Preserving the Spell

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

Armando Maggi

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226243016
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism

Fairy tales are supposed to be magical, surprising, and exhilarating, an enchanting counterpoint to everyday life that nonetheless helps us understand and deal with the anxieties of that life. Today, however, fairy tales are far from marvelous—in the hands of Hollywood, they have been stripped of their power, offering little but formulaic narratives and tame surprises.If we want to rediscover the power of fairy tales—as Armando Maggi thinks we should—we need to discover a new mythic lens, a new way of approaching and understanding, and thus re-creating, the transformative potential of these stories. In Preserving the Spell, Maggi argues that the first step is to understand the history of the various traditions of oral and written narrative that together created the fairy tales we know today. He begins his exploration with the ur-text of European fairy tales, Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales, then traces its path through later Italian, French, English, and German traditions, with particular emphasis on the Grimm Brothers' adaptations of the tales, which are included in the first-ever English translation in an appendix. Carrying his story into the twentieth century, Maggi mounts a powerful argument for freeing fairy tales from their bland contemporary forms, and reinvigorating our belief that we still can find new, powerfully transformative ways of telling these stories.

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”

Magic tales became relevant in Western culture as purported transcriptions of oral narrations. We began to see these stories as something precious coming from the past (someone had told a story to someone else, and this listener wrote it down some time ago). As untainted narrations coming from nature itself, these tales were meant for children, for human beings in the purest, uncontaminated, and sincere stage of their lives. Charles Perrault claimed that his son had written down his tales.1 But most nineteenth-century bourgeois in the West believed that these stories had already existed before their narrator and their listener. They were convinced that these tales had spontaneously blossomed from nature’s bosom in times immemorial, maybe after Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden. Who can count all the heroes and heroines expelled from a royal place because of their disrespect for the rules? Didn’t Psyche break Love’s law and as a consequence had to wander alone through foreign lands? Folk tales, in their written format, came from the realm of the immemorial past.

This book is not intended to be a historical survey of the sociocultural foundations of seventeenth-century or twentieth-century magic tales, even though Maria Tatar has correctly defined my approach as “archeological”; nor I am interested in doing any kind of survey.2 I look at this genre from an archeological perspective because I believe that, in order to understand how fairy tales work and what they accomplish, we need to move backward, toward their past, when they existed hidden within other tales, when they were constantly forming and unforming themselves, when they were both themselves and their opposite, when they let other tales enter and contaminate or even defile them. It goes without saying that the vexed issue of the ‘oral’ versus ‘literary’ nature of these tales is absolutely central in this context.

An “archeological” approach, however, may also help us see more clearly the repetitious imitations, adaptations, and parodies, which are already showing signs of fatigue. Before becoming paralyzed in their current shapes, magic tales enjoyed an amazing, indeed magical vitality. Robert Coover’s marvelous Briar Rose (1996) testifies to our contemporary impasse. His book is a set of short variations on a single well-known motif: the prince’s arduous passage through the thorny branches that prevent him from reaching Sleeping Beauty. Coover’s prince never reaches the princess, and the princess never wakes up. The brave prince is forever “caught in the briars” and the sleeping princess forever “lies alone in her dusky bedchamber atop the morbid bed.”3 The prince and the princess are stuck; they have become victims of their own stories.

Our contemporary rewritings of classic fairy tales share a set of unwritten plot summaries that have neither oral nor literary origins. These stories simply exist as outlines that can take up an infinite variety of artistic manifestations, such as films, video games, comic books, children’s books, and TV commercials.4 Experts call these abstractions ‘types,’ that is a “stable sequence of motifs” that result in an “ideal form of a tale.”5 They result from bowdlerized versions of the Perrault and the Brothers Grimm collections, which are de facto relegated to a literary limbo as inactive objects that are still officially part of an international literary canon.6 Our modern retellings, even the most morally outrageous and politically challenging ones, are securely anchored to these atrophied formations.7

A NEW FORM OF ORAL TALE

In this new cultural context, the controversy over the oral or literary nature of folk and fairy tales is not passé. If we wish to understand how our cherished magic tales survived, metamorphosed, and then, maybe, breathed their last, we need to go back in time, to their first written forms. In my view, this going back is essential if we are to rethink what ‘oral’ and ‘literary’ mean. For the sake of my study, I believe it is fruitful to move from a literal application of the terms ‘oral’ and ‘literal’ to a rhetorical one, as I will explain in a moment. The actual relationship between oral and literary narration is porous and dynamic. I am certainly not the first to contend that the oral and the literary, rather than being in strict opposition, have always been engaged in a prolific dialogue.8 As Jack Goody points out, when speaking of this difficult subject “we are not dealing with a clear-cut division. In the first place there is the important distinction between composition and performance, with the further possibility of having to differentiate between performance and transmission. Secondly, there is a meaningful sense in which all ‘literate’ forms are composed orally, if we include the use of the silent voice, the inner ear.”9

