Preserving the Spell: Basile's "The Tale of Tales" and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition 9780226243016

Citation preview

Preserving the Spell

Preserving the Spell Basile’s The Tale of Tales and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition ARMANDO MAGGI

The University of Chicago Press chicago and london

armando maggi is professor of romance languages and literatures and a member of the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including Satan’s Rhetoric and The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Sade to Saint Paul, both published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

1 2 3 4 5

isbn-13: 978-0-226-24296-5 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-24301-6 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/Chicago/9780226243016.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maggi, Armando, author. Preserving the spell : Basile’s The Tale of Tales and its afterlife in the fairy-tale tradition / Armando Maggi. pages ; cm Includes index. isbn 978-0-226-24296-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-24301-6 (ebook) 1. Fairy tales—Western countries—History and criticism. 2. Fairy tales— Social aspects. 3. Basile, Giambattista, approximately 1575–1632—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. gr550.m33 2015 398.2—dc23 2015001106 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48—1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents Dancing Backward: An Introduction • 1 part i “cu p i d a nd psych e ,” t h e ta l e o f ta l e s , and t h e bi rt h of w e s t e r n fa i ry ta le • 23 ch a p t e r one • 25 A Never Ending and Never Told Tale: Basile’s Undoing of “Cupid and Psyche” ch a p t e r t wo • 68 Orpheus, the King of the Birds, Moves to Sicily with Cupid and Psyche: Laura Gonzenbach’s “King Cardiddu” ch a p t e r t h r e e • 87 Melancholy Is the Best Storyteller: Oil, Water, and Blood from Gonzenbach back to Basile pa rt i i t h e i ta l i a n ta l es a nd german roma nt i ci sm: t h e brothers grim m , cl e me ns br e nta no, nova lis • 109 ch a p t e r four • 111 What We Leave Behind: Fairies, Letters, Rose Petals, and Sprigs of Myrtle ch a p t e r fi ve • 124 The Fairy, the Myrtle, and the Myrtle-Maiden: From Basile to the Grimms and Brentano ch a p t e r s i x • 148 How to Undo The Tale of Tales: Brentano and the End of Fairy Tales

ch a p t e r s e ve n • 171 Where Are the Ogresses of Yesteryear? The Neapolitan Cupids and Psyches in the Hands of the Brothers Grimm ch a p t e r e i g h t • 188 Beauty, Zulima, and Aline: The Marvel Preceding and Following the World According to Novalis pa rt i i i a me r i ca n p ost m odernism , me moi rs , a nd a ne w be g i nning • 211 ch a p t e r ni ne • 213 “You Will Never Awaken Because the Story You Were In No Longer Exists”: Coover, Postmodernism, and the End of an Era ch a p t e r t e n • 248 “Disney World Has Become a Kind of Reverse Lourdes”: From Stanley Elkin back to Basile ch a p t e r e l e ve n • 257 “A Benign Fairy Tale out of the Brothers Grimm”: Memoirs and the Magic of Reality ch a p t e r t w e lve • 278 “Everything Beautiful Is Gone”: Beasts of the Southern Wild and a New Beginning Appendix: The Grimms’ Adaptation of Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales • 287 Notes • 347 Index • 397

Dancing Backward: An Introduction I better remember the poorly composed fairy tales that my nurse used to recite when I was a child than the tales of poets that I read every day. giovan battista della porta, The Art of Remembering (1566)

In Sickness unto Death, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard distinguishes between those who are aware of their despair and those who are not. “To arrive at the truth,” Kierkegaard writes, one has to pass through two negativities: despair and ignorance. He further explains that “It is just as the old story says about breaking a certain spell: it won’t be broken unless the piece is played right through backward.”1 Kierkegaard borrows this allusion from the Brothers Grimm’s German translation of Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825). In their long introduction, the Grimms speak about an enchanting melody that forces everyone and everything to dance. According to this folk tale, the Grimms say, the player can’t stop the bewitching music unless he plays the melody backward or someone slashes the chords of the player’s violin.2 In early modern culture, reading a holy text or a prayer backward was seen as a perverse, demonic act, intended to upend the natural order of things. Witches and demon worshipers performed Christian rituals in reverse to celebrate their alliance to God’s Enemy.3 Witches, Jacob Grimm writes in German Mythology, used to gather in places where “formerly justice was administered or sacrifices were offered,” in order to turn those locations into their opposites, places of demonic meetings.4 A compulsory dance is also a familiar motif of European fairy tales, in which it is frequently used to punish an evil or greedy character. Remember the wicked queen dancing until she dies in the Grimms’ “Snow White,” but also the young girl in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” who can’t stop dancing as soon as she puts on a pair of beautiful red shoes. One night, in tears, she dances

2

dancing backward

all the way to a little house where the official executioner lives. “Chop off my feet with the red shoes!” the girl begs the man, who complies with her wish.5 In the Irish story reported by the Grimms and then appropriated by Kierkegaard, the way to stop the distressing music is to perform a diabolical action; that is, one can liberate people from their slavery to an unnatural dance only by perverting the natural flow of music. When they described their night encounters with demons, sixteenth-century witches often explained that the evil spirits appeared to them as men with feet looking like geese feet turned backward.6 It is not by chance that Kierkegaard associates the enchanting, but coercive and deadly, melody with a state of despair. What could be more despairing than dying while dancing to pleasant live music?

In this book, we will play a similar ‘evil’ game. We will question the natural character of our beloved classic fairy tales and their ineluctability, and we will play them backward by going back in time, often mixing them up with other tales. We will question whether the tales we usually label as Grimms’ fairy tales have always existed in nature, are intrinsic parts of who we are, and will never leave us because by departing from them we would depart from ourselves. How could we raise our children without these charming and undying stories? Have we perhaps forgotten Bruno Bettelheim? One could easily claim that the idea of reversing these stories and thus ceasing to dance at their magical and eternal melody is not just pretentious or even evil, but also stupid. Could it be really possible to delete the picture of Cinderella dancing with her prince charming in the royal ballroom as Disney immortalized it on the screen?

This project is based on the assumption that fairy tales, in their oral or literary form, are supposed to evoke an unexpected and exhilarating transformation, a magical turning into something completely different. In 1798–99, the great Romantic poet Novalis wrote that in a fairy tale “everything must be marvelous—mysterious and unconnected.”7 Such an optimistic definition couldn’t be more distant from our contemporary view of fairy tales. First of all, we don’t even know what “unconnected” means, and how “unconnected” could relate to something “marvelous.” For us, “unconnected” is usually a synonym for incomplete, imperfect, unsuccessful. Today, magic

an introduction

3

tales are meant to provide the reader or listener (whether young, adult, or elderly) with a tame sense of surprise, a reassuring déjà vu similar to the reaction we have to a Hollywood blockbuster, whose story line and ending we can predict even before it begins. Let us remember, however, that the Grimms’ book opens with the story of a prince who has changed into a frog that then changes into a prince. A fairy tale is the least presumptuous kind of storytelling, and yet it claims to call forth a mutation in the reader or listener. It can work its magic only if it is allowed to transform itself into something new (not just a new story, but with a new and unexpected context and a new artistic form), but this change doesn’t seem possible any longer. The very idea that these magic stories could be told in new formats, in visual and written texts that apparently have little to do with their traditional contents and forms of transmission, is ludicrous. We are not referring to comic books or film adaptations, which try to ‘subvert,’ ‘challenge,’ ‘undermine’ the traditional plot (as is sometimes said in praise of a retelling), but to truly different, truly new artistic stuff that succeeds in absorbing, digesting, and transcending the conventional (‘classical’) storytelling, as if no magic tale had ever been told before. When we speak of fairy tales today, we often implicitly allude to a handful of ‘classic’ literary tales (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, etc.) that, in our increasingly global culture, after centuries of unstable variations, seem to have finally reached their truest, most natural, and purest form. We vaguely associate these tales with the Brothers Grimm, even though, as Donald Haase points out, “secondhand adaptations and retellings have usurped the place of the Grimms’ own texts.”8 As a consequence, “we can no longer speak of the longevity of Grimms’ tales, but at best of their reincarnation.” What we consider a Grimms’ tale today is in fact a “type,” that is, “the ideal form of a tale” more or less arbitrarily derived from the multitude of its variants.9 Our tales are abstractions. For the Grimms, as Nicole Belmont explains, nature expresses a poetry that has no author. The poetry of nature is an organic being, like a tree or a fish, and evolves spontaneously, like oral language, without losing its immutable divine essence.10 The Grimms contended that natural poetry can manifest itself in different forms, such as myths, folk tales, legends, which suit nature’s diverse self-expression.11 They borrowed the concept of ‘natural poetry’ (Naturpoesie) from Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who strongly emphasized the pedagogical power of fairy tales.12 Herder himself had planned a collection of fairy tales to nourish “the spirit and heart of children.” Natural purity and moral purity were thus two sides of the same coin.13 The ‘pure’ and ‘original’ version of magic tales is what the

4

dancing backward

Brothers Grimm sought to attain with their collection, and their endeavor was successful, even though adults and children today are often unfamiliar with their book.14 By adults and children I mean middle-class members of a Western or Westernized society. Even students of fairy tales often allude to these ‘classic’ stories without specifying their titles. A post-Grimm Western culture has created a two-level ranking: (1) fully-formed, classic, and immutable tales; (2) a myriad of inferior, imperfect, and opaque tales that haven’t attained their perfect form. Both kinds of tales can be either oral or literary. But we must bear in mind that “oral and literary tales,” in Jack Zipes’s words, “form one immense and complex genre because they are inextricably dependent on one another.”15 This mutual influence, Rudolf Schenda confirms, can be traced back to the Middle Ages.16 The term ‘classic’ is not incorrect if used for the seminal literary collections of Hans Christian Andersen, Perrault, or the Brothers Grimm. The problem is that ‘classic’ has acquired an all-encompassing meaning. ‘Classic’ implies natural, correct, and final. Today, even public performances of fairy tales are in essence oral repetitions of classic (and thus written) tales. The fact that a tale is told orally doesn’t mean that the tale is an oral tale. “Today,” the folklorist Giuseppe Gatto maintains, “the oral tale in Europe and in the Western world doesn’t exist anymore.”17 Jack Goody reminds us that the contemporary Western “process of transmission differs greatly from that in a purely oral society, since with a written text the storyteller (the mother, for example) can always go back to the original and correct the story that she has told.”18 It is worth remembering that, according to the Brothers Grimm, the mythic Dorothea Viehmann, their primary source of oral tales, introduced no variations in her stories.19 The Grimms held that she was able to repeat the same tale over and over again with no change. She knew the ‘right’ version and didn’t let it go. As Jens Sennewald points out, it was as if Dorothea read from a preexisting and invisible written text, which would become a real book thanks to the Grimms. Dorothea served as the sacred recipient of an immense corpus of immemorial tales that had been corrupted through their oral transmission, but could be restored (or, better yet, healed, like an infected body) through a careful work of philological reconstruction.20 The pure and stable forms of the original tales, which were nowhere to be found, could be recreated. The Freudian folklorist Alan Dundes alleges that the Grimms disguised “their actual sources and even destroy[ed] all of their original field notes.”21 In Dundes’s view, although the Grimms are traditionally considered two pioneering figures in the study of folklore, “to the ex-

an introduction

5

tent that oral material are rewritten, embellished and elaborated, and then presented as if they were pure, authentic oral tradition,” their Children’s and Household Tales is “a prima facie case of fakelore.”22

The demonic spell mentioned by Kierkegaard and the Grimms is a cogent image of our contemporary condition. The spell is about a repetitive movement that can’t be stopped. What seems dynamic is in fact a static, and agonizing, condition. Our fairy tales, the tales we cherish and repeat to our children as a necessary element of their intellectual growth, speak of a change that is no more. Cultural oblivion, the lack of historical perspective, social conformity, and the end of oral storytelling are crucial facets of the problem. Emphasizing that these stories used to be something else seems pointless because, even if we are aware that these stories used to exist incognito in other stories, in an ocean of infinite other stories, or that they were significantly different from the ones we know, we can’t let go of the idea that there are right and wrong, perfect and flawed versions. As James Heising rightly points out, modern “children subjected to standardized schooling and mass modes of entertainment no longer want to be ‘told’ stories that might depart from the ‘correct’ versions printed in books or on film.”23 Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) is the rare case of a ‘new’ classic tale, and only for the Anglo-American world. The result is a paradox. What was meant to free is now used to conform. “Products of the imagination,” says Zipes, “are set in a socio-economic context and are used ultimately to impose limitations on the imagination of the producers and the receivers. The mediation between the imagination of the producer and audience becomes instrumental in standardizing forms and images of the fantasy.”24 Not only classic tales, but all other modern magic tales, which look to the classic ones as their basic models (their images, their syntax, etc.), are parts of a consensual ideology that fosters in people “the sense that the current system is right, that it is beneficial, that alternatives are threatening.”25 One could argue that our contemporary culture does offer alternatives: on the one hand, we are free to embrace and perpetuate traditional, conventional stories; on the other, we are also free to question or undermine them through infinite forms of parody. The former kind of storytelling may be good for our children, so that they grow up by absorbing the eternal magic of the Grimms’ or Perrault’s tales (more likely through their film versions or simplified texts); the latter is more suitable for an adult audience hoping to subvert the status quo. Contemporary ani-

6

dancing backward

mated cinema astutely blends tradition with innovation by presenting, for example, gutsy princesses and dumb princes, without substantially changing the format of the tale (see the most recent films based on Snow White or Brave). What is missing from this scheme is a third possibility: the belief that something truly new, a new form of storytelling, a new form of magic may exist. In The Culture of Conformism, Patrick Colm Hogan speaks of the “structural exclusion” that cuts off cultural alternatives presented as simply impossible, unhealthy, extreme, or ridiculous, so as to reinforce a sense of safety against the unknown.26 A frequent misunderstanding is to associate new forms of narrative expressions, such as comic books or graphic novels, with originality and freedom from old cultural conformities. The reality is that a new medium does not necessarily translate into a more vital artistic message. Even the Japanese manga with overt fairy-tale tones often seek to emphasize their Western sources. The popular Princess Tutu, for example, tells the story of the young Ahiru, a schoolgirl who loves ballet and dreams about dancing with a prince. The manga opens with the image of the girl’s romantic dream, which is a clear allusion to a Disney film, because only Disney can bless Princess Tutu with a sense of magic (see figure 1). Surrounded by flowers, the Japanese (Disney-Grimm) Cinderella pirouettes with her young lover and confesses: “I have a dream. One day, a handsome prince and I will dance a pas de deux.”27 These booklets prove that conformity transcends age. Young consumers are not less conventional than middle-aged ones. Both reason along the lines of an “ingroup” and “outgroup” mentality, according to which classic magic tales are charming, eternal, and healthy, either in their traditional forms or in their updated versions.28

Like the food we eat, the fairy tales we (children, adults, young adults) read, watch, or listen to, are processed; that is, we approach them knowing that what we are absorbing is derivative. In most American supermarkets and drug stores, we consumers find ‘organic’ food, which is supposed to be more real and substantial than our regular food. But a general perception is that organic food is not sufficient. Perceiving that the food we eat lacks the nutrients it used to have, we add protein pills, vitamins, omega three, and all sorts of precious herbs from distant lands that preserve the secret key to our ailments and deficient edibles. Whereas our processed food can give us deadly diseases such as cancer, mysterious herbs or roots from nonWestern cultures can save us. On Espacio en blanco, a popular night program

an introduction

7

f i g u r e 1 . Manga, Princess Tutu, 2003

about “mysteries and other realities” on Radio nacional de España, the ethnobotanist Juan González Simoneau recently spoke about the “sacred plants” of Amazonia, whose great powers (curing a paralyzed man, for example, or even certain forms of cancer) seem astonishing for us Westerns only because we, unlike the primitives of Amazonia, have walked away from nature. The Amazonian tribes keep their ancient knowledge alive in “ancestral communal houses,” where “at night they tell the stories that constructed the quo-

8

dancing backward

tidian life of their ancestors,” along with the “myths, legends, instructions” necessary for their tribal existence. Medical remedies, myths, legends are facets of the same natural knowledge that we have lost.29 We travel out there (Amazonia is only one example) to find what is missing here. With a similar attitude, the nineteenth-century collectors of folk tales visited those who were socially inferior, and literally or metaphorically lived outside the urban and civilized society. Those people (peasants, maids, etc.) were different from us (members of the middle class), yet held something crucial for us (our soul, the spirit of our national identity). In a like manner, the Grimms insisted that their beloved storyteller Dorothea Viehmann was a peasant woman, even though, as Maria Tatar points out, she “was neither a peasant nor a representative of the Volk.”30 She was a tailor’s wife, and her tales had a strong French background. It is difficult to comprehend the enormous success of the Grimms’ book unless we recall the profound spiritual meaning that their tales seemed to convey, their sacred and ‘magical’ quality. ‘Primitive’ people hold the key to our identity, and their ‘ancestral’ folk tales were their modest way of expressing the wisdom that we have forgotten. In the fascinating The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), the ecologist and philosopher David Abram rephrases the fundamental dichotomy between the world of the written word and processed stories, and the primitive world of orality: “It is likely that the ‘inner world’ of our Western psychological experience, like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief, originates in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth . . . The sense of being immersed in a sentient world is preserved in the oral stories and songs of indigenous people—in the belief that sensible phenomena are all alive and aware, in the assumption that all things have the capacity of speech. Language, for oral people, is not a human invention but a gift of the land itself.”31 In this context we are less interested in assessing the accuracy of Abram’s statement than in acknowledging that contemporary Western culture is indeed based on its perceived distance from the source of its identity. Abram sees human life as a “living dream that we share with the soaring hawk, the spider, and the stone silently sprouting lichens on its course surface.”32 “Our task,” Abram contends at the end of his significant book, “is that of taking up the written word . . . and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land . . . It is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local sound-scape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told.”33 We could read the conclusion of The Spell of the Sensuous as a manifesto, a compelling invitation to transform ourselves through a radical renovation of our storytelling. Abram’s insistence on going “back to

an introduction

9

the land” is in essence an invitation to move our storytelling back to nature, as the Grimms advocated also, even though Abram does not believe in the existence of an original, pure narrative form that needs to be preserved from the passing of time. Whereas the Grimms intended to preserve the past, Abram looks to the future, to a new way of spinning our “living dream.” Living in nature and outside the boundaries of a civilized lifestyle makes the ‘primitives’ less clean and unaccustomed to the practice of writing. But “dirt,” a recent New York Times article suggests, is good for you: “In a world of hand sanitizer and wet wipes we scarcely imagine the pre-industrial lifestyle that resulted in the daily intake of trillions of helpful organisms . . . Our rotting and fermenting food has been chilled.”34 However, our “postmodern era of squeaky-clean food” has deprived us of the benefits of what used to be unfiltered and unprocessed: “Increasing evidence suggests that the alarming rise in allergic and autoimmune disorders during the past few decades is at least partly attributable to our lack of exposure to microorganisms that once covered our food and us.” As a result, “we should probably hug our local farmers’ markets a little tighter,” because they are “our only connector” to the natural food of yesteryear. Many of the retellings of classical fairy tales try to smudge these pure tales with the mud of reality. An extreme case are the stories dealing with the horrors of Nazism, such as Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992) or Louise Murphy’s The True Story of Hansel and Gretel: A Novel of War and Survival (2003). Murphy’s adaptation opens with the image of a man and a “stepmother” driving a motorcycle in a desolate and snowy landscape in Poland. His two children sit in the sidecar. Since three Nazi motorcycles are about to catch up with them, the woman insists that they abandon the two children at the border of a forest because the kids are slowing them down. She also reminds the children not to disclose their Jewish names. “You are Hansel and Gretel. Remember,” she yells at them while they enter the dark wood.35 If we usually associate a fairy-tale narrative with an abstract and atemporal place, a widespread tendency in contemporary literature and visual arts is to contaminate them by setting them in brutally realistic, un-fairy-tale settings.36 The irruption of reality into the realm of classical fairy tales is a form of parody.

A ‘dirty,’ unrefined kind of storytelling is a central topic of this book. Despite the Grimms’ questionable statement about Dorothea Viehmann, oral folk tales used to be dirty. Please remember Novalis’s emphasis on the link between “marvelous” and “unconnected” in a genuine fairy tale. Dirty, immoral, obscene, disjointed are some of the adjectives used to characterize

10

dancing backward

Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales) the first collection of European literary fairy tales (1634–36). These tales are dirty also because they are unpolished and resemble rushed transcriptions of oral stories. Recall the citation at the beginning of this introduction. It comes from The Art of Remembering (L’arte del ricordare, 1566), a popular Renaissance treatise on the art of memory, a set of rhetorical techniques that meant to revitalize the Latin tradition of oratory. Its author, Giovan Battista della Porta (Naples 1535–1615), was one of the most famous philosophers and scientists of sixteenth-century Europe. Quintilian and Cicero wrote famous books that explained how a public speaker could memorize a long and complex speech and then deliver it in the most effective way. In The Art of Remembering, Della Porta fondly recalls the marvel arising from the “poorly composed fairy tales” (mal composte favole) that his nurse used to tell him as a child.37 Unlike Dorothea Viehmann, Della Porta’s nurse did not recite stories by heart from an imaginary book that was yet to be written; the Italian tales had something spontaneous and unscripted, which contributed to an effect of marvel (maraviglia) that marked the child’s imagination forever. The ‘dirt’ of the Italian nurse’s tales has become unfamiliar to us. Commenting on his fairy-tale film Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno, 2006), the director Guillermo del Toro laments the audience’s resistance to all forms of storytelling that defy full explanation.38 Every moment in a magic tale must make sense, del Toro complains.

Contemporary Western literary culture is firmly rooted in parody. We live in a postclassical time reminiscent of a late-antiquity or post-Renaissance, baroque environment, in which ‘classical’ texts were perceived as supreme models with which readers and writers conversed and tried to imitate, without questioning their fundamental superiority and immutability. In Zipes’s words, a community “may still think in terms of a previous time or behave according to thought patterns and traditions of a past society while living in the present.”39 This paradoxical situation takes place when “the social development does not fully work out the contradictions of the past society.” Resorting to parody is a way of maintaining a solid link to the past while implicitly acknowledging the discomfort of this dependence. “Parody,” Simon Dentith points out, “includes any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice.”40 This general definition is effective if by “polemical” we also include all forms of texts that try to improve or update the original. Bowdlerized versions of the Grimms’ tales, all the rewritings considered more

an introduction

11

suitable for present-day children, are also, from this perspective, forms of parody, because parody “depends for its effect upon recognition of the parodied original, or at least, upon some knowledge of the style or discourse to which allusion is being made.”41 In her introduction to The Fairies Return, or New Tales for Old, Maria Tatar stresses that “both satire and fairy tale are driven by a lack, by a sense that something vital is missing.”42 I would argue that the “lack” in modern takes on classic literary tales is not only the longing for a more humane world, which is a fundamental constituent of this narrative genre (fairy tales express hope for a better life), but also the frustration with a narrative language that is derivative and insufficient. Today the genre of fairy tales, Claudio Marazzini rightly contends, “is not as vital as it was in an archaic agricultural society in which oral performance triumphed.”43 Speaking about the great impact that Ovid’s Metamorphoses had on his poetics, in a 1973 interview the great American postmodern novelist Robert Coover, whose books often mock and subvert the most famous classic fairy tales, stated that Ovid’s poem helped him understand how strongly we resist change: “The Ovidian stories all concern transformation . . . I suddenly realized that the basic, constant struggle for all of us is against metamorphosis.”44 A fundamental tenet of modern consumerist society is that consumers be given a predictable version of what they already know or have. The stories of Cinderella and Snow White can certainly be varied, since variations make them appear alive, but not transformed to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Consumers buy a novel or a children’s book with the same attitude they approach the purchase of a car or a dishwasher. The pictures on the book cover, the blurbs on its back, but also the previews of upcoming films, interviews on talk shows with their protagonists are only some of the possible paratextual techniques used to titillate consumers’ desire and reassure them that the product they are about to purchase is safe because it is well known to them. The most frequent adjective used to dismiss a failed product is ‘weird,’ whereas what is successful, because it looks both new and familiar, is ‘cool.’ “Cool is a matter of things,” Michael Taussig writes in Beauty and the Beast, “yet it is also, and because of that, predominantly image, predominantly the occasion of looking and being looked at, of display.”45

a brief historical survey of the most important approaches to folk and fairy tales Consumers also make use of legitimate critical findings to reinforce the idea that what the Grimms, and later Disney, accomplished is the last step in a

12

dancing backward

natural, and immemorial, evolution toward clarity and perfection, in other words, written documents. The notion that those cherished and reassuring tales are literary constructions and not natural phenomena is hard to accept. We are immediately reminded that in reality these tales have an extremely ancient origin and are present in diverse cultures (Cinderella first appeared in China in the ninth century!), and that in reality they are ancient myths in disguise. They are thus eternal. In other words, classic literary magic tales have acquired a theological depth; they must be taken as articles of faith. They are sacred narratives of Western spirituality. Like the differing stories in the four Gospels, these tales do accept variations, as long as their existence is not called into question. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, “the study and growing knowledge of the ancient languages of India and of the texts,” Jan de Vries explains, “made a path far deeper into the past than the Greek or Germanic sources.”46 The Vedas, the most ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism, were rich in mythic allusions and powerful descriptions of nature. Also inspired by the Brothers Grimm ( Jacob published German Mythology in 1835), Adalbert Kuhn, the founder of Indo-European archeology, became interested in popular traditions and collections of folk tales, which led him to the study of mythology. In The Descent of Fire and of the Divine Drink (1859), which can be seen as the first example of comparative mythology, Kuhn offers a mythic interpretation of natural phenomena. Prometheus, for example, is “an old god of fire,” who, in Kuhn’s hypothesis, should be connected to the Sanskrit word pramantha, which indicates the sticks that priests used to light a fire.47 Max Müller in England and his follower Angelo de Gubernatis in Italy looked to India as the primordial source of all folk and fairy tales.48 For these scholars, Indian myths were behind the tales collected in the Grimms’ book.49 De Gubernatis dedicates the first chapter of his History of Folk Tales (1883) to the tale of Cinderella, which he connects to the image of the dawn interpreted according to Indian mythology: The dawn walks ahead of the sun, but neither she (lei ) touches him nor does he touch her. The sun follows her; she dances before him, but when they seem to get closer, they depart from each other. The Vedic dawn always flees on a luminous, extremely fast chariot, which the two celestial knights, the dioscuri, perhaps brothers of hers, lent her. In a like manner, when the ball is over, i.e., the celebration of light, she flees on the same large chariot that took her there.50

The Christianized Cinderella tales we hear in Northern Italy, de Gubernatis holds, are “variants” of the original Vedic story.51 Despite its far-fetched

an introduction

13

conclusions, de Gubernatis’s detailed interpretation of the most famous motifs of the Grimms’ Cinderella is a pleasure to read as another form of independent literary product inspired by the literary tale. In de Gubernatis’s accounts, the clear-cut differences between mythic and fairy-tale stories become blurry. More importantly, this kind of (scientifically questionable) approach can be seen as an attempt to remythologize nature, if we bear in mind that, as Laurence Coupe contends, “myth is a living force when it is understood as imaginative exploration; it becomes sterile and oppressive when it is read as literal explanation.”52 This, in my view, is the major flaw of numerous psychoanalytic readings, which use fairy-tale motifs to prove Freud’s or Jung’s theories; that is, to confirm an already established and literal explanation of magic tales. Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1976), based on a Freudian approach, or Marie-Louise von Franz’s The Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1970), reproducing a Jungian mindset, are two well-known, albeit controversial, examples.53 All the above approaches share a view of folk and fairy tales as narrative ‘types,’ with infinite and essentially inconsequential, variations. It is worth citing, at this point, a key passage from J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous essay “On Fairy-Stories,” in which the author of The Lord of the Rings tackles this important issue. Students of folklore, he writes, are inclined to say that any two stories that are built round the same folk-lore motive, or are made up of a generally similar combination of such motives, are “the same stories.” We read that Beowulf “is only a version of Dat Erdmänneken”; that “The Black Bull of Norroway is Beauty and the Beast,” or “is the same story as Eros and Psyche” . . . Statements of this kind may express (in undue abbreviation) some element of truth; but they are not true in a fairy-story sense, they are not true in art or literature. It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count.54

Tolkien rightly emphasizes that a motif is not a story, and that even when two stories share some easily recognizable motifs, they may differ in substance. Tolkien explains that dissecting a tale into a sequence of motifs (its “bones”) ends up depriving the tale of its uniqueness and its “life.” But dissecting was in fact the prevalent scientific approach to oral magic tales throughout the twentieth century. Instead of acknowledging that, regardless of its form of transmission (oral, semiliterary, or literary), a tale exists as an independent organism, albeit in dialogue with a multitude of other tales, the overwhelming majority of scholarship dedicated to this genre has operated

14

dancing backward

according to a series of distinctions: written versus oral; eternal and classic tales versus transient, unstable, and thus inferior written versions; written tales with or without an author. The fundamental and justified impulse to organize the countless number of oral tales has exerted a long-lasting influence on how we, the general public and experts, read them. We see an oral, authorless tale as a reservoir of motifs. Within this critical frame, we can also draw some conclusions about the overall cultural message of a given collection (how it defies or reaffirms the social credo in which its tales were told). Salman Rushdie lampoons the motif-driven analysis of folk and fairy tales in Haroun and the Sea Stories, an original interpretation of the Arabian Nights. Haroun, the hero of Rushdie’s book, suddenly finds himself “standing in a landscape that looked exactly like a giant chessboard . . . He was, so to speak, looking out through the eyes of the young hero of the story.”55 The hero of this postmodern magic tale sees a tower with a window, out of which gazed “a captive princess.” Haroun, however, doesn’t know that what he is experiencing is “Princess Rescue Story Number S/1001/ZHT/420/41(r)xi; and because the princess in this particular story had recently had a haircut and therefore had no long tresses to let down (unlike the heroine of Princess Rescue Story G/1001/RIM/777/M(w)I, better known as ‘Rapunzel’), Haroun as the hero was required to climb up the outside of the tower by clinging to the cracks between the stones with his bare hands and feet.” By cutting her hair, Rushdie’s princess disrupts the patterned format of her own tale, according to which she is supposed to act as an Arabian Rapunzel. Rushdie mocks two of the most pervasive modern approaches to folk and fairy tales. The first is based on a catalogue of universal types and motifs originated from the so-called Finnish School in the first decades of the twentieth century. Antti Aarne’s and Stith Thompson’s immensely influential The Types of Folk-Tale (published in 1928 and 1961), and Thompson’s Motif-Index (1932–36) are the two pillars of the Finnish school, whose central position in the study of folklore and fairy-tale literature is so crucial that, according to Alan Dundes, “anyone who writes about Indo-European fairy tales without reference to the Aarne-Thompson (AT) classification system is almost certainly an amateur or dilettante from the folklorist’s point of view.”56 The second fundamental approach teased in the passage from Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea Stories is Propp’s emphasis on the structure of the tale, seen as a sequence of a limited number of possible actions. Contemporary to the Finnish school’s method of analysis, Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928) represents the other seminal work of the twentieth

an introduction

15

century in the field of folklore studies, even though it became known in Western Europe only three decades later. Propp’s dissection of the Russian magic tale, the main focus of his research, looks to its composition, which he divides into a series of “functions.” A function, in Propp’s own words, is “an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action.”57 The motif-based analysis originating in the Finnish school and Propp’s structural approach are necessary attempts to systematize the ocean of folk and fairy tales of the Western tradition. Both result, however, in an abstract approach, which risks denaturalizing the tale itself. By looking at the tale as a conglomerate of universal units (motifs, types, functions, etc.), these approaches emphasize what makes a tale similar to a myriad of others, and not what makes it unique.58 In Jack Goody’s view, for example, Propp doesn’t seem to realize that “changes in a recitation can be very radical, in a generative way, leading to something ‘other.”59 In The Cinderella Story, an anthology of twenty-two versions of the famous tale, Neil Philip remarks that using such tools as The Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, “it is fatally easy to get bogged down in classification and comparison . . . Each version should stand and be considered on its own.”60 Several folklore and literary studies point out the limits of Aarne-Thompson’s and Propp’s approaches, but their overall influence on how we read folk and fairy tales has been much more subtle and pervasive than we are willing to acknowledge.

