Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale Read online

  Similarly, Antoine Galland had made scanty notes in his journal after hearing his source, Hanna Diab, tell ‘Aladdin’ or ‘Ali Baba’, and then later, through a similar literary process of expansive dramatization, enrichment, and elaboration, produced the lengthy early written versions, which themselves have been pulled and pushed into different shapes ever since.

  Travelling Tales or Collective Unconscious?

  Arguments still carry on between the diffusionists, who believe stories travel, and the universalists, who propose a collective unconscious. Formalists like the Russian Vladimir Propp and, later, structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss, influentially argued there were only this number of stories, or that number of plots. It is accepted wisdom that there are only seven stories and all the rest are variations on them (the first archive in Britain dedicated to Children’s Literature, founded in Newcastle in 2005, is called Seven Stories). This view can only be maintained, I feel, by taking a very blunt approach, and differences between versions and the context which shapes them now command critical interest far more than basic similarities: several recent studies of ‘Bluebeard’ explore very fruitfully the tale’s transformations. A picture book of the fairy tale for the early reading market, the Bartók opera Bluebeard’s Castle with a libretto by the fabulist Béla Balázs, and the witty and perverse low-budget film, Barbe-bleue (2009), directed by Geneviève Breillat, hold far more fascination for their divergences than their structural identity. Conditions of conflict and flux in the contemporary world, alongside economic migration and global business mobility have also brought squarely to the foreground the restless movement of cultural expressions. Theories about world literature, of which fairy tale is a fundamental part, emphasize the porousness of borders, geographical and linguistic: no frontier can keep a good story from roaming. It will travel, and travel far, and travel back again in a different guise, a changed mood, and, above all, a new meaning.

  In one sense, however, the Grimm Brothers created what they set out to discover. Their fairytale findings shaped a cultural identity for their country that readers and audiences, interpreters on stage, screen, for the eye and for the ear, recognize and associate with Germany, and not entirely to the advantage of the nation and its place in the cultural imaginary. The callous violence, cruelty, bizarre and extreme solutions produce a shiver no matter how many times you hear or read the stories. Even when they unfold a plot found in several other languages, the Grimm versions have a particular flavour and an unmistakable tone that compels attention and excites mixed feelings—a kind of guilty excitement at the heartless, even blithe outcomes. It’s a tone of voice many subsequent writers have imitated—it reverberates in Margaret Atwood and her revisionings of myth and fairy tale. Philip Pullman invokes the American poet James Merrill yearning for ‘the kind of unseasoned telling found | In legends, fairy tales, a tone licked clean | Over the centuries by mild old tongues, | Grandam to cub, serene, anonymous’. He wanted to capture this in prose, Pullman declares in the introduction to his 2012 translation of the Grimms. Yet the brothers were themselves kindly, restrained, peaceable souls. When death did come, first for Wilhelm in 1859, Jacob was disconsolate; he followed his brother four years later, in 1863. He was still hard at work on their vast Dictionary, and had only reached the letter F and the word for Fruit, Frucht. In many ways, they were looking to fairy tales for a binding common legacy, and for solace, light, and harmony; what they found there was a different kind of fruit, and yet the peculiar horror of their tales has brought an intense form of joy to multitudes of readers and listeners.

  The dream of a pure fountainhead, of the old crone storyteller passing on the wisdom of the tribe, is an axiom of cultural nationalism, as well as a form of Romantic Pastoral that still runs through present-day writings of place and memory. But fairy tales, as the Grimms discovered, have no more sense of nation or native tongue than swifts or butterflies, and have proved stubborn and repeating emigrants, always slipping across borders (and back again).

  Even when mass literacy was still on the distant horizon, popular storytelling existed in symbiosis with written variations, and the transition to the page gave every copyist itchy fingers. Rhythm, metre, refrain, and rhyme helped texts to set in a certain form, but as the myriad variations of a single ballad show, tellers and singers keep ringing their own changes. Pullman echoes this forcefully when he insists that the connection to voice must not be lost: ‘A fairy tale is not a text.’

