The association of storytelling with the practice and metaphor of weaving, and spinning of course, has a long tradition in literature. Examples are Ovid’s classic stories of Arachne’s weaving contest with Athena and of Philomela’s woven tapestry denouncing her rapist brother-in-law as well as Native American creation stories featuring Spider Grandmother and her singing. In language this metaphor appears in English when we “spin tales,” which have “threads,” and when we “weave a spell.” The weaving metaphor in modern books’ representation of fairy tales as children’s literature is exemplified through the image of old women, iconically Mother Goose, spinning flax and tales. The metaphor shows up in narrative studies, since Roland Barthes reminded us that “etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric” and that “the plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers”18; and in fairy-tale studies, most prominently with Karen Rowe proposing that “strand by strand weaving, like the craft practiced on Philomela’s loom or in the hand-spinning of Mother Goose, is the true art of the fairy tale” in her landmark essay “To Spin a Yarn” (1999 [1986]).19 With varying emphases, the metaphor connects storytelling with women, intertextuality, and action or response in the face of unequal power relations of weavers, fabrication of meanings, and media or crafts. I aim to keep these links active in my exploration of the fairy-tale web, along with some ideas about what a spider’s web does in nature. The spider’s web catches prey, just as we get caught up in stories; it sparkles, the way fairy-tale magic or wonder does in successful performances. But it has a dilatory pattern and center because it emanates from one spinner, unlike the fairy-tale or any other intertextual web that depends on the activity, memories, locations, and responses of many individuals and institutions.
When it comes to storytelling in practice, we are now very familiar with the idea that all texts—oral, written, visual, and social—participate in a web of intertextual relations. While intertextuality has been central to both oral poetics and textual criticism “since the latter part of the seventeenth century, when oral tradition became a key element in marking the juncture between premodern and modern epochs in the evolution of language and culture,”20 thinking about intertextuality as a web implies a critical conception of it that originated with Julia Kristeva and was informed by Mikhail Bakhtin’s multivocality. Verbal intertextuality, to gloss Kristeva, is not the dialogue of fixed meanings or texts with one another; it is an intersection of several speech acts and discourses (the writer’s, the speaker’s, the addressee, earlier writers’ and speakers’), whereby meanings emerge in the process of how something is told and valued, where, to whom, and in relation to which other utterances. “Stories echo with other stories, with those echoes adding force to the present story. Stories are also told to be echoed in future stories. Stories summon up whole cultures.”21 To put it differently, * * * “each act of textual production presupposes antecedent texts and anticipates prospective ones,”22 and how that works is somewhat out of the control of any one individual or group. We cannot fully predict or control which stories mingle with, influence, anticipate, interrupt, take over, or support one another because every teller and recipient of a tale brings to it her or his own texts; we also cannot fully anticipate how a story, no matter how the teller or writer intends it, will act on its listeners/readers/viewers. * * *
As a reading practice, the twenty-first-century fairy-tale web reaches back in history and across space to intersect with multiple story-weaving traditions. Several scholars have shown how French, German, and British women’s fairy tales assumed a subaltern position within literary histories of the genre that revolve around the canonical figures of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Oscar Wilde. Tracing the history of the genre has meant highlighting the pioneering role of Giovan Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile in establishing the fairy tale as a print genre in sixteenth-century Venice and seventeenth-century Naples, respectively, or showing how fairy tales circulated ante nominem in ancient world and medieval Latin texts. Other researchers have contributed to our understanding of how tales in the oral tradition from the nineteenth century into the present popularize, talk back at, or diverge from the literary ones. And transnational research on The Arabian Nights has reconfigured it as a “huge narrative wheel” whereby stories “flowed with the traffic across the frontier of Islam and Christendom, a frontier that was more porous, commercially and culturally, than military and ideological history will admit.”23 Today, the kind of multilayered and multiperspectival reading of the fairy tale that Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber inaugurated has become part of increasingly knowing adult readers’ expectations. A greater awareness of multiple traditions and voices * * * is not limited to academic circles but also informs varied contemporary fairy-tale practices in popular culture.
However, while the twenty-first-century fairy-tale web is complex, not all its links are equal since, as mentioned earlier, maintaining a socioeconomic and cultural divide is built into a for-profit globalizing economy of cultural production. The reach of small-press authors, independent filmmakers and artists as well as the cultural capital of genre fiction—with which the fairy tale is increasingly merged—are small compared to those of the multinational corporate media circuits. This inequality, I want to underscore here, extends to the construction of the fairy-tale web’s history and its geopolitics of knowledge. If “fairy tales are fiction’s natural migrants,”24 historically their traffic has been regulated by commerce, religion, and prejudice—which is not always recognized and results in an unequal flow of tales and an unequal valorization of different tellers’ located knowledges. As a methodological field—whereby the web is “experienced in the activity of production,”25 that is, of reading, rather than as a received or preexisting object—it matters how through the construction and reconstruction of a web of intertextuality we make multiple (hi)stories of the genre visible/narratable, or not; for instance, how we link fairy tales with folktales.