The widespread identification between classic fairy tales and types, as we said earlier, and some fundamental critical approaches highlighting the universality of this form of storytelling (structuralism, motif-inventory, but also psychoanalysis) have led to a generalized weakening of the tales themselves. By weakening I mean a significant reduction in the potential ‘magic’ of the tale itself. We have domesticated the tales; we have tamed them. Not only are their new versions often repetitious and predictable; their characters, especially the most famous ones, have become parodies of themselves. A recent narrative strategy to revitalize them, which is in fact an attempt to say something new about them, is to gather all the major characters of these narrative types into one big story, in which Snow White, Cinderella, Prince Charming, but also Pinocchio and Beauty and the Beast, interact among themselves. The authors of such retellings emphasize that these characters survive in a circumscribed space, which is meant either to protect them from the rest of society or to prevent them from going into the

16

dancing backward

world of human beings. I will mention three variations of this narrative setting. The most original and entertaining one is Michael Buckley’s The Sisters Grimm, a series of young adult novels centered on the characters of two young girls whose parents have vanished for no apparent reason. The two girls, after being assigned to mean and abusive foster parents, are brought to an elderly lady, “Grandma Grimm,” who speaks with a German accent and who has applied to adopt them. Mrs. Grimm lives in a remote little town called “Ferryport Landing,” in the state of New York. She explains to the stunned girls that the Grimms’ collection is a “history book” because “every story is an account of something that really happened.”61 Wilhelm Grimm, who was the girls’ “greatgreat-great-great grandfather,” brought the fairy-tale creatures (called “Everafters,” including other major figures such as Pinocchio, Geppetto, and Baba Yaga) to America because, being different from other people, they were being persecuted in Europe. They settled in the isolated Ferryport Landing, but soon felt endangered again when humans began to move to their town. Showing great hostility toward the human race that had abused them in Europe, the Everafters threatened to mount a rebellion. To prevent a war between humans and fairy-tale characters that would spill over the entire continent, Wilhelm Grimm cast a spell on the village, which made it impossible for the Everafters to leave.62 They now used “magical disguises to live and work alongside their normal neighbors.”63 Fairy-tale characters as an endangered species is also the central idea of Fables (first published in 2002), a popular comic book series focused on the secret community of “fables,” a new name for characters of fairy tales who, after being exiled from their homeland by the evil “Adversary,” now live incognito in a “quiet little corner” of New York City.64 Fables are in constant danger of being discovered and persecuted by human beings (called “mundies”) and “unknown enemy alike” (see figure 2).65 The lighthearted The Sisters Grimm and the bleak Fables share a similar insight: the traditional, classic fairy-tale characters risk being annihilated, even though they are supposed to be immortal. They barely survive, hidden in a ghetto (a small town or a few remote blocks in New York City). The paradox behind both series is that, although humans seem to adore the classic tales, they can’t tolerate the actual existence of their characters, who can be accepted only as abstract figures frozen in time and pinned down in conventional books. Humans love them as wax figures in a Madame Tussaud’s museum or in a Disney World park. The Sisters Grimm and Fables reveal a second major element: in order for

f i g u r e 2 . Front cover of Fables, vol. 1, 2012

18

dancing backward

their biographies to develop, these characters must live together, because after their exile (from Western Europe, from their homeland), they continue each other’s stories; they keep each other alive, since their audience is unwilling to accept them for who they really are. Snow White becomes a character of Cinderella’s and Pinocchio’s ‘new’ biographies, which remain unknown to human beings. The unremarkable ABC TV series Once upon a Time (2011), clearly indebted to The Sisters Grimm, describes an imaginary, remote town in Maine, where the evil queen of the Snow White tale keeps all the major fairy-tale characters under her strict surveillance after casting a spell that prevents them from leaving. Snow White, Prince Charming, Red Riding Hood do not remember their glorious past. The three recent narrative series we have mentioned (The Sisters Grimm, Fables, Once upon a Time) try to inject new blood into the conventional versions of some classic tales, which have been reduced to narrative types almost devoid of any narrative energy. These recent products are also forms of parodic rewritings, expressions of a postclassic anxiety, which looks to pastiche as a form of artistic survival. An additional serious problem concerning the sclerotic biography of classic characters is that in reality they don’t have one, if by biography we mean a clearly identifiable sequence of events characterizing the life of a (fictional) individual. Although contemporary consumers of magic tales are vaguely aware that the Grimms tampered with some previous oral versions of their most popular tales, they still believe that the Grimms (who are now more a concept than real authors) captured the real, immemorial form of a given tale, even though Jack Goody wonders “if one can talk about an original folktale.”66 Goody’s statement is particularly significant if read in the light of what Tolkien said about the intrinsic difference between a motif and a story. Take, for example, the case of “Sleeping Beauty.” In the Western tradition, we usually think of three main literary variations, even though its first formation is to be found in the fourteenth-century French romance Perceforest.67 The first main variation is to be found in Giambattista Basile’s Italian The Tale of Tales (1634–36); the second appears in Perrault’s French Tales and Stories of the Past (1697); and the third in the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales (last edition 1857). The moment defining the Sleeping Beauty’s identity is usually linked to her awakening thanks to the prince’s intervention (possibly his kiss). The beautiful girl coming back to life exists insofar as she wakes up from a long sleep. This is the core of her story, but only if we see the Grimms’ tale as the conclusive step of a process of clarification. In other words, the Grimms’ Sleeping Beauty is finally herself after shedding the dross of previous inac-

an introduction

19

curate or digressive versions, which had failed to capture the true spirit of her biography. The reality, on the contrary, is that Basile, Perrault, and the Grimms are not talking about the same young woman In this regard, it is useful to read the brief summary preceding the Basile version titled “Sun, Moon, and Talia.” We don’t know if Basile authored the synopses introducing each of his fifty tales, but what matters for us is seeing what details were perceived as necessary in the transmission of the tale. What is “Sun, Moon, and Talia” about? This is what the summary says:

Talia dies because of a little piece of flax and is left in a palace, where a king chances to pass by and causes her to have two children. The children fall into the hands of the king’s jealous wife, who orders that they be cooked and served to their father and that Talia be burned. The cook saves the children and Talia is freed by the king, who has his wife thrown into the same fire that had been prepared for Talia.68

What stands out in this short summary is that it makes no allusion to the magical moment of the girl’s awakening. It is true that, unlike Perrault and the Grimms, Basile doesn’t describe a resurrection due to the power of romantic love. The king, a married man, rapes the sleeping girl and walks away. Talia comes back to life months later when one of her babies accidentally sucks the piece of flax out of her fingernail. The immoral nature of the king’s encounter with the sleeping girl fails to justify the lack of any reference to her sudden awakening, for Basile too presents it as a moving, magical moment, which celebrates maternal and not romantic love. Talia sits up, sees her beautiful babies, and hugs them tight. Basile writes: “Talia felt as if she were awakening from a long sleep, and when she saw those jewels beside her she offered them her tit and held them as dear as her own life.” The summary of Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” focuses on the part of the story that Perrault kept in his rewriting, but the Grimms removed in its entirety. It is fair to say that the changes introduced in Perrault’s version essentially reflect his intention to moralize the tale. Although this is not the point of my analysis, it is hard to believe that the French author ignored Basile’s version. One could even speak of plagiarism, since we are in the realm of literary texts. The idea that Basile’s The Tale of Tales couldn’t be known in France has been questioned more frequently in recent times.69 Instead of a married and unfaithful king, Perrault introduces a brave young

20

dancing backward

prince. Instead of a jealous wife, in the French tale we find an evil mother who was “of the race of the ogres,” a nonhuman creature.70 For the author of the summary in Basile’s book, what precedes the girl’s awakening (her sad fate foretold by her rich father’s wise men) is superfluous if compared to the exciting events following her return to life. Opening with the brief sentence “Talia dies,” the Italian summary tells the story of an innocent young girl and her babies persecuted by a jealous wife, and the reversal of fortune at the end of the tale. The breaking of the spell does not define the girl’s identity. Her identity is marked by her sudden death, not by her awakening. We could ironically say that if the anonymous author of the summary had read the Grimms’ ‘correct’ version of the story, he wouldn’t have made the gross mistake of overlooking the centrality of the girl’s awakening. No modern retelling misses it. Sleeping Beauty, as we know her, was born with the Brothers Grimm as a result of the radical editing that they performed on the tale transmitted by Basile and Perrault. The Grimms’ version is significantly shorter than the Italian and French tales. The young woman’s awakening becomes the crucial mark of her identity when the Grimms truncate her biography, which in the Italian and French stories continues with her distressing misadventures at the king’s court. In the Grimms’ “Brier Rose,” on the contrary, the girl’s story ends with the kiss that breaks the evil spell and leads to her subsequent marvelous marriage. Nothing relevant happens in her life after the historic kiss. Sleeping Beauty, our modern conventional Sleeping Beauty, was born at that moment. True, it was Perrault who first highlighted the romantic tone of the girl’s awakening, but Perrault’s heroine is not the girl we have come to associate with Sleeping Beauty. The Grimms knew how crucial the ending of a tale is. In their German summaries and adaptations of Basile’s fifty Italian tales, which the Grimms published merely as an appendix to the second edition of their collection (1822), the two German writers performed a similar editorial work. At times, the Grimms chopped off the final chunk of an Italian tale in order to make it more romantic and magical. They make a tale end with a heart-warming embrace (the male protagonist takes his lady in his arms) even when the Italian tale doesn’t end there.

the structure of this book Although Basile’s Tale of Tales is the main source of inspiration and point of reference of the entire volume, this book is divided into three major parts.

an introduction

21

The first part opens with Basile’s extraordinary rewritings of the Cupid and Psyche myth, which is an ancient tale of the Western tradition. It is in Basile’s book that we find the first modern interpretations of the classical tale. I will place Basile’s rewritings of Cupid and Psyche in dialogue with Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilian Fairy Tales, an important nineteenth-century collection of oral tales in which fascinating rewritings of Basile’s own interpretations of the Latin myth are identified. This dialogue between the baroque masterpiece and the nineteenth-century collection throws light on the crucial concepts of beginning and ending in a folk and fairy tale. The second part begins with an analysis of Basile’s “The Myrtle” (“La mortella”) This tale, one of the best-known in The Tale of Tales, contains clear echoes of the Cupid and Psyche myth and leads to a turning point in the history of the Western fairy tale. We will look at the way three major figures of German Romanticism—Clemens Brentano and the Brothers Grimm— interpreted and appropriated Basile in order to justify a radically different view of the magic tale. For Brentano and the Grimms, Basile’s The Tale of Tales represents the first collection of national magic tales. Brentano contends that Basile composed an essentially literary interpretation of oral folk tales, whereas the Grimms emphasize the oral nature of Basile’s book. Furthermore, we will see that Brentano became the scribe of an oral storyteller when he returned to the Catholic faith and befriended the mystic Anna Katharina Emmerick, whose visions Brentano transcribed live. It is worth mentioning that Anna Katharina’s Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu Christi inspired Mel Gibson’s controversial film The Passion of the Christ, although critics agree that this mystical text was “largely the work of the poet” Brentano.71 In a subsequent chapter we focus on the tale of Beauty and the Beast, one of the best-known metamorphoses of the Cupid and Psyche tale. The German Romantic poet Novalis saw this famous fairy tale as representing a fundamental philosophical concept: the universal harmonization of two opposites, which is the core of Novalis’s poetics. The third and final part opens with a detailed analysis of Robert Coover’s postmodern interpretation of classic fairy tales, especially Basile’s version of Sleeping Beauty, which the American author places in opposition to the conventional version deriving from Perrault, the Grimms, and Disney. We find a ferocious attack on the banality of Disney’s appropriation of the magic of fairy tales in Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom, whose unbecoming, ‘dirty’ storytelling, especially in the conclusion of his book, takes us back to the original ‘dirt’ of Basile’s style. Part three ends with a study of a popular kind of present-day memoir, in which some basic traits of a fairy-tale narrative

22

dancing backward

can be identified. Memoirs of this kind are based on an original trauma (an abusive mother or the death of a daughter or husband, for example) and often unfold according to a fairy-tale format. The last chapter of my book shows that, although oral storytelling barely exists anymore and the classic fairy tale has turned into a banal form of literary reproduction, innovative forms of this genre are detectable outside its traditional boundaries. In the final chapter, I discuss the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, identifying it as a new, powerful fairy tale, classic but not banal. My translations of the Grimms’ initial German renderings of Basile’s stories appear in the appendix.

chapter one

A Never Ending and Never Told Tale: Basile’s Undoing of “Cupid and Psyche”

Magic tales became relevant in Western culture as purported transcriptions of oral narrations. We began to see these stories as something precious coming from the past (someone had told a story to someone else, and this listener wrote it down some time ago). As untainted narrations coming from nature itself, these tales were meant for children, for human beings in the purest, uncontaminated, and sincere stage of their lives. Charles Perrault claimed that his son had written down his tales.1 But most nineteenthcentury bourgeois in the West believed that these stories had already existed before their narrator and their listener. They were convinced that these tales had spontaneously blossomed from nature’s bosom in times immemorial, maybe after Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden. Who can count all the heroes and heroines expelled from a royal place because of their disrespect for the rules? Didn’t Psyche break Love’s law and as a consequence had to wander alone through foreign lands? Folk tales, in their written format, came from the realm of the immemorial past.

This book is not intended to be a historical survey of the sociocultural foundations of seventeenth-century or twentieth-century magic tales, even though Maria Tatar has correctly defined my approach as “archeological”; nor I am interested in doing any kind of survey.2 I look at this genre from an archeological perspective because I believe that, in order to understand how fairy tales work and what they accomplish, we need to move backward, toward their past, when they existed hidden within other tales, when

26 c h a p t e r o n e

they were constantly forming and unforming themselves, when they were both themselves and their opposite, when they let other tales enter and contaminate or even defile them. It goes without saying that the vexed issue of the ‘oral’ versus ‘literary’ nature of these tales is absolutely central in this context. An “archeological” approach, however, may also help us see more clearly the repetitious imitations, adaptations, and parodies, which are already showing signs of fatigue. Before becoming paralyzed in their current shapes, magic tales enjoyed an amazing, indeed magical vitality. Robert Coover’s marvelous Briar Rose (1996) testifies to our contemporary impasse. His book is a set of short variations on a single well-known motif: the prince’s arduous passage through the thorny branches that prevent him from reaching Sleeping Beauty. Coover’s prince never reaches the princess, and the princess never wakes up. The brave prince is forever “caught in the briars” and the sleeping princess forever “lies alone in her dusky bedchamber atop the morbid bed.”3 The prince and the princess are stuck; they have become victims of their own stories. Our contemporary rewritings of classic fairy tales share a set of unwritten plot summaries that have neither oral nor literary origins. These stories simply exist as outlines that can take up an infinite variety of artistic manifestations, such as films, video games, comic books, children’s books, and TV commercials.4 Experts call these abstractions ‘types,’ that is a “stable sequence of motifs” that result in an “ideal form of a tale.”5 They result from bowdlerized versions of the Perrault and the Brothers Grimm collections, which are de facto relegated to a literary limbo as inactive objects that are still officially part of an international literary canon.6 Our modern retellings, even the most morally outrageous and politically challenging ones, are securely anchored to these atrophied formations.7

a new form of oral tale In this new cultural context, the controversy over the oral or literary nature of folk and fairy tales is not passé. If we wish to understand how our cherished magic tales survived, metamorphosed, and then, maybe, breathed their last, we need to go back in time, to their first written forms. In my view, this going back is essential if we are to rethink what ‘oral’ and ‘literary’ mean. For the sake of my study, I believe it is fruitful to move from a literal application of the terms ‘oral’ and ‘literal’ to a rhetorical one, as I will explain in a moment. The actual relationship between oral and literary nar-

a never ending and never told tale

27

ration is porous and dynamic. I am certainly not the first to contend that the oral and the literary, rather than being in strict opposition, have always been engaged in a prolific dialogue.8 As Jack Goody points out, when speaking of this difficult subject “we are not dealing with a clear-cut division. In the first place there is the important distinction between composition and performance, with the further possibility of having to differentiate between performance and transmission. Secondly, there is a meaningful sense in which all ‘literate’ forms are composed orally, if we include the use of the silent voice, the inner ear.”9 The belief in a totally uncontaminated oral origin of classic fairy tales is obsolete. A literary tale, inspired at least in part by oral motifs, may engender both additional literary versions and new oral retellings that in turn influence subsequent literary versions. It is unquestionable, however, that “literary variants represent essential landmarks” in the transmission of a given tale.10 Goody rightly stresses that “there may well be more of a boundary problem in some societies and one type of . . . standardized oral forms may slide into another, may not be distinguished from it, like romance and novel in English as distinct from roman in French and the equivalent in Italian.”11 Walter Ong recalls the oral readings of Renaissance Italian epics, such as Ludovico Ariosto’s immensely popular Orlando furioso, which lent themselves to oral performances thanks to their division into single episodic units.12 Early modern European culture was particularly sensitive to the fruitful relationship between written text and oral performance.13 This complex interaction becomes clearer when we read Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales (Lo cunto de li cunti, 1634–36), the first collection of literary fairy tales in Western Europe, and then identify its influence on oral narratives in nineteenth-century Sicily and early twentieth-century Spain.14 Paradoxically, these later ‘oral’ Spanish and Sicilian retellings seem more literary (that is, better structured, less obscure, and more moral) than Basile’s literary versions. These anonymous oral narrators took great pains to clarify Basile’s seemingly sloppy and convoluted narratives, as if their new oral versions were in fact exegeses of the seventeenth-century literary texts. The Tale of Tales, “one of the most significant and most inventive fairy tales books in world literature,” is in reality a hybrid of oral and literary elements.15 Although it is a highly learned rewriting of classical literature and mythology, early modern culture and folklore, and Renaissance theories on visual expression, this seminal volume written in seventeenth-century Neapolitan dialect reads like the transcription of a series of oral performances

28 c h a p t e r o n e

that may have taken place in the Neapolitan courts.16 In Rudolf Schenda’s words, “there cannot be any doubt that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors . . . drew orally told material into their writings.”17 Schenda speaks of a semiliterate and a semi-oral process, the former describing a situation in which a literate person (pastor, schoolmaster, etc.) read to an illiterate audience, and the latter indicating the oral repetition of material found, for example, in chapbooks, which already circulated in early modern Europe.18 The two seemingly opposite poles of oral and literary nourish each other. As Ong reminds us in Orality and Literacy, “fortunately, literacy, though it consumes its own oral antecedents . . . is also infinitely adaptable. It can restore its memory too.”19 “Oral expression,” Ong emphasizes, “can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality.”20 There are obviously significant differences between folk tales and Basile’s book, which “is the first integral compilation of authored, literary fairy tales in Western Europe.”21 Many of the so-called classic fairy tales, such as “Sleeping Beauty” or “Cinderella,” find their first complete literary form in Basile’s collection.22 But it is also true that The Tale of Tales evokes a strongly oral flavor, as if we were listening to its stories rather than reading them. Nicole Belmont defines Basile’s fundamental book as a wonderful example of oraliterature, a written text that expresses a “nostalgic” evocation of oral expression.23 A literary artifact that works like an oral one, The Tale of Tales is in fact a marvelous example of baroque literature.24 “In the baroque,” maintains the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, “the tension between the spoken and the written word is immeasurable.”25 In the seventeenth century, Benjamin continues, “the spoken word . . . is the ecstasy of the creature, it is exposure, rashness, powerlessness before God; the written word is the composure of the creature . . . omnipotence over the objects of the world.” The characters in Basile’s tales, even the ones who, like Cupid and Psyche, embody a more-than-human nature, are cursed individuals who survive in a grim and violent universe. We could claim that modern European literary fairy tales could only emerge in the baroque era, and especially in the Italian peninsula, whose rhetorical experimentations and linguistic excesses were notorious throughout seventeenth-century Europe. Basile’s collection of tales manifests the “immeasurable” tension between the oral and the literary by adopting all the rhetorical devices of Italian baroque prose (lengthy and complex metaphors, convoluted sentences, hyperbole, repetition, etc.), which he corrupts through the use of an essentially oral and crude idiom, his beloved Neapolitan dialect, and by mimicking the episodic, even fragmented, structure

a never ending and never told tale

29

typical of folk tales.26 Jack Zipes emphasizes this essential point of Basile’s text in clear terms: “In the case of the literary fairy tale in Italy, Giovan Francesco Straparola, Giambattista Basile, and Sarnelli . . . framed their works around speech communities . . . They chose a particular primary speech genre, the oral folk tale.”27 It is essential to understand, however, that these three authors of ‘oral-literary’ fairy tales did not exert an equal influence on the genre. Straparola’s The Facetious Nights (Le piacevoli notti, 1550–53) presents itself as a collection of written tales, more than a series of transcriptions of oral ones.28 Straparola’s language does show signs of local inflections but is still within the great Italian tradition of short stories à la Boccaccio. Pompeo Sarnelli published his Polisicheata in 1684, several decades after Basile’s The Tale of Tales, which Sarnelli tried to emulate. Basile is unquestionably the creator of a literary storytelling that strives to maintain an essentially oral appearance. A rhetorical, rather than historical, approach to the dialogue between the oral and the literary highlights what ‘oral’ and ‘literary’ concretely mean (that is, what they look like and what they do) when we read a collection of Volksmärchen or Kunstmärchen. Or we could say that the incorrect use of the word ‘oral’ reflects what we expect from an oral tale, regardless of its real or fictitious oral origin. As we will see, although the Brothers Grimm and Clemens Brentano saw Basile’s The Tale of Tales as a fundamental model for the Romantic Kunstmärchen, they couldn’t have disagreed more on the nature of this Italian book. The three German intellectuals all thought that Basile had captured the spirit of the Italian people, but whereas the Grimms emphasized the oral foundation of Basile’s masterpiece, Brentano held that Basile, essentially, had written a collection of literary stories. These divergent standpoints are not simply the result of a different literary taste. They correspond to two different views of what a fairy tale is meant to accomplish, and thus they reflect distinct social and political ideologies. We will see that Brentano and the Grimms literally rewrote Basile in order to prove their point. Brentano composed a collection titled Italian Fairy Tales, an explicit interpretation of eleven of Basile’s stories, and the Grimms wrote extensive summaries of the fifty tales in The Tale of Tales (altogether more than a hundred pages) and added them to the second edition of their Children’s and Household Tales.

the dirt of the oral ‘Oral’ and ‘literary’ are, in fact, mutually enlightening concepts. Rather than defining two distinct artifacts, ‘oral’ and ‘literary’ are two modes of aesthetic appreciation. In contrast to the traditional view of oral tales as narratives

30 c h a p t e r o n e

that “served to stabilize, conserve, or challenge the common beliefs, laws, values, and norms of a group,” in my view and that of others ‘oral’ is what destabilizes all messages and all agendas, what makes a story less clear and reliable.29 When placed as a mirror in front of ‘literary,’ ‘oral’ is first of all what is perceived as incomplete, inconsistent, deficient, redundant, verging on nonsense.30 ‘Oral,’ furthermore, is ‘dirty,’ in both literal and metaphorical senses, that which calls for restoration, remodeling, and interpretation; it is, in Benjamin’s words, “the domain of the free,” whereas the written “enslaves objects in the eccentric embrace of meaning.”31 A literary tale, according to Zipes, “in contrast to the rough and raw folk tale, is very ‘civil.’”32 ‘Oral’ is also that which is “natural” and dynamic, as the voice that improvises a story in the here and now of its performance.33 ‘Oral’ is what should have been reread before being sent to the publisher.34 ‘Oral’ is, finally, what fails to communicate a clear message, an unquestionable moral teaching. ‘Literary’ is not just the opposite of ‘oral.’ ‘Literary’ also implies an author, someone who has been able to bring order to the chaos of the oral. “Expectations associated with the literary arts,” writes Heather Maring, “do not adequately take into consideration how oral traditions work and may even obscure their aesthetic vitality.”35 The problem is that few literary critics have been interested in bringing to the fore the alleged “aesthetic vitality” of oral tales, as Nicole Belmont confirms in Poétique du conte: oral tales “are literary products, [although] their literary status has been denied due to the emphasis our society puts on writing.”36 Max Lüthi’s studies, such as Once upon a Time (1970) and The Fairy Tale as Art Form (1975), are still immensely fertile sources of inspiration for those who attempt to read ‘oral’ fairy tales as complex literary artifacts. Lüthi’s books, however, do not address specific stories and only offer a theoretical framework. Moreover, they make sweeping assumptions about oral tales that are not substantiated by all oral narratives (for instance, the lack of flashbacks or the strictly linear unfolding of the story).

giambattista basile and the history of the magic tale The mythic (also in the sense of ‘hypothetical) ‘oral’ stage preceding all subsequent written crystallizations is detectable in Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales. This is the book that first arranged a sequence of magic tales within a structure closely reminiscent of Boccaccio’s Decameron, a pillar of European medieval literature.37 In The Tale of Tales, a narrative frame intro-

a never ending and never told tale

31

duces fifty tales divided into five ‘days’; four long poems (eclogues), thematically unrelated to the stories, separate one day from the next. The last, fiftieth tale is also the conclusion of the initial frame tale. The complexity of the book, especially the presence of the four sophisticated poems, has always been seen as evidence of the fundamentally literary nature of The Tale of Tales. It is worth stressing, however, that Boccaccio’s book often claims to report the experiences, the stories, the culture of lower social classes, in which the oral is supposed to thrive. According to the philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), who published an Italian translation of The Tale of Tales in 1925 and thus played a major role in reviving the fame of this book in Italy, the fairy tales in this seventeenth-century masterpiece for the first time “showed off the grandeur of popular imagination and spoke its simple and picturesque language.” 38 The myth of the fairy tale as an oral expression of the folk’s wisdom blossomed with The Tale of Tales, as the Brothers Grimm acknowledged. It should be remembered, however, that the Grimms had a German prototype: the painter Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810) had made a transcription of two tales in Low German dialect. Runge’s versions of “The Juniper Tree” and “The Fisherman and His Wife” became two of the most famous stories of the Grimms’ collection.39 The Grimms received Runge’s two tales no later than 1808, thus several years before the first edition of their own book. Runge’s original manuscript is now lost, but his influence on the Grimms’ view of folk literature is unquestionable. There are clear similarities between Runge and Basile. In the Grimms’ view, both strove to stay close to the authentic voice of the people by faithfully reproducing the Italian and the German people’s voices.

If the first modern manifestation of the oral genre of folk and fairy tales is a highly literary text, it is also worth recalling that “the one surviving fairy tale of antiquity” is the myth of Cupid and Psyche, which is, however, also a dense philosophical meditation placed at the center of an intricate Latin novel, Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, written in the second century AD.40 The story of Cupid and Psyche is at once a myth, a fairy tale, and an allegory. “Cupid and Psyche” is our ancient tale. Like Boccaccio’s Decameron and Basile’s The Tale of Tales, the Metamorphoses depicts the often base, sorrowful, and obscene life of the lower classes. Moreover, like the stories in Boccaccio’s and Basile’s books, Apuleius’s famous tale results from the interaction between oral and literary sources. Echoes of this tale are even detectable

32 c h a p t e r o n e

in the Mayan civilization.41 Cupid and Psyche are ubiquitous presences in Basile’s masterpiece. The Cupid and Psyche myth, a very ancient tale of the Western tradition, lies at the core of Basile’s The Tale of Tales, the first collection of modern fairy tales.

the medieval and renaissance views of cupid and psyche: a brief overview In the introduction to his Italian Folk Tales, Italo Calvino contends that the Cupid and Psyche myth is central to Italian folk and fairy tales.42 According to Calvino, it reflects the “spirituality” of the Mediterranean world.43 In The Tale of Tales, innumerable are the allusions to the myth of Cupid and Psyche, which is not only a marvelous tale of classical literature but also, and more importantly, a narrative that has exerted an immense influence on Western culture since the early Renaissance because of the spiritual and philosophical allegories Western readers have always identified in it.44 Despite the significantly different emphases given to specific aspects of the tale, all medieval and Renaissance rewritings and exegeses share a basic, and dominant, point of view. No interpreter doubts that the tale is about the travails of the soul (Psyche) in her traumatic journey toward an enlightenment that can be of an intellectual or an explicitly religious nature. Even today, questioning this assumption seems impossible. The center of Apuleius’s tale is the human soul. In the history of European readings of the Cupid and Psyche myth, the first major names are Fulgentius the Mythographer in the late fifth century and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century.45 For the Christian Fulgentius’s Mythologies, the tale allegorizes “the sins of the flesh and the evil of sexual desire.”46 Psyche resembles Adam exiled from the Garden of Eden. As Adam succumbs to his curiosity and eats from “the tree of concupiscence,” so Psyche follows the immoral suggestions of her two older sisters (“flesh” and “free will”), and falls prey to her “erotic desire” (Cupid), and is subsequently expelled from her paradisiacal residence.47 Fulgentius’s bleak view of the tale emphasizes the soul’s fall from grace. In Genealogies of the Pagan Gods (Genealogie deorum gentilium), Boccaccio revisits the Latin myth, correcting Fulgentius’s discouraging view of Psyche’s destiny.48 In Genealogies, Cupid is divine love, the Christian god, and Psyche is not allowed to look at him because no human being can possibly fathom God’s wisdom.49 No one has ever seen God, Boccaccio writes. Cleansed of her sin, the soul is taken up to heaven where she gives birth to Pleasure, that is, “eternal joy.”50

a never ending and never told tale

33

Fulgentius’ Mythologies and Boccaccio’s Genealogies agree on the two essential elements of Apuleius’s tale: Psyche signifies the soul, and her transformation is the core of the story. The tale recounts a private process of selfunderstanding or self-realization, which may or may not have a religious subtext. “Psyche is also Greek for butterfly or moth,” Marina Warner points out, “as first attested in Aristotle’s Historia animalium.”51 In the twentieth century, for example, according to Erich Neumann’s well-known interpretation grounded on Jungian psychoanalysis, Psyche’s vicissitudes dramatize the “principle of individualization.”52 For the German scholar, “the birth of Psyche is a critical event in human history.”53

In The Tale of Tales, a book of ‘oral’ tales in theory meant for “the little ones,” the Neapolitan storyteller writes against the conventional view of Psyche as the Christian soul in search of God. In Counterreformation Europe, Calderón de la Barca writes three religious plays explicitly based on the Latin myth: two autos sacramentales (Psiquis y Cupido para Toledo, 1640; Psiquis y Cupid para Madrid, 1665) and Ni amor se libra de amor (staged in 1662). Basile’s The Tale of Tales in essence works as the negative of the medieval, Renaissance, and Counterreformation reading of Cupid and Psyche. Basile’s multiple renderings of the myth deny the presence of a concerned providence that leads human beings toward their self-realization. Basile’s Psyches are far from being incarnations of a spiritual yearning, and his Cupids couldn’t be more distant from the god of the pagan or Christian tradition. Basile does not deconstruct the original myth; rather, he creates a new mythic narrative that responds to a postclassical time. His two versions feed on the original tale without becoming direct citations. Basile appropriates the classic tale and brings to the surface additional hidden possible plots lying dormant within Apuleius’s myth. For Basile, the Latin tale is not a fixed, immutable sequence of events and does not harbor a fixed, immutable message that has something to do with the human soul. The Tale of Tales suggests that the world holds a secret that transcends human comprehension. In Basile’s hands, Cupid is a cursed man. He may be a despondent or a commanding figure, but someone (an unnamed ogress, for example) is more powerful than he. More importantly, for Basile the union of Cupid and Psyche may have nothing to do with love, and if it does concern desire, it is basically selfish and sterile lust. Basile is very fond of some of its famous motifs (the girl snatched away through a divine intervention; her not being allowed to see the face of her mysterious night lover;

34 c h a p t e r o n e

her disregard of this prohibition and the subsequent rejection and humiliation; the pregnant girl’s quest for her beloved), and he also uses these motifs as single, independent narrative units in stories loosely related to the classic tale.54 Basile’s “The Myrtle” (the second tale of the first day), “The Three Crowns” (“Le tre corone”; sixth tale of the fourth day), “Pretty as a Picture” (“Smalto splendente”; third tale of the fifth day), and even the horrific “The Old Woman Who Was Skinned” (“La vecchia scortecata”; tenth tale of the first day) can be understood fully only if placed in dialogue with the Cupid and Psyche myth, for they present explicit allusions to some unforgettable moments of that myth.55 The Tale of Tales also offers two strikingly different rewritings of the tale of Cupid and Psyche: “The Padlock (“Il catenaccio”; ninth tale of the second day) and “The Golden Trunk” (“Tronco d’oro”; fourth tale of the fifth day). It is worth noting that critics usually identify only “The Golden Trunk” as Basile’s rewriting of Apuleius’s story. This widely held view, however, is premised on the questionable assumption that some moments of the Latin tale are more relevant than others. In his preface to Felix Liebrecht’s first German translation of The Tale of Tales, Jacob Grimm identifies Basile’s “The Padlock” and “The Golden Trunk” as two versions of the Latin myth, and rightly understands that the two Italian tales emphasize different moments of Apuleius’s story.56 We will see that “The Golden Trunk” omits some crucial episodes of the Latin tale that are present in “The Padlock.” If we bring these two tales together, we see Basile composing two stories that mirror and complement each other. One tale seems to answer the questions left unanswered by the other. The moral of one tale is the opposite of the moral of the other. One story revolves around Cupid; the other seems to be about Psyche. Basile explicitly places his two ‘incompatible’ retellings of Cupid and Psyche in opposition to each other as if to say that his ultimate interpretation of the Latin myth derives neither from the first nor from the second version, but rather from the narrative dialogue between his two rewritings. The unified story would be a tale that cannot be told as one independent narrative, because its message, what it means to convey, is, like all myths, intrinsically multiple and ambivalent. Several decades after Basile, Charlotte-Rose de Caumont La Force (1646– 1724), one of the numerous French conteuses of the late seventeenth century, published a tale titled “More Beautiful Than a Fairy,” in which she splits the character of Psyche into two female figures as Basile does in “The Padlock” and “The Golden Trunk.”57 In the same tale, the French author presents two Psyches and two Cupids, who reflect and support each other in their fight against a common enemy, a mischievous old fairy, who, like Basile’s evil

a never ending and never told tale

35

ogress, is a new incarnation of Venus. De Caumont La Force makes the first Psyche (named More Beautiful Than a Fairy) the embodiment of Psyche’s almost divine beauty and gives the feeling of longing to a second Psyche (named Desire). Whereas the first Psyche is not sure she really loves her Cupid, who has more-than-human powers, the second and less important Psyche remembers with a deep yearning her lover, who, unlike the first Cupid, has no superior powers. De Caumont La Force successfully writes a tale made of two tales, a new baroque marvel.

dreaming fairy tales In his fine essay “Creativity and Tradition in the Fairy Tale,” Neil Philip establishes a fascinating parallel between fairy tales and dream narratives: “Fairy tales move like dreams from image to image, rather than rationally from event to event, and like dreams they resist explanation.”58 A fairy tale, Philip adds, “is resistant to any single simplified meaning.” A dream simply is. Its omissions, its blank spots, its inconsistencies are rhetorical devices typical of this unique narrative genre. To penetrate the recesses of Basile’s two tales based on Cupid and Psyche (as “to go deep into a dream”) requires that the reader be willing to tolerate the darkness, the disorientation, the vertigo that arise from the bleak pages of his disturbing collection of oral fairy tales, as the Grimms defined them. In The Tale of Tales, Cupid and Psyche ceases to be an allegory and becomes a nightmare. Basile doesn’t intend to demythologize the Latin fairy tale; he remythologizes it; that is, he shows that today the enlightenment at the end of the soul’s quest is the awakening to a quotidian horror. 1. “The Padlock” “The Padlock” is one of the shortest and most disjointed stories in The Tale of Tales. By giving this tale a structure that unambiguously evokes Apuleius’s myth, Basile leads us to believe that he intends to write a modern adaptation of the classical tale. At the same time, however, his narrative presents elements that undermine our reassuring impression that we are reading a story we already know, and we feel as if we are going through two different stories poorly stitched together. The factors disturbing the narrative flow of what should be a straightforward rewriting of Cupid and Psyche are hard to make sense of from a logical point of view. They belong to the realm of the oral, that is, they are what is usually jotted down and edited out later. Instead of attributing their presence to the fact that Basile died before hav-

36 c h a p t e r o n e

ing a chance to clean his book of such narrative dregs, we look to them for enlightenment. Basile’s new Psyche and Cupid arise from these remains. What Max Lüthi calls the narrative “ballast” present in oral fairy tales is also “suggestive of secret systems that project just this tip into the realm of the tale.”59 The German philosopher Ernst Bloch defines these unexplained allusions, details, or echoes lying within a tale as the marks or traces that “point out a ‘less’ or ‘more’ that will have to be thought in the telling, retold in the thinking.”60 The marks or traces are the peaks of hidden icebergs (Lüthi’s “secret systems”) lying beneath the narrative surface, in the realm of Orcus, which Basile invites us to visit. What follows is my abridged version of “The Padlock”:

A poor mother found some cabbage and asked her three daughters to fetch some water from a fountain. Luciella, the youngest daughter, volunteered, took the jug, and walked to the fountain, which was outside the city. There she found a handsome slave who invited her to follow him to a grotto nearby, where he said he would give her many nice things. Luciella, “always dying for a favor,” told him she would be right back, because she first needed to take the jug of water to her mother. With the excuse of going to look for some wood, the girl left her house again and went back to the slave, who took her to a wonderful underground palace where two female servants dressed her “to perfection” and gave her a marvelous bed, in which at night, “as soon as the candles were put out, someone came and lay down beside her.” After some days, the girl told the slave that she wished to see her mother. The slave went to another room and spoke with someone there, came back to the girl, and told her that she could go. He gave her a big sack of money for her mother, but also reminded her to return soon and to disclose nothing about her new home. After these quick trips had happened three or four more times, her envious sisters found out everything that was going on from an ogress, and when Luciella returned they revealed to her that every night she was given a sleeping potion so that she wouldn’t know that a handsome young man was sleeping beside her. Her happiness would be forever incomplete, her sisters continued, unless she followed their suggestions. When the slave brought the cup with the mouthwash before she went to bed, she would have to ask for a napkin so as to have the time to pour out the wine and thus stay awake during the night. Her sisters also gave Luciella a padlock and suggested that she open it when she saw that the man beside her was asleep. This was supposed to break the spell and make Luciella the happiest woman in the world. Luciella did as instructed. Then, when her bedmate was sound asleep, she lit a candle, marveled at his beauty, and opened the padlock. She saw a

a never ending and never told tale

37

group of women carrying quantities of fine yarn on their heads. One of them dropped a skein, and Luciella, raising her voice, told her “Pick up the skein, madam!” The young man woke up at her shout and was so annoyed that he called a slave and ordered Luciella to be sent away. Her sisters too rejected her when she returned home. After wandering for a long time and suffering a thousand torments, the poor girl, who was also pregnant, arrived at the royal palace in the city of Tall Tower, where a merciful lady-in-waiting helped her to give birth to a beautiful baby boy. The first night after his birth, when everybody was asleep, a handsome young man walked into the room and said, “Oh lovely son of mine, if my mother only knew, she would wash in a basin of gold.” The visitor also said, “If the rooster never sang, I would never depart from you.” After the ladyin-waiting found out that a mysterious man visited the baby every night, she spoke with the queen, who ordered that all the roosters in the kingdom be immediately killed. When the night visitor came back, the queen realized that he was her son and embraced him. An ogress had put a curse on him, leading to his exile, which would end when his mother embraced him and the rooster stopped crowing. That night the curse was broken. The queen gained a beautiful grandson, and Luciella acquired a handsome husband.