The belief in a totally uncontaminated oral origin of classic fairy tales is obsolete. A literary tale, inspired at least in part by oral motifs, may engender both additional literary versions and new oral retellings that in turn influence subsequent literary versions. It is unquestionable, however, that “literary variants represent essential landmarks” in the transmission of a given tale.10 Goody rightly stresses that “there may well be more of a boundary problem in some societies and one type of . . . standardized oral forms may slide into another, may not be distinguished from it, like romance and novel in English as distinct from roman in French and the equivalent in Italian.”11 Walter Ong recalls the oral readings of Renaissance Italian epics, such as Ludovico Ariosto’s immensely popular Orlando furioso, which lent themselves to oral performances thanks to their division into single episodic units.12

Early modern European culture was particularly sensitive to the fruitful relationship between written text and oral performance.13 This complex interaction becomes clearer when we read Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales (Lo cunto de li cunti, 1634–36), the first collection of literary fairy tales in Western Europe, and then identify its influence on oral narratives in nineteenth-century Sicily and early twentieth-century Spain.14 Paradoxically, these later ‘oral’ Spanish and Sicilian retellings seem more literary (that is, better structured, less obscure, and more moral) than Basile’s literary versions. These anonymous oral narrators took great pains to clarify Basile’s seemingly sloppy and convoluted narratives, as if their new oral versions were in fact exegeses of the seventeenth-century literary texts. The Tale of Tales, “one of the most significant and most inventive fairy tales books in world literature,” is in reality a hybrid of oral and literary elements.15

Although it is a highly learned rewriting of classical literature and mythology, early modern culture and folklore, and Renaissance theories on visual expression, this seminal volume written in seventeenth-century Neapolitan dialect reads like the transcription of a series of oral performances that may have taken place in the Neapolitan courts.16 In Rudolf Schenda’s words, “there cannot be any doubt that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors . . . drew orally told material into their writings.”17 Schenda speaks of a semiliterate and a semi-oral process, the former describing a situation in which a literate person (pastor, schoolmaster, etc.) read to an illiterate audience, and the latter indicating the oral repetition of material found, for example, in chapbooks, which already circulated in early modern Europe.18

The two seemingly opposite poles of oral and literary nourish each other. As Ong reminds us in Orality and Literacy, “fortunately, literacy, though it consumes its own oral antecedents . . . is also infinitely adaptable. It can restore its memory too.”19 “Oral expression,” Ong emphasizes, “can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality.”20 There are obviously significant differences between folk tales and Basile’s book, which “is the first integral compilation of authored, literary fairy tales in Western Europe.”21 Many of the so-called classic fairy tales, such as “Sleeping Beauty” or “Cinderella,” find their first complete literary form in Basile’s collection.22 But it is also true that The Tale of Tales evokes a strongly oral flavor, as if we were listening to its stories rather than reading them.

Nicole Belmont defines Basile’s fundamental book as a wonderful example of oraliterature, a written text that expresses a “nostalgic” evocation of oral expression.23 A literary artifact that works like an oral one, The Tale of Tales is in fact a marvelous example of baroque literature.24 “In the baroque,” maintains the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, “the tension between the spoken and the written word is immeasurable.”25 In the seventeenth century, Benjamin continues, “the spoken word . . . is the ecstasy of the creature, it is exposure, rashness, powerlessness before God; the written word is the composure of the creature . . . omnipotence over the objects of the world.” The characters in Basile’s tales, even the ones who, like Cupid and Psyche, embody a more-than-human nature, are cursed individuals who survive in a grim and violent universe.