In the introduction to The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, Angela Carter provocatively insisted on weaving them into a “great mass of infinitely various narrative”26: “Ours is a highly individualized culture, with a great faith in the work of art as a unique one-off, and the artist as an original, a godlike and inspired creator of unique one-offs. But fairy tales are not like that, nor are their makers. Who first invented meatballs? In what country? Is there a definitive recipe for potato soup? Think in terms of the domestic arts. ‘This is how I make potato soup.’ ”27 But in actuality, the fairy tale comes to us today manufactured and branded differently from the folktale. As Jan M. Ziolkowski writes, “fairy tales have acquired their current niche in Western and even in world culture thanks to the imprimatur of having been subsumed in collections that are not at all anonymous or collective (as would be expected with folk literature) but that are instead attached indissolubly to particular writers.”28 The published tales associated with Charles Perrault, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen have epitomized what is commonly understood to be the fairy-tale genre and its “universal” appeal, as opposed to the outmoded and simple “folktales,” which are instead associated with a specific kind of group identity (ethnic, national, gendered). As this generally accepted narrative goes, fairy tales develop out of folktales by turning a staple of narrative sustenance into a chef’s signature dish, and the chef—no matter where the staple came from—could only be in the literate classes and, more specifically, the literate classes of Europe.
This popular construction of the fairy tale as a modern genre, then, reproduces what Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies as the stagist historicism of European modernity that “came to non-European peoples in the nineteenth century as somebody’s way of saying ‘not yet’ to somebody else.”29 The genre of the “fairy tale” is still generally understood as European and North American; the Middle East constructed as the Orient has produced The
Thousand and One Nights, wonder tales that have become identified with exotic magic and fantasy; most of the rest of the world has or had “folktales” that can become “fairy tales,” but are not yet. It is from the vantage point of those who have “progressed” from listening to folktales to reading fairy tales (to children) that storytelling and story power in general are measured. Within this ethnocentric construction of magic, wonder, and enchantment, some peoples and some groups have imaginations that make art and reach for symbolic truth, and others have limited inventiveness that is hopelessly fantastic or obsolete and ultimately untrue. Furthermore, historically, the translation of oral stories from “exotic” places and cultures into European languages has meant that radically different narrative forms—including nonfiction—were reduced to and marketed as “fairy” stories. The fairy tale’s cultural capital today continues to accrue interest on the commodification and appropriation of both oral and non-European storytelling traditions.
* * *
* * *
† From Cristina Bacchilega, “Introduction,” in Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013), pp. 1–12, 18–22. Copyright © 2013 Wayne State University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Wayne State University Press. All parenthetical citations have been provided as footnotes.
1. Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013), p. 2.
2. Catriona McAra and David Calvin, eds., Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment (Cambridge UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), pp. 1–15.
3. Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London: Granta, 1990), p. 22.
4. Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), p. xx.
5. Zipes, Irresistible Fairy Tale, p. 2.
6. Maria Tatar, The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 305.
7. Donald Haase, “Yours, Mine, or Ours? Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and the Ownership of Fairy Tales,” Merveilles et contes 7 (1993).
8. Ziolkowski, Jan M., Fairy Tales from before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 64.
9. Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, p. 3.
10. Ibid., p. xx.
11. Arthur W. Frank, Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010), p. 4.
12. Ibid., p. 10.
13. Ibid., pp. 74–75.
14. Stephen Benson, Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2008), p. 5.
15. Vanessa Joosen, Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings (Detroit: Wayne State UP), p. 7.
16. Ibid., p. 10.
17. Theo Meder, “Internet,” in Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, ed. Donald Haase (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2008), II, 490.
18. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), p. 168.
19. Karen Rowe, “To Spin a Yarn,” reprinted in this edition. See pp. 393–405.
20. Richard Bauman, A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), p. 1.
21. Frank, Letting Stories Breathe, p. 37.
22. Bauman, A World of Others’ Words, p. 4.
23. Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and The Arabian Nights (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 2012), pp. 9, 12.
24. Andrew Teverson, “Migrant Fictions: Salman Rushdie and the Fairy Tale,” in Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale, ed. Stephen Benson (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2008), p. 54.
25. Barthes, “From Work to Text,” p. 167.
26. Angela Carter, ed., The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (London: Virago, 1990), p. ix.
27. Ibid., p. x.
28. Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from before Fairy Tales, p. 236.
29. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007), p. 8.