Basile uses some of the best-known moments of the Cupid and Psyche myth: the girl being led to a mysterious and magnificent palace clearly belonging to a person of a superior social status; her secret night visitor, whom she can’t see; the envious sisters convincing her to break this unusual arrangement; her lighting a candle and marveling at her bedmate’s beauty; his sudden awakening and anger; her banishment and humiliation; the final marriage. The four lengthy tasks Venus imposes on Psyche are missing, but Basile does specify that Luciella undergoes “a thousand torments” before reaching the castle where the pregnant girl begs for “a little straw on which to rest.”61 The basic problem with Basile’s story is that in his hands the transformative process at the core of the Psyche myth concerns Cupid rather than Psyche. It is worth noting that, because of the sedative she is given every night, the indigent girl doesn’t even know at first that someone is sleeping with her, and no one has officially forbidden her from looking at her night visitor. Furthermore, her evil sisters refer to a “spell” that she needs to break with the help of the padlock. What spell? The girl freely travels from the secret palace to her mother’s house several times. A final point to bear in mind concerns the vague number of trips that she takes (some five times) and the number of challenges she faces before reaching the queen’s castle.

38 c h a p t e r o n e

As we know, symbolic numbers (three, four, seven) are essential markers of the fairy-tale genre, in both its oral and its literary style. By deritualizing, so to speak, the girl’s actions, Basile’s story winds up deemphasizing her role. Let us take a closer look at the pivotal moment in “The Padlock.” In Apuleius, on the night of the dénouement, Psyche holds a sharp razor in her hand to slit the throat of the snake that, according to her sisters, sleeps with her and intends to kill her once she has given birth to their child. In Basile, the strange padlock, an object certainly suitable for a baroque Wunderkammer, replaces the razor. It is not a drop of boiling oil that wakes the prince up (the drop that burns Cupid’s flesh), but rather Luciella’s anxious concern for one of the Lilliputian women who lets a skein fall from her head. It is easy to connect the ladies carrying yarn to the act of weaving and thus of storytelling. When the skein falls off the woman’s head, the thread of the ‘sedative’ story is essentially broken. Unlike Psyche and Cupid, Luciella and the prince have never spoken to each other before the appearance of the women in the padlock. One could go so far as to say that the woman drops the skein on purpose, in order to bring to an end the unpleasant tale of a poor girl being drugged and violated night after night by a prince who is ashamed of his vile actions. But why doesn’t he want Luciella to know him or even see him, if he is such a handsome young man? The dropping of the skein certainly stops a repetitive story, but also reveals that the story itself seems to lack a thread or two. At the end of the tale we learn that an ogress had put a curse on the prince. Why? Because of this unspecified spell, he is forced out of his kingdom until his mother hugs him and the rooster stops crowing. The crucial aspect of this unclear spell seems to be the prince’s inability to voice it. The prince is mute, so to speak. He never addresses the girl that he visits at night and only gives free rein to his deep sadness when he thinks he is alone with his baby boy. The prince’s reticence recalls the motif of the girl silenced by an evil spell or by her promise not to reveal her identity in order to rescue someone dear to her, as in the Grimms’ “The Twelve Brothers.” In that story an old woman tells a distraught and lonely girl that if she wants to save her brothers who have turned into ravens she must “remain silent for seven years and neither speak nor laugh.”62 In “The Padlock,” the cursed prince surrenders to the silence that usually befalls those female characters who have experienced sudden, brutal violence. The prince has a ‘female’ sorrow and a ‘female’ silence. He is powerless and ashamed like the girl he has lured to his bed, drugged, and raped. In “The Padlock,” the handsome but cursed young prince mutes his shameful sorrow, disappears from the tale after the girl has betrayed his

a never ending and never told tale

39

slave’s orders, and secretly visits his baby at night, telling him how much he misses him and his mother the queen. This sad and abusive prince enjoys the delicate submission of the ill-fated girl of so many fairy tales who embarks on a challenging journey to rescue a loved one. The prince’s affectionate words for his baby (“Oh lovely son of mine!”) recall one of Basile’s religious madrigals titled “Holy Sighs” (“Sacri sospiri”), in which the Virgin Mary voices her sorrow when she realizes that, as the Gospel narrates (Luke 2.41–45), her young son has suddenly disappeared: “Where can I find / my lost love? / Who among you, women, has seen [him]?”63 Nowhere in this fairy tale are we told of Luciella’s intimacy with her baby. When his father walks into the room at night, the baby seems to be alone. It is the father who shows a feminine closeness to the baby, a motherly dedication to his only precious son. Luciella, the mother, is too busy trying to survive the “thousand torments” haunting an indigent young woman. The prince and Luciella share a similar experience of expulsion and exile, and neither of them is able to change this unfortunate condition alone. It is the lady-in-waiting, and not Luciella, who sees the strange night visitor and reports it to the queen, thus leading to the final reconciliation. It is the queen who orders that every rooster be killed. It is the slave who gives instructions to Luciella during her stay in the prince’s marvelous residence. Whereas Apuleius describes a painful process of initiation inspired by the transformative power of divine Eros, Basile presents two all-too-human antiheroes whose destiny escapes their will. It is fair to say that “The Padlock” is not about love at all. Luciella’s despair after her departure from the prince’s marvelous house is due to her poverty and homelessness, not to her longing for the prince. Recall that, in the Metamorphoses, after discovering Cupid’s divine beauty, Psyche pricks her thumb with one of his arrows while he is still asleep, which makes her fall in love with him.64 Psyche becomes aware of her passion for Cupid just before being exiled from her divine lover. She first looks at the tiny drops of blood oozing from her finger and then inadvertently spills a drop of hot oil on her sleeping lover. In Apuleius, love and rejection are startling and almost simultaneous. No love arrow pierces the poor Luciella. Her sorrows result from hunger, fatigue, and social humiliation. Furthermore, her prince wishes he would never have to leave his son, not his son’s mother, whom he never mentions. He yearns to reconstitute a ‘chaste’ family made of a mother (the prince’s mother), a father (the prince), and a little son. A biological mother (Luciella) is needed for the creation of the family nucleus, but her role is peripheral. The ogress’s curse must have something to do with the breaking of a family, of a mother-son tie that will be reconstituted thanks to the birth of the prince’s baby.

40 c h a p t e r o n e

The killing of all the roosters signifies an attempt to avert the arrival of another morning, which will only perpetuate the prince’s exile. Whereas the rooster’s crowing could be associated with the end of a night of lovemaking, in this fairy tale the arrival of the day must be suspended or delayed. The prince’s curse is in the nature of things. His exile from his mother is ‘natural.’ Instead of preserving the pleasures of intense sexual intercourse, the slaughtering of the roosters interrupts the natural flow of time and the ‘natural’ persistence of an unexplained curse. In antiquity the rooster was sacrificed to Aesculapius, the Latin god of medicine, because of the “vigilance” this bird shares with all good physicians, and to Mercury because the rooster’s “alertness” awakes men from their slumber.65 The same bird, however, was also part of the pagan rituals of witches, since demons often appeared in the shape of roosters to their female worshipers, who also sacrificed roosters and babies to their masters.66 The rooster has the power to heal and to pervert. In “The Padlock,” what is presented as unnatural is not the curse but rather its brutal ending. Like the killing of the rooster announcing a new day, the unraveling of the skein fallen from the lady’s head announces the beginning of a new story. The queen welcomes the exiled son back to her realm. The poor girl marries the man who drugged and raped her night after night. The story ends on a happy note, certainly, but imparts no moral lesson. No deity has been pulling the strings behind the scenes. Why did the ogress put a curse on this prince in the first place? What did the prince do to displease her? What happened before the beginning of the tale? And what about the queen, who rushes to embrace her son as if he had finally gained her forgiveness after a long trial? Or was the queen prevented from hugging her son because of the ogress’s curse? Too many basic questions are left unanswered. By stripping Apuleius’s tale of its mythic and religious character, Basile’s fairy tale becomes a portrait of human existence, of its vagaries and serendipities, and first of all of the exile that founds all biographies, of the poor and the noble alike. An obscure and hostile fate, rather than divine providence, rules over the life of the disgraced girl who, abandoned by the man who raped her, wanders alone in utter despair. No bird shows up to help her out. 2. “The Golden Trunk” One way of addressing the questions left unanswered in “The Padlock” and thus also of gleaning a better understanding of this cryptic tale is to

a never ending and never told tale

41

read it in the light of Basile’s second version of Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche, the one critics usually identify as Basile’s sole retelling of the Latin tale because it is only in this second tale that the presence of the divine is detectable. “The Padlock” centers on human suffering, which is even more intolerable because of its meaninglessness; “The Golden Trunk,” from the outset, presents a heroine graced with a divinely inspired destiny. The echoes of the narrative between the two Italian fairy tales on the one hand and their Latin source on the other are hard to miss, but their contrasts too are impossible to overlook, the clear opposition, for example, between the helpless Cupid in “The Padlock” and the all-powerful Cupid in “The Golden Trunk,” between the curse against the prince in one tale and in the other, between what is omitted in the first version and what is omitted in the second. Basile makes sure we understand that the two tales are related to each other by opening this second version in a way that closely recalls “The Padlock.” In this second retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, instead of an extremely poor mother we encounter an extremely poor father, who like the mother in “The Padlock” is on the verge of starvation and has three daughters to feed. In both stories, the three daughters behave in a similar way: in “The Golden Trunk” the two older girls dislike their younger sister, whose name is Parmetella. As in “The Padlock,” a pleasant fountain in a thick wood marks the beginning of the heroine’s journey. This is my abridged version of “The Golden Trunk”:

A very poor father purchased three little sows as dowries for his three daughters, but her two older sisters didn’t want Parmetella to take her sow to graze in the good pasture they had found. Parmetella then took her sow to a wood, where she discovered a fountain. Next to the fountain was a marvelous tree with golden leaves. Parmetella plucked one leaf and took it to her father, who was amazed. The girl went back to the wood several times to pluck more golden leaves, but eventually the tree became a naked trunk. Parmetella returned with a hatchet, chopped the roots around the golden trunk, and lifted it up. Underneath she found a porphyry staircase leading to a dark cave and eventually to a beautiful underground palace. Parmetella walked into a room with some wonderful emblems on the walls, in particular the image of the ignorance of men considered wise, the injustice of those who hold the scales of justice, and the crimes punished by the heavens.67 These images were so powerful that they seemed alive. In this mysterious room Parmetella also found a table with a

42 c h a p t e r o n e

nice meal set out on it. While she was enjoying the rich food, a handsome slave showed up and asked her not to go away because he wanted to marry her and make her the happiest woman in the world. After some initial doubts, the girl accepted the offer, and the slave gave her a diamond carriage pulled by four golden horses with emerald and ruby wings, which took her for a ride in the air, and several monkeys that served her as her private maids and dressed her up like a queen. The slave told Parmetella she must snuff the candle when she went to bed or she would ruin everything. She did as instructed and fell asleep. The slave then turned into a handsome young man, lay down next to her, and caressed her pubic hair. Astonished, the girl woke up, but didn’t budge while the man took advantage of her. In the morning her lover returned to his “dark veneer” without telling the curious girl who had taken her virginity. But on the second night, after the young man had had sexual intercourse with her, Parmetella took out “a flint she had prepared, struck it on some tinder, made a flame, and lit the candle.”68 She realized that the dark-skinned slave had become a handsome white young man (“the ebony had turned into ivory”). Suddenly he woke up and yelled at the girl that because of her disregard of his orders he would have to perform “this accursed penance” for seven more years. Forced to leave that marvelous palace, Parmetella came out of the cave and ran into a fairy, who warned her of some extreme and possibly deadly trials. The fairy called them “the Bridge of Hair.” The fairy gave the girl some useful gifts: seven spindles, seven figs, a jar of honey, and seven pairs of iron shoes. She had to keep walking, wearing those shoes until they were completely worn out. The fairy also told her how to behave at the end of her journey. She would encounter seven ladies spinning thread and winding it on dead people’s bones, from a balcony down to the ground. Parmetella would have to replace the bones with the seven spindles dunked in honey plus the seven figs. The seven ladies then would ask who had been so kind to them, but Parmetella had to reveal herself only when they swore by Thunder-and-Lightning that they would not eat her.69 The fairy’s predictions came true after the girl had wandered for seven years. It turned out that Thunder-and-Lightning was the young man who had welcomed the girl into his palace, and that the seven ladies were his sisters. Although they were angry with the girl for having doubled their brother’s curse, they were bound by their oath not to eat her. They even recommended that, when their mother, an ogress, came back, the girl should grab the old woman’s breasts, which dangled down her back, and squeeze them until she swore on Thunder-and-Lightning that she wouldn’t hurt her. Parmetella did as instructed, but, even after pronouncing her promise, the ogress didn’t give up on the idea of eating the girl, and she gave her three impossible trials in the hope that she would fail: (1) The girl had to sort out twelve

a never ending and never told tale

sacks of beans mixed up with other legumes and rice by the end of the day. “Thunder-and-Lightning,” who had just ended his seven-year exile, showed up and, although still angry with the girl, helped her out by asking “a river of ants” to do the job on her behalf.70 (2) The girl had to fill twelve ticks, which would become twelve mattresses, with feathers before the end of the day. Thunderand-Lightning came to rescue her again. First, he had her mess up her hair to look desperate; then he took her to the port and told her to spread the ticks on the ground and cry aloud that the king of the birds was dead. Innumerable birds came down and dropped their feathers, which filled up the ticks in less than an hour. (3) The ogress suspected that her son had been helping Parmetella and tried one last trick. She told the girl to pay a visit to the ogress’s sister and ask her for some musical instruments because the ogress wanted her son to marry a lady that she had selected for him. The ogress’s sister was instructed to kill the girl as soon as she arrived. For the third time, Thunder-and-Lightning appeared to Parmetella on the street and warned her. He gave her three gifts: a loaf of bread, a bundle of hay, and a stone. The bread was for a guard dog at his aunt’s house; the hay was for a horse, which would try to trample on the girl; and the stone was for the door that was always slamming. Thunder-andLightning also told the girl that inside the house she would find his aunt holding her baby girl next to an oven, ready to roast Parmetella. When the aunt asked her to hold the baby a second while she fetched the musical instruments, Parmetella had to throw the baby into the hot oven, since the baby was just “ogre meat,” snatch the musical instruments behind the door, and run away, without opening the box containing the instruments.71 Parmetella couldn’t resist her curiosity, and all the instruments jumped out of the box making a terrible racket. While the girl tried in vain to catch the instruments, Thunder-and-Lightning appeared one more time, reprimanded her because she had again disregarded his orders, and whistled all the instruments back into the box. At the wedding of Thunder-and-Lightning and his ugly bride, the ogress had the table placed next to a well, where she seated her seven daughters and Parmetella. The ogress gave a torch to each of her daughters and two torches to Parmetella, whom the ogress ordered to sit on the edge of the well because she hoped that the girl eventually would fall into the pit. When Thunder-and-Lightning asked Parmetella for a kiss, the girl refused and instead blessed his marriage. Parmetella’s refusal surprised the ugly bride, who confessed to kissing a shepherd for a couple of chestnuts. Once in the bedroom, the bridegroom again asked Parmetella for a kiss, and again his bride couldn’t understand why a girl could possibly say no to such a handsome man while she, the bride, had kissed a shepherd just for a few chestnuts. Furious, Thunder-and-Lightning slashed his bride’s throat, buried her in the cellar, and made love to Parmetella. In the morning, his mother the ogress found him in bed with Parmetella, rushed to her sister for help but discovered

43

44 c h a p t e r o n e

that her sister, after her baby’s brutal death, had committed suicide by jumping into the hot oven. Desperate, the ogress banged her head on the wall until her brain squirted out. The two lovers made peace with the seven sisters and lived happily ever after.

After reading this summary, it should be evident that Basile has divided the Latin tale into two parts. He has based “The Padlock” on what happens to Psyche up to her discovery of her lover’s identity and “The Golden Trunk” on what happens to Psyche after her ill-fated discovery. In other words, part 1 runs from the beginning of the tale up to the expulsion of Psyche from Cupid’s palace, and part 2 from Psyche’s exile to the final wedding of Cupid and Psyche. While in “The Padlock” Luciella’s “thousand torments” before reaching the queen’s reign are an abstract, simplified rendition of Psyche’s tasks, in “The Golden Trunk” the well-known motif of the heroine’s (three or four) trials is clearly spelled out, and the first of the three ordeals is a direct echo of Apuleius’s tale.72 In the Metamorphoses, Venus “took some wheat and barley and millet and poppy-seed and chickpeas and lentils and beans, jumbled them up . . . and poured them together in a single mound.”73 Psyche will have to sort them out “before evening.” This is also the first task that the ogress imposes on Parmetella.

the cursed god The two Italian tales, however, share a fundamental element that seems to be missing from the Latin model: a mysterious curse that struck the prince before the beginning of either tale. Some scholars who have studied Cupid and Psyche in connection with “Beauty and the Beast,” which is unquestionably linked to the Latin tale, have hypothesized that when Apuleius has the oracle introduce the divine lover as a terrifying snake, he is trying to merge two older tales, one about a young man turned into a beast (Cupid) and the other about the breaking of a taboo (Psyche).74 This double narrative layer is present in Basile’s two retellings, but it is absent in Apuleius. What makes this original’ prehistorical curse even more calamitous is that it remains unexplained in both stories. In the Metamorphoses it is Psyche who is cursed by the goddess, as the oracle confirms to her father. Basile shifts the curse from Psyche to Cupid without revealing us its cause: Cupid and Psyche Venus curses Psyche

“The Padlock” ogress curses prince

“The Golden Trunk” ogress curses prince

a never ending and never told tale

45

It is fair to state that Basile’s two Cupid and Psyche tales are about the vicissitudes of Cupid, and Psyche’s suffering and trials are a function of Cupid’s tormented biography. In Max Lüthi’s words, “at the focal point in the [genre of ] fairy tales stands man” even though many popular tales have a female main character.75 The shift from Psyche to Cupid in The Tale of Tales also reflects a pervasive resentment of the pagan god of love in seventeenth-century Catholic culture, which abounds with texts against Cupid, who is seen as the embodiment of a blind and immoral desire. For example, in her long poem in octaves titled Amore innamorato et impazzato (“Infatuated and Mad Love,” 1618), the poet Lucrezia Marinella recounts Cupid’s progressive fall into madness due to a violent and unrequited passion for a nymph.76 The philosopher and poet Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) is even more vehement against the divine little boy. In Campanella’s incisive sonnet “Contra Cupido,” Venus’s son is openly associated with the devil (“he sickens the bodies with infernal wounds,” v. 10).77 It is in this cultural milieu that Basile writes.

Let us rewrite the basic outline of Apuleius’ myth and the two Italian tales from the point of view of the god’s suffering: Cupid and Psyche Psyche wounds Cupid

“The Padlock” Prince is cursed

“The Golden Trunk” Prince is cursed

In the Metamorphoses, Cupid’s intense suffering is due to an open wound that refuses to heal. Cupid’s cursed wound is Psyche’s doing, and like the seven-year curse inflicted on the two Italian princes it will be healed when the trial has run its course. A major difference, however, is that, whereas Cupid’s wound carries an explicitly metaphorical meaning (Cupid’s open wound is the wound of love), the two Italian princes who stand for Cupid have been wounded by someone for no clear reason. Apuleius creates a sentimental mirroring between the opening of the wound and the healing of the scar. Psyche drops burning oil on Cupid and wakes him up from his night sleep. At the end of the tale, “recovering now that his scar had healed,” Cupid rushes to “wipe the sleep off ” his beloved, who had carelessly opened the jar that contained sleep instead of Proserpina’s beauty.78 In the Metamorphoses, the love story between Cupid and Psyche is a mutual awakening, the wounding and healing that only love can bring about. If in the beginning falling in love is a wound that paralyzes the

46 c h a p t e r o n e

lover, at the end of the tale it is the medicine that heals the original wound. In Apuleius, Love wounds Love and heals Love.

the goddess mother, the clueless mother, the ogress mother The wound preceding the beginning of the Italian tales also leads to a reinterpretation of the central role of the mother in the classical myth. The Cupid and Psyche story in the Metamorphoses opens with an angry Venus who sees her divine supremacy challenged and insulted by a human being, Psyche. The girl’s very existence is an affront to Venus. Psyche is like a false god who is leading people away from the true goddess of love. Venus’s temples lie abandoned; the rituals dedicated to her are forgotten. If we read the tale as the mise-en-scène of a divine profanation, we have to conclude that Psyche is the curse, a curse that falls on both the divine mother and her divine son: Psyche profanes Venus’s cult and later wounds Cupid. Psyche’s very existence is the original motive, the original curse, preceding Venus’s ferocious resentment, which is usually seen as the starting point of the story. Throughout the Latin tale, the “poor girl” (misella), as Cupid affectionately calls her when he shakes her from her slumber, is described as the passive victim of divine persecution, even though in actuality she triumphs over the goddess of love and her son. Because of Psyche, Venus is compelled to accept not only the contamination between divine and human love but also, and more importantly, the sanctification of this mixed union through a marriage blessed by Jupiter himself. The father of the gods reminds Cupid that he has “robbed” Psyche of her maidenhood and thus deserves the “shackles of matrimony.”79 Basile makes no reference to the fact that his two Cupids, the two princes of his tales, have stolen their beloved’s virginity and caused her a “thousand torments.” At the beginning of the Metamorphoses, Venus doesn’t want to accept that “in the very flower of my youth I shall be called grandmother, and the son of a cheap slave-girl will be known as Venus’s grandson.”80 The four tasks she imposes on the pregnant girl are meant to prove that Psyche does not deserve to become a member of a goddess’s family, primarily because Cupid and Psyche are “unequals” (impares).81 Even though she is the daughter of a king (not a “cheap slave-girl” as Venus calls her), Psyche is not of divine origin. The truth is that Venus resents Psyche’s “dazzling” beauty, which at the beginning of the tale had led many people to venerate the girl “as if she were the very goddess Venus herself.”82 Venus had shown the beautiful

a never ending and never told tale

47

Psyche to her son in the hope that he would be able to make the girl fall madly in love with “the meanest man,” with the unexpected result of bringing the two together.83 The entire story of Cupid and Psyche is under the aegis of the resentful goddess, who unsuccessfully tries to destroy what she herself has brought about. Apuleius’s tale finds in Venus a focal center. The Latin myth is also about the contrast between the human and the divine, about the sacredness of human identity. This brief excursus on the troubled relationship between the goddess and Psyche highlights a primary difference between the Latin tale and its first two modern versions in Basile’s collection. In “The Padlock,” the cursed prince’s mother shows up at the very end of the story, and her eagerness to embrace her son signals the end of his exile. In “The Golden Trunk,” the mother, far from being the goddess of love, is an ugly old ogress with breasts so long and flabby that she carries them on her back like two empty sacks. This emphasis on the ogress’s repulsive appearance is also remarkable given that ogres and ogresses, for Basile, don’t usually need to be described.84 In the two Italian stories, the mother figure is either powerless (“The Padlock”) or both sinister and ridiculous (“The Golden Trunk”). The problem is that the character that initiates the chain of events regarding the two modern Cupids and Psyches has departed from the tale before its beginning.

the missing witchlike ogress We have noted that the first strange aspect of Basile’s two retellings of the Cupid and Psyche myth is that the first real victim in both his tales is the male character, the one who should stand for Cupid. What is even stranger is that the person who mistreated him makes no appearance in the story. In the Metamorphoses, the larger-than-life presence of the revengeful goddess is hard to miss. Although we know, even without having read the Latin tale, that the Cupid and Psyche myth is supposed to be about the overwhelming power of Eros (Cupid), whom we humans (Psyche) are not allowed to look in the eye, we cannot deemphasize the role of Venus to the point of dismissing her as a secondary character. At the end of Psyche’s four trials, Cupid is still “apprehensive” of his mother’s “austerity” and thus flies up to “great Jupiter” to try to win his support.85 Without Jupiter, Venus would have kept opposing the union between her divine son and his human beloved, and the tale would never have reached an ending. The problem with Basile’s two retellings is that they presuppose an initial chapter. In “The Padlock” the author mentions in passing an unidenti-

48 c h a p t e r o n e

fied ogress who had put a curse on the unnamed prince, whereas in “The Golden Trunk” he doesn’t even bother to tell us who cursed the poor prince, whose intermittent metamorphosis into a handsome black slave is supposed to last seven years. Basile gives us two truncated stories. Having the Metamorphoses in the back of our mind, we may overlook this huge narrative void since the rest of the two Italian tales read more or less like the version in Apuleius. Moreover, since witches and ogresses are villains who specialize in curses, we could conclude that in “The Golden Trunk” too a witch of some kind must be responsible for the prince’s ordeal, but it’s just a conjecture, and the why remains unclear.86 We could go so far as to claim that “The Padlock” and “The Golden Trunk” are each composed of two stories, the first of which has been edited out. Giving free rein to our imagination, we could hypothesize that the first of these two parts is a story of unrequited love, a sort of negative mirror of the second part of the tales, which instead narrates a successful though painful love story. In “The Snake” (“Lo serpe”), the fifth tale of the second day of The Tale of Tales, as a result of an ogress’s curse, a young prince becomes a serpent for seven years.87 This curse, however, has a quick explanation: the prince had refused to satisfy the ogress’s unbridled lust. “The Padlock” and “The Golden Trunk” omit all clarifications. What remains of the original, edited-out narrative segment is the prince’s awareness of being cursed. In the beginning was a curse, one could say, a persecution that needs no explanation because no explanation could make sense of it. The two curses, however, work in two different ways. In “The Padlock,” the unknown ogress puts a curse on the prince and disappears without a trace before the beginning of the story. Even though its cause is unknown, the workings of the curse are spelled out, and the good queen mother will be able to defuse it. Although the ogress’s curse has no expiration date, it follows a clear logic. In “The Golden Trunk,” on the contrary, the curse simply is, and thus neither the seven Fates (the prince’s sisters spinning thread with dead people’s bones) nor their mother the ogress can fight it.

the two realms of death One might be surprised to find the deity of love metamorphosed into an old ogress who can’t wait to wolf down her son’s fiancée. In “The Golden Trunk” the ogress subjects the girl to a series of trials so that the evil cannibal, if the girl fails, will have the right to devour her.88 This is the technicality the evil mother has come up with to get around her promise not to

a never ending and never told tale

49

harm the girl who grabbed and squeezed her dangling breasts. However, the transformation from goddess of love to ugly monster is much more than an ironic device. In the Metamorphoses, before seizing the poor girl by her hair and dragging her inside Venus’s palace, Habit (Consuetudo) yells at Psyche: “Now you are caught in the very clutches of Death!” In the original Latin the word “Death” is Orcus (“inter Orci cancros”), which becomes the Italian orco and the English “ogre.”89 Habit indeed addresses Psyche as if the girl were being dragged into the netherworld, whose supreme ruler is Venus, the goddess of love. 1. The Hell of the afterlife Both of Basile’s tales have their heroine journey down into the kingdom of death. What differs in the two fairy tales is what the ‘reign of death’ means. In “The Golden Trunk,” the good fairy outside the cave warns Parmetella about the “Bridge of Hair” she will have to cross, an allusion to the Islamic vision of the afterlife, according to which the soul must cross the bridge Sirat, which leads to eternal happiness.90 According to the mystic Al-Ghazali, “it is a bridge stretched over the back of hell, sharper than a sword, finer than a hair. The feet of the unbeliever slip upon it, by the decree of God, and fall with them into the fire; but the feet of the believers stand firm upon it, by the grace of God, and so they pass to the Abiding Abode.”91 Christian imagination appropriated the Islamic image of this ominous bridge, as is attested in the twelfth-century Visio Alberici, the monk Albericus’s mystical vision of the three areas of the afterlife, which might have been a source of Dante’s Divine Comedy. At the age of ten, Albericus was terribly ill for nine days.92 One night in a vision he saw an iron bridge over a river of boiling pitch.93 Although the bridge was very wide, it became as thin as a hair as soon as sinful souls tried to cross it, and these souls fell into the burning liquid underneath. They would repeatedly fall into the river until their cleansing was complete.94 2. The Hell of this life In “The Padlock,” the allusion to the realm of death could easily be missed. How do the evil sisters come to know the identity of their younger sister’s secret lover? An ogress tells them, and Luciella’s demise begins there, with a gossip. Another ogress (or is she the same one?) had cast an evil spell on the handsome prince before the beginning of the tale. As the harbinger of Orcus on earth, the ogress launches the narration and determines its entire

50 c h a p t e r o n e

course. The darkness of the netherworld, the reign of meaninglessness and despair, pulls the strings of this sad tale from beginning to end. A force that escapes their understanding leads the Italian Cupid and Psyche on. In “The Padlock,” evil manifests itself in its human forms: envy, resentment, scorn for the poor and defenseless. One or two unidentified evil ogresses hide in the background, but their presence is simply hinted at because what matters is less who they are than what these agents of death are eager to do.

