Tired Tales

“...Readers can be inventive, oppositional, and rebellious...but the real restlessness of readers manifests itself in the activity of rewriting and redrafting. Readers famously copy out books they love, write prequels and sequels to them, or just refashion them in their heads, often with little regard for what was actually in the book.”

“The French sociologist Michel de Certaeu has argued that, as readers, we are not passive beings, molded, marked, informed, or imprinted by cultural products. Instead, we invent responses to texts in ways detached from the moral, educational, or aesthetic agendas advanced by their authors. As we read we engage, interpret, and improvise, creating new narratives.”

“Wondrous narratives transfix children, engaging their intellectual powers and administering jolts of curiosity with the horrors they portray. The unsparing savagery of fair tales-with their predatory wolves, murderous stepmothers, treacherous siblings, and ravenous giants-does more than stun, astound, and shock. It also bewilders children in ways that drive them to know more, to launch intellectual campaigns, that will broaden their understanding of the human condition and help them navigate and manage what lies ahead.”

“The fairy tale, in sum, knows no stable middle ground. Inversion of character traits, violation of narrative norms, and reversal of initial conditions are just a few of the ways in which it overturns notions of immutability and creates a fictional world in which the one constant value is change.”

“Fairy tales have many marvelous features, but none perhaps so disarming as their persistent thematic and structural uniformity. Reading fairy tales from the world over, one is struck time and again by a feeling of dejà vu or dejà entendu. Folklorists have advanced two different, although not entirely incompatible, theories...The first, known as the theory of migration or borrowing, proceeds along the assumption that nothing new is ever discovered so long as it is possible to copy...The contrasting theory of polygenesis assumes that resemblances among tales can be attributed to independent invention in places unconnected by trade routes or travel...Defenders of polygenesis endorse the notion of spontaneous generation and focus on the meaning of tales...The human psyche figures as the breeding ground for folkloristic plots.”

“Italo Calvino has observed that every tale, no matter what its origins, “tends to absorb something of the place where it is narrated-a landscape, a custom, a moral outlook, or else merely a very faint accent or flavor of its locality.” Sometimes that something can be trivial...but often it takes on a representative significance, telling us something about the ethos and assumptions of the culture in which the given tale took hold and developed in new directions.”

“Critics have accused Wilhelm Grimm not only of creating a homogenous, stylized language for the tales, but also of introducing messages, motivations, judgments, morals, and other often pedantic touches. A prisoner of his passion for order, logic, and instrumentality, Wilhelm Grimm unfailingly smoothed the rough edges of the tales he heard and read, even as he imbued them with the values and pedagogical demands of his time.”

“Ever storyteller has a unique repertory of tales, one developed in collaboration with an audience. Much as the tellers of the tales may appear to exercise unilateral control over their material, their powers of invention are to some extent held in check by their audiences. The successful retelling of a tale requires the narrator to take the measure of his listeners, anticipate their wishes, and veer away from what might offend their ears...The folkloric community operates as a kind of censor, endlessly revising the content of the tale until it meets with full approval. Thus it is not surprising to find radically different versions of the same tale as one moves from one cultural context to another. Each community or culture participates in its own unique oral narrative traditions, imbuing them with their particular mores and values.”

“Folktales are historical documents, [Robert Darnton] tells us, each colored by the mental life and culture of its epoch. Interpreting a folktale without troubling oneself to learn about its genesis and historical context can spell disaster.”

“Through the medium of these traditional tales, even when they fail to meet today’s standards of political correctness, we can reflect on what matters in our lives, about issues ranging from fear of abandonment and death to fantasies of revenge and retaliation that lead to happily-ever-after. Even if stories were told “once upon a time,” in another time and place, they can provide opportunities for reflecting on cultural differences, on what was once at stake in our life decisions and what is at stake today...We can mediate on the effects of the stories and reflect on our own cultural values engaging in a reading that can take at times a playful turn, at times a philosophical turn.”

“Bringing myths down to earth and inflecting them in human rather than heroic terms, fairy tales put a familiar spin on the stories in the archive of our collective imagination. What is Tom Thumb or Jack if not a secular David or diminutive Odysseus, and what is Bluebeard’s wife if not a cousin of Psyche and a daughter of Eve? Fairy tales take us from a reality that is familiar in the double sense of the term-deeply personal and at the same time centered on the family and it’s conflicts than on what is at stake in the world at large.”

“Fairy tales are up close and personal, mixing fact with fantasy to tell us about our deepest anxieties and desires. They offer roadmaps pointing the way to romance and riches, power and privilege, and most importantly to a way out of the woods, back to the safety and security of home.”

“Fairy tales may seem to operate in some form of. cultural-repetition compulsion, but in fact that is only because we continue to need stories that expose wrongdoing, reveal ways to survivor, and point the way to justice.”

“In the safe space of once-upon-a-time-in-Hollywood and within the domain of the symbolic, we can face down the specters that haunt us. Disturbing metaphors are always easier to process than disturbing realities, and they lower our inhibitions, allowing us to engage out critical faculties in ways that often do not happen when we encounter trauma in real life.”

“ Atwoods…exercise (a story about storytelling) suggests that the process of internalizing and retelling can open your eyes to realities that – however disruptive, painful, and disturbing - are not without a liberating potential. Just as the telling of stories and fairy tales leads to discovery and disclosure, so the rewriting of the story can lead to some kind of liberating rebirth.”

“ “All must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending on how you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more-which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of the readers, the realm of change.” In other words, we have to take those stories from times past and make them our own.”

“What is at stake and Carter’s rewritings of fairy tales? Nothing less than a focused protest, an unrepentant rebuke, and a powerful retort to stories that once duped us, taking us in with their cozy bedside manner. Carter’s heroines, bent on self actualization and reconciliation – the word “peace“ recurs mantra-like in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories-repudiate the cult of self effacement and self immolation in fairytales that continues to perpetuate itself through films like Disney.”