  In The Invention of Literature (1999), the classical scholar Florence Dupont reminds us that many of the greatest works of human imagination were created to be performed, to be heard. Before the printing press and mass literacy, the written versions existed as blueprints or records of performances, recitals, speeches, songs, and other forms of oral communication. Voicing was an art of living creators, and the voice of the storyteller was polyphonous; the stories created were all different and the same at one and the same time—again the fairy tale as tune, riffed by singers or instrumentalists. Every listener is potentially a new storyteller. Early literature was not composed of fixed texts, but of play scripts and prompt books, storytellers’ scrolls, pattern books. This certainly applies to the Arabian Nights and to the corpus of well-known fairy tales: storytellers remember the stories from having experienced them—heard or read—and they then recast them. However, the records were fluid and the work constantly re-created as it was passed on. In the same way as we hear a version of the Fall of Troy from the bard Demodocus in the Odyssey and another told by Aeneas to Dido in Virgil’s Aeneid, so ‘La Belle au bois dormant’, Perrault’s surprisingly gory ‘Sleeping Beauty’, is only one permutation on a persistent theme.

  Literature was a speech act performed by living voices present to their audiences, as in many public events today, when literary festivals put growing pressure on writers to become public performers. Writing, according to Dupont’s argument, represented an attempt to capture the living voices in the work. Every story is an act of memory that communicates the living presence of its subjects. This turns books into death masks, she suggests, entombing the once living beings that made the sounds of the words. In the absence of those bodies, writing is fated to draw attention endlessly to that absence. The imagined presence of Old Mother Goose or ‘die alte Marie’ or another narrator stages a strong attempt to keep continuity with a past when the tale was spoken and its teller was alive. Almost every collection of fairy tales pretends that they were told by someone who had it from someone who had it at first hand, once upon a time.

  At a crucial moment in literary history, the earnest and scholarly Grimm Brothers acted as keepers of the records, like the scribes whom Caliph Haroun al-Rashid commands in the Arabian Nights to write down Shahrazad’s stories in letters of gold, and place them in the palace library. Nineteenth-century collectors set out to capture the national imagination of their country, but time has revealed them to have been unwitting internationalists. The example of the Grimms set off a train of imitations: at a varying pace, all over the world, writers collected national or tribal fairy tales. In keeping with the political idealism of the earliest period of Romanticism, this literature of the illiterate became the foundation stone of a theory of cultural distinctiveness. The stories offered rich deposits of memory, uncontaminated, it was hoped, by learned imports. Giuseppe Pitrè, a doctor in Messina, Sicily, equipped his carriage with a special desk, writing equipment, and seating arrangements so he could gather stories from his patients as he made his rounds: Agatuzza Messia, who was his former nanny and worked as a quilt maker and laundress, was his chief source: ‘She is far from beautiful, but is glib and eloquent; she has an appealing way of speaking, which makes one aware of her extraordinary memory and talent. Messia is in her seventies, is a mother, grand-mother, and great-grandmother; as a little girl she heard stories from her grand-mother, whose own mother had told them … [she] can’t read, but she knows lots of things others don’t.’

  In the same town, Laura Gonzenbach,
daughter of a prosperous textile merchant who later served as the Swiss consul, also took down stories from her friends and neighbours, and translated their Sicilian into High German for publication in 1870. Through Gonzenbach’s retellings, Sicilian Orientalism flows north again, and meets the streams of story spreading across Europe as a result of the German Romantics’ success. Jack Zipes quotes a letter in which she writes, ‘I’ve not been able to capture the genuine charm of these tales that lies in the manner and way the tales are told by these Sicilian women. Most of them … act out the entire plot with their hands … they even stand up and walk around the room when it’s appropriate. They never use “he says” because they change the people’s voices always through intonation.’