That Basile’s rewritings of the Latin myth are centered on death is apparent by the references to the Fates and their constant spinning, unfolding, and cutting the threads of human beings’ existence. In “The Padlock,” the girl’s downfall is unlocked by one of the tiny ladies who, living in the mysterious padlock, carry yarn on their heads. These ladies mirror the seven sisters spinning thread on dead people’s bones in “The Golden Trunk.” In the latter tale the seven Fates are sisters of Thunder-and-Lightning (Truonee-lampe), that is, of Cupid himself, whose ugly mother is the Orcus of the netherworld. In the Metamorphoses, Psyche’s last task is to go down to the underworld (inferos) and straight to “Orcus’ own dismal abode” (“Orci ferales penates”). Venus demands that the girl fill a jar with Proserpina’s beauty because she has used up all she had to cure her son Cupid’s wound, which had been caused by the hot wax that dripped from the candle that the disrespectful girl had lit in order to look at her secret lover.95 Psyche rushes to a high tower with the intention of jumping to her death and thus reaching the realm of Orcus, but the tower warns her that if she dies she won’t be able to come back to life. Basile summons the image of Psyche’s long journey through the realm of the dead in Apuleius when he introduces the seven ladies who, from a balcony, use human bones to spin thread. The seven Fates, daughters of an ogress, are cannibals who at once unfold human beings’ destiny and feed on their flesh, as ogresses usually do. Keep in mind that at the end of the tale, Thunder-and-Lightning, himself the son of an ogress, has no qualms about slitting his bride’s throat and burying her body in the cellar of his palace. In the Metamorphoses, the tower tells Psyche that when she reaches the river of the dead she must pay the toll demanded by Charon to carry her over on his ferry. Behaving like all the dead who arrive at the banks of the river according to the Latin tradition, she must put a coin in her mouth and let the ferryman take it out with his own hand. Once on the boat, she must ignore a dead old man floating in that filthy water who will beg her to pick

a never ending and never told tale

51

him up. After crossing the dark river, she must also brush off “some old women weaving at a loom” who will ask her to lend them a hand for a moment.96 In “The Golden Trunk,” tipped off by a good fairy (like the talking tower in the Metamorphoses), Parmetella ingratiates herself with the seven Fates spinning on the balcony and receives helpful suggestions from them. Conversely, in “The Padlock,” Luciella gets in trouble precisely because she lends a hand to one of the miniature ladies. Her “thousand torments” come from that act of kindness.

the tower warning against suicide Psyche, Luciella, and Parmetella are three unfortunate girls who enter three forms of the netherworld. Two of them, Psyche and Luciella, are carrying a baby in their womb. In “The Padlock” the reader is asked to imagine the “thousand torments” a destitute young woman suffers because of her ‘immoral’ conduct, which her pregnancy soon makes visible like a scarlet letter stitched on her dress. Her utter alienation, her loneliness, is her hell on earth. No good fairy is there to advise her and give her magical gifts. Luciella’s “thousand torments” are hardly original. She shares the destiny of those girls who have strayed from the moral path according to seventeenthcentury Western society. Only a lady-in-waiting has mercy on her because of her advanced pregnancy (Luciella was then “big-bellied”) and offers her a modest place to rest.97 No deity follows her; no secret lover longs for her. Luciella experiences a world devoid of divine providence. One of the unforgettable passages in Cupid and Psyche concerns the tower that speaks to Psyche: “Why, unhappy girl, do you want to destroy yourself in a suicideleap?”98 The divine is concerned about Psyche. Even inanimate things get involved in her arduous life. Psyche’s destiny concerns the creation in its entirety. In “The Golden Trunk,” the tower becomes the solicitous fairy who waits for Parmetella outside the cave. The difference between a tower and a fairy is of course not a minor one, but for the time being let us focus on the lack of any more-than-human intervention in Luciella’s tormented biography. Basile does not entirely remove the reference to the tower. Luciella’s “thousand torments” come to an end when she arrives in the “city of Tall Tower,” an unmistakable allusion to Apuleius’s “very high tower” (“turrim praealtam”). Basile’s tower is nothing more than a famous monument, a tourist attraction. But it is in this city that the pregnant girl encounters her helper, neither a divinely inspired tower nor a fairy of the woods, just a

52 c h a p t e r o n e

compassionate lady-in-waiting who will be there for her when she gives birth to her baby. The saving tower from the Latin myth is reduced to a modest but safe room in which a disgraced girl can rest and take care of her baby boy.99 What is divine in “The Padlock” is the human compassion that rules over the city of Tall Tower. The queen herself embodies the enthusiasm of a compassionate soul. Unlike Venus, the queen rescues her son from his curse and blesses his marriage to a dishonored, ‘cursed’ woman.

the four and three and “thousand” trials of the pregnant girl Psyche’s and Parmetella’s descent to hell is not a disturbing reference to the sad reality of an unmarried pregnant girl, such as we find in Luciella’s story. Psyche and Parmetella enjoy an actual trip to the world dominated by Orcus, which for Apuleius and Basile is the realm of the mother. The mother announces the horror of death and inhabits it. A major difference between “The Padlock” on the one hand, and the Metamorphoses and “The Golden Trunk” on the other, lies in the roles played by the mother. These two tales are marked by the presence of an evil mother who forces her future daughter-in-law into the darkness of hell. Moreover, it is no coincidence that both tales, unlike “The Padlock,” have a strong divine, magical undertone. The crucial role played by the divine in Cupid and Psyche and “The Golden Trunk” is accompanied by the central presence of a sinister mother who makes attempts on the life of the unfortunate heroine. It is the negative mother who safeguards the divine nature of Psyche’s and Parmetella’s sorrowful biographies. In Luciella’s experience, the world is naturally evil, and the mother intervenes to bring some solace, if the situation permits (the mother, understanding that the night visitor is her estranged son, slaughters the roosters with no further ado). Let us summarize the labors of Psyche and Parmetella. In the Metamorphoses Venus imposes the following four tasks on Psyche: “Sort out the motley mass of seeds and put each grain properly in its own separate pile.” “Procure a hank of some sheep’s fleece” that “shines with the pure hue of gold.” “Draw me some of the freezing liquid” that flows down from “a black spring on [the] peak” of a steep mountain. That liquid waters “the swamps of Styx and feed[s] the rasping currents of Cocytus.” “Go straight to the underworld” to get some of Proserpina’s beauty.100

a never ending and never told tale

53

In “The Golden Trunk” the ogress demands that Parmetella fulfill three tasks: “Take these beans and sort them so that each kind is separate from the others.” “Take these ticks, which are for twelve mattresses, and fill them all with feathers.” “Roll on down to my sister’s house and tell her to send me the musical instruments.”101 The first task remains the same in the two versions, so as to make the connection between the Latin and the Italian tale easily recognizable. Keeping the first trial so close to the original paradoxically allows Basile to take great liberty in reshaping the following two assignments, once the reader understands that Parmetella’s actions somehow recall Psyche’s. The Italian Psyche could be said to have an easier job than her Latin counterpart, since only the third of her three tasks is potentially lethal, whereas Psyche is repeatedly compelled to face death. It is worth remembering, though, that Venus wishes the girl to die a horrible death while trying to accomplish her assignment, whereas the ogress simply wants Parmetella to fail in her tests, so that she, as the monster from Orcus, will be allowed to devour the girl, according to the rule that she, the ogress herself, has established. Parmetella’s trials are at once far less dangerous and far more ominous than Psyche’s. In Basile’s tale, the heroine does not have to go to the netherworld to confront Orcus; she enters Orcus when she first runs into the seven Fates spinning death from a balcony, an encounter the Latin Psyche will only experience during her fourth and final trial. Psyche She goes to Orcus

Luciella She lives in Orcus

Parmetella She goes to Orcus

Luciella does not go down to the netherworld; she lives in it. Her existence begins in misery (her family is starved) and continues in misery.

orpheus and poetry are dead If we look at the content of the individual tests, we see that Parmetella’s second test blends Psyche’s second and third: the gathering of some violent sheep’s fleece and the collecting of the liquid that waters the netherworld. Psyche is asked to confront the animal world in her second test, and in her

54 c h a p t e r o n e

third she has an introduction to hell. She has a first taste, so to speak, of the water that nourishes the regions of the afterlife. The two basic allusions in Psyche’s second and third tests (animals and death) are reflected in Parmetella’s second. She has to gather feathers to fill twelve mattresses. Death is present both in the fleeting reference to the twelve mattresses (the sleep of death) and in the Italian Cupid’s instructions on how to gather the necessary feathers. Thunder-and-Lightning suggests that Parmetella stage a funeral for the King of the Birds, the mythic Orpheus, as Basile calls him in his introduction to Giulio Cesare Cortese’s poem La Vaiasseide.102 Like a stereotypical southern Italian woman who is either unable to contain her despair at the funeral of a family member or is hired as a professional mourner (the so-called “weeper” or prefica), Parmetella must ruffle her hair and scream aloud that the King of the Birds is dead. When the girl follows his recommendation, a “cloud” of birds darkens the sky and countless feathers come down to alleviate the girl’s plight. As if attending a funeral, the birds pay homage to their “king,” the poet whose melodic verses seduced both the animals of this world and the deities of hell. Like Psyche and Parmetella, Orpheus was alive when he traveled down to the regions of the netherworld, but unlike the two heroines of our tales he failed in his mission. When he died, “the mourning birds wept for thee, Orpheus,” as Ovid writes in the Metamorphoses.103 Orpheus shared with the birds the fascinating power of singing. His enchanting voice moved even stones and trees, Apollodorus tells us in his vast collection of myths.104 Orpheus’s death marks an irretrievable loss.105 It is Cupid himself, the Italian prince Thunder-and-Lightning, who breaks the devastating news. Parmetella’s trial turns into a funeral in which the poor girl, as high priestess, invokes the animal world to lament with her the tragic consequences of this irredeemable loss.

cupid, the god of a loveless love Unlike Cupid in the Metamorphoses, Basile’s Thunder-and-Lightning plays a decisive role throughout Parmetella’s ordeal under the infernal reign of his mother the ogress. In Apuleius, Cupid is bedridden because of the painful wound Psyche unwittingly inflicted on him, and he only appears at the end to wake her from her deadly slumber. Thunder-and-Lightning is a mysterious figure, more ominous and powerful than Cupid in Apuleius. He is more than Cupid, as we will see in a moment, but what matters here is that this exceptional young prince announces the death of the poet Orpheus, who in the name of love descended into the netherworld to plead for the life of

a never ending and never told tale

55

his beloved Eurydice, and succeeded at least temporarily in reversing the order of nature. The love that Orpheus was able to evoke from the creation through his melodies and poetry is lost once and for all, and this frightening prince, son of an old ogress, is aware of the intensity of this loss and stages a funeral with the help of his disgraced girlfriend. A new form of love rules over the creation, a loveless love, in a sense, a love that is and is not the same as it used to be. Like the sixth book of the Metamorphoses, Basile’s “The Golden Trunk” ends with a wedding. It is significant, however, that the wedding is the last of the girl’s trials and not their final, positive conclusion. The wedding in the Italian tale creates a perfect contrast with the funeral of Orpheus. A wedding follows the funeral of the poet whose verses and physical existence celebrated the sacredness of love. It is remarkable that Basile replaces Psyche’s descent to hell with Parmetella’s descent (“roll on down to my sister’s house,” orders the evil ogress) to her final demise, since the ogress’s sister is instructed to kill and cook the girl right away, so that later the two ogresses may eat her together.106 The girl has to rush down (“vrociola a la casa de sorema”) as Psyche walks down to the world of the dead.107 Parmetella shows no sign of jealousy or anger at the ogress’s order; she is actually relieved because this final task sounds pretty easy. She is asked to bring up the musical instruments that will enliven her secret lover’s wedding to some other lady, but she seems quite unconcerned about it. We have noted that, unlike Apuleius’s Cupid, Thunder-and-Lightning looks out for the young woman and helps her overcome his evil mother’s challenges. Whereas Cupid’s wound heals at the end of the girl’s trials, the unknown curse afflicting Thunder-and-Lightning is lifted at the very beginning of Parmetella’s ordeal. His wicked mother knows that he is behind Parmetella’s successful performances. An almost imperceptible shift occurs in the way Basile narrates Parmetella’s three sudden encounters with Thunderand-Lightning, who out of nowhere shows up to support her. Whereas in the first two meetings Thunder-and-Lightning “appeared” (“eccote comparere”; “comparze”) to the girl, in their third encounter she “ran into” him on the street (“trovato pe la strata”).108 In all three cases we look at Thunderand-Lightning’s unexpected appearance from the girl’s point of view. Her lover materializes out of the blue, the way the Christian god suddenly revealed himself to Paul of Tarsus on his way to Damascus. Apuleius gives a much more human depiction of the young god’s anxious rushing to his beloved, who lies unconscious after opening the jar with Proserpina’s fatal sleep: “Since his wings had been restored by a period of rest, he flew much

56 c h a p t e r o n e

more rapidly; he rushed to his Psyche’s side, carefully wiped off the sleep . . . then he roused her with a harmless prick of his arrow.”109 His wound has healed and he can’t wait to save his girl. Apuleius and Basile describe a similarly abrupt form of awakening, but Basile presents it not as the arrival of a concerned lover, but rather as a repeated divine intervention into the life of a troubled human being. The Italian Cupid is a detached, all-powerful deity who deigns to save a reckless girl even though he can’t hold back his anger at her thoughtless behavior. Thunder-and-Lightning calls the girl “treacherous woman” (“tradetora”), as the Christian god might call a soul that repeatedly commits a sin that distances that soul from the resentful divinity. In the Metamorphoses, nature itself spontaneously intervenes to give a hand to the disgraced Psyche. The girl’s despair, her insistence in attempting to take her own life, triggers a natural reaction both in the animate world (ants, a green reed, an eagle) and in the inanimate world (a tower) to act promptly so as to prevent her premature death. When she is asked to gather the golden fleece of some dangerous sheep, the reed, “nurse of melodious music, divinely inspired by the gentle stirring of a sweet breeze, prophesied” to avert the girl’s death.110 A “gentle breeze” had already saved her when “trembling and weeping at the very top of a cliff ” she was expecting to meet her monstrous groom, as the oracle had predicted.111 In “The Golden Trunk,” nature does not respond to Parmetella’s anguished call for help. The ants that gather the scattered legumes in the first test are simply following Thunder-and-Lightning’s order. Behind the Italian Psyche’s salvation is an enraged, godlike individual who appears, insults her, tells her what to do or not to do, and disappears.

the tale of jupiter and psyche This ominous god, shackled to a terrible curse for no apparent reason, nonetheless manages to appear to humans whenever he wants to, demands that nature fulfill his orders, and knows what is going on in distant places. This Neapolitan deity is not Venus’s naughty son, who wouldn’t deserve the scary nickname “Thunder-and-Lightning.” In Vincenzo Cartari’s The Images of the Ancient Gods (1556), a treatise that exerted a profound influence on sixteenthand seventeenth-century European culture, thunder and lightning are attributes of Jupiter, father of the gods, and not of the young boy Cupid.112 For Cartari, lightning belongs exclusively to Jove, and, as far as he knows, no other god has ever been depicted holding a lightning bolt or keeping it at his feet.113 According to Cartari, the image of Jove holding a lightning bolt

a never ending and never told tale

57

f i g u r e 3 . Image of “Faith” from Vincenzo Cartari, Le vere e nove imagini de gli dei degli antichi, 1615

with both hands means that ancient Romans saw the father of the gods as the “custodian of the oath,” and, because of this important role, they also called him “the god of faith” (“Dio Fidio”).114 Cartari mentions a Latin representation of faith (Fidei Simulacrum) that shows a boy, “Amor,” standing between his father, “Honor,” and his mother, “Veritas” (see figure 3). It is interesting to note, however, that the emblematic image printed in the seventeenth-century edition of Cartari’s book reproduced here derives from Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata (1531), in which the young boy between the two

58 c h a p t e r o n e

f i g u r e 4 . Image of “Faith” from Andrea Alciato, Diverse imprese, 1551

adult figures is explicitly identified as Cupid.115 It will suffice to take a look at an edition of Alciato’s book published in 1551. In its “Image of Faith” the “sincere and holy love” is unquestionably the mischievous little Cupid, who is standing between two tall women, Truth and Honor (see figure 4).116 In Basile’s “The Golden Trunk,” Thunder-and-Lightning is both Cupid, as one would expect from a rewriting of Apuleius’s myth, and Jupiter, the all-powerful god who chastises those who do not take their oaths seriously.

a never ending and never told tale

59

He recalls a god of unbridled passion and a god of stern justice. This Italian Jove, furthermore, is the victim of a curse he cannot shrug off; he can only endure it until it reaches its natural end. How to make sense of this bundle of disparate allusions, these visible contradictions? I don’t think we can, because it is not in the nature of Basile’s fairy tales to present a loving Christian god who dispatches his saints and angels to succor a pious but unlucky young girl, as we read in some of the Brothers Grimm’s ‘Christianized’ stories. The distance between the male deity and the lovely girl is maintained throughout the Italian tale, for their encounters are dictated by the god’s sole and inscrutable decision to appear before the girl just as she is about to lose all hope of defeating the ogress, the mother of this cursed Jove. A sense of chaos and frustration takes hold of those readers who try to give a stable identity to Thunder-and-Lightning, at once mighty and shorttempered like the father of the gods, defenseless like a human being, and passionate and stubborn like the ‘blind’ little god of desire and longing. What makes things even more complicated is that his ethnic background is far from honorable: son of an ogress, brother of seven ogresses (Parmetella can’t come out of her hiding place unless the seven women promise they won’t eat her), he is technically an ogre himself. But for Basile, ogres are not always unattractive, smelly, and gullible cannibals. In his stories, the same ogres are at times evil and at times good; like witches, at times they have more-than-human powers, and at times they do not. More importantly, being a son or daughter of an ogre or ogress does not necessarily make you an ogre. Take, for instance, “The Dove” (“La palomma”), the seventh tale of the second day in which an ogress has a daughter who is an adorable young lady, who, however, can also darken the sun and make water curdle.117 In “The Golden Trunk,” the ogress mother, her sister, and her seven sinister daughters feed on human flesh and belong to the same race of ogres. Ogres may or may not generate other ogres, as in the case of Filadoro and Thunder-and-Lightning. Is Thunder-and-Lightning an ogre, like his mother, aunt, and sisters? Yes and no. This genetic instability reflects another, more basic characteristic: being a hybrid (human and bestial), an ogre’s flesh is perceived as naturally impure and prone to degeneration. Ogres seem to exist only to be vilified and annihilated. She is just “ogre meat,” Thunder-and-Lightning says of his little cousin, his aunt’s baby daughter, whom Parmetella meets when she is sent to get the musical instruments needed for his wedding. Thunder-and-Lightning uses these disparaging words to describe his own people, who are verminous like rats and deserve to be exterminated. But it is worth recalling that the ‘happy

60 c h a p t e r o n e

ending’ of this Italian Cupid and Psyche includes the suicide of the two old ogresses, the prince’s mother and his aunt, both of them ravaged by despair. His aunt throws herself into the burning oven when she discovers her baby’s burned body, and his mother smashes her head against the wall when she discovers her sister’s corpse. Was it really necessary for the Italian Psyche, Parmetella, to throw the baby into the oven? How did the murder of the child help her fulfill her final test? The “ogre meat” elicits the same anguish and longing that Thunder-and Lightning attributes to human meat. This same ogre prince, who does not mourn his mother’s suicide, slits his bride’s throat and dumps her body in the cellar without showing any remorse. Whereas Apuleius ends his tale with the humanization of the divine ( Jupiter orders that the wedding of Cupid and Psyche be performed “in accordance with civil law”), Basile celebrates the dehumanization of his hero.118 Whereas his ogress mother and aunt behave like sensitive human beings who can’t bear a sudden and overwhelming sorrow (the loss of a child), the hero prevails not by moral superiority, as one would expect from a fairy tale, but because of his bestial ruthlessness. At the end of his biographical evolution, from being cursed to being freed from the curse, Thunder-and-Lightning relinquishes both his human and his divine nature in favor of his original ogre-ness: Cupid Divine → Human

Thunder-and-Lightning Divine/Human → Ogre-ish

the wedding of the ogre and psyche, or the wedding of cupid and the evil shadow Technically speaking, “The Golden Trunk” does not end with the wedding of the formerly cursed prince and the poor girl. The paradox of Basile’s tale is that the wedding celebrated at the end is that of Thunder-and-Lightning with someone else. The “legitimate” wedding of Cupid and Psyche in the Metamorphoses was the apotheosis of matrimonial vows. First, the father of the gods reassured Venus that the protocol would be followed very carefully; then he had Psyche drink from a cup of ambrosia that made her immortal; and finally a rich wedding-banquet appeared. “The bridegroom reclined on the couch of honor, clasping Psyche in his arms. Jupiter with his wife Juno were similarly placed, and then all the gods in order of rank.”119 The whole Olympus rejoiced at the felicitous conclusion of this extraordinary love story: “The Graces were sprinkling balsam, and the Muses too

a never ending and never told tale

61

were there, singing melodiously.” Even Venus, who had so strenuously opposed her son’s love for a human being, “danced gorgeously” accompanied by Apollo’s lyre. The wedding feast in “The Golden Trunk” recalls a witches’ sabbath, which often ended with a banquet based on human flesh, especially that of children. Witches, like ogresses, are cannibals. We saw that the Italian Psyche’s last trial is indeed a face-off with the ogress, who is expected to kill and cook her. For this night ritual, Thunder-and-Lightning’s mother places the table close to a well; she forces Parmetella to hold two torches instead of one and has her sit her on the edge of the well in the hope that she will get sleepy and fall backward into the well.120 This highly pictorial passage is the visual representation of a perverse rite that centers on the sacrifice of a human victim rather than on the union of two loving souls. Thunderand-Lightning’s bride, chosen by his mother the ogress, is “a plague, a cancer, a harpy, and an evil shadow.”121 During this nocturnal wedding, the “evil shadow” (“malombra”) will marry the young prince who stands for the Latin Cupid.122 The seven Fates, each of them holding a torch, sit around a table and face the sacrificial victim, who sits alone awaiting her execution on the edge of a deep well. According to the ogress’s plan, this evil ritual is supposed to find its conclusion when the girl falls into the dark hole that would plunge her into the viscera of the earth. In “Penta with the ChoppedOff Hands,” the second tale of the third day in Basile’s book, a king who has developed an incestuous passion for his sister tells his beloved that her beautiful hand is the “hook that lifts the bucket of my soul from the well of this life.”123 The soul ascends from the well of the man’s life and is thrown into the well of the man’s death. The form of a circle is an essential trait of a witches’ sabbath and signifies the enclosed space within which evil triumphs during the night ritual. The circle is the black hole that annihilates those who step into it. The witches’ (or ogresses’) abandonment to evil equals the loss both of their human nature and of their soul. In Strozzi Cigogna’s influential Palace of Marvels and of the Great Enchantments of the Spirits and of All of Nature, first published in Italian in 1605 and in Latin in 1606 with the title Magiae omnifariae, we find a clear reference to a circular space of the kind just described.124 My book In the Company of Demons summarizes Cigogna’s words as follows: In a forest . . . Cigogna once spotted a clearing that had a circle of some twenty feet marked on the ground. The grass marking its perimeter looked rotten and never grew back. It is well known . . . that these circles usually are a sort of

62 c h a p t e r o n e

dance floor where . . . the devils usually called “fantasme” (ghosts) dance with their worshipers and possess them sexually.125

In Basile’s tale, the well is a synecdoche, standing for the larger circular void that encircles and swallows the human soul into the pit of death. An ogress stages this perverse celebration, which her daughters the Fates bless with their presence. The wedding of Thunder-and-Lightning and the “evil shadow” is in fact the Italian Psyche’s final and most challenging trial, because this time Cupid himself tests her instead of supporting her as he did during her previous trials. Parmetella officially attends Cupid’s night wedding as a mere bystander, a barely tolerated guest, even though in reality she is at the center of this infernal ritual. She is the sacrificial victim whose life is threatened by the groom’s mother and the groom alike. The wedding is a set-up against this modern Psyche. Thunder-and-Lightning doesn’t question his mother’s decision to marry him to an “evil shadow.” If we keep in mind the similarities between this nocturnal wedding scene and the witches’ sabbath, we could say that Thunder-and-Lightning plays the role of the demon who assumes a male human form in order ‘to marry’ the witches during their night gathering. At the banquet, Thunder-and-Lightning asks Parmetella: “Treacherous woman, do you love me?”126 Parmetella reveals her passion for her Cupid (“all the way up to the terrace!”) in the presence of his spouse. “If you love me, give me a kiss!,” retorts the newlywed prince. Thunder-and-Lightning’s odd questioning of the poor girl in front of his lawful wife continues in the spouses’ bedroom, where Parmetella is welcome to spend the night with the bride and the groom. Parmetella loves her Cupid but refuses to kiss him because he is now a married man. Neither the bride nor the groom, however, seems to be taking the marriage seriously. Why doesn’t the girl want to kiss such a handsome man, the ugly spouse wonders, when I once kissed a shepherd just for a couple of chestnuts? The bride can’t make sense of Parmetella’s refusal. The “evil shadow” praises her husband’s beauty, whereas Parmetella respects his nuptial vows. Thunder-and-Lightning is here less Cupid than Jupiter, the god of oaths, who in antiquity was often depicted as a Cupid-like boy holding a bundle of arrows, which he would throw at those who committed perjury. The Italian prince wants to see whether Parmetella has any respect for the institution of marriage, which he, however, has mocked with his deceitful wedding. Whereas in the Metamorphoses Cupid always addresses his beloved Psyche

a never ending and never told tale

63

with words of pity and concern (“my poor naïve Psyche”; “you, naïve and inexperienced as you are”; “poor girl”), Thunder-and-Lightning shows a stern and reproachful attitude toward Parmetella, constantly calling her a “treacherous.”127 As the god of oaths, Thunder-and-Lightning despises the girl’s inability to fulfill his orders. More than her love, the prince ogre appreciates the girl’s final demonstration of respect for an institution that transcends Thunder-and-Lightning himself. Their love paradoxically triumphs not because together they overcome the obstacles preventing them from consummating their passion, but because the girl honors his marriage to someone else. Their union remains an adulterous one, since the bride’s corpse rests in a cellar at the bottom of the castle as an “evil shadow” over the two lovers’ joy. Unlike the Latin Cupid and Psyche, Basile’s tale ends with a tragic bloodshed. The groom slaughters the bride; his lover murders a child; the groom’s mother and his aunt commit suicide. The entire text could be rewritten as a baroque tragedy, in which, as Benjamin suggests in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the timeless events of classical mythology turn into tragic instances of the here and now of human existence.128 In Basile’s second rewriting of Cupid and Psyche, both lovers commit heinous acts of violence. Parmetella doesn’t question Thunder-and-Lightning’s order to throw a baby into a burning oven, and Thunder-and-Lightning hastily drags his wife’s dead body down to the grave that he has dug in the cellar. It is important to note that “The Golden Trunk,” which for many scholars is the first modern version of the Latin myth, celebrates the love of a sterile couple.129 “When her time was come,” Apuleius writes at the end of his tale, “a daughter was born to them, whom we call by the name Pleasure.”130 In the two Italian tales, no pleasure is associated with babies. In “The Padlock,” the birth of a boy draws the cursed prince back to his mother’s castle. The happy ending of this fairy tale is the reunification of an original family. The prince is saved from the curse and restored to life, not because of his love for Luciella (Psyche) and the creation of a new family, but because of his return to his original role as a son. At the end of the tale, this adult son can be also a husband and a father. The happy ending of “The Golden Trunk” reads as the antithesis of “The Padlock.” Instead of the restoration of a family, Basile’s second retelling of Cupid and Psyche celebrates an egotistical, private satisfaction. Thunder-and-Lightning’s seven sisters show no sorrow at the news of their mother’s suicide. They rejoice at their brother’s happiness, which finds its unofficial celebration in bed and not at a wedding banquet. “Pleasure” remains under the covers of the two lovers’ bed. Their

64 c h a p t e r o n e

union bears no fruit. The only baby present in the tale is murdered by the happy couple.

the marvel of the luminous beginning: the golden palace and the golden tree Luciella and Parmetella both come from indigent families. These two girls leave their houses to run basic errands, the one to fetch water to boil some vegetables, the other to find grazing land for a sow. We don’t even know whether they are attractive or not. Since the author says nothing about their beauty, we can assume that these girls are neither pretty nor ugly. Each the youngest of three daughters, Parmetella and Luciella are subservient, modest girls. They can’t say no to a man who promises them “a lot of nice little things,” even if he is a slave.131 Would it be wrong to assume these girls have been chosen to help two noblemen free themselves from a curse simply because the girls are poor, and poor people are much easier to seduce with gold and wealth? It is worth remembering that magic is almost absent in “The Padlock.” In this all-too-human version of Cupid and Psyche, no gentle breeze lifts up the girl and carries her to a soft lawn; no golden tree presents itself to her in all its luminous beauty.132 A slave approaches her and tells her that he will give her some unspecified gifts if she follows him into a cave. That the slave may take her into that cave to rape her doesn’t keep Luciella from accepting his invitation. The simple promise of some kind of gift is all the magic a poor young woman needs. It is also important that the girl has not been selected by the cursed prince. He is no modern Cupid who has secretly fallen in love with young Luciella. He just sends out his slave to bring him a woman who can bear him a child. An impoverished girl fills the bill. By contrast, magic abounds in “The Golden Trunk,” beginning with the golden tree that Parmetella finds in the wood. We could simply conclude that Parmetella, like the original Psyche, finds a generous supporter in the creation. The golden tree seems to be waiting for her. In a like manner, when Psyche is in trouble, the vegetable and animal worlds intervene without being asked. But unlike Psyche, Parmetella slowly destroys the tree first, by plucking all its leaves; (it looks as though it has been ravaged by violent winds, writes Basile), and then by cutting it down.133 This Italian Psyche has no respect for the marvel she has stumbled upon. Instead of embodying the beauty of the created world, as Psyche does to the point of inspiring a new cult of beauty, Parmetella reaches her lover’s luxurious abode by destroying

a never ending and never told tale

65

the marvelous tree. Moreover, when Parmetella panics because she doesn’t know how to fulfill her first trial, it is her lover Thunder-and-Lightning who calls up the ants to sort out the beans. The little insects paid no heed to the girl’s desperate plea for aid. A sense of foreboding darkens the tale of Parmetella and the divine ogre. Her second trial is a public mourning of the death of poetry, to which the birds respond by dropping their feathers from above like a rain of tears. The final wedding is a night sabbath that ends in bloodshed. And, as I’ve mentioned, the two lovers are sterile, and they are baby killers.

In the Metamorphoses, the birth of Psyche inaugurates a new era in the history of mankind. The new ‘religion’ she founds is based on the harmonious accord among nature, human beings, and the divine. Thanks to Psyche, human love is divinized. Thanks to Psyche, the gods become humanized. The dazzlingly beautiful girl speaks of the beauty of creation. Her naïve behavior shows that the beauty of this world of gods and humans does not require an act of consciousness, an intellectual process. Parmetella signifies the conclusion, and not the beginning, of an era. Parmetella is the Psyche who arrives when the new world ushered in by Psyche is coming to an end. This new world is a place where the magic of the gods has turned into horror and despair, and where love is a barren passion. This is the modern world, as the seventeenth-century Neapolitan Giovanbattista Basile knew it. In Basile’s book, as Jacob Grimm stresses, “the absence of all Christian figures” is truly “remarkable.”134 Grimm is right in pointing out that the Virgin Mary, angels, and demons are nowhere to be found in Basile, whereas they abound in the German fairy tales. What does Parmetella notice in the first grand room of the cursed prince’s magnificent palace? Her attention is drawn toward a series of paintings depicting “the ignorance of men considered wise, the injustice of those who hold the scales of justice, and the crimes punished by the heavens.”135 These emblematic pictures are anticlimactic to say the least. Why hang such pessimistic images on the walls of the room in which the Italian Psyche will enjoy her first luscious meal? Allegorical representations of the immoral decadence ruling the ‘world,’ in the negative Christian sense, versus the ‘New Jerusalem’ that will come down from heaven at the end of time are extremely common in seventeenth-century Italy and Spain. Ignorance, injustice, and dishonesty are the pictorial symbols that Thunder-and-Lightning has chosen for his royal dining room. But the “marks of ignorance” are also

66 c h a p t e r o n e

what the noble brigade at the end of “The Three Animal Kings” (third tale of the fourth day) read on the walls of a tavern where they stop to rest on their way back to their realm.136 The same message against the present state of corruption adorns the vaults of a mysterious divine palace and the prosaic walls of a tavern. Ours is a world in which the gods have metamorphosed into ogres from the netherworld. Ours is an ugly and infertile world devoid of poetry. Orpheus is dead. And yet, because of what we know of the original Latin myth, its powerful message, its indelible poetry, we may be blind to Basile’s stunning and sobering retellings. Rather than modernizing the Latin myth by turning it into an allegory of new (Christian, philosophical or psychoanalytic) beliefs, Basile exposes the radical, unbridgeable chasm dividing the time of myth and modernity. The Psyche and the Cupid of yesteryear are no more.

the end and the unborn child “The Golden Trunk” ends with the romantic image of Parmetella and her Cupid asleep in bed after a long, exhausting night of lovemaking. Their naked bodies abandoned to the pleasurable oblivion of sleep celebrate their final victory over those who opposed their union. Relinquishing vigilance (the old ogress looks at them in horror before committing suicide), the two lovers also “relinquish” every kind of “attention and intention,” in JeanLuc Nancy’s words, and their identities become empty shells, mere visible forms.137 Their lack of “attention and intention” remains with them even when they finally wake up and “restore peace” with the seven young ogresses.138 Their happy ending literally rests upon the corpse of the lawful bride, who rots at the bottom of their castle. Being awake and being asleep have become synonyms at the end of the tale, because both are characterized by the same absolute intellectual void.

“The Golden Trunk” and the last tale of Basile’s book end with the very same sort of amnesia. At the conclusion of the fiftieth tale, the prince Tadeo realizes that it was the lovely princess Zoza, and not the deceitful black slave, who brought him back to life by almost filling the pitcher with her tears. Tadeo orders that the pregnant slave, his wife, be buried alive, “with only her head above ground, so that her death [will be] more tortured.”139 The prince seems not to remember that the slave is carrying his child. Like

a never ending and never told tale

67

the baby tossed into the oven because she is just “ogre meat,” the slave’s fetus is just slave meat, and deserves to die with his ugly mother. Is this the final, tragic lesson of the Italian “entertainment for the little ones”? Is this the transformative power of storytelling according to Basile? The Tale of Tales closes with the appalling image of a dark-skinned woman buried alive with her head sticking out of the ground. What lies beneath, what lies in the ground, what the happy and victorious lovers don’t care to remember, is the baby whose life is meaningless in this “world out of balance,” a world of contented sleepwalkers.140 Basile’s “The Padlock” and “The Golden Trunk” inaugurate our modern view of the Cupid and Psyche story. We should add that these two stories are also the first transcriptions of European oral renderings of the classical myth, if we follow the Grimms’ approach to The Tale of Tales. Apuleius composed a “civil” rendering of the story, as Zipes calls literary fairy tales, whereas Basile’s two versions brought it back to the macabre reality of the common people, who know that nature is not benign, that no providence is pulling the strings behind the scenes, that life is a sequence of a “thousand torments,” and that happiness means being oblivious of the suffering of others.

chapter two

Orpheus, the King of the Birds, Moves to Sicily with Cupid and Psyche: Laura Gonzenbach’s “King Cardiddu”

Following Psyche and Cupid in their marvelous transformations from divine figures celebrating their joyous wedding in the heavens into two dejected Neapolitan girls, Luciella and Parmetella, and their spouses, a sad prince and a disgruntled prince by the pretentious name of Thunder-and-Lightning, we have wrestled with these restless and untamable characters and their misadventures. Leaving ancient Greece for seventeenth-century Naples, their existence underwent the traumas and adjustments typical of all immigrants’ lives. Their divinity was denied; their biographies dissected and rewritten. Their lives became sets of motifs, themes, fragmented images scattered in a multitude of human stories. “Happy land of the Greeks, the thrones, where are they?” asked the German poet Hölderlin more than a century after Basile. “Where do they shine, the oracles winged for far targets?”1 The oracle that set Psyche’s ordeal in motion is silent. The gods “who have fled,” in Hölderlin’s moving words, and the memories they brought along in their exile sustain and enliven the tales of our all-too-human travails.2 The fragmented biographies of these displaced deities have sometimes become unrecognizable; at times, sparks of reminiscence are relegated to the footnotes of our collections of fairy tales, as proud acknowledgments of archeological findings. These gods no longer possess their own lives. As the precious mementos stolen from the suitcases of refugees in a hostile foreign country, pieces of their divine past were confiscated and reassigned, and thus dispersed in a confusing flux of appropriation and assemblage. In the tension between the erasure and the preservation of an immemorial past, new, “unconnected” and mysterious stories came to be, as Novalis would say, in which, for example, what used to be the beginning of a tale meta-

orpheus, the king of the birds, moves to sicily

69

morphosed into an ending, thus troubling the meaning of every single event and character. In Umberto Eco’s words, “characters migrate [and] even the most enduring literary characters risk becoming evanescent, mobile, shifting, losing that fixity which forced us to acknowledge their destinies.”3 We shouldn’t be surprised if the vicissitudes of Luciella and Parmetella, both human incarnations of the divinely beautiful Psyche, end up getting enmeshed in a single new tale, in which each of the three plays a brief role. The tale in question appears in Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilian Fairytales, first published in German in 1870.4 Its title is “King Cardiddu.”5 Before we proceed, a few introductory words about Sicilian Fairytales are necessary. Gonzenbach’s book is one of the most fascinating examples of the nineteenth-century obsession with the recovery and preservation of ‘authentic’ popular storytelling. In this collection, oral accounts in the Italian dialect of Sicily mutate into literary German texts. Born to German-Swiss parents in Messina, Sicily, Gonzenbach (1842–78) was raised in that cosmopolitan Italian city and with her younger sister Magdalena became an active participant in the local cultural life.6 Magdalena, for example, was a regular contributor to La Donna, a prominent feminist publication, and founded an educational center for women in Messina in 1874.7 Both sisters also supported cultural salons, whose members discussed literary issues and played classical music. Like the Grimms’ collection, Gonzenbach’s Sicilian Fairytales was inspired by a request from someone else, the German theologian and historian Otto Hartwig, who moved to Messina for five years as pastor and teacher in the local school for foreigners. In the years 1867–68, Hartwig decided to add some Sicilian folktales as an appendix to his two-volume history of the Italian island, and he asked Laura for help in this endeavor. In a single year, Laura was able to gather almost one hundred local folktales, which she heard almost exclusively from maids and Sicilian peasant women. She then translated them from the Sicilian dialect into literary German.8 We know nothing about her method of transcription, whether she wrote down the tale while she was hearing it or its main points and then reconstructed it according to what she remembered of the oral account.9 After being almost forgotten for more than a century, Gonzenbach’s precious book was brought back to life thanks to Luisa Rubini’s meticulous Italian edition in 1999. According to Jack Zipes, who published the first part of his English translation of Gonzenbach’s collection in 2003, Sicilian Fairytales “is much more interesting and important than the Children’s and Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm.”10 Given its female author and the overwhelming presence of female storytellers, Gonzenbach’s book seems to “represent more candidly the female