We could claim that modern European literary fairy tales could only emerge in the baroque era, and especially in the Italian peninsula, whose rhetorical experimentations and linguistic excesses were notorious throughout seventeenth-century Europe. Basile’s collection of tales manifests the “immeasurable” tension between the oral and the literary by adopting all the rhetorical devices of Italian baroque prose (lengthy and complex metaphors, convoluted sentences, hyperbole, repetition, etc.), which he corrupts through the use of an essentially oral and crude idiom, his beloved Neapolitan dialect, and by mimicking the episodic, even fragmented, structure typical of folk tales.26 Jack Zipes emphasizes this essential point of Basile’s text in clear terms: “In the case of the literary fairy tale in Italy, Giovan Francesco Straparola, Giambattista Basile, and Sarnelli . . . framed their works around speech communities . . . They chose a particular primary speech genre, the oral folk tale.”27 It is essential to understand, however, that these three authors of ‘oral-literary’ fairy tales did not exert an equal influence on the genre. Straparola’s The Facetious Nights (Le piacevoli notti, 1550–53) presents itself as a collection of written tales, more than a series of transcriptions of oral ones.28 Straparola’s language does show signs of local inflections but is still within the great Italian tradition of short stories à la Boccaccio. Pompeo Sarnelli published his Polisicheata in 1684, several decades after Basile’s The Tale of Tales, which Sarnelli tried to emulate. Basile is unquestionably the creator of a literary storytelling that strives to maintain an essentially oral appearance. A rhetorical, rather than historical, approach to the dialogue between the oral and the literary highlights what ‘oral’ and ‘literary’ concretely mean (that is, what they look like and what they do) when we read a collection of Volksmärchen or Kunstmärchen. Or we could say that the incorrect use of the word ‘oral’ reflects what we expect from an oral tale, regardless of its real or fictitious oral origin. As we will see, although the Brothers Grimm and Clemens Brentano saw Basile’s The Tale of Tales as a fundamental model for the Romantic Kunstmärchen, they couldn’t have disagreed more on the nature of this Italian book. The three German intellectuals all thought that Basile had captured the spirit of the Italian people, but whereas the Grimms emphasized the oral foundation of Basile’s masterpiece, Brentano held that Basile, essentially, had written a collection of literary stories. These divergent standpoints are not simply the result of a different literary taste. They correspond to two different views of what a fairy tale is meant to accomplish, and thus they reflect distinct social and political ideologies. We will see that Brentano and the Grimms literally rewrote Basile in order to prove their point. Brentano composed a collection titled Italian Fairy Tales, an explicit interpretation of eleven of Basile’s stories, and the Grimms wrote extensive summaries of the fifty tales in The Tale of Tales (altogether more than a hundred pages) and added them to the second edition of their Children’s and Household Tales.

THE DIRT OF THE ORAL

‘Oral’ and ‘literary’ are, in fact, mutually enlightening concepts. Rather than defining two distinct artifacts, ‘oral’ and ‘literary’ are two modes of aesthetic appreciation. In contrast to the traditional view of oral tales as narratives that “served to stabilize, conserve, or challenge the common beliefs, laws, values, and norms of a group,” in my view and that of others ‘oral’ is what destabilizes all messages and all agendas, what makes a story less clear and reliable.29 When placed as a mirror in front of ‘literary,’ ‘oral’ is first of all what is perceived as incomplete, inconsistent, deficient, redundant, verging on nonsense.30 ‘Oral,’ furthermore, is ‘dirty,’ in both literal and metaphorical senses, that which calls for restoration, remodeling, and interpretation; it is, in Benjamin’s words, “the domain of the free,” whereas the written “enslaves objects in the eccentric embrace of meaning.”31 A literary tale, according to Zipes, “in contrast to the rough and raw folk tale, is very ‘civil.’”32 ‘Oral’ is also that which is “natural” and dynamic, as the voice that improvises a story in the here and now of its performance.33 ‘Oral’ is what should have been reread before being sent to the publisher.34 ‘Oral’ is, finally, what fails to communicate a clear message, an unquestionable moral teaching. ‘Literary’ is not just the opposite of ‘oral.’ ‘Literary’ also implies an author, someone who has been able to bring order to the chaos of the oral.

“Expectations associated with the literary arts,” writes Heather Maring, “do not adequately take into consideration how oral traditions work and may even obscure their aesthetic vitality.”35 The problem is that few literary critics have been interested in bringing to the fore the alleged “aesthetic vitality” of oral tales, as Nicole Belmont confirms in Poétique du conte: oral tales “are literary products, [although] their literary status has been denied due to the emphasis our society puts on writing.”36 Max Lüthi’s studies, such as Once upon a Time (1970) and The Fairy Tale as Art Form (1975), are still immensely fertile sources of inspiration for those who attempt to read ‘oral’ fairy tales as complex literary artifacts. Lüthi’s books, however, do not address specific stories and only offer a theoretical framework. Moreover, they make sweeping assumptions about oral tales that are not substantiated by all oral narratives (for instance, the lack of flashbacks or the strictly linear unfolding of the story).

GIAMBATTISTA BASILE AND THE HISTORY OF THE MAGIC TALE

The mythic (also in the sense of ‘hypothetical) ‘oral’ stage preceding all subsequent written crystallizations is detectable in Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales. This is the book that first arranged a sequence of magic tales within a structure closely reminiscent of Boccaccio...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dancing Backward: An Introduction
• PART I “CUPID AND PSYCHE,” THE TALE OF TALES, AND THE BIRTH OF WESTERN FAIRY TALE
• PART II THE ITALIAN TALES AND GERMAN ROMANTICISM: THE BROTHERS GRIMM, CLEMENS BRENTANO, NOVALIS
• PART III AMERICAN POSTMODERNISM, MEMOIRS, AND A NEW BEGINNING
• Appendix: The Grimms’ Adaptation of Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales
• Notes
• Index