The Irresistible Fairy Tale

The Cultural and Social History of a Genre

Jack Zipes

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781400841820
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A provocative new theory about fairy tales from one of the world's leading authorities If there is one genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world, it is the fairy tale. Yet we still have great difficulty understanding how it originated, evolved, and spread—or why so many people cannot resist its appeal, no matter how it changes or what form it takes. In this book, renowned fairy-tale expert Jack Zipes presents a provocative new theory about why fairy tales were created and retold—and why they became such an indelible and infinitely adaptable part of cultures around the world.Drawing on cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, literary theory, and other fields, Zipes presents a nuanced argument about how fairy tales originated in ancient oral cultures, how they evolved through the rise of literary culture and print, and how, in our own time, they continue to change through their adaptation in an ever-growing variety of media. In making his case, Zipes considers a wide range of fascinating examples, including fairy tales told, collected, and written by women in the nineteenth century; Catherine Breillat's film adaptation of Perrault's "Bluebeard"; and contemporary fairy-tale drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that critique canonical print versions.While we may never be able to fully explain fairy tales, The Irresistible Fairy Tale provides a powerful theory of how and why they evolved—and why we still use them to make meaning of our lives.

1

The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales: Human Communication and Memetics

Even the simplest and most static of human cultures is an engine of inventive mutual influence and change. Furthermore, at least orally, human cultures preserve historical record, imaginative or real, couched in a human language. The past pervades human consciousness to some degree even in the simplest societies, and discussions of past events—narrating, sometimes dramatically, commenting on the narration, challenging points of fact or logic, and co-constructing a suite of stories—occupied many an evening for perhaps 300,000 years, but not for millions of years before that. And while our ancestors were arguing, many ape communities not far away in the forest were making their—yes, traditional—nests and drifting off to sleep. The only modern apes that have learned language learned it from human teachers, and none of their wild counterparts has anything like it. Even if their individual minds preserve some private history, it is difficult to see how they could have a collective one without being able to tell it to each other and to their young. All human cultures can, do, and probably must.

—Melvin Konner, The Evolution of Childhood (2010)

Stories may not actually breathe, but they can animate. The breath imputed by this book’s title is the breath of a god in creation stories, as that god gives life to the lump that will become human. Stories animate human life; that is their work. Stories work with people, for people, and always stories work on people, affecting what people are able to see as real, as possible, and as worth doing or best avoided. What is it about stories—what are their particularities—that enables them to work as they do? More than mere curiosity is at stake in this question, because human life depends on the stories we tell: the sense of self that those stories impart, the relationships constructed around shared stories, and the sense of purpose that stories both propose and foreclose

—Arthur Frank, Letting Stories Breathe (2010)

Though it is impossible to trace the historical origins and evolution of fairy tales to a particular time and place, we do know that humans began telling tales as soon as they developed the capacity of speech. They may have even used sign language before speech originated to communicate vital information for adapting to their environment.¹ Units of this information gradually formed the basis of narratives that enabled humans to learn about themselves and the worlds that they inhabited. Informative tales were not given titles. They were simply told to mark an occasion, set an example, warn about danger, procure food, or explain what seemed inexplicable. People told stories to communicate knowledge and experience in social contexts.

Though many ancient tales might seem magical, miraculous, fanciful, superstitious, or unreal to us, people believed them, and these people were and are not much different from people today who believe in religions, miracles, cults, nations, and notions such as “free” democracies that have little basis in reality. In fact, religious and patriotic stories have more in common with fairy tales than we realize, except that fairy tales tend to be secular and are not based on a prescriptive belief system or religious codes. Fairy tales are informed by a human disposition to action—to transform the world and make it more adaptable to human needs, while we also try to change and make ourselves fit for the world. Therefore, the focus of fairy tales, whether oral, written, or cinematic, has always been on finding magical instruments, extraordinary technologies, or powerful people and animals that will enable protagonists to transform themselves along with their environment, making it more suitable for living in peace and contentment. Fairy tales begin with conflict because we all begin our lives with conflict. We are all misfit for the world, and somehow we must fit in, fit in with other people, and thus we must invent or find the means through communication to satisfy as well as resolve conflicting desires and instincts.