70 c h a p t e r t w o

if not feminist perspective on life.”11 A pervasive female point of view is certainly detectable in Sicilian Fairytales, although at times a seventeenthcentury ‘male’ tale (Basile) seems much more ‘feminist’ than its nineteenthcentury ‘female’ counterpart. Jennifer Fox is right in pointing out that, “while there have been numerous women folklorists, these women have generally adopted models for the collection and interpretation of data generated by men operating within a male-biased Western framework.”12 The conventional opposition between the (male) collector who holds a superior, authoritative, and almost magical role, and the “female informants” who “appear as passive vehicles, unwitting receptacles of knowledge,” is present in Gonzenbach’s collection.13 As Luisa Rubini points out, the modest oral storytellers addressed Gonzenbach as la signura, a term indicating the respect due to a socially superior and ‘foreign’ woman.14 The collector’s power is indeed visible in Sicilian Fairy Tales if we bear in mind that Gonzenbach not only transcribed the oral tales but also translated them into a foreign language and retained only scattered remnants of the original Sicilian words. In my view, Gonzenbach’s fascinating collection reflects a double cultural tension: on the one hand, Laura, who was very attentive to the issue of gender inequality, had to deal with a set of stories that often presented their female characters as “slaves,” as Rudolf Schenda points out in a fine essay on Gonzenbach. Schenda goes so far as to hypothesize that Laura, maybe with the help of her sister, sometimes tampered with the Sicilian oral tales in order to promote her feminist ideals.15 On the other hand, Laura’s female narrators wrestled with their own tales, the tales they had learned. In their brutal recounting of violence and repression, these women presented a reality that had been transmitted to them as eternal and immutable (the woman as an intrinsically inferior creature), yet through their storytelling they also communicated their natural desire for change.16 The Sicilian Fairy Tales thus oscillates between the repetition of traditional negative beliefs and the need to expose their outdated nature. This internal inconsistency is what makes Gonzenbach’s book so vibrant.17

Gonzenbach’s “King Cardiddu” is a fairly long story and can be summarized as follows:

An indigent shoemaker had a wife and three beautiful daughters, whom he struggled to support. One day, alone in a forest, he sat down on a rock and cried out “Oh, woe is me!”18 A handsome young man showed up and explained to the

orpheus, the king of the birds, moves to sicily

surprised shoemaker that every time someone sat on that rock and said those words he had to appear. The young man took the shoemaker through an underground passage to a marvelous subterranean castle. He fed the poor man, filled the man’s pockets with money, and sent him back to his family with the request that within a week he should return with his youngest daughter. He added that he couldn’t marry her immediately but would be able to in the future. The father honored the young man’s demand and left his daughter with the handsome man. She was very happy there, and one day her host showed her all the rooms in the underground castle and told her that she could do whatever she liked with all those treasures and could also give her sisters gifts when they came over. He showed her a small locked room and ordered her never to open that door and not to follow any suggestions her sisters might make. It would lead to her misfortune. He explained that he would have often to leave her alone for two or three days. The handsome man was King Cardiddu and had been forced by an ogress to live in that underground abode because he had refused to marry her daughter.19 In that small room, good fairies were making clothes for the children of the shoemaker’s daughter. When the king left, her sisters arrived and tried to persuade her to open the secret door, but the girl didn’t budge, because the king had forbidden her to peek into the room. Curiosity, however, began to torment her, and one night after he had gone to bed, she took a candle and leaned over him to make sure he was asleep, and a drop of wax fell on his head. All of a sudden she found herself on the stone in the forest on which her father had sat, and the king told her that her curiosity had been her misfortune, as he had warned her. She could still become his wife though. She had to go to the ogress’s house, sit down, and when the ogress asked her to go upstairs, she would demur until the ogress swore by “King Cardiddu” that she wouldn’t eat her. The girl walked alone in the forest in tears. When she reached the ogress’s house, she followed the king’s instruction and went upstairs when the monster swore by King Cardiddu. The girl became a servant to the ogress, who still wished to find a way to eat her up. The ogress first tried to trick her by giving her three impossible orders while she was in church to attend Mass: (1) “Sweep the house and don’t sweep it.” (2) “Start the fire and don’t start it.” (3) “Make the bed and don’t make it.” Each time King Cardiddu appeared to the despondent girl, he scolded her (“Why don’t you ask your sisters for help?”) and gave her the solution to the ogress’s riddle. The ogress then changed tactics and subjected her servant to new kinds of tasks: (1) She took all her white laundry, which had been dipped in ox blood, and ordered that the girl wash, bleach, iron, and fold it all by the end of the day. Again, the king appeared to the weeping girl and told her to bring the heavy bundle of laundry to the king of the birds, who lived on a mountain peak, and to tell him that King Cardiddu had sent her. The king of the birds gave the stained laundry to his fairies, who took care of it in no time. (2) The ogress took her mat-

71

72 c h a p t e r t w o

tresses and ordered the girl to open them up, wash and dry the wool inside, and wash and iron the sheets. King Cardiddu appeared again, helped the girl drag the mattresses up the mountain to the king of the birds, who gave them to his fairies. (3) The ogress asked the girl to deliver a letter and a box to her sister, who was an even crueler ogress. The king appeared again and instructed her how to proceed: (1) Without opening the box, she must walk until she encountered a roaring river carrying water and blood, to which she must say: “What a beautiful river!” The river would calm down and let her cross. (2) She would then see a donkey chewing on a bone and a dog eating hay. She must switch the bone and the hay, which would make the two animals happy. They would let her pass. (3) The door of the ogress’s castle would open and close incessantly, preventing her from walking in. Then she must say: “What a beautiful door!” and the door would let her pass. Finally, when the ogress’s sister received the letter, the girl must not wait for her to read it through, because the letter said that the sister should eat her. Out of curiosity, on her way to the ogress’s sister the girl opened the small box, which began to ring. Unable to make it stop, the girl burst into tears. The king appeared, told her off, and silenced the box. The girl reached the castle and followed the king’s suggestions. The ogress’s sister tried to capture her, but the door, the two animals, and the river prevented her from reaching her victim. The ogress’s sister drowned in the river. When the girl returned to the ogress’s castle, she saw that King Cardiddu was about to marry the ogress’s daughter. Although she loved the king, the girl had to work during the wedding. At night, after the extravagant celebration, the king asked his mother-in-law to let the girl kneel at the end of the bed with two burning candles. The girl did as ordered, while the king’s wife lay in bed. Thanks to her magical powers, the ogress planned to crack the floor open at midnight, so that the girl would fall and die. Knowing the ogress’s intentions, the king told his wife that he felt sorry for their maid, given her condition,20 and asked her to replace the maid and let her sit for a moment. The groom whispered to the maid to get onto the bed. At midnight, the floor shook violently, and the bride fell through the gaping hole. The king and his lover ran away. In the morning, the ogress wished to see her daughter but couldn’t find her until she went down to the cellar. Desperate, the ogress pursued the two lovers, but the king saw her behind them. The two runaways were transformed three times, and three times the king pretended not to understand what the ogress wanted from him: (1) the girl turned into a vegetable garden and the king into the gardener; (2) The girl turned into a church and he into a sacristan; (3) she became an eel and he the pond in which she was swimming. The ogress tried to catch the eel but failed. On her way home she found a way to take her revenge. She sat down at a window, closed her hands, put them between her knees, and said: “May the king’s bride be unable to give birth until I put my hands between my knees.”

orpheus, the king of the birds, moves to sicily

73

As soon as the couple arrived at the king’s palace, it was time for the bride to give birth. But she couldn’t because of the ogress’s evil spell. The king ordered a servant to visit all the churches with the order to toll the bells. Then the servant stood before the house of the ogress, who asked him what had happened. He told her that King Cardiddu had died. The ogress was so happy that she clapped her hands, and at that very moment the king’s bride gave birth to a baby boy. The servant went back to the churches with the order to ring the bells for the Gloria. Finally, the good servant went back to the ogress’s house and in answer to her new question responded that the bells were celebrating the fact that the bride had given birth to a wonderful baby boy. Furious, the ogress banged her head on the wall so hard that she died. The king celebrated a marvelous wedding, to which his bride’s entire family was invited.

p l e a s e r e m e m b e r a n d f o rg e t, s ays t h e ta l e “King Cardiddu” is clearly indebted to Apuleius’s Metamorphoses and Basile’s “The Padlock” and “The Golden Trunk.” Its borrowings from the three older tales are so evident that we won’t linger on them except to highlight some obscure aspect of Gonzenbach’s tale. At first glance, we could state that “King Cardiddu” is more of a fairy tale than either of Basile’s two stories. No extreme violence, no weird humor is to be found in the Sicilian tale. “King Cardiddu” reads like a traditional tale of magic, with even the final charming motif of the two lovers constantly being transformed into something else to avoid their evil enemy. What puzzles us, however, is the stark contrast between its well-organized structure, based on narrative clusters of three events (for example, the ogress gives the girl two sets of three trials; on her way to the ogress’s sister, the girl has three meaningful encounters; fleeing the ogress, the two lovers undergo three transformations), and some important, albeit humorous, inconsistencies: (1) King Cardiddu asks the poor shoemaker to return with his youngest daughter, but the girl will play no role in the king’s liberation from his curse. He can’t marry her now, he says to the poor father, but probably sometime in the future. That’s not what a father usually likes to hear from his daughter’s fiancé. (2) The king shows the girl all the areas of his palace but forbids her from opening a small locked room. But does she have the key that unlocks it? Think of Perrault’s “Blue Beard.” The sinister host always makes sure to show the key in question. (3) Why are the good fairies locked up? (4) And what about the girl’s alleged curiosity? Yes, she drops some hot wax on the king’s face, and

74 c h a p t e r t w o

he exiles her from his palace. But she hasn’t opened the secret door yet and may not even have the key to unlock it. Psyche, Luciella, and Parmetella are very curious too, because they can’t wait to see their lover’s face, but the anonymous Sicilian girl knows what her man looks like. Whether she looks at the king or not makes no difference for his future. The locked door will never be opened, and as far as we know the scrupulous fairies are still there working away at a future baby’s clothes. They are not even invited to the king’s wedding. It would be reasonable if they got really mad at the royal family and cast some old-fashioned evil spell on the baby, which would lead to a suspenseful sequel to “King Cardiddu.” Allow me one final question: Why does the king first turn down the ogress’s daughter and then, toward the end of the tale, agree to marry her? The many narrative inconsistencies in this tale are not only humorous but say something about the story itself. That fairy tales are patchworks of motifs is a commonplace. Notable in this specific case, however, is the apparent clumsiness with which these discordant segments are stitched together. What really holds the tale together is the subtle interaction between remembering and forgetting, between recognizing an allusion to a previous tale and dismissing it immediately afterward. For example, saying that “King Cardiddu” recalls the Cupid and Psyche myth is a half-truth. It does and it doesn’t. To identify motifs in a fairy tale is far from enabling a correct understanding of a tale. Gonzenbach’s Sicilian story shows that motifs are not always stable, enduring presences in a given tale, even when the motif in question is the most recognizable moment in the famous Latin myth. In “King Cardiddu,” the image of a girl holding a candle over her sleeping lover and then burning his face with a drop of hot wax is a weak echo of Cupid and Psyche in that it neither represents what it represents in Apuleius (the unveiling of a divine beauty at night and then the disfigurement of that beauty), nor signifies the betrayal of an order (King Cardiddu orders the girl not to open a certain door, and she doesn’t). King Cardiddu accuses the girl of being curious without having any evidence of her curiosity. Rather than being a direct borrowing, the motif of the girl anxiously holding a candle and looking at her lover in bed serves to arouse expectation, the suspenseful moment preceding a dramatic crisis. Given that the girl has broken no promise, even her subsequent ordeal loses any apparent meaning. After abandoning the girl in the forest, King Cardiddu tells her that their marriage is still possible, as if the tasks the girl will face are mere formalities rather than risky trials. Again, the Sicilian girl acts like a new Psyche or a new Parmetella, but her fears, her tears, and her sufferings have no clear meaning. Neither are they necessary to free

orpheus, the king of the birds, moves to sicily

75

the king from his evil spell, nor do they serve as forms of atonement. But if instead of dissecting the tale and thus revealing its problems, we simply enjoy the unfolding of its episodes, the tale shows a narrative unity. We are asked to remember and then to forget what we have remembered, and then to remember we were asked to forget. The girl’s pregnancy, which King Cardiddu only mentions to his wife indirectly (“given her condition”), shows up all of a sudden at the end of the story as something we somehow gleaned from the earlier episode about the girl in bed holding a candle over the king’s face. One image has engendered another without there being a need to describe it. Psyche’s or Luciella’s big belly is nowhere to be found in this Sicilian tale because we hardly need to hear about it. We remember it from other tales, maybe Apuleius, maybe Apuleius plus Basile, maybe neither of them. We just know it.

the beginning: psyche is given by her father to cupid as a thank-you gift Someone has to go into the woods to get the story started. The dark forest is the womb where the tale is conceived and brought to life. But that someone who finds him- or herself in that secluded, foreign space is always in a state of need. Just as the forest is a nonplace with no geographical coordinates, so the person who enters it is less, or has less, than others. In “The Golden Trunk,” one of Basile’s retellings of the Cupid and Psyche myth that we have already examined, a poor girl walks into a forest. When she reaches a fountain, her tale gushes out, so to speak, and a mysterious handsome slave shows up to greet her. In Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilian tale, we have the same ingredients: poverty, a wood, and a mysterious, handsome young man. The indigent shoemaker essentially gets rid of his youngest daughter; with this girl gone, he has one less mouth to feed. The girl isn’t even granted a name. She will remain “the daughter,” “the servant,” “the girl,” or “the poor woman” throughout the tale. She enjoys the luxurious environment and doesn’t mind sleeping with this man, who, however, has to leave once in a while for a few days. She is not entitled to question her lord’s behavior. The nameless girl sees herself less as a wife-to-be than as a servant in and outside of bed.

the secret of the fairy seamstresses The real mystery of the tale is not the lover’s identity but the fairies imprisoned in the small room. What the girl is not supposed to know is that

76 c h a p t e r t w o

the cursed king is in reality hosting some good fairies and, furthermore, that these fairies are making baby clothes for the girl’s future son. Remember that the ending of the tale coincides with the glorious revelation of the baby’s birth and the ogress’s subsequent death. The bells of all the churches in the king’s realm ring in honor of the little prince. The secretive opening of the tale, with its brief allusion to magical seamstresses working on the baby’s clothes, counterbalances the final joyful unlocking of that secret. Let us hypothesize for a moment that the real unifying center of the tale is the birth of the boy and not the curious girl’s vicissitudes. The future arrival of the baby is the secret that the girl is not supposed to know about, even though the baby in question will be her own. This secret is so momentous that the future mother can’t even step down from the bed she shares with the king at night. Moreover, fairies, and not just ordinary women, are making this baby’s clothes, and their work is so absorbing that they can’t even take a quick break. This mysterious future event is more powerful than the disclosure of Cupid’s divine identity. In Apuleius, Psyche does look at her divine lover, whereas for the Sicilian girl the mere intention of disregarding the king’s order is sufficient for her exile. Celebrated by church bells at the end of the story, the newborn has the power to kill the evil ogress, who can’t tolerate his birth. The birth of this marvelous baby is a given. King Cardiddu already knows that his birth will take place, which means that he also knows that the girl will overcome all the trials to which the ogress will subject her. Maybe the fairies work in that undisclosed location because neither the girl nor the ogress must know of this baby’s inevitable birth.

psyche as mother The myth of Cupid and Psyche ends with the birth of a beautiful, happy baby girl: “In proper form Psyche was given in marriage to Cupid. And when her time was come, a daughter was born to them, whom we call by the name Pleasure.”21 “Voluptas” is the offspring of a loving couple who have shown a mutual and everlasting love. Apuleius’s myth sees the birth of this girl as the natural outcome of a passion stronger than the gods themselves. Venus tries hard but fails miserably to foil her son’s marriage to the formerly human young lady. In “The Golden Trunk,” Basile omits this final, but important, detail and instead stresses the sterility of his Cupid and Psyche’s desire. His bleak tale speaks of a passion that is not even totally human, given that his Cupid is the son of an ogress. The happy ending of Basile’s tale

orpheus, the king of the birds, moves to sicily

77

coincides with the suicide of Cupid’s mother. We couldn’t be more distant from the humorous image of mother Venus dancing at her son’s wedding. In “King Cardiddu,” the birth of the baby boy is not only part of the happy ending; it lies at the core of the tale. Like Apuleius, the Sicilian narrator emphasizes an educational process that her Psyche must undergo before marrying her Cupid. Neither Luciella nor Parmetella, Basile’s two Psyches, seem to learn anything from their ordeal. According to Basile’s baroque sensibility, what the two Neapolitan girls suffer is the ‘natural’ and meaningless pain and alienation all humans must tolerate in their existence. Gonzenbach’s tale applies a very different meaning to Psyche’s trials. The anonymous young woman must learn how to become a good wife and thus a good mother. The Sicilian narrator rewrites the girl’s tasks with this specific goal in mind. Note that the “girl” (Mädchen) never acquires a proper name because a wife and a mother is defined by her role, which is given to her by others (her father and then her husband). Although her trials seem to connect her to Psyche, this anonymous girl is far from being “the soul” (psyche). If we take a look at the doubled number of trials that the “poor woman” has to overcome, it becomes apparent that her initiation relates to her motherhood, which can only find its fulfillment in marriage. The evil ogress who subjects her to six, not three, hard tasks behaves like a suspicious, hostile mother-in-law who repeatedly tries to show her son how inept this “poor woman” is. The two sets of tasks are not repetitious. They test the girl on the two major areas of her social identity: housewife and fertile virgin. The first three trials are: 1. Sweep the house and don’t sweep it 2. Start the fire and don’t start it 3. Make the bed and don’t make it Her future husband, King Cardiddu, tells her how to pull off these impossible tasks.22 The funny thing about his suggestions is that they are not real solutions to the evil witch’s riddles. But he knows how the witch wants to see them performed. The ‘solution’ to the first test is to sweep the house and then to throw the trash down the stairs. Doesn’t the king suggest that the girl in fact sweep the house? And what about the second trial? According to King Cardiddu, the girl is supposed to take the wood as if she were about to start a fire without actually starting it. She must also take matches and

78 c h a p t e r t w o

a cooking pot. The girl does not start and unstart a fire, as the witch’s trial requests; she simply doesn’t start it. Same thing for the third task: The king tells her to take sheets, fold them, and leave them on the mattress. The bed is simply not made. But what matters is that these are the actions that the old witch has in mind, and the king knows it. Isn’t a mother-in-law supposed to have a million idiosyncrasies and pet peeves? Like a pious but hateful woman, the ogress makes her three dangerous requests before going to church. King Cardiddu knows the ogress’s house and habits, along with her ‘piety,’ since his evil spell dictates that he must periodically leave his splendid palace and spend a few days with the evil ogress. What is missing from these first three tasks is the presence of natural elements, which play such a powerful role in Psyche’s ordeal. Where are the lentils, chickpeas, and beans that Psyche must gather and sort into separate piles by the end of the day? Where are the ants that rush to help the desperate girl? Both Psyche and the Sicilian girl cry their eyes out, but the significance of their tasks is very different. In the Latin myth, nature itself intervenes to protect the girl’s well-being. The Sicilian girl is first subjected to trials that are meant to test her skills in household affairs. There would be no point in going any further if she didn’t know how to sweep around or make beds.

orpheus, king of the birds, has his fairies wash, fold, and iron laundry The second set of three trials revolves around one symbolic event: a young woman’s loss of virginity on the bed that she has shared with her man. In a sense, these trials are memorials of what our heroine has already experienced in King Cardiddu’s palace. Before killing his wife, the king briefly refers to the “condition” of the girl who is holding two candles in their bedroom. Two images dominate these new tasks: blood and bed: 1. Wash, bleach, and iron this huge bundle of laundry stained with ox blood 2. Wash and dry the wool inside these mattresses and these sheets 3. Deliver this letter and this small box to my sister With these three tasks, the ogress revisits the pivotal moment in a young woman’s life, the loss of her virginity, and tries to turn it into an ominous memory that threatens to destroy the young woman. All three trials rehearsal the girl’s possible demise, her being literally devoured because of what she

orpheus, the king of the birds, moves to sicily

79

did in a recent past and is now unable to undo. The sheets are stained with blood; the bed must be washed and purified of the girl’s pollution. Only magic has the power to reverse time, and thus to cleanse an irremediably tainted human being and her sullied memory. Spotless, well-folded sheets and a thoroughly washed mattress will show that nothing filthy took place on that bed. But, as in a nightmare, the bloodstained sheets are heavy and innumerable, and a single mattress becomes infinite mattresses. The good news about these heavy tasks is that, thanks to them, we learn that the king of the birds, whose death Basile’s Parmetella had mourned as a professional weeper at a southern Italian funeral, is not dead at all, and loves doing laundry for Sicilian maids in peril of being eaten if they don’t do a good job. That this Sicilian tale echoes Basile’s “Golden Trunk” is hard to dispute. Both Parmetella and the Sicilian girl must fulfill a task that has to do with mattresses and that finds its solution in the king of the birds. This mysterious king, who was dead and has come back to life in Gonzenbach’s tale, is no longer who he used to be. In Basile, the king of the birds was Orpheus, the poet whose voice and music were capable of seducing nature and the gods of the netherworld. The announcement of his death had tragic consequences. As Parmetella tore her hair because of her unbearable pain, so did the birds tear their feathers and drop them down from the sky as the entire creation wept at Parmetella’s desperate weeping. In “King Cardiddu,” the king of the birds is certainly alive but with no birds to serve and praise him. His title makes little sense unless we read it as a residuum from Basile’s tale. The Sicilian king of the birds is merely a sort of magician who lives on top of a mountain, away from society, and is served by some faithful fairies, who take care of the girl’s stained laundry and dirty mattresses in no time. These servile fairies are very different from the ones who follow their king in Sir Orfeo, the fourteenth-century English poetic retelling of the Orpheus myth. When the king of the fairies kidnaps Heurodis, Lord Orfeo’s lady, the distraught lord withdraws into a forest to mourn the loss of his beloved. One day he sees a procession of “sixty ladies riding by / as blithe and fair as birds on spray, / with not a man in all their band. / Each bore a falcon on her hand / and hawking rode beside the river.”23 These fairies are courtly ladies who traverse the recesses of the forest in their noble attire and enjoy what nature has to offer. These English fairies would be appalled if they learned that some distant relatives of theirs, in that southern land called Sicily, have fallen so low on the social scale. These southern European fairies do what modern fairies are supposed to do: they help us out in times of need. Walking up that steep mountain twice,

80 c h a p t e r t w o

the girl moves from the realm of the present, where her stained sheets are a persistent reminder of her being ‘tainted,’ to an out-of-time space where fairies and magicians wait to help out. The very title “king of the birds,” indeed, alludes to that high and almost unreachable space of salvation, a place suspended in midair above the trials of the world below. This king rules over the space above, where the birds fly free of concern and good and ethereal fairies are women who cannot be ‘stained’ like normal girls but who are nonetheless more than happy to serve as humble maids who wash and fold your heavy laundry and make pretty clothes for your baby boy.

how to tell a story backward: from the days after cupid and psyche’s wedding to psyche’s exile and trials The girl’s final trial is the most ominous and complex one because it is in fact three trials in one. The old ogress asks the girl to deliver a letter and a small box to her sister, who is of course another, even more evil ogress. The reader will remember an almost identical trial in Basile’s “Golden Trunk.” So far, the Sicilian girl has faced tasks that remained in the realm of reality, that is, they were straightforward competitions between the ogress and the girl. The last challenge, on the contrary, forces the girl into the realm of the symbolic, reminiscent of Psyche’s and Parmetella’s journeys toward death and salvation. This final, more ominous, trial, however, does not differ from the previous two; it completes them by staging the sacredness of the Sicilian girl’s ordeal. She has already proved that she could be a good housewife, and that she is chaste. Her mattress stained with blood testifies to her virginity. What is essential to realize, however, is that the single episodes of this modest girl’s ordeal are segments of a cohesive narrative, which is paradoxically told backward. If we turn Gonzenbach’s tale upside down, we have an easily recognizable tale: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Courtship leading to marriage Consummation of marriage Washing away the stains left on the nuptial bed The young girl is now a married woman

To construct this easy, sensible story, we need to start from the end and work our way toward the beginning, up to the girl’s first trial. The above four sections of the tale correspond to the following moments of “King Cardiddu:”

orpheus, the king of the birds, moves to sicily

81

1. Although she loves King Cardiddu, the girl agrees to hold the candles by the bed where he is about to sleep with the ogress’s daughter. He asks the girl to get onto the bed. The king kills his wife and marries the girl. 2. The girl crosses the river of water and blood, and avoids death. 3. The ogress challenges her to wash stained mattresses and sheets. 4. The girl, now a proficient housewife, sweeps the house. The turning point of this backward tale is the crossing of the river of blood and water, as Parmetella, Basile’s second Psyche, had to cross the infernal “bridge of hair” after being expelled from Cupid’s palace. The very expressions “bridge of hair” and “river of water and blood” announce an important transformation within the tale. These words alert us that the tale is passing from a literal to a symbolic environment, from reality to mystery. It is not only that our heroine performs a symbolic gesture by crossing a river or a bridge; the Neapolitan bridge and the Sicilian river themselves reveal their being more than real. In “King Cardiddu,” no other image matches the intense violence summoned by the “river of water and blood,” which seems to allude to a tragedy of epic proportions, as we would find in the Iliad. In a tale in which washing a huge pile of dirty laundry and refreshing heavy mattresses are the heroine’s first challenges, the sudden vision of such an ominous flowing of blood mixed with water can only signify a radically new, and deeply upsetting, beginning. For a Sicilian narrator and listener, it would be hard to miss a Christian echo in this sinister river: instead of breaking Jesus’s legs, “one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance; and immediately there came out blood and water” ( John 19:34).24 The Sicilian girl walks back to the origin of her tale, so to speak, by reliving the trauma of shedding blood and water, which she experienced at the beginning of the tale when her father delivered her to King Cardiddu and she shared his royal bed. She now faces a river that carries downward the visible memories (blood and water) of a distressing and life-changing event. The signs of that past trauma flow down the river while she crosses over it, thanks to the way she addresses the river itself, as instructed by King Cardiddu: “What a beautiful river!” The river is moved by the girl’s gentle words precisely because the river and the memories flowing in it are not beautiful. In a sense, the girl’s mission is impossible. How could she change something in her past, blot out a trauma or loss? Although this is what the Sicilian girl is meant to do, washing the sheets stained with blood does not erase the memory of staining those sheets with blood. Like Lady Macbeth trying to clean her hand, or Bluebeard’s young wife desperately scrubbing the bloodstained key, the girl in Gonzenbach’s fairy tale can’t wash away the

82 c h a p t e r t w o

blood that she has successfully removed from the sheets and the mattress. Although life won’t allow her to change her past, which according to the reversed order of the tale should occur at the end and not at the beginning of the tale, the logic of fairy tale demands that all logic be dismissed and order be thrown out of the window. Our heroine “crosses” the flowing of blood, that is, she can look at the blood that has been shed, but from the opposite side of the story. Instead of mourning the loss of the blood as something that lies always before her eyes as an irremediable loss, she walks up to the memory of that loss, crosses it, and leaves it behind for the time being. Land of the past: Loss Stained bed King of the birds

river of blood and water

Land of the future: Marriage Staining the bed Suicide of ogress

Why place the king of the birds and his scrupulous fairies in the realm of the past, and the ogress and her violent death in the one across the river, the land of the future? It is because the king of the birds and his fairies support that fruitless washing and cleaning and ironing and folding of the sheets defiled with a blood and impure water that no soap can remove. This king and these fairies living on top of a mountain away from human society are indeed fairy-tale characters, in that their intervention is as magical as it is imaginary. Basile’s Parmetella was right in crying out that the king of the birds was dead. Two centuries after the marvelous Neapolitan story, no one had the slightest clue that this king of the birds used to charm birds with his melodious voice and that even stones and trees were moved by his verses. Running a cleaning business was not one of Orpheus’s skills. Crossing the river of blood and water also involves bringing the letter and the strange little box to the ogress’s sister. The girl is supposed to deliver the order of her own execution to her executioner. But what is the meaning of the small box? In Basile’s “The Golden Trunk,” the ogress sends Parmetella to get a box from her sister, not to give her one as in the Sicilian tale. In Basile, the box contains the musical instruments necessary for Thunderand-Lightning’s imminent wedding, and Parmetella has to take them to the wedding. In “King Cardiddu,” the girl has to deliver a small music box to an ogress who is supposed to devour her. Why? Is that music box meant to accompany the slaughtering and funeral of the girl? All celebrations require the presence of a musical accompaniment, weddings and funerals alike. If, as we said, the nameless girl is slowly walking backward toward to the beginning of her story, the music box that she car-

orpheus, the king of the birds, moves to sicily

83

ries along in the final lap of her journey, and that she can’t wait to open up, sounds like an annoying alarm clock that forces us to wake up, reach for it, and push down the button to stop the ringing. And that’s exactly what King Cardiddu does. He scolds the girl, as Cupid and Thunder-and-Lighting scold their curious girlfriends. But, unlike Psyche’s vial from the netherworld and Parmetella’s music box, the Sicilian girl’s box plays no narrative role. Psyche falls into a deathlike slumber after opening the small bottle; Parmentella is supposed to take the box with the musical instruments to her lover’s wedding. The Sicilian girl is holding a box that the ogress’s sister is not expecting and that has no effect on the girl’s encounter with her. The Sicilian heroine needs to open the mysterious box so that its piercing sound may commemorate the shedding of blood and water that she left behind when she crossed the river. The box is for her and for her only; she carries it because it belongs to her. It is her music. Its resounding message is that the tale is about to end, that is, it is about to reach its final beginning, the moment when a poor shoemaker’s girl will begin a love story with a king, who will fall for her, marry her, take her virginity in his royal bed, and have a beautiful child by her. Before reaching the ogress’s house, the girl encounters two animals and a magical door that swings back and forth. These tests are extremely similar to Parmetella’s, who must face a ferocious dog, a violent horse, and then a restless door. The difference between the two sets of tasks is, however, enormous. What the Sicilian girl needs to do is not to stave off some deadly danger (a dog that could bite her; a horse that could kick and trample on her to death); she needs to fix a contradictory situation. The dog is chewing the donkey’s hay and the donkey is holding the dog’s bone in its mouth. She switches the objects so that the animals can have what they like and need. It’s a pretty easy task, but full of symbolism. What the girl is doing on her way to her beloved King Cardiddu is to rearrange what has been reversed, what has been placed in an unnatural condition. She is blotting out the wrong version of her story (a tale in which the beginning is the end and where a donkey eats a bone and not hay), so as to start her beautiful new fairy tale.

the tale opens and closes with the girl holding a light in the bedroom, and the end is an abyss You will remember that in “The Golden Trunk” the sinister night wedding of Thunder-and-Lightning and his ugly fiancée took place next to a well. The evil ogress had Parmetella hold two torches and sit on the edge of that

84 c h a p t e r t w o

deep pit, in the hope that the girl would fall into it. Gonzenbach narrates an eerily similar situation: Holding two candles at her Cupid’s wedding, the girl risks tumbling into a hole that the ogress will magically open in the floor at midnight. But consider for a moment the fascinating changes this setting has undergone from Basile to Gonzenbach: King Cardiddu himself demands that the girl hold the two candles, in order to light up not his wedding but rather its consummation. He wants the girl to kneel down, hold the candles, and witness his sexual intercourse with the ogress’s daughter in the newlyweds’ bedroom. Forcing the girl into such a humiliating position allows the king to see the girl’s submission to his will. The opening of the floor under the girl’s feet is scheduled to take place at midnight, the symbolic instant when the king’s marriage will officially take effect. It is at this pivotal moment, in the bedroom where the girl’s lover is about to possess his wife, that we learn that the girl is pregnant. King Cardiddu himself informs his wife of the girl’s condition, asking her to take pity on the maid and replace her for a moment. What a weird and humorous scene! Just as the girl had fixed the wrong situation between the donkey and the dog, so the king has the two women switch their roles in order to restore the natural order of things. His wife ends up holding the candles next to the bed while her husband whispers seductive words to their pregnant maid, who will first sit next to him on their bed and then will lie in bed with him. The king’s ogress wife literally sheds light on a secret: the king already has a wife. But remember that the Sicilian girl’s misadventures had begun with her lighting a candle and looking down on her lover as he lay in bed. Unlike the Cupid and Psyche tale and Basile’s versions, “King Cardiddu” creates a harmonious balance between the beginning of the girl’s exile and its resolution. Her ordeal opens and closes with her holding a light and looking at her lover in bed at night. The act of gazing at someone in bed always involves shame and uncertainty. In the bedrooms of “King Cardiddu,” those who are looked at have the power of shaming the onlooker, and not vice versa. Reassembling the pieces of Basile’s and Apuleius’s versions of the tale, the narrator of “King Cardiddu” turns the repeated act of lighting up a dark bedroom into the two central moments of the tale itself. When the girl kneels down and holds the candles in the king’s bedroom, she is on the brink of an emotional abyss of shame and rejection. But the ogress’s daughter will fall into a literal abyss, and the girl will replace her in bed. In Basile, Thunder-and-Lightning has to slit his wife’s throat and drag her body down to the cellar to make her disappear from his bedroom. In

orpheus, the king of the birds, moves to sicily

85

Gonzenbach, the wrong wife simply vanishes into the hole that opens under her feet, shipping her directly to the cellar, a place for trash and oblivion, where her mother will find her dead. At the moment of the young ogress’s death, all three main characters are undergoing an important transformation: the poor girl is now defined as the king’s “wife,” the king’s original wife becomes “the ogress’s daughter,” and the king forgets about his royal status and can’t wait to beat it with his sweetheart.25

the marvelous transformations of a blossoming love A striking motif in many fairy tales consists of a sequence of metamorphoses, usually three, undergone by two lovers fleeing a terrible enemy, especially ogres, ogresses, or witches. In the Sicilian tale, this final part could be seen as a digressive expansion of the much more straightforward ending in Apuleius and Basile, in which the reunification of the two lovers is the positive finale of the story. But the charm of the Sicilian Cupid and Psyche version is undeniable. Please consider again the meaning of what happened in that dark bedroom. A first metamorphosis took place right there, when the king and the shoemaker’s daughter, despite their hugely different social status, became husband and wife. In the Latin myth, Psyche is turned into a deity to satisfy her mother-in-law’s opposition to a mixed (human and divine) marriage. In a like manner, Basile points to the amazing social change that his indigent Psyches undergo. In Sicilian Fairytales, on the other hand, Gonzenbach narrates how both spouses metamorphose into something marvelous and new. The ogress’s final attempt at destroying their union reveals the marvels hidden in this new loving couple. Their mutual love allows them to change into whatever they want to, because when we love, everything is possible: garden and gardener, church and sacristan, pond and eel.

but the greatest marvel is the baby “Pleasure” is the name of Cupid and Psyche’s baby girl. “Pleasure” is also the last word of Apuleius’s tale. Once again, the Gonzebach retelling introduces a wonderful expansion. The birth of a boy is not the end of the story. The boy in fact accomplishes what his parents had been unable to do: eradicate evil from their kingdom. His birth is a terrible blow for the cruel ogress, leading her to suicide. She dies as the ogress died in Basile’s “The Golden

86 c h a p t e r t w o

Trunk,” banging her head against the wall, but in the Sicilian tale the ogress’s death follows the dissolution of a spell she had cast on the baby. The boy was not supposed to come into this world. All the church bells in the kingdom celebrate with “great joy” the birth of the little prince and the king’s wedding to the shoemaker’s daughter. The wedding ceremony takes place only now, as if the two lovers could not finalize their union until the arrival of their child.26 It is impossible not to perceive a spiritual, even religious undertone in this marvelous ending. The bells are celebrating a boy whose sole existence is capable of blotting out the evil threatening the well-being of the royal family and thus of their entire realm. The boy doesn’t necessarily stand for Jesus, however, for the arrival of a new baby, in all kingdoms of this world, is a marvel that silences evil, renews our hopes, and brings us a “great joy.”

chapter three

Melancholy Is the Best Storyteller: Oil, Water, and Blood from Gonzenbach back to Basile

A story’s climax is commonly assumed to occur at the end of the story. A tale may reverse the order of the beginning and the middle (see the Odyssey), but the ending is sacred.1 That the end must happen at the end is actually a moot belief. Consider, for instance, the so-called ring narratives, which present a pivotal center, after which the story moves backward to its starting point. In a ring composition, Mary Douglas explains, “the end corresponds to the beginning” and “may suggest a cosmology of eternal return.”2 The renowned anthropologist identifies a ring structure in the Iliad and the Book of Numbers, among other ancient texts, both written and oral. Instead of forming a circle, a story may also form two parallel narrative lines that reflect, complement, or improve each other. In this second structure, the tale is characterized by two endings, one ‘better’ than the other. This chapter is about stories based on renewed beginnings and renewed endings, and about the transformations brought about by this unusual technique. A repeated process of forgetting and remembering, abandoning and encountering, leaving and returning ensures the narrative unfolding of these unique tales, which read like a string of shorter tales stitched together. We will see how multiple stories, structured according to this pattern but written in different eras, echo and seem to influence and clarify each other. When we read a story of this kind, the tale does more than tell a story; it also formulates questions. Further, in telling its story, a fairy or folk tale reveals its unconnected nature, as Novalis would say; it exposes its need for completion and coherence. *

*

*

88 c h a p t e r t h r e e

We have already noticed that Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilian Fairytales reads like a warehouse of familiar themes and events, which at first glance seem to have lost their original freshness because they have become recognizable to the point of looking obvious and secondhand. It is as if what happens in one of the Sicilian tales doesn’t really belong there, having already happened centuries ago, in Basile’s The Tale of Tales, for example. What matters is how we approach a tale in which these well-known themes or motifs now reside. If we read the Sicilian tales just to extract their single segments, they will sound unoriginal and derivative. If, on the contrary, we are willing to look at any one of these tales as a new, unique, and cohesive narrative, we also apprehend its single pieces in a different way. The Sicilian tales have not borrowed their episodes from previous stories. They own their characters, their events, and their meanings. The occurrences that make a Sicilian tale are both old and new, derivative and fresh. Being perennial immigrants, the fragments of a tale have been naturalized in a new narrative land, yet without deleting or forgetting their past. But being eternal immigrants, they surprise us with their foreignness, though they are no longer totally foreign. And, finally, being immigrants, they long for a fresh start, to change into something better or at least new.

