have domesticated the tales; we have tamed them. Not only are their new versions often repetitious and predictable; their characters, especially the most famous ones, have become parodies of themselves.

A recent narrative strategy to revitalize them, which is in fact an attempt to say something new about them, is to gather all the major characters of these narrative types into one big story, in which Snow White, Cinderella, Prince Charming, but also Pinocchio and Beauty and the Beast, interact among themselves. The authors of such retellings emphasize that these characters survive in a circumscribed space, which is meant either to protect them from the rest of society or to prevent them from going into the world of human beings. I will mention three variations of this narrative setting. The most original and entertaining one is Michael Buckley’s The Sisters Grimm, a series of young adult novels centered on the characters of two young girls whose parents have vanished for no apparent reason. The two girls, after being assigned to mean and abusive foster parents, are brought to an elderly lady, Grandma Grimm, who speaks with a German accent and who has applied to adopt them.

Mrs. Grimm lives in a remote little town called Ferryport Landing, in the state of New York. She explains to the stunned girls that the Grimms’ collection is a history book because "every story is an account of something that really happened."⁶¹ Wilhelm Grimm, who was the girls’ great-great-great-great grandfather, brought the fairy-tale creatures (called Everafters, including other major figures such as Pinocchio, Geppetto, and Baba Yaga) to America because, being different from other people, they were being persecuted in Europe. They settled in the isolated Ferryport Landing, but soon felt endangered again when humans began to move to their town. Showing great hostility toward the human race that had abused them in Europe, the Everafters threatened to mount a rebellion. To prevent a war between humans and fairy-tale characters that would spill over the entire continent, Wilhelm Grimm cast a spell on the village, which made it impossible for the Everafters to leave.⁶² They now used magical disguises to live and work alongside their normal neighbors.⁶³

Fairy-tale characters as an endangered species is also the central idea of Fables (first published in 2002), a popular comic book series focused on the secret community of fables, a new name for characters of fairy tales who, after being exiled from their homeland by the evil Adversary, now live incognito in a quiet little corner of New York City.⁶⁴ Fables are in constant danger of being discovered and persecuted by human beings (called mundies) and unknown enemy alike (see figure 2).⁶⁵ The lighthearted The Sisters Grimm and the bleak Fables share a similar insight: the traditional, classic fairy-tale characters risk being annihilated, even though they are supposed to be immortal. They barely survive, hidden in a ghetto (a small town or a few remote blocks in New York City). The paradox behind both series is that, although humans seem to adore the classic tales, they can’t tolerate the actual existence of their characters, who can be accepted only as abstract figures frozen in time and pinned down in conventional books. Humans love them as wax figures in a Madame Tussaud’s museum or in a Disney World park.

FIGURE 2. Front cover of Fables, vol. 1, 2012

The Sisters Grimm and Fables reveal a second major element: in order for their biographies to develop, these characters must live together, because after their exile (from Western Europe, from their homeland), they continue each other’s stories; they keep each other alive, since their audience is unwilling to accept them for who they really are. Snow White becomes a character of Cinderella’s and Pinocchio’s ‘new’ biographies, which remain unknown to human beings. The unremarkable ABC TV series Once upon a Time (2011), clearly indebted to The Sisters Grimm, describes an imaginary, remote town in Maine, where the evil queen of the Snow White tale keeps all the major fairy-tale characters under her strict surveillance after casting a spell that prevents them from leaving. Snow White, Prince Charming, Red Riding Hood do not remember their glorious past.