Fairy tales are rooted in oral traditions and, as I mentioned above, were never given titles, nor did they exist in the forms in which they are told, printed, painted, recorded, performed, filmed, and manufactured today. Folklorists generally make a distinction between wonder folk tales, which originated in oral traditions throughout the world and still exist, and literary fairy tales, which emanated from the oral traditions through the mediation of manuscripts and print, and continue to be created today in various mediated forms around the world. In both the oral and literary traditions, the tale types influenced by cultural patterns are so numerous and diverse that it is almost impossible to define a wonder folk or fairy tale, or explain the relationship between the two modes of communication. There are helpful catalogs of tale types along with encyclopedias of fairy tales such as Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson’s The Types of the Folktale (1928), revised by Hans-Jörg Uther in 2004, my Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (2000), William Hansen’s Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature (2002), Donald Haase’s Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales (2007), and the worthwhile ongoing project Enzyklopädie des Märchens, begun in 1958 and still not finished. Yet despite the value of these books, the intricate relationship and evolution of folk and fairy tales are difficult to comprehend and define. In fact, together, oral and literary tales form one immense and complex genre because they are inextricably dependent on one another.

It is for this reason that I use the modern term “fairy tale” in this book to encompass the oral tradition as the genre’s vital progenitor and try to explain the inexplicable fairy tale, including its evolution and dissemination. In other words, my use of the term fairy tale here refers to the symbiotic relationship of oral and literary currents, even if I occasionally make historical distinctions concerning the mediation and reception of different tale types. In focusing on the interaction between various mediations of the fairy tale, I want to refute the useless dichotomies such as print versus oral that some scholars are still promoting to paint a misinformed history of the fairy tale.² I also want to explore the more sophisticated and innovative theories of storytelling, cultural evolution, human communication, and memetics to see how they might enable us to understand why we are disposed toward fairy tales, and how they breathe life into our daily undertakings.

In his most recent book, Letting Stories Breathe, Frank notes that stories embody capacities we need to consider in order to articulate and discuss problematic issues in our lives. Frank maintains that he does not want to interpret stories. Rather, he uses several different types of narratives to explain the claims and operating premises of socio-narratology. He is not interested in interpreting stories because critics tend to use heuristics and critical methodologies to foreclose the meanings of stories. Frank wants to analyze how stories work by focusing on how they are in dialogue with one another, people’s experiences, and societies.³ The source for Frank’s ideas on dialogic narratology is the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who elaborated principles of dialogic philosophy in his many works.⁴ Key for Frank is the notion that all utterances are essentially dialogic because they depend on the interplay of varied, and at times opposed, meanings. At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that all language usage is a product of conflicting social forces that engender constant reinterpretation.

Given the dialogic nature of language and how we use it to form narratives that inform us, Frank’s basic premises are these:

1. Stories do not belong to storytellers and story listeners because all stories are “reassemblies of fragments on loan” and “depend on shared narrative sources.”⁵

2. Stories not only contribute to the making of our narrative selves but also weave the threads of social relationships and make life social.

3. Stories have certain distinct capacities that enable them to do what they do best and can be understood as narrative types or genres. Though distinct, genres of stories depend on one another, for there is no such thing as a pure genre, and all tale types have a symbiotic relationship to one another.

4. Socio-narratology encourages a dialogic mode of interpretation so that all voices can be heard, and open up a story for various interpretations and possible uses.

5. “Socio-narratology, although always relational in recognizing that all parties act, pays most attention to stories acting. It analyzes how stories breathe as they animate, assemble, entertain, and enlighten, and also deceive and divide people.”⁶

6. Analysis demands that we learn from storytellers. “The primary lesson from storytellers is that they learn to work with stories that are not theirs but there, as realities. Master storytellers know that stories breathe.”⁷

Among the stories that breathe, fairy tales are unique but not independent, just as most genres are unique in some way but are interdependent. To understand the uniqueness and impact of fairy tales on our lives, we need first to discuss the origins of language and its evolution, for once a plethora of stories began to circulate in societies throughout the world, they contained the seeds of fairy tales, ironically tales at first without fairies formed by metaphor and metamorphosis and by a human disposition to communicate relevant experiences. These primary tales enabled humans to invent and reinvent their lives—and create and re-create gods, divine powers, fairies, demons, fates, monsters, witches, and other supernatural characters and forces. An other world is very much alive in fairy tales, thanks to our capacity as storytellers.

Human Communication and the Origins of Fairy Tales and Other Genres

It is impossible to locate and study the history of stories and the evolution of genres because people began speaking and told stories thousands of years before they learned to read, write, and keep records. And even when they learned how to write, only a tiny minority of humans was capable of reading and writing, and these elite groups were preoccupied with their own interests, which had little bearing on the general or popular modes of communication. Nevertheless, there are certain grounded assumptions that we can make about the evolution of communication and storytelling as well as the origins of fairy tales. It is also possible to demonstrate how all stories are linked to one another, yet distinct in their personal and social functions.