“the beautiful maiden with seven v e i l s ” : t h e f o u n ta i n o f m e l a n c h o ly This tale, the thirteenth in Sicilian Fairytales, opens with the image of a fountain at the center of a royal courtyard.3 Oil constantly flows from it. There is something miraculous about this fountain, which a king and a queen built in response to a miracle granted by the Virgin Mary. Oil coming from a fountain certainly signifies abundance and wealth, but it also reflects the contradictory idea of both sharing and squandering that beneficial liquid. It is a joyful fountain, which may nonetheless cause a reaction of melancholy. And, as this long tale shows, from melancholy flows a bounty of adventurous tales. It is important to become acquainted with “The Beautiful Maiden with Seven Veils,” for it echoes the introduction of Basile’s The Tale of Tales and its multiple interpretations of the Cupid and Psyche myth:

A king and a queen were long unable to have children. The queen prayed to the Madonna del Carmine, promising that if the Virgin granted her a child, she would have a fountain built in the courtyard when her child turned fourteen. Oil would flow from it for an entire year. The queen gave birth to a boy, and

melancholy is the best storyteller

when he turned fourteen, his parents kept their promise and built the fountain. From his window, the handsome prince liked to look at the people going to the fountain to get oil. Just before the ending of the year, an old lady, carrying a sponge and a pitcher, approached the fountain. The oil had stopped flowing, but there was still some in the basin. After the old lady had filled her pitcher with oil, the arrogant prince threw a stone at the pitcher and shattered it. The old lady cursed the prince: “May you never marry until you find the maiden with seven veils.” From that moment, the prince became melancholic and all he could think about was the beauty with seven veils.4 After traveling for many days, he arrived one night at the edge of a large forest, where he saw the modest house of a peasant and his family. They welcomed him in. The following morning he resumed his journey, but the peasant’s wife called after him, warning him that giants and wild beasts lived in the forest, and that they guarded the girl with seven veils. Before him, many other princes had failed to return from the forest. The peasant’s wife told him that at the end of the day he would see a hermit’s house and should ask the hermit for advice. At dusk, after journeying all day long in the forest, the prince knocked at the door of the hermit’s house. “Who is there?” asked the hermit, and the prince answered: “I am a poor wanderer who needs shelter” “I cast you away in the name of God,” was the hermit’s harsh reply.5 “Don’t cast me away; I am a baptized soul!,” said the prince. The hermit let him in and warned him of the terrible dangers ahead of him. He told him that, when he saw a door that kept opening and closing, he had to fasten it. The hermit also gave the prince half of his bread and some water, because an angel brought him food every day. Finally, the holy man suggested that the young man stop by at his brother’s hut, which the prince would find at the end of day. The second hermit welcomed the prince and told him that when he saw a donkey and a lion, with the lion holding the donkey’s hay in his mouth, and the donkey the lion’s bone, he should help them by switching the food. The second hermit also told him to speak with his brother, the oldest of the three hermits, whom he would encounter at the end of the day. The third hermit told the prince that he needed to take three items: bread, a pack of brooms, and a bundle of feathers to fan the fire. The old hermit also told him that after taking care of the lion and the donkey, as his brother had recommended, he would encounter some giants striking an anvil with big iron clubs. When he saw the giants raising the clubs, he should rush between the clubs and the anvil. Then he would encounter a fig tree with small, ugly fruit.6 The prince should eat some of the figs and praise the tree. Then he would see a grand palace in which a terrifying giantess was guarding three ladies with seven veils.7 After taking care of the restless door, the prince would have to throw the bread at some ferocious lions. Then he would have to walk up the palace steps. The hermit warned the prince that the giantess’s servants swept the floor with sticks because they didn’t have brooms, and they would attack

89

90 c h a p t e r t h r e e

him with those sticks. He must show them the brooms to calm them down. Then, upstairs, her cooks would try to harm him, but the feather dusters would appease them. Finally the prince would encounter the giantess sitting on a throne. Under her elbow he would see three small boxes. He would have to give her a letter, which the giantess would read and then tell him to wait for her to return with a response. While she was in another room sharpening her teeth to eat him, the prince must randomly pick one, and only one, of the three boxes and flee. He mustn’t open the box until he was out of the forest and near a fountain, because as soon as he opened the box he would hear the beautiful maiden cry out “Water!” from inside the box, and he would have to give her some water immediately; otherwise she would die. The prince followed the hermits’ instructions and overcame all the obstacles he encountered on his way to the giantess’s palace: (1) he took care of the lion and the donkey; (2) he avoided the giants’ big clubs; (3) he ate the small figs and complimented the tree; (4) he fastened the door; (5) he gave bread to the lions; (6) he gave the brooms to the giantess’s servants; (7) he gave the feather dusters to the giantess’s cooks. (8) when he saw the giantess on her throne, he gave her the letter, and she asked him to wait for her reply, but he snatched one of the boxes and fled before she returned. The giantess tried to catch the prince, but her cooks, her servants, the lions, the door, the fig tree, the giants, the donkey, and the lion refused to help her. The prince came out of the forest and reached a fountain. He opened the box, and a voice said: “Water!” After he poured some water into the box, a beautiful maiden arose.8 Her beauty shone through her seven veils, which were her only clothing. The prince asked the girl to climb a tree nearby and hide in its foliage while he rode home to fetch her some clothes. The girl warned the prince that he would forget her if he let his mother kiss him and would remember her only after one year, one month, and one day. When he was home, the prince explained this to his mother, but after he had gone to bed, she walked into his room and couldn’t help kissing him. The prince forgot his bride, who grew very sad because she understood what had happened. She decided to live on the tree and wait there for one year, one month, and one day. After a year, an ugly black slave passed by to get some water and when she looked down into the fountain, she saw the reflection of the beautiful maiden and thought it was her own image. The slave thought herself so beautiful that she needn’t bother to fetch water for her mistress, and broke the pitcher. When she told her mistress why she had broken the pitcher, the woman laughed and sent her back to the fountain with a copper pitcher. Again the slave looked down into the water, but when she saw the girl’s beautiful reflection, she raised her eyes and saw the maiden on the tree. The slave asked her what she was doing up there, and the maiden answered that she was waiting for the handsome prince, who would be back in one month and one day. The slave offered

melancholy is the best storyteller

91

to comb the girl’s hair and climbed onto the tree. After combing her hair for a while, she stuck a pin into the girl’s head. The beautiful girl turned into a white dove and flew away. In the prince’s castle lived an old chambermaid who had a hard time speaking, and when she did, the prince laughed at her. One day the prince laughed at the old chambermaid while she was peeling an orange, and she cut her finger. A drop of blood fell onto the marble floor. The old woman cursed the prince: “May you never marry unless you find a bride who is as white as this floor and as red as this blood.” Suddenly the prince remembered his beloved because one year, one month, and one day had just passed from the day when he had last seen her. He took a coach and fine clothes and went to the tree where he had left her. He was surprised to find the ugly black slave, who told him the sun had changed the color of her skin and the wind had changed her voice. Blaming himself for these negative changes, the prince took the slave home and married her. The day after the wedding, while the cook was cleaning the antechamber, a white dove flew into the room and sang: “Cook, cook of the kitchen, what is the king doing with the slave?” The dove flew away and then came back at noon when the cook was preparing the table, and asked: “Cook, cook of the kitchen, what is the king doing with the queen?” The dove flew over the food and shook her feathers, spilling the salt onto the meal.9 Since this happened for several days, the prince grew very angry with the cook and asked him what was going on. The cook had to admit that twice a day a dove came into the kitchen and asked about the prince and his bride. The prince ordered the cook to put glue on the windowsill. The next day, the dove flew into the kitchen, asked the same question, but got stuck in the glue and couldn’t escape. The prince took the dove and stroked her feathers. He saw the black tip of the pin stuck in her body and wondered who could do such a cruel thing to a pretty bird. He took out the pin and suddenly the beautiful maiden with seven veils was there before him, even more beautiful than before. The prince had her dressed in elegant clothes and driven to the castle in a luxurious coach as if she were arriving from a distant place. The slave didn’t recognize her. At the end of their meal, the prince asked the maiden to recount her story, but the slave was blinded and failed to recognize her.10 The prince asked the slave what she thought would be the right punishment for a person who had treated the beautiful maiden in such a way. The slave said the evil person should be thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil and then tied to a horse’s tail and dragged all over the city. This is how the slave was punished. The prince married his beloved.

The fountain of oil was not built at the moment of the prince’s birth. Although the king and queen’s problem was that they couldn’t have children,

92 c h a p t e r t h r e e

the celebration of the Virgin Mary’s miracle takes place when the child reaches the age of fourteen, the time of his departure from childhood and the beginning of adulthood. It is a time of transition that for the queen mother is even more significant and dangerous than her child’s birth. The queen’s promise to Mary conceals a twofold request. The queen prays that the Virgin will allow her to have a child and will protect the child until he reaches the threshold of adulthood. Several tales from diverse traditions emphasize the importance of the fourteenth year in a human being’s life. In Italian Fairytales, Clemens Brentano narrates the moving story of a little girl, Little Rose Petal, who, like Sleeping Beauty, lies enclosed in seven glass cases and is brought back to life at the age of fourteen when her uncle’s enraged wife shatters the seven cases.11 The Grimms’ collection has at least two tales based on the meaning of this symbolic age: “Faithful Ferdinand and Unfaithful Ferdinand” and “The Virgin Mary’s Child,” which is one of the core tales recorded in their 1810 manuscript.12 The handsome prince in Gonzenbach’s tale faces an essential trial at the age of fourteen and fails. The queen, who seems aware of this perilous time, promises Mary to keep the fountain flowing for the entire time of her son’s trial, as if the presence of the fountain built under the aegis of the Virgin will also protect the prince from the dangerous test represented by the fountain itself. The fountain is both test and protection from the test. The prince has almost passed his trial; he has enjoyed looking at the people gathering at the fountain built in his honor and has not disrupted his mother’s festive ritual of gratitude. After hearing the old woman’s curse, Gonzenbach tells us, the prince becomes very melancholy. According to early modern medicine, the humor of melancholia was so alienating that it could even cause suicide. A melancholic was locked in a chaos of obsessive feelings that he could not cough out in the way a person possessed of demons was supposed to spit the demons out.13 As soon as he hears the curse, the prince in Gonzenbach’s tale withdraws into himself and hides his fixation from his worried parents. Unable to tolerate this secret pain, the handsome young man asks his parents to bless him and let him wander through the world.

g o n z e n b a c h ’s m e l a n c h o ly p r i n c e a n d b a s i l e ’s m e l a n c h o ly p r i n c e ss Melancholy is the engine of this tale. The prince sets out on his anguished journey because of the malaise that has silenced all his other concerns. The fury of melancholy demands that he seek the veiled lady and erases all sub-

melancholy is the best storyteller

93

plots in the story of his life. Basile’s The Tale of Tales, which could be considered a major source of Gonzenbach’s book, is founded on the savagery of melancholy. The frame tale of The Tale of Tales narrates that the “King of Hairy Valley” had a daughter called Zoza, who had never laughed because she suffered from melancholia.14 Since nothing was able to heal the princess’s sadness, the king had a large fountain built in front of his palace gate in the hope that the numerous passersby swarming around the fountain would alleviate his daughter’s condition. An old woman arrives at the fountain with a jar and a sponge. When her jar is filled with oil, a young man throws a stone at the jar and breaks it. After exchanging a series of vulgar insults, the enraged old lady raises her skirt and flaunts her genitals defiantly. At that point, Zoza bursts out laughing, but the old woman, deeply offended by the princess’s reaction, yells at her: “May you never pluck a blossom of a husband unless you take the prince of Round Field!”15 Zoza learns from the old woman that this prince died because of a fairy’s curse and is now buried outside the city walls in a tomb with an epitaph stating that if a woman fills a pitcher hanging nearby with her tears in the span of three days, he will come back to life and marry her. “A little demon enter[s] her [Zoza’s] lovely head and, after spinning countless doubts about the matter,” the princess falls prey to such a powerful melancholic furor that she leaves everything and sets out to find the deceased prince.16 The handsome but arrogant prince in Gonzenbach’s tale reacts with similar urgency. Melancholy manifests itself in two opposite forms: a lethargic inability to live and smile, and a frantic and exhausting drive to action. Lethargy and hyperactivity are two facets of the same “demon” that enters Gonzenbach’s prince and Basile’s princess. In Basile and Gonzenbach, the melancholy hero and heroine follow a similar three-step preparation before approaching the object of their obsession: Gonzenbach’s prince visits three hermits who instruct him how to behave when he reaches the maiden’s castle; Basile’s princess visits three fairies who give her three precious gifts: a walnut, a chestnut, and a hazelnut, whose magical contents will help Zoza conquer her handsome prince.

tears, water, and the fountain of life: a pause and a new beginning The princess Zoza arrives at the prince’s marble tomb “at the foot of a fountain that, imprisoned in porphyry, was crying crystal tears.” She crouches down and cries her eyes out as if, in Basile’s words, she were competing with the fountain itself. Exhausted, she falls asleep when her pitcher is

94 c h a p t e r t h r e e

almost full of her tears. An ugly slave, who knows about the spell, steals the princess’s pitcher and adds a few more tears, completing the task. The prince awakes from death and marries the slave. The prince’s rebirth in Basile corresponds to the ‘birth’ of the maiden with seven veils in Gonzenbach. In both tales, the miracle of life takes place next to a fountain. Moreover, in both tales this new birth is witnessed by a second fountain, as if to replace the one that appeared at the beginning of the tale. The first fountain (of oil), in the frame tale of Basile’s book and in Gonzenbach’s Sicilian fairy tale, was meant to entertain and amuse but instead led to a surprisingly sorrowful outcome. It was an unnatural fountain, because oil doesn’t flow from fountains. The second fountain (of water) reinstates the natural order of things. The Neapolitan princess Zoza sheds warm tears by the fountain where the handsome prince rests in his marble tomb. The melancholy prince in The Tale of Tales waters the magical box at the first fountain he sees outside the ominous forest, and a woman whose beauty can be seen through seven veils arises from the water. Let’s start over. The two tales seem to be telling us to forget the first fountain and focus on the new one. As Gaston Bachelard would say, a fountain of water is a source of forgetfulness and generation. The second fountain in both tales washes off the false start (the prince’s arrogance and the princess’s disrespect) and allows a new beginning. The prince and the princess, formerly selfish and conceited, have now become altruistic and caring. “All water is a kind of milk,” Bachelard reminds us, since mother’s milk is the first liquid a baby tastes and water is the liquid that sustains an adult.17 “Water!” a voice cries out when the Sicilian prince opens the little box he has stolen from the evil giantess. The princess Zoza cries her heart out as if she were in labor; she falls asleep exhausted like a new mother. Her pain is so intense and miraculous that it can almost fill a pitcher and can even defeat death. And what does the Sicilian prince do when he sprinkles water on the box but ‘baptize’ his beautiful girl, who, like an infant, is barely covered by seven thin veils.

the handsome prince comes back to life, and the beautiful maiden appears: a new tale begins We paused our tale—as if we were watching a film adaptation—at the point that shows the prince marveling at the sudden appearance of a seductive young “beauty,” as the original German version calls the maiden with the seven veils (Gonzenbach), while the Neapolitan princess Zoza has fallen

melancholy is the best storyteller

95

asleep after spilling all her tears (Basile). This pause in our hypothetical film turns out to be more than a brief intermission. When the story resumes, we realize that the new reel is now showing a different film. The break was, in fact, a transition from one tale to another. The first part of our story made up of two stories (Basile’s frame tale and Gonzenbach’s “The Maiden with Seven Veils”) ends with one character replacing another. One falls asleep and another takes her place. In Basile’s introductory tale, a black slave makes the prince believe that she has filled up the pitcher with her tears. When Zoza, the melancholy, exhausted princess who needed to rest a moment, realizes what has happened, it is too late. She moves into a house in front of the prince’s residence and beguiles the black slave, who is now pregnant, with the three magical gifts she had received from the three fairies: the walnut, which contains a tiny singing man; the chestnut, which contains a hen with twelve golden chicks; and finally the hazelnut, which contains a doll that spins gold. The ugly slave threatens to punch her own belly and kill her baby if she doesn’t get them. Before giving the magical doll to the prince, who has knocked on her door to ask for that amazing little object, Zoza begs “the little piece of clay to instill in the slave’s heart the desire to hear tales.”18 The whole of The Tale of Tales results from the princess’s secret spell. The slave can’t help asking for more tales. Her obsession with stories is similar to the restlessness that took hold of Zoza at the beginning of the book. She couldn’t help seeking the prince’s tomb and weeping beside it. In a like manner, Gonzenbach’s melancholy prince couldn’t help leaving his parents and searching for the maiden with the seven veils.

The tale I’ve been spinning since the beginning of this chapter by joining two threads (the Sicilian and the Neapolitan) paused for a moment when the characters had to shift roles (a princess can’t keep her eyes open; a new “beauty” appears) and can now resume. But what has happened in the meantime is that one of the two threads has been surreptitiously cut and replaced. We will now leave the introductory story in The Tale of Tales and jump to the very last story, “The Three Citrons,” one of the best known in Basile’s book.19 Let us visualize this modification by means of a chart: FIRST PART 1. Frame tale from Basile’s The Tale of Tales Princess is melancholy → Fountain of oil → Fountain of water 2. Gonzenbach’s “The Maiden with Seven Veils”

96 c h a p t e r t h r e e

Fountain of oil → Prince is melancholy → Fountain of water PAUSE 1. Zoza sleeps → Slave replaces her [Basile] 2. Maiden awakens → Slave replaces her [Gonzenbach] SECOND PART 1. Last tale from Basile’s The Tale of Tales, “The Three Citrons” Prince abandons his “beauty” and then recalls her → Slave dies 2. Gonzenbach’s “The Maiden with Seven Veils” Prince abandons his “beauty” and then recalls her → Slave dies As the chart shows, in the second part of our tale, one of the two narrative threads undergoes a significant change: a princess longing for love becomes a prince longing for love. When she wakes up from her sleep, the Neapolitan princess Zoza becomes a prince obsessed with the colors red and white. This new prince (the main character of “The Three Citrons”) and Zoza are certainly similar in character: withdrawn and haughty. The turning point of their existence is the encounter with the object of their affection, and both settings require the presence of a fountain and the use of water. Zoza must fill a pitcher with tears; the prince must pour water on his mysterious lady. This parallelism, however, presents several challenges, the main one being that Zoza’s life lies outside the fictional frame of Basile’s book (the forty-nine tales), whereas the prince in “The Three Citrons” is the main character of the forty-ninth and final tale. At the end of “The Three Citrons,” Zoza takes over and recounts the ‘true’ story of her sad life. Setting aside for the moment the question of fictional versus truthful, let us listen to the new prince’s story in “The Three Citrons”:

The King of High Tower had a son who was unsociable and didn’t want to marry. One day, while he was trying to cut a lump of ricotta cheese in half, he was distracted by some crows flying by and cut his finger. Two drops of blood fell on the cheese, and the resulting blend looked so beautiful that the prince took it into his head to find a woman as white and red as the ricotta with blood. The prince arrived at the island of the ogresses, where he had three encounters: (1) with an old woman, who warned him against her three sons who fed on human flesh; (2) with another old woman, who warned him against her three daughters who fed on human flesh; (3) with a third old woman, who sat on a wheel, holding a basket of candy on one arm. She threw pieces of candy at some donkeys, which then jumped onto the bank of a river and kicked some

melancholy is the best storyteller

swans. This last old woman listened to the prince’s story, consoled him, and gave him three citrons and a good knife. She also told the prince to go back to Italy and, when close to his realm, to stop at a fountain and cut one of the three citrons. A fairy would come out of it and say: “Give me some water!” She would disappear if he didn’t get the water right away. The prince left, and when he reached a fountain in a wood, he got off his horse and cut the first citron. He was so amazed at the fairy’s beauty that when she asked for water, he couldn’t move, and the fairy disappeared. He failed the second attempt as well, but when he cut the third citron he quickly offered the fairy some water. The prince suggested that the fairy climb up an oak tree close by while he hurried to his kingdom to fetch some royal clothes for her. While the prince was away, a black slave arrived with a pitcher to get water from the fountain. Seeing the fairy’s image reflected in the water, the slave believed she was looking at herself. She smashed the pitcher because she thought that she was too beautiful for that chore. The next day, she broke another container. Each time, her mistress got very angry and beat her up before sending her back to get water. On the third day the mistress gave the slave a goatskin and again ordered her to go back to the fountain. Again seeing the beautiful face reflected in the water, the slave grew angry with her mistress, took a pin from her hair, and started poking at the container. The fairy burst out laughing, and the slave realized that the fairy was responsible for all the beating she had got from her mistress. When she asked the fairy what she was doing on that tree, the fairy told her that she was waiting for her prince. The slave offered to comb the fairy’s hair to make her more beautiful for her prince, but after combing the fairy’s hair for a while, the slave pierced the fairy’s memory (the nape of her neck) with her pin. The fairy turned into a white dove and flew away. When the prince returned to the fountain and saw that his beauty was now an ugly, dark-skinned woman, the slave claimed that she was under a spell and sometimes her skin was white, other times black. The prince reluctantly accepted her justification, took her to his kingdom, and the celebrations for his marriage began. A dove appeared at the kitchen window and said: “Cook in the kitchen, what is the king doing with the Saracen?”20 The dove returned three times. When the cook told the slave about the bird, she ordered him to catch it and cook it. The cook followed her instructions, threw the dove into some hot water, then plucked it, and finally dumped feathers and water into a flowerpot in the garden. Before three days had passed, a citron tree was springing up. The prince saw the tree and ordered that no one touch it. Soon, three ripe citrons appeared on that tree. The prince picked them and in secret sliced the first one. As had happened the first time, a fairy showed up and asked for water, and again the prince was slow in getting her some water. As before, he succeeded only with the third fairy, who told him what the slave had done to her. Immensely happy, the prince took the fairy to the hall where his court admired

97

98 c h a p t e r t h r e e

her beauty. The prince asked his ugly wife what punishment she would inflict on someone who had harmed such a beauty. She said the person should be burned and his ashes thrown from the castle. That was what happened to her.

give me something to drink! “Water!” a voice from the box had asked Gonzenbach’s Sicilian prince. “Give me something to drink!” a beautiful girl calls to Basile’s prince, who, while resting beside a fountain after a long and difficult journey, cuts the first of three magical citrons. This new prince from Basile’s “Three Citrons” and the prince from Gonzenbach’s Sicilian tale are twins. They are similar in character, have come through similar adventures, and now face the same request: a beautiful girl needs some water, as if she herself had experienced a long and stressful journey and now needs a little water to regain some strength. These twin princes from Naples and Sicily began their journey because they were withdrawn and had no social skills.21 Like his Sicilian counterpart, the Neapolitan prince made a very sudden decision to leave home, and his parents failed to reason with him. Like the Sicilian, prince, the Neapolitan entered an extremely dangerous space (“the island of the ogresses”) and met with three helpful individuals (old women) who warned him against the risks of that sinister land. The third old woman gave the prince three citrons and told him to go back to his kingdom. Before entering his country, however, the prince had to find a fountain and cut one of the three citrons. A fairy would appear and ask him for water. If he weren’t quick enough to get her some water, the fairy would disappear. In a like manner, the Sicilian prince had to snatch one of three boxes from the evil giantess. The problem with the Neapolitan prince is that the first two times he cuts a citron he is so stunned by the appearance of the beautiful fairy that he is deaf to her need, and thus the first two fairies disappear. Making sure not to fail for the third and final time, the prince cuts the third citron and rushes to the fountain to please this fairy, who is also the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

the ending of the tale is about forgetting and r e m e m b e r i n g a n d f o r g e t t i n g i t s b e g i n n i n g 22 Each of the two princes has just met the love of his life, but each has to leave because his beloved is not properly dressed to enter a royal court.

melancholy is the best storyteller

99

So each tells his lady to wait for him at the fountains while he rides to his castle, finds some appropriate female clothes, and returns to pick her up. As soon as each prince takes off, the ugly slave arrives at the fountain, sticks a pin in the girl’s head, and pretends to be the prince’s “beauty.” The two noblemen’s long and painful quest for their beloved ends at the fountain of water, which literally materializes their desires. The two girls appear and do not object to the princes’ affection. This is the end of the story that had started under the aegis of melancholy. This sickness is a curse, certainly, but in fairy tales, where everything is unstable and mutable, melancholy is the sadness, even the despair, that keeps a story going. In fairy tales, one may move from one form of melancholia to another, from lethargy to hyperactivity. The asocial prince in Basile’s “Three Citrons” is suddenly filled with desire, and the princess who couldn’t laugh has a similar, sudden reaction. A persistent somberness had isolated her from others, or, if you will, an unspoken gloomy thought had made her despise everything. Melancholia can indeed take the form of sudden recollection (of a person one has always loved without even knowing it) and of sudden oblivion. The image of two or three drops of blood is very popular in fairy tales (in the Grimms’ “Snow White,” the queen pricks her finger with a pin and “three drops of blood fell on the snow”)23 and finds its source in Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, the famous Arthurian romance. Early in the morning, Perceval sees a falcon attacking a goose in flight: “The goose had been wounded in the neck and bled three drops of blood, which spread upon the white snow.”24 Perceval “became lost in contemplation” because the image “resembled the blush of his lady’s face.” The knight became so absorbed in this inner revelation that “when the squires came out of their tents and saw him, they thought he was sleeping.”

f i rs t, f o rg e t t i n g ; a p i n p i e rc e s m e m o ry The two beautiful girls are left alone by a fountain while their princes fetch appropriate garments for the girls’ new royal status. A new beginning is about to take place. The Neapolitan fairy and the Sicilian girl with the seven veils believe they must wait only a short time until their fiancés come back for them. This moment of suspension inaugurates the beginning of their new tale. This beginning, however, turns out to be an act of oblivion that deletes the story the two protagonists expected to embody. The maiden with seven veils warns her beau about the risk of oblivion. His mother is not supposed to kiss him, and the prince, mindful of this

100 c h a p t e r t h r e e

warning, asks her not to, but she does anyway while her son is asleep. Forgetfulness is a form of sleep of the mind. While a prince’s kiss is capable of waking up a princess from the most obdurate sleep (even one lasting a hundred years), a queen’s kiss wipes off all memories of other women from her son’s mind. With her kiss, the queen mother forces her son back to the time preceding the old woman’s original curse. In a sense, the mother cures her son of that hex and of the melancholia that prompted him to travel away from her kingdom; with a kiss, the queen takes him back to the time when he was just her son, the little boy who enjoyed watching people scurrying through the square. The Sicilian girl soon realizes that her Prince Charming has forgotten her. Oblivion has taken over their love story. This is what the Neapolitan fairy in Basile’s tale experiences as well, with a (literally) piercing pain. An ugly black slave shows up in both Sicilian and Neapolitan tales. The fountain that has given life to a beautiful girl deceives a poor slave into believing that she has become someone else. What the slave experiences is a form of self-oblivion, since all of a sudden she forgets her own face. The slave is led to believe that a new beginning is in store for her as well. She smashes the jug and tells her mistress that, given her amazing beauty, she will no longer carry water from the fountain. In both tales, the black slave is humiliated and derided. In Gonzenbach, her mistress laughs at her and sends her back to the fountain; in Basile, the fairy bursts into laughter when the slave is back at the fountain talking to herself about her newly discovered beauty. The humiliation of the black slave recalls the insult to the old woman at the beginning of the two stories. If we picture the two scenes, we see a similar setting: someone from a superior position (from a balcony or a tree, but also from a higher social status) looks down on an inferior woman bending over a fountain and mocks her.

t h e m e l a n c h o ly o f t h e w h i t e d ov e s The new beginning that occurs in each tale deletes the first beginning by reproducing it and then erasing it. The Sicilian prince has literally forgotten the starting point of his story thanks to his mother’s kiss. In both Sicilian and Neapolitan tales, the black slave stabs the beautiful girl in the head with a large pin; the girl turns into a white dove and flies away. Basile specifies that the slave “pierced her memory with the pin.”25 According to early modern medicine, the memory is located in the back of the head. Recall the beginning. A prince and a princess became deeply melancholy

melancholy is the best storyteller

101

after laughing at a poor old woman who then cursed them. Their minds were pierced by an unexpected and violent longing, as if for the first time they remembered something of such a vital importance that they had to abandon everything and embark on a long journey. Isn’t love itself perceived as the sudden remembrance of one’s deepest yearning? “Where have you been all my life?” lovers ask each other. Like the prince and the princess taunting a poor woman who is trying to collect the last drops of oil from a fountain, the girls brought to life by the water of a fountain fly away after the slave, like the old woman, has cursed their memory. Like the arrogant prince and the morose princess, the fairy and the maiden with seven veils attempt to regain the objects of their affection, who have abandoned them. A sudden urgency takes hold of them when they die as women and turn into swift birds that disappear instantaneously, terrified by human cruelty.

remembrance of things past: the red and the white Our understanding of all tales is, of course, a matter of perspective. We read Basile’s “The Three Citrons” and Gonzenbach’s “The Maiden with Seven Veils” as stories of obsessive melancholy. Thanks to a curse, they ‘remember’ an image of beauty that belongs to them; it is theirs, even though they have never seen it in reality. The princes experience a wound, a discrepancy between an irresistible longing and the object of that longing, an object they know and don’t know. It is important to bear in mind, though, that only the Sicilian prince, like Zoza in Basile’s frame tale, actually receives a malediction from an old woman. The Neapolitan prince was transfixed, rather, by seeing his blood in the ricotta when he cut his finger. But these tales should also be looked at from the standpoint of the women who capture the princes’ hearts. Aren’t these tales, perhaps, less about the melancholy desires of two young men than about two young women who expect to come to life? The latter two live imprisoned in cocoons that prevent them from becoming incarnate as human beings. One survives in a little box stuck under a giant’s elbow, the other inside a fruit. They need to be taken to a fountain; like exhausted and dehydrated prisoners, they finally see the light of day. The princes’ melancholia is a calling. The women, it should be recalled, have the power to defy death and mutate into animals. In Gonzenbach’s story, the maiden with seven veils warns the prince that if his mother kisses

102 c h a p t e r t h r e e

him, he will forget her for one year, one month, and one day. And this is exactly what happens. But what is more important is how it happens. The last day of the prince’s forgetfulness opens with the young man mocking a maidservant who is so old that she can barely speak. This new act of arrogance on his part leads to a new curse. When the prince laughs at her, the old woman is slicing an orange and becomes so enraged at his disrespect that she cuts a finger, and a drop of her blood falls onto the marble floor. Despite her usual inability to speak, rage makes her very articulate. Looking down at that composition of white and red, she exclaims: “May you never marry unless you find a bride who is as white as this floor and as red as this blood.” Perceval in Chrétien de Troyes’ text and the Neapolitan prince in Basile are transfixed by a surface of pure white (snow; ricotta) stained with the red of blood. In the Sicilian tale, it is paradoxically the old servant who recalls the ideal if unattainable image of a female beauty. But it is also this elderly servant who unwittingly makes the prince remember his beautiful fiancée, who waited for him for more than a year before being stabbed by the slave with a pin. Now a dove hiding somewhere, she knew that eventually he would remember her. It is her ideal, magical image—summoned by two drops of blood on the marble floor—that compels the prince to go back to her. Her image, which he has always carried, magically arises from another woman’s blood. The two tales from Basile and Gonzenbach that mirror each other thus speak of a mirrored longing, a dual desire to find and be found, to recognize and be recognized. The same magical image that causes melancholia also arouses the memory of the image that heals. The two women now living as birds of peace and reconciliation have a pin stuck in their memory, as Basile writes in “The Three Citrons.” That pin prevents their tale from finding a happy ending. It is a wedge driven between the beginning and the joyous finale of their love story.

to slice memory in half like a citron The reciprocal mirroring of the Neapolitan and the Sicilian tales functions also as exegesis. The events related in the more recent story (in Sicilian Fairytales) seem to comment upon its older version (in The Tale of Tales) by clarifying some of its blurry spots, yet without modifying the unfolding or the meaning of the story. We paused our reading of the tale when the young lady transforms into a

melancholy is the best storyteller

103

dove and flies away, a moment of disappearance. The fairy and the maiden are no more. They are gone; their princes have forgotten them. Mistaking an ugly slave for one’s “beauty” is a form of oblivion; the lover is no longer able to recall the original beauty of his beloved. The opposition between fairskinned (good) versus dark-skinned (evil), so repulsive to our modern sensibility, in the Neapolitan and Sicilian tales signifies the contrast between the visible and the invisible. When the prince shows the slave to his mother, the queen calls her “a scrawl of black ink on my royal paper.”26 The slave is an unreadable text. Is she supposed to embody the visible reminder of the prince’s idea of beauty? Or is she an inscrutable doodle? The long waiting in the sun has darkened my skin, the slave says to the mystified prince. In Basile’s version, the sun seems to have also affected her ability to speak Italian correctly. As to the narrative exegesis mentioned above, the Sicilian tale is right in having the prince forget the existence of his beloved, because in essence this is what happens in the Neapolitan tale. The Sicilian prince suddenly remembers his beloved thanks to a curse that conjures up his inner image of beauty. The old woman he has mocked curses the prince by reminding him that his memory has stored away something very important. In Basile’s older version, this is exactly what makes the prince melancholy at the beginning of the tale. In the red and white ricotta he reads the name of his beloved, whom he hasn’t yet met. The Sicilian narrator moves this ‘reading’ from the beginning of the tale to its middle, when the prince realizes that he has forgotten his “beauty” and rushes back to the fountain to pick her up. The problem is that the prince thinks he remembers, as when we dream that we are waking up, but he merely recalls that he has forgotten something essential, the beauty lying inside of him. The memory does not return fully, because when he goes back to the fountain and finds the dark-skinned slave, he believes she is the beauty he has forgotten, and thus marries her.