  Calvino makes a similar point in the introduction to the magnificent collection, Fiabe Italiane; but his instincts as an original writer led him to abandon the dream of fidelity to the source. Instead, he rewrote all the stories from start to finish, trying to keep a feel for the voices he had encountered in the dusty back rooms of Italian provincial archives, voices whose vitality and brilliance he acknowledges fully in his Introduction. All the same, when Calvino decided to combine and re-imagine the material in the interests of literature, he stepped into the writerly tradition of Basile and Perrault, and his volume’s lasting richness and fluency confirms his judgement.

  In Russia, many collectors followed the Grimms’ lead, mapping a national heritage through stories. Alexander Afanasyev, the most widely read today, published his stupendous anthology of around 600 fairy tales between 1855 and 1867. Chronology does not indicate which tales come first; many Russian fairy tales are unique, but again polyphony breaks out, as the stories echo with others from the circumpolar regions and the cultures along the Silk Road, intertwining with fairy tales from India, Central Asia, the Middle East, and from among the Lapps and Tungus.

  In the English-speaking world, the Grimms’ emulators were slower on the uptake, but once under way, folklore—the cartography and anthropology of the imagination—became a Victorian enthusiasm, alongside the imperial and scientific mapping adventures of the age. Joseph Jacobs assembled two influential volumes, English Fairy Tales (1890) and More English Fairy Tales (1894); he retells the Scottish ‘Cinderella’, in which the heroine is not covered in ashes, but wears a coat of rushes. Her mother feeds her and cares for her in the shape of a cow whose ears miraculously produce sustenance; this Cinders goes to the kirk, not the ball, where she catches the eye of the local laird. In this period, too, Charlotte Guest pieced and patched the Welsh Mabinogion, interweaving some of the strangest and fiercest wonder tales yet told.

  The Blue Fairy Book and Ever After

  The Romantic ideal of national heritage was however overstepped when Andrew Lang embarked on the coloured Fairy Books (1889–1912). He jumbled everything together, wherever the tale came from, then passed it all through an editing process under the direction of his wife, Leonora Alleyne, and a team of mostly women writers and translators, who standardized the prose for parental imprimatur. There are flashes of inspiration in the general Edwardian mannerliness: in Miss Minnie Wright’s succinct version of D’Aulnoy’s ‘Princess Rosette’, she replaces the long tongue-in-cheek moralité (originally targeting the Sun King) with the happiness of the princess’s dog Frisk (for French Frétillon, wagging [its tail]), who ‘never had anything worse than the wing of a partridge for dinner all the rest of his life’.

  After The Blue Fairy Book came out in 1889, Andrew Lang was taken by surprise at the book’s huge success and, in response to overwhelming readers’ enthusiasm, agreed to bring out another, The Red Fairy Book, the very same year. But demand was still not satisfied, and he built a series of twelve volumes all told.

  Lang wrote copiously and thought deeply about fairy tales, but even though he supported the distinction between oral, anonymous folk tales and literary production, he tumbled together, pell-mell, romances, myths, legends, episodes from the sagas, fabliaux, and fables from dozens of different sources of various kinds. He sifted ethnographical records to find stories that had once been told aloud, like the Arabian Nights, as well as translating stories that were literary in origin like the fairy tales of French conteuses. His accumulations re-kindled acquaintance with the population of giants, selkies, and brownies indigenous to Britain, with the kraken, ogres, and trolls from Scandinavia, Koschey the Deathless and Baba Yaga from the Russian forests, and a whole population of goblins and dragons. Lang had an inclusive, generous, world-embracing picture of the nations, flattened onto a plane of an eternal, monolithic past where making up fairy tales signified the human, and the stories joined us up together across time, modern society with ancient, contemporary with primordial. He declared:

  The natural people, the folk, has supplied us, in its unconscious way, with the stuff of all our poetry, law, ritual: and genius has selected from the mass, has turned customs into codes, nursery tales into romance, myth into science … ballad into epic … The student of this lore can look back and see the long-trodden way behind him, the winding tracks through the marsh and the forest and over burning sands. He sees the caves, the camps, the village, the towns where the race has tarried, for shorter time or longer, strange places many of them, and strangely haunted, desolate dwellings and inhospitable …

  Yet, as Francis Spufford points out in his perceptive and unusual memoir, The Child that Books Built (2003), by the time of Domesday Book in 1086, it would have already been impossible for Hansel and Gretel to walk more than four miles through any English wood without bursting back out into open fields. The landscape of fairy tales is symbolic: ‘The forest is where you are when your surroundings are not mastered.’

