Fantasy/SF Micro-essay #1: Grimm's Household Tales
Sunday, August 19th, 2012 06:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturner[Just in case anyone is interested in what I've written for Rabkin's course, here's the first essay (the one I missed the deadline for while trying to paste from Evernote to Coursera using a tablet).]
With regard to fairy tales, the brothers Grimm were to the 19th century what Walt Disney was to the twentieth: they set the prototypes for particular fairy stories and for fairy tales in general. Just as a robin is a prototypical bird (as Eleanor Rosch pointed out) the Grimm's version of, say, "Little Red Riding Hood" is a prototypical fairy tale, in that when we think of Little Red Riding Hood, we will probably think of something akin to the Grimm version even though it was called by the less familiar name "Little Red Cap") not Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" or the recent film Red Riding Hood. Yet this is not because the Grimm version is the original from which all others are mimetically derived. The Grimm brothers did to earlier versions of LRRH what Disney did to the Grimm version of "Snow White": the prototypical centre was shifted so that the new work became more influential than the work it was derived from (think "Snow White" and you will almost certainly see a scene from the Disney film).
It is tempting to get Baudrillardian here and talk about simulacra, hyperreality and so forth, but this would be a mistake. It is not the case of a fake becoming more real than the real thing, because fairy tales occupy a cultural space which is by its nature blurry. A published fairy tale is half way between a legend, which is common cultural property, and fantasy as we normally understand the word, which is the product of an individual (even though it draws heavily on common folkloric tropes). Thus, while we may not personally like Disney's bowdlerising Grimm's "Snow White", it is just as valid as the Grimm brothers' insertion of their own moral ending to LRRH in preference to earlier versions where the girl dies or escapes by pretending to go out of her grandmother's house to urinate. Each fairy tale is the product of its author, its authors culture, and the authors and cultures preceding it.
With regard to fairy tales, the brothers Grimm were to the 19th century what Walt Disney was to the twentieth: they set the prototypes for particular fairy stories and for fairy tales in general. Just as a robin is a prototypical bird (as Eleanor Rosch pointed out) the Grimm's version of, say, "Little Red Riding Hood" is a prototypical fairy tale, in that when we think of Little Red Riding Hood, we will probably think of something akin to the Grimm version even though it was called by the less familiar name "Little Red Cap") not Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" or the recent film Red Riding Hood. Yet this is not because the Grimm version is the original from which all others are mimetically derived. The Grimm brothers did to earlier versions of LRRH what Disney did to the Grimm version of "Snow White": the prototypical centre was shifted so that the new work became more influential than the work it was derived from (think "Snow White" and you will almost certainly see a scene from the Disney film).
It is tempting to get Baudrillardian here and talk about simulacra, hyperreality and so forth, but this would be a mistake. It is not the case of a fake becoming more real than the real thing, because fairy tales occupy a cultural space which is by its nature blurry. A published fairy tale is half way between a legend, which is common cultural property, and fantasy as we normally understand the word, which is the product of an individual (even though it draws heavily on common folkloric tropes). Thus, while we may not personally like Disney's bowdlerising Grimm's "Snow White", it is just as valid as the Grimm brothers' insertion of their own moral ending to LRRH in preference to earlier versions where the girl dies or escapes by pretending to go out of her grandmother's house to urinate. Each fairy tale is the product of its author, its authors culture, and the authors and cultures preceding it.