In his recent, significant study, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet, Marshall Poe maintains that the media, communicative networks, and culture have their own type-specific attributes that are related to each other. If we regard a medium as a tool for sending, receiving, storing, and retrieving information, there are eight media attributes that we must consider if we are to understand the evolution of speech as a medium of communication up to the Internet’s invention: accessibility, privacy, fidelity, volume, velocity, range, persistence, and search ability. Poe divides the history of communication into six historical phases that began about three hundred thousand years ago: speech, manuscript, print, audiovisual, Internet, and digital. Throughout the development of communication in the course of these approximately three hundred thousand years, speech was and has remained the primary constant up to the present day. Communication developed in the first place, according to Poe, because we talk to be relevant. “Evolutionarily speaking, we talk because we were the only primates who gained social status and therewith fitness by talking. . . . Psychologically speaking, we talk because we must be heard.”⁸

Building on the theory of Jean-Louis Desalles in Why We Talk: The Evolutionary Origins of Language, Poe points out that different social practices dependent on speech and human communication emerged, and that these social practices gave rise, and still do, to commensurate values. He argues that “the formation of allies and coalitions that cooperated with one another to live in groups that became societies was dependent on communication. Proto-humans had to look for a characteristic in allies that would be mutually beneficial. Desalles proposes that this criterion was relevance. Relevance here means utterances that will profit a listener and thereby recommend the speaker as an ally.” Poe goes on to assert that “speech is not so much a form of cooperation as a contest between speakers for the approbation of listeners.”⁹

Of course, speech has many other functions, but the point about relevance is significant, because almost all storytellers strive to make themselves and their stories relevant, and if they succeed, those stories will stick in the minds of their listeners, who may tell these stories later and contribute to the replication of stories that form cultural patterns.¹⁰ Telling stories—that is, command of the word—was vital if one wanted to become a leader, shaman, priest, priestess, king, queen, medicine man, healer, minister, and so on, in a particular family, clan, tribe, or small society. Desalles maintains that language was a product of not only information sharing but also argumentation and verification. It was in conversation or dialogue that the communication of information could be assessed and verified. Desalles explains that

the behaviors underlying conversation obey unconscious mechanisms. Speakers drawing attention to salient situations, hearers trying to trivialize them, others expressing doubts about the internal consistency of what they are hearing are all behaving instinctively. . . . At stake in these conversations is something of vital importance to each of the speakers: who is going to have a close relationship with whom, who will rise in the estimation of others, who will gain the benefits and the influence that come with status. What we are unconsciously exercising in our conversations is part of our biological programming. Behind the immediate stimulus of exchanging relevant information, what we are doing is assessing others’ ability to decide what is good for the set of people who will choose to ally with them. Language can thus be seen more as a means than as an end. Just as phonology makes for the construction of an extended lexicon, so our use of language makes for the construction of coalitions.¹¹

Telling effective, relevant stories became a vital quality for anyone who wanted power to determine and influence social practices. In the specific case of fairy tales, we shall see that they assumed salient aspects in conflict with other stories and became memetically and culturally relevant as a linguistic means to communicate alternative social practices. In the process fairy tales came to be contested and marked as pagan, irrelevant, and unreal. Poe traces how access and control over the changing media from antiquity to the present have defined which voices will be articulated and heard, and which stories will become part of a cultural network and tradition that people with different dispositions will either maintain or subvert.

Throughout human history, there has always been a tension between groups wanting to control speech and the way individuals have used speech to know themselves and the world. In his book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Tomasello makes the point that

language is a form of cognition; it is packaged for the purposes of interpersonal communication. Human beings want to share experience with one another and so, over time, they have created symbolic conventions for doing that. . . . Given that the major function of language i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling And Fairy Tales: Human communication and Memetics
• 2 The Meaning of Fairy Tale within the Evolution of Culture
• 3 Remaking “Bluebeard,” or Good-bye to Perrault
• 4 Witch as Fairy/Fairy as Witch: Unfathomable Baba yagas
• 5 The Tales of Innocent Persecuted Heroines and Their Neglected Female Storytellers and Collectors
• 6 Giuseppe Pitrè and the Great Collectors of Folk Tales in the Nineteenth Century
• 7 Fairy-Tale Collisions, or the Explosion of a Genre
• Appendix A Sensationalist Scholarship: A “New” History of Fairy Tales
• Appendix B Reductionist Scholarship: A “New” Definition of the Fairy Tale
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index