What the two princes do not know is that their lost loves, now living as white doves, have a pin stuck in their memory. The marvelous finale of both stories stages the extraction of the pin, the liberation of memory, and the subsequent full recollection of the past. The dove is a bird that delivers felicitous messages; it is the bird of enlightenment and reconciliation. In both fairy tales the white dove keeps returning to the kitchen of the prince’s palace and each time asks the cook about the prince and the black slave. The

104 c h a p t e r t h r e e

final breakthrough of the suppressed memory takes place in the two tales in a complementary way. In the older tale, the cook grabs the bird and dumps it in a cauldron of hot water before plucking its feathers. Then he throws the water and the feathers into a flowerpot. After three days, a little citron tree springs up. When he hears about this marvel, the prince begins to remember. He picks the three citrons hanging from the tree, takes a bowl of water and a knife to a private room, and does what he did the first time he met his beloved. The prince literally relives the memory that has revealed his “beauty.” He slices the first citron and fails to reach for the water; slices the second citron and fails again; and manages the third time to sprinkle water on the fairy. In order to remember correctly, the prince must make that memory into a present experience. The fairy and the memory become incarnate when the prince, as if in a trance, does what he has learned to do: to nourish that beauty which lives within him. Water awakes the memory of his beloved. In the Sicilian story, the prince literally pulls the pin out of the dove’s head so as to liberate the memory of their love. When the dove gets stuck on the glue that the cook has put on the windowsill, the prince picks up the bird and immediately notices the black head of the pin inserted in its brain. “Poor creature, who tortured you so?” are his first compassionate words.27

the beginning was cool, flowing oil; the ending is boiling oil The ending of the two tales is similar but not identical. The beautiful girl is back; the prince has finally seen that the slave was not his real “beauty”; and the slave defines her own execution. Basile and Gonzenbach describe a similar brutal punishment for the slave who used to be so cunning but is suddenly unable to recognize the girl that she herself had tried to murder. What is eerie about the beautiful fairy, as Basile calls her, is that she is a young woman who can also be a vegetable (that needs to be watered like a plant and can even pop out of citron) or an animal (the white dove). When someone does notice her, her beautiful figure works as an insight. Her being flourishes like a luscious fruit hanging from a tree. As we have noted, the nineteenth-century Sicilian tale recalls and clarifies the seventeenth-century Neapolitan one. In Basile, the prince shows his elegantly dressed beloved to his courtiers and his evil wife, and asks them what the right punishment would be for someone who had hurt her. The prince’s dark-skinned wife has the harshest penalty for the hypothetical abuser:

melancholy is the best storyteller

105

that person should be burned and the ashes scattered from the tower of the royal castle. In Gonzenbach, the black woman says that the culprit should be thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil. The two different executions are not mere variations. Basile has the slave literally disappear from the tale. Even her body must be canceled and forgotten as if this monster of cruelty had never existed, and with her erasure the Neapolitan tale ends. Gonzenbach, on the other hand, describes a ritual that echoes the beginning of the story: a fountain of oil built because the Virgin Mary has granted the queen her wish to have a child. Throwing the slave into a cauldron of scalding oil is an appropriate closure for this tale from Sicily. At the beginning, oil flowed from a fountain and gave life and nourishment. At the end, oil is poured into a container and scalds. The first oil comes freely from a fountain and lets the tale flow; the second is kept within a cauldron and closes the tale. This second oil kills and purifies. In aiming to improve the Neapolitan tale, which said nothing about the slave’s sudden forgetfulness, Gonzenbach explains that the slave couldn’t recognize the maiden with seven veils because she was “blinded”; she neither recalled her crime nor saw that her victim was right in front of her. Weren’t the Sicilian and the Neapolitan princes also blinded when they were incapable of seeing whom they were really marrying? The seesaw of remembering and forgetting informs this narrative. Oil is the precious liquid that flows slowly like the steady unfolding of a tale, and in its course transforms, burns, and annihilates. Oil and flames are linked to each other. Scalding oil is the liquid that turns what is inedible into a delicious meal and burns what is evil. Oil is thick like the humor of melancholia and transparent like the sudden remembrance of the beauty lying in a prince’s heart.

birth and stillbirth In both tales the miraculous fountain exists or works only because of a boy. For Zoza, looking at it fails to trigger any amused reaction. She laughs only when a youngster throws a stone at an old woman’s water pitcher. In “The Maiden with Seven Veils,” the fountain celebrates the prince’s fourteenth birthday, and the prince himself is the prankster who sets his own story in motion by throwing the infamous stone at the old woman. Basile and Gonzenbach both describe a fountain of youth, so to speak, a fountain that has the joyful carelessness of childhood. In Basile’s “The Three Citrons,” which, as we have seen, mirrors the sec-

106 c h a p t e r t h r e e

ond part of Gonzenbach’s tale, there are no children. There is no fountain and no naughty child. But “The Three Citrons” is not a regular tale. Being the forty-ninth story in The Tale of Tales, it introduces the closure of Zoza’s ordeal, which constitutes the fiftieth tale. In the first, frame tale we have learned how Zoza, after crying her heart out at the tomb of the prince of Round Field, falls asleep and how a black slave takes her place when the prince arises from death. With the help of a magical doll, Zoza causes a strong craving for stories in the evil, and now pregnant, slave. To please his wife, the resurrected prince gathers ten skilled women storytellers, who end their performance with “The Three Citrons.” At the end of this tale, the prince tells Zoza it’s her turn to tell a tale. Zoza accepts the challenge, but instead of telling a fictional story she recounts her own life. The most dramatic event in Zoza’s life is identical to the central moment in the life of the fairy who comes out of a citron. A similar black slave, who speaks a broken Italian, has wronged both Zoza and the fairy. There is a difference between Zoza and the fairy, though. As Zoza says at the beginning of her autobiographical tale, her story is about the “truth” (verità).28 Obviously, both stories are fictional. We also have to remind ourselves that The Tale of Tales is a baroque book. Reality echoes fiction and vice versa, like two mirrors placed one in front of the other. The fiftieth tale, the finale of Basile’s masterpiece, presents itself as countering the fiction (the fortynine tales) that constitute most of the book. The finale reveals what is true. No more fiction. The distraught Zoza recounts all the details of her ordeal. She tells about “her natural melancholy,” the old woman’s curse, and her weeping at the prince’s tomb so as to fill up the pitcher with her tears and bring the prince back to life.29 Out of fatigue, Zoza tells us, she fell asleep, and the black slave dishonestly claimed to be responsible for the prince’s resurrection. The punishment for the slave’s lie is far harsher in Zoza’s ‘true’ story than in the ‘fictional’ “Three Citrons.” The ‘fictional’ slave tries to murder the fairy by sticking her pin in her brain, whereas the ‘true’ slave has only stolen Zoza’s place at the prince’s court. Yet at the end of Zoza’s confession, the pregnant black slave is buried alive, her head sticking out of the ground, to make her death even more painful. The book that opens with the festive celebration of youth’s playfulness (a boy who makes Zoza laugh for the first time in her life) ends with the murder of an unborn child and his wretched mother. The horror evoked in the final page of The Tale of Tales shatters the fiction that has sustained the entire book. The slave’s face sticking out of the ground and breathing

melancholy is the best storyteller

107

her last points to what lies beneath, the unseen dying of her fetus. The final image in The Tale of Tales is a baroque marvel: the pathetic face and the gasping of an ugly, dark-skinned woman whose increasing despair shows the progress of her death and that of her baby. This horrendous ending is the truth of the book. The truth, Basile seems to be saying, is buried within the bowel of the unseen and unexpressed. What is visible is appearance and fiction, or fairy tales. Above, the princess Zoza is celebrating her happy ending with her Prince Charming; below, death is staging a different sort of show.

At the end of the last sentence of The Tale of Tales, Basile himself speaks to the reader: “and I left, one foot after the other, with a little spoonful of honey.”30 Basile seems to be alluding to “mellification,” which means “the act of making honey” but is used to indicate the phenomenon of literary imitation, as described by Seneca in Letters to Lucilius and later updated by Petrarch in his Familiares letters.31 “We must imitate bees,” Seneca writes in letter 84, because like bees we must wander until we find the flowers most suitable for our literary honey. Bees gather nectar from flowers and then deposit it in their beehives in an orderly fashion. As the bees turn all kinds of nectar into honey through a process of fermentation, so good writers appropriate and transform the sources of their writing. It is like digesting food, Seneca explains, which in our stomach turns into energy and blood (“in vires et in sanguinem”). If a borrowing from another author is still detectable, it should resemble a son of ours (“simile esse . . . filium”), not a static painting.32 The image of the black pregnant slave buried alive is of such an overwhelming horror that the concluding allusion to honey seems cynical and revolting. The process of transforming nectar into honey, of chewing on a tale and then digesting it, leads to an unexpected conclusion in Basile. Recall Revelation 10:79: “I went to the angel and asked him to give me the small scroll, and he said: ‘Take it and eat it; it will turn your stomach sour, but it will taste as sweet as honey.’”33 And who could deny that this is Basile’s gift to the reader? The truth and nothing but the truth is what princess Zoza wishes to reveal to the prince. The sweet, liberating disclosure of truth is what the end of the book is about. “Entertainment for the little ones,” as Basile promises in the title of his volume, mutates at the end, as in a sudden reversal of fate typical of a fairy tale, into something bitter and gruesome.

chapter four

What We Leave Behind: Fairies, Letters, Rose Petals, and Sprigs of Myrtle

Hurrying to get what they need or desire, heroes and heroines of ‘oral’ fairy tales don’t have time to ponder over details, and neither do we, the readers. We look forward to the ending, and in the linear trajectory from A to Z, from the problematic beginning (a curse, a melancholic’s desire, a challenge) to its resolution, even if strange and questionable as in Basile, we forget, like the heroes and heroines of our stories, about those things or individuals who were part of their heroic experiences. Although characters in oral fairy tales don’t universally suffer from lack of memory, they have little time for wistful recollections of the people young and old, the animals small and huge, and the mysterious places they have encountered in their journeys.1 Fairy-tale heroes and heroines are certainly not philosophers.2 Max Lüthi’s distinction between “blinded” motifs (things or characters that are “not made use of once they are introduced”) and “blunted” motifs (those that “do have a particular function but are not fully developed”) is useful in theory but moot in practice, for it is not always easy to determine what is used or not used in a tale.3 A fundamental difference between what we usually call an oral fairy tale and a literary one is its speed. By that I mean that what we perceive as oral is a narration that reads as if rushing toward its end, whereas a literary tale has the leisure to pay attention to details, reflect upon its past events, interpret them, and then reshape them according to their possible meanings. Writing about oral narrators, Walter Benjamin holds, “Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell.”4 By “death,” Benjamin doesn’t mean that oral narratives prefer depressing endings. Death is the

112 c h a p t e r f o u r

rationale behind the telling itself. The oral tale doesn’t intend to capture or freeze time; it speaks of things that, like snakes, shed their meaning and consistency while they are being told. They are empty shells. A literary tale, on the other hand, is able to look back on itself and identify what it has used and what it has not used; therefore it is also able to dispose of the dross of memory. Tales vary in speed. As far as the tales we have examined are concerned, Gonzenbach’s Sicilian Fairytales is in theory a faithful transcription of orally narrated stories, whereas Basile’s theatrical tales, reminiscent of the commedia dell’arte, read as if they were being improvised before an audience. Explicitly literary tales, such as Clemens Brentano’s Italian Fairytales (1846–47; his rewritings of some stories from The Tale of Tales), are written texts to be savored in silence and in private.5 In Brentano’s stories, characters have time to philosophize, as Lüthi wryly says, because time slows down for them; they reminisce about their misadventures and learn from their past. They have flashbacks; their deceased parents and friends resurface in their minds; and even those events that seemed like loose ends are eventually tied up nicely. Even if narrated in the historical present tense, the biographies of Brentano’s heroes and heroines are told from the vantage point of the future, from the time after the happy ending. In Benjamin’s words, a literary narrative, especially a novel, “presents someone else’s fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate.”6 This is the basic reassurance that fiction grants us: we are invited to enter a narrative space where everything has already happened (to someone else).7 We remember insofar as the hero of the story remembers. Heroes of oral literature are, rather, absentminded but are nonetheless “led safely through the dangerous, unfamiliar world.”8 Without remembering anything, this kind of hero just keeps going as the narrator’s hypothetical voice keeps narrating. In oral fairy tales, lack of memory is often the sudden result of an evil spell, as with the prince in Basile’s story who forgets his fiancée when his mother kisses him.9 Once the spell is broken, he instantaneously recalls her. Conversely, it is thanks to a chaste kiss that Sleeping Beauty (in the Grimms’ version) wakes up, and the fact that she and the entire royal court have been asleep for a century is wiped away in the blink of an eye. They resume their activities as though nothing had happened, and the princess hastens to marry the attractive intruder. The characters and events of an oral fairy tale never existed and never will. They are one-dimensional, opaque figures (a queen who can’t have children, an ugly old woman, etc.). The amazing paradox of this genre is that it

what we leave behind

113

is eerily close to our life experiences without claiming to echo our existence. The fairies springing from citrons or the girls popping out of boxes may be beautiful to look at, like plants, but are hard to distinguish from one another. Plants certainly react to our touch and to the environment; they live, grow, and die. Like plants, the young women in the Basile and Gonzenbach stories need water to live and to blossom. The Tale of Tales opens with the image of a fountain of oil. Sitting beside a second fountain, the sad princess sheds her tears to bring a prince back to life. On his way home, another prince stops at a fountain and gives water to a thirsty fairy. Beside a fountain, a newly alive young woman turns into a white dove and flies away. It is always the same in fairy tales: the same princes, the same princesses, the same fountains; the tale only cares about hastening to its end.

myrtle is the plant that grows in marshes a n d b y s e a s h o r e s a n d e n g e n d e r s l o v e 10 As the same princes, princesses, ogresses, and fairies hop from one story to another, so Cupid and Psyche, the heroes of one of the most ancient tales ever written in the Western world, leave their own tale and move to another; and in this transfer they do not deny their original biography but renew it, as if by overcoming new trials in new stories they are reaffirming their original marital vows. Cupid and Psyche act incognito in one of Basile’s most cherished tales, “The Myrtle.”11 It is the story of a peasant couple that “had not even the bud of a child.”12 From the outset, the narrator compares the birth of a child to a blossoming plant. Indeed, the tale revolves around the act of watering and caring for a mysterious plant that sparks feelings of an overwhelming love. The woman, after repeating her deep-seated longing for a child numerous times, finally gets pregnant and after nine months pulls a branch of myrtle out of the “Elysian Fields” of her womb. It should be noted that this woman had earlier exclaimed, “Oh God, if only I could bring something into this world, I wouldn’t care if it was a sprig of myrtle!” The ancients believed that myrtle was a plant dedicated to Venus, having “the power to generate love,” according to Cartari’s seminal The Images of the Ancients Gods (1556). Cartari adds that the myrtle grows in waterlogged areas or close to seashores, the way Venus arose from the sea. Not only does myrtle generate love; it also protects it. Ovid tells us in Fasti that the naked Venus, while still on the shore and drying her hair, saw some satyrs leering at her. The goddess “screened her body by myrtle interposed: that done, she was safe.”13

114 c h a p t e r f o u r

Myrtle, then, both it creates and safeguards love. In “The Enchanted Doe” (the ninth tale of the first day), Basile narrates the moving tale of a prince who, devastated by his beloved friend’s sudden decision to leave the court, asks the friend “to leave him some sign of his love.”14 Before taking off, his friend drives a dagger into the ground twice. The first time, a fountain appears; the second time, a myrtle. By the clarity of the water and the health of the myrtle, the friend explains, the prince will be able to tell whether he is doing well or not. In the prince’s yearning for his absent friend, he finds the myrtle growing beside the magical spring not only a remedy against his painful solitude but also a way of keeping his love alive, for if the myrtle wilts, the prince will do whatever is necessary to help his friend. Myrtle is thus the plant of love as both joy and melancholy, as both desire and the satisfaction of desire. “The Myrtle” opens on a sweet but allusively obscene note: a woman wishes to give birth to something so badly that she can barely contain her joy when a sprig of myrtle finally emerges from her vagina. But what redeems this strange appearance is the sincere and humble affection that it triggers in the mother, who plants this single sprig in a decorated pot on the windowsill and tends it with great love. Although Basile describes the plant’s birth in crude terms (the woman “cast it out” of her genitals as if she were giving birth to an actual child), the myrtle is not a child. A baby would be the result of an act of marital love, but Basile mentions no sexual intercourse following the woman’s prayer. Basile is certainly no prude, for in other tales a king’s or queen’s entreaty precedes a successful copulation. A baby would result from an act of procreation; a myrtle engenders love, as the ancients believed. As soon as a young prince passes by the peasants’ house and sees the plant in its pot, “he became infatuated beyond all measure” with the lovely myrtle, writes Basile. This is my summary of the rest of the tale:

The prince asked the peasant woman to sell him the beautiful plant. At first she refused the prince’s numerous offers but finally gave in and let him have her beloved myrtle. Overjoyed, the prince took the pot to his bedroom and watered the plant regularly. One night, after putting out the light, the prince heard someone walking toward his bed. At first he was suspicious, but when he touched the mysterious creature’s soft skin and caressed her body, he came to the conclusion that she had to be a fairy, and made love to her. Before dawn, she left the prince’s bed. For seven consecutive nights the secretive creature slept with the prince, whose curiosity had become unbearable. The prince tied one of her braids to his arm so that she couldn’t get away. Then he called a

what we leave behind

115

servant and asked him to light the candles. The prince marveled at the fairy’s immense beauty and cried out: “And now go jump into an oven, goddess of Cyprus!” The prince put his arm around her like a vine and held her tight. While he kept praising her beauty, the fairy woke up, blushed, and told the prince she was honored to serve such a noble and virtuous man. The prince promised her that she would become his wife. The prince was called to hunt a wild boar that was wreaking havoc on his land. He told his fairy that he would be away for two or three days and that in the meantime she should go back to her pot. The fairy asked him to tie a little bell with a silk thread to the top of the myrtle, so that when he returned, he could pull the thread and she would come out of the plant and say: “Here I am.” The prince ordered a servant to make the bed every night just as if he were sleeping in it, and to water and care for the plant on his behalf. He knew the exact number of its leaves, and if just one were missing when he came back, he would deny his servant his daily ration of bread. Seven harlots who lived with the prince realized that he had grown cold in love and suspected that he had a new lover. They paid a mason to dig a tunnel that would take them to the prince’s room. There they only found the myrtle in its pot. Enraged, each of them plucked a leaf from the plant. The youngest took the whole top. As soon as she touched it, the bell rang and the fairy emerged. When the seven wicked women saw the beautiful fairy, they tore her apart. All the youngest took was one of the fairy’s golden locks. When the servant discovered the dreadful occurrence, he gathered what was left of the fairy’s body, scraped her blood off the floor, and put everything in the pot. He watered it and ran away. When the prince returned and saw the branchless pot, he burst into tears and grew sick mourning the fairy’s disappearance. The fairy, who in the meantime had begun to grow again, took pity on him and came out of the pot: “Get up, get up, my prince! Stop crying. Here I am!” She told him what the harlots had done to her. The prince married the fairy and invited the seven women to the wedding. While sitting at the table, the prince asked his guests what sort of punishment, in their view, someone who harmed his wife would deserve. The evil women said that such a person deserved to be buried alive in a sewer. This was their punishment. The prince had his faithful servant marry the youngest of the seven women and gave her a good dowry.

the uncertainties that come with fairies Discussing previous stories from The Tale of Tales, we tried to understand the nature of ogresses, referring also to the Grimms’ readings of Basile’s tales. Let us now take a brief look at the Neapolitan fairies, since a fairy plays a

116 c h a p t e r f o u r

central role in “The Myrtle.” In The Tale of Tales, these magical creatures can be fickle and unreliable. They counsel and support human beings if they feel like it, or laugh at them even if the humans are in a serious predicament. They are superior creatures, like noble ladies strolling through the streets of Naples, observing the troubles of lower-class people, deriding them, and at times deigning to help them. The princess Zoza, we recall, tries to fill up a jar with her tears to resuscitate a prince who died because of a fairy’s curse.15 The Neapolitan fairies are particularly naughty and unpredictable when they show up in small groups. In “The Three Fairies,”, the tenth story of the third day, a humble girl finds three beautiful fairies at the bottom of a ravine inhabited by a sinister ogre.16 These fairies assist and reward this kind girl and punish her arrogant stepsister by having a donkey’s testicle grow on her forehead.17 In “The Old Woman Who Was Skinned,” the tenth tale of the first day, an old woman is thrown out of a king’s window, and her hair gets entangled in the branch of a fig tree.18 Before dawn, a group of morose fairies, who have never laughed, pass by and see her hanging from the tree and find this pathetic scene so hilarious that they roar with laughter. They then grant this poor woman three precious gifts, only because she has involuntarily helped them shed their sour disposition. Do Neapolitan fairies age? A mean fairy kills a handsome prince, and then three good fairies help princess Zoza to bring him back to life through three magical gifts. The first of these good fairies takes pity on Zoza because she is young and, as the fairy points out, only young people can burn with a sudden and overwhelming passion for someone that they don’t even know.19 This remark seems to come from someone who has the wisdom that only age can impart. In the tale “Peruonto,” a lazy but considerate young man sees three boys “sleeping like butchered animals under the blazing heat of the sun,” feels sorry for them, and builds a bower over their heads with some branches.20 When they wake up, these young men, who are a fairy’s sons, grant him a special gift: he may have whatever he desires. Basile’s fairies, like his ogresses, have diverse emotions and experiences; they may be middle-aged and cynical, like the ones who made a donkey’s genital pop up on a girl’s face; they may be mothers of teenagers; they may have the moral reservation that a human being develops toward the end of her life; or they may be innocent and inexperienced like the fairy residing in a myrtle. It is their humanity that makes them unique, not their morethan-human condition. They are unique insofar as they appear human and, like humans, betray not only moral shortcomings but also ignorance with respect to the snares of life.

what we leave behind

117

the fairy from the myrtle is not cupid; the prince is not psyche The young fairy coming out of the myrtle is the humblest of all the fairies in The Tale of Tales, perhaps the youngest and the most inexperienced of all the Neapolitan fairies. Unmatchable beauty and profound humility are the traits that distinguish her. This fairy is not the myrtle; that is, the myrtle is not another form of the fairy’s identity. This modest and subservient young woman is hesitant to come out of the myrtle as if she were too shy to show herself in public, and thus she remains crouched in its branches. In a Sicilian retelling of Basile’s story recorded by Pitrè called “Rosemary” (1875), the distinction between the plant and the girl couldn’t be sharper. A rosemary plant doesn’t have the symbolic meanings of a myrtle bush. Moreover, the king buys the plant from her poor mother simply because he feels like it and not because he has an erotic attraction toward the plant. It is the maiden who suddenly steps down from the plant that he falls in love with.

Like Venus in Ovid’s Fasti, Basile’s fairy seems to hide within the myrtle and only comes out when no one (no prince and no satyr) can see her. We know that, in ancient Rome, myrtle was the magic plant of love. In Basile’s story, the prince falls in love with the myrtle as soon as he sees it, but it would be more accurate to say that the prince feels love as soon as he sees the myrtle. The myrtle enchants him, and this enchanting plant can only give life to an enchanting, magical being: a fairy. Night is the time when our desires become images and fantasies, when fairy tales are told, and at night the fairy, the embodiment of the prince’s desire, steps down from the pot and shares the prince’s bed. Remember that ‘her mother,’ the poor peasant, had undergone a similar experience: she had such a profound longing for a child that she became pregnant with her own desire. Being the answer both to the longing of both the lowest and the highest social classes (both peasant and prince need love), the fairy exists to serve. This is what she explicitly says to the nobleman who showers her with compliments when he sees her for the first time beside him in his bed: “I am your servant, and to serve that face of a king I would go so far as to empty your chamber pot.”21 She is even willing to clean up the prince’s feces. When the prince wishes to see her, all he needs do is ring a bell as if summoning a maidservant, and she will exclaim: “Here I am!” This beautiful and submissive fairy takes us back, once again, to Psyche

118 c h a p t e r f o u r

and Cupid. The setting of the Neapolitan lovers’ first encounter is clearly reminiscent of Cupid and Psyche’s night of lovemaking. Also, the sudden dénouement (the prince lights candles and marvels at his bedmate’s beauty) mirrors Cupid and Psyche’s face-to-face dramatic encounter. Apart from the unmistakable narrative echoes, Psyche and this fairy share a similar humility and acceptance of their destiny. Basile’s fairies are usually superior and powerful creatures, but not this young fairy, who sees herself as the prince’s humblest servant, the one willing to dispose of her master’s waste. Often overlooked in Psyche’s mythic tale is the moment when, “accompanied by the entire populace,” Psyche somberly walks toward the rock of her funereal wedding and, seeing her dejected parents hesitant to join the group, asks them: “Why are you marring with useless tears those features that I revere? Why do you wound my eyes by wounding yours?”22 In a series of moving rhetorical questions to her parents, Psyche insists that she must fulfill her tragic fate because a goddess, Venus, has decreed that she be punished. She shows great love for her parents and respect for the jealous goddess. The prince himself makes the comparison between the fairy and Venus. “And now go jump into an oven, goddess of Cyprus!” are his first words when he has the candles lit and admires the fairy’s face. It is impossible not to perceive echoes of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses in “The Myrtle.” But it is also impossible not to notice that in “The Myrtle” the roles are at once reversed and not reversed. Who is the lover and who is the beloved? Who is Psyche and who is Cupid in this tale? It depends on how we look at it. The prince could be Cupid because he is the one who falls in love and takes the object of his affection to his royal house. The prince could be also Psyche because he is the one who is suddenly visited at night by a mysterious creature who makes love to him. Like Psyche, the prince lights a candle to see who has been sleeping with him for seven days. The same could be said for the fairy. Like Cupid, she is the more-than-human character in the story. She makes love to the prince in the dark and disappears before dawn. But she is also Psyche insofar as she is the one who submits herself to her male lover. This confusion of gender and sexual roles makes “The Myrtle” one of the most sensual of Basile’s stories. In The Tale of Tales, as Italo Calvino puts it, “there are several stories about an enchanted or invisible spouse, but the night of love narrated in ‘The Myrtle’ is the most lavish one.”23 In her response to the prince’s enthusiastic expression of love, the fairy does not reciprocate the prince’s feelings. The prince loves; the fairy serves the prince who loves her. The fairy, who belongs to a race superior to humans, is nonetheless grateful to him because, in her words, “from a myrtle branch planted in a clay pot I have been transformed into a laurel bough

what we leave behind

119

hung on the tavern of a heart of flesh and blood, a heart that contains such greatness and such virtue.”24 Roman generals and poets wore crowns of laurel as a sign of triumph. The fairy’s words can’t be taken literally. She is neither a myrtle nor transformed into a laurel. When the evil women attack the plant in the pot, the fairy is unharmed. Later, when the bell rings because the youngest woman touches the thread on the myrtle, the fairy comes out of the plant without a scratch. What the prostitutes tear apart is a flesh-and-blood girl. The myrtle is the physical symbol of the loving fairy. It stands for the fairy. Later, when telling the prince she is now a “laurel bough” hanging on the “tavern” of the prince’s “heart,” she is alluding to the tradition of hanging branches of vine or olive outside a store. The branches stood for the wine or olive oil sold there. The fairy’s existence, brought about by the prince’s noble heart, is now a symbol of the noble heart that has given life to her. This intricate set of symbols is summarized in the following chart: 1. Myrtle = Fairy

2. Fairy = Laurel

3. Laurel = Prince’s heart

Everything begins with the prince’s heart’s strange feelings for a plant. The prince loves a myrtle that symbolizes the love emanating from a magical being who then becomes the symbol of that prince’s virtuous love: Prince’s heart → myrtle → fairy → laurel → prince’s heart

how myths work if read backward To find out who has been making love to him for an entire week, the prince ties one of the mysterious girl’s braids to his arm so that she won’t be able to escape. Then, after lighting candles and admiring her beauty, the prince embraces her “like a vine” and holds her neck so tightly that he wakes her up. The fairy’s response is anticlimactic, to say the least. Instead of showing despair or anger, she declares herself the prince’s submissive servant. We would expect a resentful response from the fairy because the setting closely recalls the famous scene from the Cupid and Psyche myth. The fairy shares with the young god of love a nonhuman nature and indescribable beauty, and like Cupid she arrives in the dark. The nightly love encounters between the prince and the fairy, however, clearly allude to another mythic tale, that of Daphne, who begs her father, the river-god Peneus, to save

120 c h a p t e r f o u r

her from Apollo and turns into a laurel while fleeing the love-struck god. Daphne rejects Apollo’s advances because, like Diana, she wishes to preserve her virginity. When she is metamorphosed into a laurel tree, Ovid writes, “even now in this new form Apollo loved her; and placing his hand upon the trunk, he felt the heart still fluttering beneath the bark. He embraced the branches as if human limbs, and pressed his lips upon the wood.”25 When Basile likens the prince’s embrace to a vine, he evokes the image of Apollo embracing the trunk in which Daphne’s body is now enclosed. When Basile’s fairy wakes up, she compares herself to a laurel branch outside the ‘door’ of the prince’s heart. “The Myrtle” thus results from the overlapping of two myths, which present the love experience in two opposite ways: Requited love (Cupid and Psyche) versus unrequited love (Apollo and Daphne) Flight of divine from beloved (Cupid and Psyche) versus flight of beloved from divine lover (Daphne and Apollo) The strange opening of this story—a handsome prince suddenly taken by an overwhelming passion for a plant—becomes more acceptable if read as a quotation from the Metamorphoses, where Ovid writes that Daphne’s “gleaming beauty alone remained” when she became a laurel tree, and that Apollo could even hear her anxious heartbeat within the trunk.26 In other words, Basile’s “The Myrtle” starts where the Apollo and Daphne’s myth ends, and then goes backward to the beginning of the myth, where Daphne was still the beautiful young daughter of a river-god. It is like watching a movie in reverse. We can synthesize the backward unfolding of the tale as follows: Apollo loves the laurel → laurel turns into Daphne A reversal mode, too, characterizes Basile’s “The Myrtle,” read in the light of the Cupid and Psyche myth: Psyche visits Cupid in the dark → Cupid reveals Psyche’s identity Following the same reversed structure, instead of anger (Cupid) or rejection (Daphne), embrace and submission result from the disclosure of the night visitor’s identity: 1. Laurel turns into Daphne, who responds to Apollo’s love 2. Cupid lights a candle, and Psyche responds to his love

what we leave behind

121

In sum, “The Myrtle” intertwines the negatives of two well-known myths: the end becomes the beginning; the lover becomes the beloved; separation turns into union. Read in this manner, the question whether the myrtle is the fairy or merely contains the fairy is also resolved as a negation: The fairy is and is not the myrtle; she is and is not within the myrtle.

a body to possess; a body to destroy; a body to save The intermittent identification fairy = myrtle becomes apparent in the second part of the tale. After the ‘happy ending’ (the prince and the fairy finally meet and love each other), the prince leaves to chase a wild boar plaguing his land, and seven harlots replace him in his relationship with the fairy. If the first part was about the love interaction between male and female, the second is about two opposite views of the female identity. The contrast between good (fairy) and evil (harlots) also reflects a conflicting relationship between body and soul, physical appearance and spiritual substance. The seven women are not only malicious and jealous; they also sell their bodies. Folk and fairy tales abound with revengeful women who get back at their rivals by sheer cruelty and then are punished for their evil acts. The seven women in “The Myrtle” reach the prince’s room through a hole in the ground. They don’t own their bodies. In this respect they are similar to the fairy who materializes to serve the prince. Like the fairy, the seven harlots exist to please their master. What is interesting about these prostitutes is their relationship to the myrtle. Unable to find secret rival hidden in the prince’s bedroom, the seven women “saw the beautiful myrtle [and] each of them took a branch for herself.”27 The plant’s beauty triggers their violent reaction. They can’t stand what the myrtle symbolizes, which is love. So they attack the plant itself. At this point in the story, although the myrtle is mutilated, the fairy who appears from the sad plant is still “resplendent.” It is noteworthy that only the youngest harlot, who plucked the tip of the myrtle along with the bell, avoids execution at the end of the tale and is married to the prince’s honest servant. Yet she is the one who causes the fairy’s murder. Her ambiguous role is linked to the ambiguous rapport between the myrtle and the fairy’s physicality. Thanks to the young prostitute’s daring action, the symbolic representation of beauty is shattered, and beauty itself is called forth. (When the bell rings, the fairy cries out: “Here I am!”)

