Fairy Tales: Z is for Zingless or Why Not to Ignore the True Zaniness of Fairy Tales

Over the years, I have read numerous books about fairy tales, including Marina Warner's From the Beast to the Blonde and Diana Purkiss's At the Bottom of the Garden. 

I have mostly ignored Jack Zipes, even though Zipes is a prolific writer and often quoted by others. 

I ignore Zipes because of passages like the following:

Thus [the Little Mermaid] must somehow justify her existence to herself through abstinence and self-abnegation--values preached by the bourgeoisie and certainly not practiced by the nobility and upper classes. Paradoxically, Andersen seems to be preaching that true virtue and self-realization can be obtained through self-denial. This message, however, is not so paradoxical since it comes from the voice of the dominated...Andersen never tired of preaching self-abandonment and self-deprivation in the name of bourgeois laws. The reward was never power over one's life but security in adherence to power.

Now, granted, the Little Mermaid is kind of a dumb story, and many of Andersen's tales--as mentioned at the beginning of this list--don't attract me. And granted, too, Andersen was a self-denying, angsty kind of guy. 

But even I, who mostly avoid Andersen, think that he was writing for the sake of story rather than for the sake of some imposed theory about power imbalances--and that the tales have way more going for them than a reductionist theory about those power imbalances. I also consider it particularly gormless for an analyst not to figure out that a tale involves self-denial from the get-go, especially since the Little Mermaid feels the equivalent of knife slices whenever she walks. Uh, you were surprised by the ending? It's like reading a story about disguises, then being surprised at the end when the disguises are uncovered, and then having to point out WHAT IT MEANS to everyone else.  

This type of analysis ends up being like AI writing:

So Andersen wrote self-denying things because he was middleclass and because he was middleclass, he wrote self-denying things, and he really loved self-denial because he  came from that class, and self-denial was something that comes up a lot in his writing.

So? 

I'm more interested in what he did with that self-denial.

In sum, I hate the imposition of theory on art and history. It becomes an excuse to stare at the naval of the analyst rather than at the writer or creation or event itself. It slathers itself across the frozen past without regard to individuality or more complex context. And it places MEANING above creativity.

Zipes writes from a historical point of view. I still dislike his work. 

The application of MEANING without any context merely bores me. I tried Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment and got tired of it within a few chapters. I lasted longer with The Witch Must Die by Sheldon Cashdan (and do recommend the latter). But not much longer.

Generally speaking, when MEANING rather than art--and context or background--becomes the object, the tales begin to suffer. It's a problem that I attempted to tackle in my thesis: how does one examine something without destroying it? How does one learn more about context without the tale losing its magic?

My overall argument is that for the examination to work, the analyst should look at events and works in terms of their individuality. That is, analysts should first behave like readers, to do as C.S. Lewis recommended and let the work sweep them away. Buy into it. Be overwhelmed by it. Stop being worried about being "taken in" by it.

I ultimately argue that readers need to believe that creativity--the desire to make something using characters and dialog--was the writer's overriding impulse. Sure, locations and mindsets and other author's influences creep into a tale since a writer/collector is the product of a time period and place. But the creative impulse takes precedence. 

Archaeology increasingly promotes the possibility that all the sophisticated theories in the world came after people were simply surviving and having fun. If a book about fairy tales doesn't start from the "surviving and having fun" perspective, it cannot do the tales justice or even the history surrounding those tales.

Consequently, I end this list not with a book ABOUT fairy tales but a fairy tale book: Rapunzel retold and illustrated by Paul Zelinsky. The illustrations use Renaissance art and settings for their inspiration. Consequently, the book is visually captivating. 

The text is one of the more classic versions, slightly less "ribald" (to borrow Zelinsky's own words in his closing note). Zelinsky points out that the tale was originally literary but became popular enough to be rewritten and retold before the Grimm Brothers got hold of it: "In recent years, scholars of folklore have traced the confluence of oral traditions and literary invention; indeed, 'Rapunzel' is a prime example of this intermingling." 

Zelinsky goes on to characterize himself as an "interloper" on the Italian Renaissance tradition, which makes the picture book an excellent place to end this list.

Fairy tales are not mere springboards to socio-political-economic-psychological meanings. They are horror and true love and humor and splatterfests and irony and literary challenges and satire and fun. They change hands. They change interpretation. They change presentation. They become what writers and readers wish. 

They are that flexible. They are that magnificent.