The three recent narrative series we have mentioned (The Sisters Grimm, Fables, Once upon a Time) try to inject new blood into the conventional versions of some classic tales, which have been reduced to narrative types almost devoid of any narrative energy. These recent products are also forms of parodic rewritings, expressions of a postclassic anxiety, which looks to pastiche as a form of artistic survival. An additional serious problem concerning the sclerotic biography of classic characters is that in reality they don’t have one, if by biography we mean a clearly identifiable sequence of events characterizing the life of a (fictional) individual. Although contemporary consumers of magic tales are vaguely aware that the Grimms tampered with some previous oral versions of their most popular tales, they still believe that the Grimms (who are now more a concept than real authors) captured the real, immemorial form of a given tale, even though Jack Goody wonders if one can talk about an original folktale.⁶⁶ Goody’s statement is particularly significant if read in the light of what Tolkien said about the intrinsic difference between a motif and a story. Take, for example, the case of Sleeping Beauty. In the Western tradition, we usually think of three main literary variations, even though its first formation is to be found in the fourteenth-century French romance Perceforest.⁶⁷ The first main variation is to be found in Giambattista Basile’s Italian The Tale of Tales (1634–36); the second appears in Perrault’s French Tales and Stories of the Past (1697); and the third in the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales (last edition 1857).

The moment defining the Sleeping Beauty’s identity is usually linked to her awakening thanks to the prince’s intervention (possibly his kiss). The beautiful girl coming back to life exists insofar as she wakes up from a long sleep. This is the core of her story, but only if we see the Grimms’ tale as the conclusive step of a process of clarification. In other words, the Grimms’ Sleeping Beauty is finally herself after shedding the dross of previous inaccurate or digressive versions, which had failed to capture the true spirit of her biography. The reality, on the contrary, is that Basile, Perrault, and the Grimms are not talking about the same young woman In this regard, it is useful to read the brief summary preceding the Basile version titled Sun, Moon, and Talia. We don’t know if Basile authored the synopses introducing each of his fifty tales, but what matters for us is seeing what details were perceived as necessary in the transmission of the tale. What is Sun, Moon, and Talia about? This is what the summary says:

Talia dies because of a little piece of flax and is left in a palace, where a king chances to pass by and causes her to have two children. The children fall into the hands of the king’s jealous wife, who orders that they be cooked and served to their father and that Talia be burned. The cook saves the children and Talia is freed by the king, who has his wife thrown into the same fire that had been prepared for Talia.⁶⁸

What stands out in this short summary is that it makes no allusion to the magical moment of the girl’s awakening. It is true that, unlike Perrault and the Grimms, Basile doesn’t describe a resurrection due to the power of romantic love. The king, a married man, rapes the sleeping girl and walks away. Talia comes back to life months later when one of her babies accidentally sucks the piece of flax out of her fingernail. The immoral nature of the king’s encounter with the sleeping girl fails to justify the lack of any reference to her sudden awakening, for Basile too presents it as a moving, magical moment, which celebrates maternal and not romantic love. Talia sits up, sees her beautiful babies, and hugs them tight. Basile writes: Talia felt as if she were awakening from a long sleep, and when she saw those jewels beside her she offered them her tit and held them as dear as her own life.

The summary of Basile’s Sun, Moon, and Talia focuses on the part of the story that Perrault kept in his rewriting, but the Grimms removed in its entirety. It is fair to say that the changes introduced in Perrault’s version essentially reflect his intention to moralize the tale. Although this is not the point of my analysis, it is hard to believe that the French author ignored Basile’s version. One could even speak of plagiarism, since we are in the realm of literary texts. The idea that Basile’s The Tale of Tales couldn’t be known in France has been questioned more frequently in recent times.⁶⁹ Instead of a married and unfaithful king, Perrault introduces a brave young prince. Instead of a jealous wife, in the French tale we find an evil mother who was of the race of the ogres, a nonhuman creature.⁷⁰ For the author of the summary in Basile’s book, what precedes the girl’s awakening (her sad fate foretold by her rich father’s wise men) is superfluous if compared to the exciting events following her return to life. Opening with the brief sentence Talia dies, the Italian summary tells the story of an innocent young girl and her babies persecuted by a jealous wife, and the reversal of fortune at the end of the tale. The breaking of the spell does not define the girl’s identity. Her identity is marked by her sudden death, not by her awakening. We could ironically say that if the anonymous author of the summary had read the Grimms’ ‘correct’ version of the story, he wouldn’t have made the gross mistake of overlooking the centrality of the girl’s awakening. No modern retelling misses it.

