Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre by Jack Zipes

Abstract

MLR, I03.2, 2008 503 Oneness (the Platonic Androgyne), melding the best ofmale and female elements. Comparably, forCamus inLe Premier Homme, themythic split is made to lead to the reconciliation of enemies (in this case, Arabs and colons). A common leitmotif is theantithesis of theblack or brown Cain and thepure-white Abel. One tradition, illustrated byHugo, posits Cain as the son of Satan, and harps on the eye of conscience hounding him everywhere likeBig Brother. A furtherem broidering is to see the twomen as twins or doubles. Yet another plays 'Cherchez la femme', and holds that thebrothers were fightingover awoman, sometimes their sister,or themother Eve. Incest, indeed, dynamizes Melville's Pierre; or,The Am biguities and Nabokov's Ada; or,Ardor. In the twins Jean/Paul in Les Meteores, Tournier makes the incest homosexual. Other writers analysed in thebroad and deep span of this study include: Butor (L'Emploi du temps, where Manchester/Bleston, the ironically named Blessed Town, plays a central role), Steinbeck (East ofEden), Her mann Hesse (Demian), Unamuno (Abel Sanchez), various dramatists of theSturm und Drang, as well as, of course, much industrious biblical exegesis, medieval moralities, and Romantic inversions. The city such as Cain built is as ambivalent as he, since ithouses both dereliction and civilization. The varying relationship of the twobrotherswith the land-organic/ predatory-also strikesmodern chords. Leonard-Roques maintains and proves that most literary rewrites create just asmuch ambiguity as theUr-text. Her book's only weakness is that itdoes not adequately justify the concept of responsibility present inher subtitle. Indeed, am Imy brother's keeper? All in all, none the less,her study is a lucid and comprehensive survey of themytheme. She astutely stresses thatmany of thepostmodern persuasion have substituted ambiguities of theirown deconstruc tivemaking for the founding ambivalence of this story.Given its chosen thematic approach, this book is inevitably condemned to repeatedly retrace its steps. A final trillion-dollar, blindingly obvious question: why today,as throughout history,domen (mostlymen) who are in the long view genetically brothers want to kill each other enmasse? UNIVERSITY OF READING WALTER REDFERN Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. By JACKZIPES. London: Routledge. 2oo6. xx+332 pp. C65. ISBN 978-0-4I5-97780-7. Those who have followed JackZipes's prodigious publishing activities since the ap pearance of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre forChildren and theProcess ofCivilization (London: Heinemann, I983) will find few surprises here. Designed as a companion to that volume, Why Fairy Tales Stick also takes readers through Zipes's particular history of the fairy tale, a genre which he ar gues is implicated in acculturating and civilizing the young. Many of the examples given are familiar from his own and others' existing publications, which is perhaps inevitable given thathe haswritten extensively about individual tales, collectors, writ ers, retellers and adapters of tales, and thegenre of fairy tales generally, including an encyclopaedia of fairy tales.While I know colleagues who are disappointed by the high level of recycledmaterial in this book, having recently used Why Fairy Tales Stick with undergraduates, my response is rather different. This book keeps inmind thatwhat is familiar to established scholars is new to those embarking on their studies, and that influential ideas need to be revisited and reinflected from time to time. Zipes has refreshed his material in this book by bor rowing several ideas from the biological sciences, notably Richard Dawkins's theory ofmemetics. As Zipes explains, 'ameme is an informational pattern contained in a 504 Reviews human brain (or in artefacts such as books or pictures) and stored in itsmemory, capable of being copied to another individual's brain thatwill store and replicate it' (p. 4). Memes must be able to replicate and pass on cultural, as opposed to genetic, information faithfullyover long periods of time. This, he argues, is precisely what fairy tales do. The biological analogy isnot unproblematic. For instance, while itmight explain why certain tales such as 'Hansel and Gretel' and 'Cinderella' have endured, itdoes not account for those that are popular in one period or culture but then fall from favour. Just as not all fairytales have the same capacity topass...