  The coloured Fairy Books sequence has been of inestimable influence: with their haunting Pre-Raphaelite wood engravings by H. J. Ford, they aren’t simply anthologies of powerful stories: they redefined for Victorians and their successors the scope and flavour of fairy tale itself as a genre. They were also hugely influential in their premise that a universal human imagination generated narratives that resembled one another far more closely than they differed, and in their wake, fairy books of stories from all over the world began to appear—Chinese, Japanese, Gipsy, Maori, and from different peoples in Africa, Australasia, India, the Caribbean, and every subdivision within national borders. Echoes are continually struck between a Palestinian tale, say, and an Inuit, though social contexts always shape the material, and the correspondences arise from the traffic of cultures, carried by many forces, including missionaries, ethnographers, and empire-builders.

  The Fairy Books have also provided rich ore for generations of writers, composers, and artists. Angela Carter acknowledged their impact on her when she was young; Jeanette Winterson, in her novel The Passion (1996), introduces numerous fairytale touches, including the mysterious shoes that are worn out every morning (from the story ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’ found in The Red Fairy Book); recently the composer Jonathan Dove with the writer Alan Middleton created a wonderfully upbeat panto from The Enchanted Pig, a tale found in Basile but included by Lang in a Romanian folk version he had tracked down.

  ‘Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth’, writes Walter Benjamin, ‘is the source from which all storytellers have drawn.’ He continues, ‘And among those who have written down the tales, it is the great ones whose written version differs least from the speech of the many nameless storytellers.’ This should be modified to read, ‘whose written version sounds as if it differs least from the speech … ’.

  For every new literary adventurer in the forests of fairy tale, keeping the voice in the story direct and lively presents the chief difficulty. Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber (1979) swerves into the first person—with brilliant, dramatic, buttonholing effect: ‘My father lost me to the beast at cards’ opens one of her variations on ‘Beauty and the Beast’, a fairy tale that turns up in the Grimms under the lovely riddling title, ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’. Another Grimm tale (‘
The Goose Girl at the Spring’) suddenly breaks off towards the end, ‘ … the trouble is, my grandmother, who told it to me, is losing her memory, and she’s forgotten the rest’. It’s a polished moment of intimacy, maybe true, maybe not, but in any case none of the sources—the tale is first found in print in 1833 in an Austrian dialect version, then in l840 in High German—thought of cutting this touch of authenticity and filling in the plot. Some of the other stories end with the storyteller breaking in; ‘Hansel and Gretel’ closes with the happy nonsense rhyme:

  The Mouse has run

  The tale is done—

  And if you can catch it, you can make yourself a great big furry hat.

  The lines are a promise and a prophecy: the narrator is there (‘Crick crack, break your back’), and the tale will never be caught, but will run and run. As has been the case, since ‘Hansel and Gretel’ has been revisited in every medium and the story has become proverbial.

  The folklorists of the nineteenth century laid too much emphasis on a national Geist (spirit) expressed by stories told in a certain language, and their model of oppositions between textual and oral transmission, popular and polite origins, literate writers and illiterate tellers, was starkly schematic and has been superseded. The flow and contraflow between voice and page and back again have been incessant in the history of the literature of enchantment, while performance, from antique oratory to present-day video games, has always conducted such stories from a fixed script to fluid narration in different forms. When fairy tales have authors—Hans Christian Andersen, Alan Garner or Philip Pullman, Margaret Atwood or Angela Carter, however invented the tale may be, the writers frequently invoke their forerunners and characterize themselves as garrulous old gossips, popular, anonymous, authentic contacts to a past world where fairy tales were the living literature that everyone knew.