At the same time that storytelling seems an obsolete handicraft, classic stories—the bloody, surreal folk inventions we know as fairy tales—seem to be having a revival. It’s even possible that in a time of economic uncertainty, readers are drawn to the oldest, most familiar stories. What else explains the simultaneous appearance of Grimm Tales: For Young and Old, in which Philip Pullman has translated 50 of his favourite stories from the classic German storytellers; a slimmer selection of tales, Long Ago and Far Away, that draws from French and Italian sources; and the new study The Irresistible Fairy Tale, by Jack Zipes, the dean of academic fairy-tale studies? And that’s just the books: the last few months have seen two movie versions of the Snow White story, Mirror, Mirror, starring Julia Roberts, and the darker Snow White and the Huntsman, starring Kristen Stewart. Viewers of American TV can tune in to Grimm, a show about a police detective with magic powers who is called upon to fight supernatural monsters; and Once Upon a Time, in which ordinary human beings are revealed to be the avatars of fairy-tale characters like Prince Charming and Rumpelstiltskin.
The reason they survive to this day, Zipes suggests, is because the classic fairy tales—such as Snow White, Cinderella, and Rapunzel, which all have analogues in cultures throughout the world—are perfect examples of “memetic” engineering. Drawing on the notion of the meme coined by Richard Dawkins, Zipes imagines the elements of fairy tales competing for mental space over generations of cultural evolution, until only the fittest tales survived. And what makes a tale “fit” is that it has the power “to determine and influence social practices,” to shape the way human beings live together.
If fairy tales are “marked” as literature for children, it is not, despite Zipes, because the patriarchy is trying to minimise their subversive power; it is because only children can be truly affected by stories of magic. The proof of this lies in the way that fairy-tale movies, even those designed for children, inevitably minimise the eventfulness and randomness of the tale in order to make it more logically and psychologically truthful: Snow White becomes a fable about vanity, Cinderella a fable about humility. In the Harry Potter stories, the formula of the fairy tale is inverted: magic becomes an accessory to what is essentially a parable about growing up, which may be why the Potter books appeal to older readers as well.
To read fairy tales in their original forms, on the other hand, is to realise that what they are really about is the primitive wish-fulfillment that storytelling makes possible. Literature is born when this kind of storytelling begins to acknowledge that the world never does grant our wishes, and that the stubbornness of things is ultimately more satisfying to hear about than their mutability.