Sleeping Beauty, as we know her, was born with the Brothers Grimm as a result of the radical editing that they performed on the tale transmitted by Basile and Perrault. The Grimms’ version is significantly shorter than the Italian and French tales. The young woman’s awakening becomes the crucial mark of her identity when the Grimms truncate her biography, which in the Italian and French stories continues with her distressing misadventures at the king’s court. In the Grimms’ Brier Rose, on the contrary, the girl’s story ends with the kiss that breaks the evil spell and leads to her subsequent marvelous marriage. Nothing relevant happens in her life after the historic kiss. Sleeping Beauty, our modern conventional Sleeping Beauty, was born at that moment. True, it was Perrault who first highlighted the romantic tone of the girl’s awakening, but Perrault’s heroine is not the girl we have come to associate with Sleeping Beauty. The Grimms knew how crucial the ending of a tale is. In their German summaries and adaptations of Basile’s fifty Italian tales, which the Grimms published merely as an appendix to the second edition of their collection (1822), the two German writers performed a similar editorial work. At times, the Grimms chopped off the final chunk of an Italian tale in order to make it more romantic and magical. They make a tale end with a heart-warming embrace (the male protagonist takes his lady in his arms) even when the Italian tale doesn’t end there.

THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

Although Basile’s Tale of Tales is the main source of inspiration and point of reference of the entire volume, this book is divided into three major parts.

The first part opens with Basile’s extraordinary rewritings of the Cupid and Psyche myth, which is an ancient tale of the Western tradition. It is in Basile’s book that we find the first modern interpretations of the classical tale. I will place Basile’s rewritings of Cupid and Psyche in dialogue with Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilian Fairy Tales, an important nineteenth-century collection of oral tales in which fascinating rewritings of Basile’s own interpretations of the Latin myth are identified. This dialogue between the baroque masterpiece and the nineteenth-century collection throws light on the crucial concepts of beginning and ending in a folk and fairy tale.

The second part begins with an analysis of Basile’s The Myrtle (La mortella) This tale, one of the best-known in The Tale of Tales, contains clear echoes of the Cupid and Psyche myth and leads to a turning point in the history of the Western fairy tale. We will look at the way three major figures of German Romanticism—Clemens Brentano and the Brothers Grimm—interpreted and appropriated Basile in order to justify a radically different view of the magic tale. For Brentano and the Grimms, Basile’s The Tale of Tales represents the first collection of national magic tales. Brentano contends that Basile composed an essentially literary interpretation of oral folk tales, whereas the Grimms emphasize the oral nature of Basile’s book. Furthermore, we will see that Brentano became the scribe of an oral storyteller when he returned to the Catholic faith and befriended the mystic Anna Katharina Emmerick, whose visions Brentano transcribed live. It is worth mentioning that Anna Katharina’s Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu Christi inspired Mel Gibson’s controversial film The Passion of the Christ, although critics agree that this mystical text was largely the work of the poet Brentano.⁷¹ In a subsequent chapter we focus on the tale of Beauty and the Beast, one of the best-known metamorphoses of the Cupid and Psyche tale. The German Romantic poet Novalis saw this famous fairy tale as representing a fundamental philosophical concept: the universal harmonization of two opposites, which is the core of Novalis’s poetics.

The third and final part opens with a detailed analysis of Robert Coover’s postmodern interpretation of classic fairy tales, especially Basile’s version of Sleeping Beauty, which the American author places in opposition to the conventional version deriving from Perrault, the Grimms, and Disney. We find a ferocious attack on the banality of Disney’s appropriation of the magic of fairy tales in Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom, whose unbecoming, ‘dirty’ storytelling, especially in the conclusion of his book, takes us back to the original ‘dirt’ of Basile’s style. Part three ends with a study of a popular kind of present-day memoir, in which some basic traits of a fairy-tale narrative can be identified. Memoirs of this kind are based on an original trauma (an abusive mother or the death of a daughter or husband, for example) and often unfold according to a fairy-tale format. The last chapter of my book shows that, although oral storytelling barely exists anymore and the classic fairy tale has turned into a banal form of literary reproduction, innovative forms of this genre are detectable outside its traditional boundaries. In the final