JESSICA TIFFIN
From Magical Illusion: Fairy-Tale Film†
Film versions of fairy tale are inevitable, given the extreme adaptability shown by fairy-tale structures across the centuries, and its ability to continually reinvent its voices, settings, and message as well as its medium of expression. As with the adaptation of oral folktale into written literature, the adaptation of written literature into film brings with it the possibilities and the constraints of the new medium: if writing and the printed book reinvented the oral tale, cinema’s impact on literary storytelling is perhaps even more profound. Film is a vitally different form of expression from the book, and its creation—technical, massively expensive, requiring the input and skills of a large and diverse body of contributors—hugely exaggerates the importance of technology in the transmission of cultural artifacts. This leap in the complexity of the process is enabled by the concomitant leap in audience: the twentieth century saw the development of the mass market, the ability of texts to reach more people more easily than ever before. The distance from the cozy oral storyteller in a small circle of listeners could not be greater. With the new costs and new audience naturally come new constraints on the narrative, which must be adapted to its viewers on a far broader and less personal scale to provide the necessary mass appeal which will recoup the enormous costs of production. Film thus has a dual nature as an exciting and powerfully visual form of artistic expression but also as a medium operating within the consumerist paradigm of modern mass culture. Both film-as-art and film-as-product retain the potential to offer an essentially self-reflexive notion of narrative, metafiction given new expression by a new technology.
From the earliest days of cinema, in texts such as the experimental fairy-tale films of Georges Méliès, fairy-tale film has been extremely successful. Fairy-tale motifs adapt easily to the visual, and fairy tale’s clear, simplified narratives are also far more conveniently adaptable to the time-scale of a film than are the detailed textures and events of a novel. This thematic simplicity also possibly explains why fairy-tale film has become strongly associated with the particular film medium of animation, a form which similarly refuses to reflect a realistically textured world. On the narrative level, fairy-tale film offers an obvious articulation of the classic Hollywood “fairy-tale” plot, which relies heavily on the comedic marriage resolution and on wish fulfillment and utopian impulses that empower the underdog. The close fit between film and fairy tale is also in some ways inevitable given folkloric narrative’s long history of happy interaction with theatrical as well as literary forms. Following the adaptation of folklore into the French aristocratic pursuits of the eighteenth century, fairy-tale motifs seem to have spread rapidly to the theater, ballet, and opera. The heyday of fairy-tale ballet in the nineteenth century saw the creation of such classics as Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and The Nutcracker, all with recognizable fairy-tale themes. In opera, fairy-tale awareness, although expanded into a more complex narrative, informs operas such as Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Verdi’s Vakula the Smith, and Puccini’s Turandot.
As a symbolic genre, fairy tale has strong visual and dramatic potential. It is also obvious that the simple, ritualistic formulae of fairy tale would work well in ritualistic traditions, most notably ballet and opera, which are artistic productions whose meaning is expressed via a powerful system of structural codes (song, movement) rather than a process of realistic representation. Suzanne Rahn writes, “Like fairy tales, ballets are constructed as highly formalized narratives which make extensive use of repetition and tell their stories primarily through the physical actions of their characters.”1 In the twentieth century, the successful
use of fairy tale in the Broadway musical follows a similar pattern; Stephen Sondheim’s 1986 musical Into the Woods, for example, explores the dangerous gap between fairy tale and real life in a manner similar to Pratchett’s Witches Abroad. Again, the musical is an artificial form whose encodings—the stock romantic characters, the likelihood of any character to break into song or dance at any moment—have very little to do with reality. Disney’s characteristic blending of the fairy tale and the musical is a good illustration of these similarities; films such as Beauty and the Beast not only use the musical format but also refer constantly to the Hollywood musical.
However, theater, ballet, and other live art forms face an inherent logical problem in visually representing the marvelous, relying on stylization or at times unconvincing mechanisms to pretend to the magical; Tolkien, typically, claims that “Fantasy … hardly ever succeeds in Drama.… Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited.”2 This is in many ways an anachronistic view in the age of CGI (computer-generated imagery), and the verisimilitude of magical spectacle in film has seen a steady increase over the last hundred years, culminating in the giant leaps made by computer imagery in influential films such as Peter Jackson’s three-film version of The Lord of the Rings. Cinema’s tricky camera is thus ultimately able to overcome the difficulties of nonreal representation, harnessing fairy tale’s symbolic qualities to provide a rich visual texture. The contributions of special effects and CGI have made possible visual enchantments Tolkien could not have imagined, but the film/fairy tale fit is more profound than that; even in the early days of the medium, cinema has always been the site of magic. While apparently offering the real, it is a fertile ground for trickery, in which apparently real objects may disappear, reappear, change size or orientation, change shape—in fact, the whole of the special effects man’s box of tricks; David Galef’s discussion of Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête offers a detailed and interesting analysis of this kind of magical cinematic function. The authority of the camera is such that the impossible takes on the same status as the realistic, which is in any case a good working definition of magic.
The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions) Page 71