122 c h a p t e r f o u r

Myrtle symbolic representation

→

Fairy real presence

Being a symbolic image, the myrtle may be destroyed without the fairy’s suffering any harm. Things change, however, after the tearing apart of the fairy’s body. The kind lady and the myrtle endure the same violence and the same devastation. Myrtle → fairy → “bits of flesh and bones” The prince’s good servant collects the fairy’s torn flesh and blood, and dumps them into the pot. Discovering “the branchless pot,” the prince falls into despair. When the fairy is slaughtered, the myrtle is not simply vandalized; it disappears totally from the pot. The fairy’s body turns into compost, which slowly fertilizes the soil. Myrtle → fairy → “bits of flesh and bones” → fairy “When the fairy, who had begun to sprout anew from the remains placed in the pot, saw how her poor lover was tearing out his hair and throwing himself around, [she sprang] out of the pot as the light of a candle comes out of a blind lantern.”28 Basile makes no reference to the myrtle. The plant is gone once and for all. What sprouts is the fairy herself. No longer a visible symbol, the myrtle has been reduced to a linguistic metaphor. Like a myrtle, the fairy grows out of her own remnants as the phoenix arises from her ashes, and then steps out of the pot to console her distraught prince. In this process of death and resurrection, the fairy has undergone a metamorphosis. Having earlier existed because of the myrtle, within the myrtle, or behind the myrtle, she now lives as a luminous presence. Her beauty, writes Basile, now shines like “the light of a candle.” You will remember that the prince had lit candles to unveil his mysterious lover’s identity, but now that invisible lover has become light itself.

the fairy who is no more At the end of the tale, the prince metes out the deserved punishments and the deserved rewards. The six evil harlots return to the bowels of the earth through which they had surreptitiously made their way to the prince’s private room. They belong in the sewers that hide and carry away not what

what we leave behind

123

is fertile (like the fairy’s flesh and bones), but what is contaminated and devoid of meaning. These women are “the daughters of hell,” as we read in the last sentence of “The Myrtle.”29 The remorseful harlot and the faithful servant, now described as “the myrtle’s mother and father,” receive enough to live comfortably, and the prince lives “happily with the fairy.” Basile seems to posit a distinction between the myrtle, on the one hand, and the fairy, on the other, as if they were separate beings. When describing how the poor peasant gives birth to the myrtle, Basile made no mention of her having sexual intercourse with her husband. The myrtle seems to be merely the offspring of the woman’s pious prayer. The happy ending of a fairy tale, however, demands that the victimized heroine finally marry her noble and handsome lover, and that her poor but honest parents be rewarded. What that dignified, albeit poor couple generate is a plant. The fairy is something else; she is not their daughter. Basile emphasizes the separation between the past of the myrtle and the present of the married fairy. In this distinction we perceive also a separation between a past time of magical occurrences (a plant that generates love; a woman who gives birth to a plant; a girl who lives in a plant) and the present time of true happiness. The magical lady of the myrtle is no more. She is happily married and, who knows, soon will have real babies.

chapter five

The Fairy, the Myrtle, and the Myrtle-Maiden: From Basile to the Grimms and Brentano

The previous chapter ended with speculation about the married fairy’s possible motherhood. Will she become a caring mother, as she was a compassionate night lover? Although Basile’s fairies are perfectly capable of having children, the aura of mystery and magic surrounding the pure fairy from the myrtle sheds no light on this issue. Two centuries later, Clemens Brentano (1778–1842) took care of clarifying this and several other questionable points in Basile’s collection of magic tales. In his Italian Fairytales (Italienische Märchen), a bold and extensive rewritings of eleven of Basile’s stories, the influential German writer, born into a Catholic family, straightened out what seemed illogical, unclear, but also reprehensible in the Neapolitan tale according to moral guidelines and intellectual expectations that have survived, at least in part, to our own age.1 Brentano didn’t limit himself to moralizing the Italian tales; he transformed them into powerful allegories of religious experiences. Despite their ideological differences, the brothers Grimm and Brentano essentially agreed that many of Basile’s tales are unsuitable for modern readers.

german “decency” versus basile’s indecency: was basile the first collector of folk tales or the first author of literary fairy tales? In his preface to Der Pentamerone, Felix Liebrecht’s 1846 translation of The Tale of Tales, Jacob Grimm unabashedly confesses to having suggested to Liebrecht that he “suppress” all “objectionable” elements in Basile’s book.2

the fairy, the myrtle, and the myrtle-maiden

125

According to Grimm, even though Basile’s vulgar words, expressions, and images are still alive in the Italian language, they sound today even more barbaric and base, because contemporary German culture has acquired a keener sense of “decency.”3 Grimm is surprised that the Catholic Basile, who like all seventeenth-century Italian writers composed several religious poems, avoids explicit Christian references (the Virgin Mary, for instance, or angels) in his collection of fairy tales.4 It is worth keeping in mind, however, that many of the Grimms’ magic tales have an animistic, rather than Christian, background.5 That is, their stories speak about a reality (trees, animals, people, etc.) that is infused with mysterious, magical qualities, which collaborate to maintain a just and moral universe. Jacob Grimm acknowledges that Basile’s questionable, obscene, but “effervescent” language is also deeply evocative. In Grimm’s view, when reading Basile one can almost hear the sound of the wind rushing through a forest or the water flowing down a river.6 Unlike many modern readers, including Italo Calvino, Grimm reads a basic aspect of Basile’s style (his baroque excesses) in a positive light. He contends that Basile’s writing, despite its vulgar metaphors, undoubtedly echoes ancient myths and the remote innocence of that Volkspoesie which gave birth to all fairy tales.7 Christoph Christian Wieland, who first introduced Basile to Germany through a free poetic adaptation of his tale “Pervonto” in 1778–79, shares Grimm’s view. Calling The Tale of Tales “a collection of Neapolitan folk and nursemaids’ tales,” Wieland mimics an oral tone at the beginning of his own poem: “Once upon a time, Salerno comes to mind, / a king, by the name—ah! names, / names, I forget them so easily!”8 Apart from keeping a veneer of oral retelling, Wieland has to deal with a very sexy tale about a good-for-nothing young man who uses magic to make a sad princess pregnant. Wieland’s moralizing adaptation shifts the focus onto the psychological development of the two main characters, a simpleton and a prideful princess.9

How can one translate the pristine freshness and naïveté of tales that are full of fairies and fountains into nineteenth-century German “decency” without stifling their spontaneous poetry? Both Brentano’s Italian Fairytales and the Grimms’ adaptations of The Tale of Tales try to update Basile without erasing the magic of his storytelling. Some of the Grimms’ summaries are masterpieces of careful and seemingly unobtrusive editing. Brentano’s manipulations, on the contrary, are much more daring and imaginative, but sometimes unintentionally amusing and even grotesque. A few of his

126 c h a p t e r f i v e

Italian Fairytales have satirical touches, primarily when they criticize German social inequality or, more generally, human pride, two major themes of Brentano’s oeuvre. While regarding Basile as an essential point of reference, the Brothers Grimm and Brentano offer a radically different view of what Basile meant to accomplish with his book. For the Grimms, The Tale of Tales is the first, most vivid, transcription of European folk tales, whereas Brentano stresses its literary character. According to Brentano, the fact that Basile used the Neapolitan dialect shouldn’t blind us to the highly sophisticated nature of his storytelling. Both interpretations of The Tale of Tales are justified. We have already stressed that this masterpiece of baroque literature is a literary text that has the effect of a human voice speaking to a hypothetical audience. It is thus possible, in Brentano’s view, to transplant the pristine message of the Neapolitan oral narratives into a new literary form without betraying its original nature. For Brentano, this transference is not only possible but also advisable, since Basile himself, the father of the European fairy-tale tradition, was doing the same thing. In a famous letter to Achim von Arnim, Brentano contends that although he admires the Grimms’ collection of fairy tales because it shows their unflinching dedication to folk literature, their style is “slovenly,” “tainted,” and that even their shortest tales are “very boring,” a description that could be applied to some of Brentano’s own tales. He would have done a better job, Brentano claims, with at least twenty of the Grimms’ best stories. First of all, he would have used a livelier style. According to Brentano, the Grimms’ collection reads like a mishmash of stories gathered from “a deceased scholar’s bequest.” The metaphor is telling. In Brentano’s view, the Grimms have published a virtually dead collection. Brentano holds that when they transferred the tales from their oral source to the written page, the Grimms stifled them. For Brentano, the written and the oral speak two different idioms. He is convinced that the Grimms have performed a word-for-word translation from one language (the oral) to another (the written), without considering that literal translations always lead to disastrous or boring results. Despite their fundamental differences, Brentano and the Grimms recognize The Tale of Tales as the first book of an important tradition. Being the first, however, doesn’t imply perfection. Also crucial is the distance between the Italian and the German culture and language. Basile’s work needs to be ‘improved’ and adjusted to a new culture. So the Grimms and Brentano feel compelled to show that the Italian author would essentially agree with their

the fairy, the myrtle, and the myrtle-maiden

127

interpretation of his tales and thus would implicitly endorse their editing and rewriting. Whereas the Grimms, in the second edition of their collection, relegate their summaries of all Basile’s tales to the appendix, Brentano writes an entire book explicitly inspired by Basile’s text.

the problem of basile’s four p o e m s i n t h e ta l e o f ta l e s In their adaptations of Basile’s fifty tales the Grimms completely ignore the four long poems (eclogues) that separate one “day” (a set of ten stories) from another in The Tale of Tales. They don’t think they need to translate or summarize those complex and highly literary poems, which, on the contrary, are essential to Brentano’s interpretation of The Tale of Tales. According to Jacob Grimm’s preface to Liebrecht’s translation, poetry is present in Basile’s book only through simple “rhymes,” such as are also found in the Grimms’ collection.10 These brief, modest verses, writes Jacob Grimm, are remnants of ancient oral myths and show the simplicity of Italian Volkspoesie.11 Brentano’s Italian Fairytales, on the other hand, abound with long and sophisticated poems, which greatly differ from the simple “rhymes” of the Grimms’ tales and as well as from Basile’s four eclogues. The problem is that neither Brentano nor the Grimms are comfortable with Basile’s verses. Brentano simply mentions their existence to support his literary style but glosses over their content, whereas the Grimms ignore them altogether. Basile’s four poems are independent compositions, placed at the end of each “day” of The Tale of Tales. They are not the inspired words uttered by a character in a tale, as we find in Brentano and, though very rarely, in the Grimms. Furthermore, Basile’s eclogues are extremely unpoetic if read from the perspective of the German Romantic authors. In the Italian tradition of pastoral poetry, an eclogue is a verse dialogue between two or more shepherds sharing the sorrows of their love life and discussing the beauty of nature, which protects them from the corruption of the city. As Nancy Canepa points out, these dialogical poems could also be seen as interludes inserted between the five acts of a Renaissance play.12 Read in this manner, the poems would emphasize the theatrical character of The Tale of Tales. Instead of the magic of nature, Basile’s poems celebrate the unmagical depravity of contemporary society. His eclogues are products of a baroque sensibility, lingering on the decadence and instability of the world. The essential message of these four long satirical poems is that what seems remarkable, even miraculous in this life is nothing but a fleeting illusion. These poems

128 c h a p t e r f i v e

couldn’t be more different from Brentano’s Romantic verses. Take, for instance, the first eclogue, “The Crucible.” Fabiello sees his friend Iacovuccio hurrying home with a crucible and asks him what he is going to do with it. “Whatever by its outer aspect and on the face of things seems to be of value,” Iacovuccio explains, “is all an illusion of the eye, a way to blind people, mere appearance.”13 All human identities, if put to the test of that crucible, reveal their nothingness. The figure of the poet is a good example. He “sends out floods of octaves and mouthfuls of sonnets, and demolishes paper and ink,” but if we throw him and his verses into the crucible, “everything goes up in smoke.”14 The four eclogues demystify the magic present in Basile’s tales. If everything is mere “smoke,” Basile’s magic tales too are frail and illusory attempts to rescue reality from its grim nothingness. An unbridgeable gap separates Basile’s poetics (and his verses) from Brentano’s and the Grimms’.

myrtle or blueberry bush Let us return to Basile’s tale “The Myrtle.” Brentano composed a charming, yet grotesque, rewriting of this Neapolitan tale, and the Brothers Grimm summarized it with rare precision. Although the Grimms and Brentano approach the same tale in two very different ways (succinct adaptation for the Grimms; expanded rewriting for Brentano), their conflicting ideologies are unquestionably visible. Let us take a look at the Grimms’ summary (in my translation from the German):

The Blueberry Bush15 A married couple live without children. The wife prays: “Oh God, if I could only give life to something in this world, even just a branch of a blueberry bush!” After nine months she gives birth to a branch of a blueberry bush, plants it with great care in a nicely decorated pot and puts it on the windowsill. On his way to the hunt, the king’s son notices it and wishes to purchase it. She refuses for a while but finally consents. She asks him to treat the bush with care. He brings it to his chamber and looks after it and waters it himself. One night, when all the lights are out and all have just fallen asleep, a young girl gets into his bed, and leaves early in the morning. She returns seven nights; the eighth night he ties one of her braids to his arm so that she can’t get away, asks for light, and sees the greatest beauty in the world. He promises her that she will become his wife. Soon afterward he must go to hunt a wild boar that is ravaging that land. He tells her that he must leave her for three days. She asks him to tie a silk thread

the fairy, the myrtle, and the myrtle-maiden

129

with a little bell to the top of the bush. When he pulls and rings it, she will come. The king’s son calls his servant: “Open up your ears: while I am away, make this bed as if I were sleeping in it, and water this plant, whose fruits have been counted; if one is missing, it will cost you your head.” Then he rides off. There were seven harlots, with whom the prince had previously done business; they couldn’t make sense of his coldness. They give some money to a mason, who must make a subterranean passage to the prince’s room for them. In the room, however, they only find the beautiful blueberry bush. Each of them plucks a berry, except for the youngest one, who takes the whole top of the plant, from which the bell was hung. As soon as it is touched, it begins to ring. The fairy thinks it is the prince who has done it, and she appears. “So you are the one who is diverting the water from our mill,” shout the harlots; “you deserve a good welcome.” They attack her and tear her apart. Each of them takes a piece; only the youngest does not, but she is persuaded by the others to take a lock of the fairy’s golden hair. Shortly afterward, they go away. When the servant arrives to make the bed and water the bush, he finds that great disaster. He picks up what is left of her flesh and bones, wipes the blood off the floor, and piles everything into the pot. The king’s son comes home from hunting and pulls the thread, but his beloved doesn’t appear. He opens the window and sees that the top of the bush has been destroyed. His wailing could move a stone to compassion. He doesn’t eat or drink anything. The fairy finally appears to him again. She has revived from the remains left in the pot and tells him everything. The marriage is celebrated. The seven harlots are also invited. Pointing to his beautiful wife, the prince asks what someone who hurt her deserves. They answer: that person should be thrown alive into the latrine. The sentence is carried out; only the youngest one is pardoned and is married to the servant.

A first change appears in the German title. “The Blueberry Bush” (“Der Heidelbeerstrauch”) is an incorrect translation of “La mortella,” a synonym for mirto (myrtle). Like the Grimms, Liebrecht opts for blueberry (his title is “Der Heidelbeerzweig,” “The Blueberry Branch”).16 Brentano, on the other hand, rightly titles his rewriting “Das Märchen von dem Myrtenfräulein” (The Fairy Tale of the Myrtle-Maiden). The easiest, and most probable, explanation for this error comes from the frequent confusion, even among native Italian speakers, between mirto (or mortella) and mirtillo (blueberry). The Italian words sound similar but denote two quite different plants. In their German Legends (Deutsche Sagen), the Grimms include a brief but incisive folk tale titled “Der Jungfernstein,” about an undisciplined girl who “on Sundays, instead of going to church,” plucks blueberries from the bushes.17

130 c h a p t e r f i v e

The mother curses her daughter, who turns into a rock, and “her image is still visible at midday.” “During the thirty-year war,” the Grimms add, “people fled there.” If the mother from the German legend damns her own daughter because of her love of those juicy berries, in The Youth’s Magic Horn (Des Knaben Wunderhorn), Brentano and von Arnim’s famous collection of German folk songs, a “Little Dance Song on the Grass” describes the playful restlessness of a child waiting to get some blueberries from his mother: “Blueberries, blueberries / are in our garden. / Mother, give some to me too, / I can’t wait any longer.”18 These verses were originally part of a wedding song, in which a young woman is asking for a husband.19 Whereas “myrtle” only indicates a plant, “blueberry bush” brings to mind a colorful branch of tempting berries, thus making an otherwise plain object into a living, fertile organism. In the German legend mentioned above, the petrified girl whose face appears on the stone at noon had to choose between morality and the irresistible charm of blueberries, as if these juicy little berries represented the damning lures of sin. The blueberry is thus a symbol of desire, as the German dance song also seems to confirm. “I can’t wait any longer,” the child sings. In a like manner, at the beginning of Basile’s “The Myrtle,” the prince begs the poor peasant, the plant’s mother, to let him have her seductive plant. The prince is willing to do or pay whatever the woman requests. He can’t wait any longer. In the Grimms’ summary, the sexual aspects of the peasant woman’s love of the plant and the prince’s longing for it are easily excised. Basile refers explicitly to the female genitals twice in his tale. The mother pulls the plant out of her vagina, and the prince becomes sexually excited when he caresses the fairy’s pubic hair. The prince surmises that the woman in his bed is a fairy precisely because his arousal is out of the ordinary. In his preface to Liebrecht’s translation, Jacob Grimm points out that the “drapery” of Basile’s baroque style is not a superfluous element of his storytelling, because even his lengthy descriptions of sunrises and sunsets reveal a secret inventiveness.20 In their abridged versions, however, the Grimms can’t help but tame the effervescence of the original Neapolitan, because their aim is a crisp plot summary. They face an unsolvable problem. On the one hand, as Jacob acknowledges, the ebullient style of the Neapolitan narratives does play a role in the formation of the story; on the other, the German scholars need to identify what is ballast and what is necessary to the tale’s coherence. By trimming the linguistic texture of the tale, the Grimms succeed in presenting a straightforward, uncomplicated, and unsophisticated story that more closely resembles the alleged oral source of Basile’s tale.

the fairy, the myrtle, and the myrtle-maiden

131

Dialogue is especially easy to cut. The Grimms summarize the first conversation between the prince and the fairy by simply reporting the result of their affectionate interaction: “He promises her that she will become his wife.” This is what a prince is supposed to do in a fairy tale that accords with German “decency.” In their summary of Basile’s tale, the Grimms retain three direct speeches, the first being the mother’s prayer to God. The fairy remains silent throughout the German adaptation, whereas the prince’s order to his servant—the second direct quotation—is spelled out: “Open up your ears: while I am away, make this bed as if I were sleeping in it, and water this plant, whose fruits have been counted; if one is missing, it will cost you your head.” Thirdly, the Grimms’ quote the words of the harlots when they are about to attack the fairy. The three quotations form the backbone of a traditional tale of marvel: (1) a poor but decent woman begs God for offspring; (2) the hero imposes himself as the pivotal presence of the tale (“Open up your ears,” he orders his servant); (3) jealous women say and do cruel things to the prince’s beloved, but eventually capitulate to his power. If the hero is at the center of the tale (the second of three speakers), the mother and the harlots embody the two opposite views of womanhood typical of the Grimms’ tales: pious and defenseless, or evil and aggressive. Ruth Bottigheimer’s careful study of the Grimms’ use of direct versus indirect speech is applicable also to their summaries of the Basile stories. She points to a number of critical studies that have celebrated Wilhelm Grimm’s “shift from indirect speech in the earliest versions of individual tales to direct speech in later and final versions.”21 Bottigheimer proves, however, that this progressive stylistic transformation emphasizes women’s passivity and silence. In the Grimms’ tales, women rarely “ask”; they either “answer” or “say.”22 The Grimms (Wilhelm, to be precise) silence their female characters, but in their summary of Basile’s “The Myrtle” the deletion of the fairy’s words is especially significant. Responding to the enthralled prince, the fairy makes it clear that she is there only to serve him; she sees herself as the lowest maidservant, the one in charge of the prince’s feces. The problem is not only that a lady (and fairies are ‘ladies’) shouldn’t speak about excrement, especially if she is incredibly beautiful; the real issue is that in the Neapolitan tale the fairy doesn’t seem to reciprocate the prince’s love feelings. By stating who she is and why she is there, she paradoxically declares her identity in opposition to the prince’s idealization. In deleting her words, the Grimms make the fairy into an indistinct damsel who obviously can’t wait to marry her hero. Evil forces try to prevent their marriage, but the prince will eventually defeat them.

132 c h a p t e r f i v e

for clemens brentano, the fairy is the voice of wisdom “They conversed for several hours, and she said so many wise and intelligent things that he had the burning desire to see her face to face.”23 This is how, in “The Fairy Tale of the Myrtle-Maiden,” Clemens Brentano describes the first night encounter between the prince and the young lady. In total darkness, the prince listens closely to the mysterious female voice. The “myrtle-maiden,” as Brentano calls her, reassures the inflamed prince but tells him that, before revealing herself, she would like to sing a short song. Her song, however, makes him fall asleep, not because it is boring, but because its verses have an enchanting power. “Sleep, my friend, oh sleep, / until I return to you,” are the song’s last words. This brief episode from Brentano’s tale should make it clear that his myrtle-maiden is neither Basile’s talkative but incorrigibly submissive fairy nor the Grimms’ opaque and speechless damsel. Her new name itself points to a different creature, one that entertains a different relationship both to the prince and to the plant in which she seems to reside. “The Fairy Tale of the Myrtle-Maiden” is Brentano’s most successful interpretation of a Basile tale. It is part of the first nucleus of his Italian Fairytales.24 His German version of Basile’s “The Myrtle” is certainly much longer than the Italian, though relatively short if compared to some of his later rewritings, primarily “The Fairy Tale of Gockel, Hinkel, and Gackeleia,” an important novella that underwent multiple drafts (from some eighty pages to more than two hundred) and whose connection with its Neapolitan source (“The Rooster’s Stone,” first story of the fourth day in The Tale of Tales) is almost undetectable. In this lengthy text, Brentano’s borrowing from Basile is reduced to a core image that generates an entirely new narrative. For example, the image of a rooster with a magical stone stuck in its head is all that remains of the original Neapolitan version. What links this story to Basile is simply the fact that Brentano included it in his Italian Fairytales, so that it cannot be defined as a rewriting in the way Brentano’s first, much shorter, stories can, which reveals a close and dynamic relationship to their Neapolitan models. As John Fetzer suggests, it is useful to divide Brentano’s fairy tales into three distinct categories: (1) The Fairy Tales of the Rhine,25 which blends Brentano’s original creations with local legends and folklore and with interpretations of classical tales such as an amusing Cupid and Psyche / Beauty and the Beast, in which Cupid/Beast is turned into a beaver; (2) the short Italian fairy tales; (3) the longer Italian fairy tales, in which Brentano gives

the fairy, the myrtle, and the myrtle-maiden

133

voice to his vehement criticism of contemporary bourgeois society, sometimes through the lens of his renewed Catholic faith.26 Both of the latter groups derive from Basile’s The Tale of Tales.27 The Fairy Tales of the Rhine and the shorter Italian Fairy Tales are based on a frame tale, a device Brentano borrowed from Basile. Brentano’s first collection emphasizes and celebrates its German roots, the Rhine being the cradle of German civilization.28 As in Basile’s book, where the pregnant slave threatens to kill her fetus unless she is told fairy tales, in Brentano’s book the river Rhine is willing to relinquish the children who have fallen into his deep waters if, for each child freed from his power, he is told a tale by their distressed mothers.29 In both books, a child’s destiny is linked to storytelling. Fairy Tales of the Rhine and the longer Italian Fairy Tales are characterized by complex and at times convoluted plots, whereas the shorter Italian tales still retain the simplicity and effectiveness of Basile’s writing. Since these ‘minor’ tales are, in my view, Brentano’s most successful fairy tales, we will focus on these stories.30 All summaries of Brentano’s relatively short “The Myrtle-Maiden,” including the Grimms’ and my own, focus on the plot and tend to overlook the “nuances of differences in detail and style” that are essential for a better understanding of the way Brentano manipulates his material.31 An unbridgeable gap seems to separate Basile from Brentano: the Italian tale is an ambiguous blending of oral and literary rhetoric, whereas its German version more clearly inhabits the realm of the Kunstmärchen, with emphasis on the art (Kunst) and even the artificiality of its character. Brentano’s rewriting, like all Kunstmärchen, doesn’t pretend to be a timeless and authorless narrative but, rather, flaunts its existence as the expression of an artist’s poetics.32 Brentano operates a form of cultural translation that aims to renew the poetic vitality of the seventeenth-century Italian book.33 As Susanne Mittag demonstrates, the baroque style and the Romantic movement emphasize the need for a spiritual renewal and, in Brentano’s case, a mistrust of language, which is seen as unable to transmit a direct experience of reality or to summon any direct religious experience.34 Brentano does have a somewhat baroque style, with its heavily adorned syntax making use of strings of metaphors, alliteration, pleonasm, hyperbole, antithesis, and internal rhymes.35 More importantly, both Basile and Brentano offer a morbid view of human physicality. The body, seen in its decadence and fragility, is a recurrent theme of Basile’s tales, which linger on the basest (often sexual) bodily expressions. Brentano translates Basile’s crude descriptions into grotesque scenes. Unlike the Grimms, Basile and Brentano write tales that aim

134 c h a p t e r f i v e

to trigger strong reactions. A scene from a Basile or a Brentano tale can be at once tragic and comic, grotesque and melancholic.

Here is an outline of Brentano’s “The Myrtle-Maiden:”

In a barren and desolate land, an honest potter lives with his good wife in a shack far from the capital, Porcelain City (Porzellania), where the prince resides. Every day, they pray to heaven to grant them a child who would ease their solitude. For his wife’s birthday, the potter fashions out of clay a cradle adorned with roses and golden putti, and a large flowerpot adorned with butterflies and flowers. His wife places these gifts next to her bed and fervently prays to God for a child or, if that is not possible, at least for a little tree, so that she and her husband, when they die, may rest in the shadow of its branches. After a terrible night storm, the potter’s wife dreams that she is sitting with her husband beside a myrtle. Its leaves begin to rustle, and she wakes up. Astonished, she finds a myrtle branch lying in the cradle. Husband and wife kneel down and thank God, after which they place the branch in the flowerpot. Thanks to their care, the branch grows healthily and emits a soothing aroma. One day, the prince visits that bleak part of the country because the buildings in the capital are made of ceramic and clay is becoming scarce. When he walks into the potter’s house and sees the myrtle, the prince is so taken by its beauty that he forgets about everything else and asks the poor family to sell him the plant, for looking at it makes his heart beat more soundly. The potter’s wife explains to the prince that she can’t live without her myrtle. The prince goes back to his castle, but his longing for the plant is so intense that he falls sick. Two messengers try to persuade the poor family to reconsider their decision, given the prince’s critical conditions. Since neither the prince nor the poor couple can survive away from the myrtle, the potter’s wife decides that the prince should take not only the plant but her husband and herself also. The potter places the flowerpot containing the plant on a litter covered with silk cloths, and together they escort the myrtle to the city. Holding a golden watering can, the prince welcomes them from his royal coach. He waters the myrtle and immediately feels better. Then, four ladies dressed in white and adorned with roses pick up the plant and place it under a canopy covered with red silk. Nine young ladies, however, do not rejoice at the plant’s arrival because the prince used to visit them, and each of them hoped to become his wife. The prince places the myrtle by the window of his room so that it can be seen by the potter and his wife, who now live in a little house in the palace grounds. The prince waters the myrtle regularly and regains his

the fairy, the myrtle, and the myrtle-maiden

health, while the plant thrives. One evening, the prince sits on a couch beside the myrtle and falls asleep. He wakes up in the night when he hears the plant rustling and a marvelous aroma is filling the room. The prince asks the myrtle why it is rustling. The plant answers that it wants to thank him, its benefactor, and that it is blossoming only for him. The prince is so enraptured by this voice that he becomes speechless. Someone sits down on a stool next to him, takes his hand, raises it to her mouth, and begs him not to ask who she is. This mysterious presence only wishes to sit next to him from time to time at night and thank him for the attention he grants her by caring for the myrtle, since she lives within that plant. But the prince burns to see her face. She tells him that she wants to sing for him before revealing herself. Her enchanting song makes the prince fall asleep. For seven nights the mysterious voice after imparting to the prince important lessons on the art of government, lulls him to sleep. The prince thus becomes even more eager to see her. He has a silk net hung from the ceiling, and that night he insists on singing to her first, and his song lulls her to sleep. Then he lets the net drop down onto her, lights a lamp, and sees a beautiful girl wearing a crown made of myrtle and folding her hands like an angel. The prince cries out: “Oh virtue, oh wisdom! How beautiful is your appearance!” He then takes her hand, and puts his royal ring on her finger. She wakes up, complains that she is imprisoned, and warns him that this will bring misfortune. When the prince begs for forgiveness, she forgives him. She also tells him that he needs her parents’ permission to marry her. Until then, he won’t be able to see her again. She suggests that he tie a bell to the top of the myrtle, so that when he rings it, she will come to him. Then she tears open the net, the little tree rustles, and she disappears. The prince calls for a meeting with his counselors and reveals his decision to be married. The meeting is interrupted by the news that a boar from the prince’s menagerie has rabies and must be killed before it contaminates other boars, together could destroy the entire Porcelain City. In reality, no boar is sick; it is just a rumor spread by the nine angry ladies. They ask a mason to build an underground tunnel through which they can reach the prince’s room. When the passage is ready, the nine women ask a tenth to go with them. Finding no one in his room, they take out their rage on the myrtle, tearing apart its leaves and branches. When they snatch the top, the bell rings, and the girl, wearing a beautiful wedding dress, comes out of the myrtle. The nine evil women attack her with knives, chop her body into small pieces, and each of them takes one of her fingers. The tenth girl bursts into tears and refuses to take anything; the others then lock her up in a closet. When the prince’s servant walks into the room, he sees the body pieces scattered on the floor and hears the girl crying in the closet. After learning from her what has happened, he and the distraught girl pick up the remaining bones

135

136 c h a p t e r f i v e

and flesh and bury them in the pot under the devastated myrtle. Together they wash the floor and water the plant with water mixed with blood. Before they leave, the girl takes a lock of the murdered girl’s hair as a memento. The prince, with the potter and his wife, open the door of the prince’s room and see the floor still marked with blood and the burial mound in the pot next to the tree. They attend to the sick plant, which slowly regains its health, but its two main branches, one on the left and one on the right, lack several buds, five on one and four on the other, while a tenth bud is beginning to sprout. This bud quickly grows into a branch resembling a finger, in part because it bears the ring that the prince had given to his betrothed. The following night, a voice sings from the tree and explains that the two missing branches and buds are her arms and fingers. The next day, the prince announces that he will reward those citizens who bring him the most beautiful myrtle branches. The nine wicked ladies bring the branches that have grown out of the girl’s fingers, which they had hidden in pots. The prince places the nine branches by the plant, which welcomes them back. Then he buries the nine branches under the myrtle, and that very day the nine missing buds appear. The tenth girl brings only the lock she took, tells him what happened, and asks for mercy both for herself and for his innocent servant, who is now hiding in a tree trunk the forest. The prince announces a great celebration in his castle gardens. The myrtle tree is placed under the canopy of the throne. The myrtle-maiden emerges from it, dressed as a beautiful bride. When the prince asks his guests what punishment should be given to someone who has harmed his bride, the nine evil women say that such a person deserves to be swallowed into the earth, and that his hand should grow out of the earth. All nine of them are immediately swallowed into the earth, and cinquefoils spring from their grave. The prince marries the myrtle-maiden, and his servant marries the tenth girl. Soon, the prince has an infant son. The myrtle tree grows very tall, and the myrtle-princess asks that it be taken back to her parents’ poor shack, which is then turned into a beautiful villa. At their death, the potter and his wife are buried beneath the myrtle tree. The prince and myrtle-maiden may be resting there as well, unless they are still alive, but this is unlikely because the events in this story took place a long time ago.

Basile’s “The Myrtle” opens with a brief, conventional mention of a married couple that can’t have children and the subsequent magic of the myrtle’s unexpected birth. The focus is on the magical appearance of the plant. Basile says nothing about its parents’ social status, mentioned only in the brief paragraph, possibly written by Basile himself, preceding the tale: “A peas-

the fairy, the myrtle, and the myrtle-maiden

137

ant from Miano gives birth to a myrtle bush.”36 For Brentano, on the other hand, the modest conditions of the myrtle’s family are crucial. His version starts off by emphasizing a sterile landscape in which no plant can survive: “They lived in a clay field, which they owned, and next to a kiln for baking ceramic.”37 In “The Myrtle-Maiden,” as Lawrence Frye observes, the first magic is an act of artistic creation through which an inanimate matter like clay becomes a beautiful object after being exposed to the transformative power of fire.38 The potter is the first and real magician of the German tale. By creating a beautiful cradle and a red flowerpot for his wife’s birthday, he establishes a basic identification between a hypothetical plant, which their land cannot produce, and a hypothetical baby, even though they seem unable to have one. His wife’s prayer to be granted either a child or a plant is simply the completion of her husband’s initial act of creation. In Brentano’s tale, art and religious practice are two forms of magic in that both question and defy what is real and visible by proving that what is sterile may become fertile and beautiful. In both religion and art, this magical transformation is made possible by an act of love. Brentano’s Catholicism was a central aspect of his poetics even before his spiritual crisis in 1816, when he officially returned to the Catholic faith in which he was raised. Rather than dividing his biography, as is often done, between his life before the 1816 crisis and his life after it, including his ‘conversion,’ we should bear in mind that Brentano attended a Jesuit high school for three years (1787–90) and that his writings often betray a distinctly Catholic sensibility. Catholicism became the sole focus of his existence after his life-changing encounter with the mystic Anna Katharina Emmerick, whose daily raptures he transcribed and edited from their first meeting in 1818 until her death in 1824. Like an ethnographer in search of the uncontaminated mythic tales still orally, and spontaneously, transmitted by peasants, Brentano wrote down Anna Katharina’s passionate, at times prophetic, revelations in a journal and then edited and reassembled them, as the Brothers Grimm did with the tales that they heard from their reliable storytellers.

dreaming a conception As far as “The Myrtle-Maiden” is concerned, a major aspect of Brentano’s magic differs from Basile’s: Basile honors the tradition of folk tales, in which exceptional occurrences, such as talking animals or animals turning into humans, are presented as ordinary events. A Neapolitan peasant

138 c h a p t e r f i v e

woman, for example, pulls a myrtle sprig out of her vagina. In Brentano, a powerful night storm with abundant thunder and lightning announces the mysterious appearance of a myrtle in the cradle next to the woman’s bed. This unnatural birth is clearly the result of a divine intervention. The divine has responded to the woman’s plea. A typical device of hagiographic narratives is the premonitory dream or vision, in which a blessed soul is granted an insight into what awaits her. Nor should we forget those women in the Bible, sterile, elderly, or virgin, who against all natural laws become pregnant thanks to God’s decision. Before waking up, the potter’s wife dreams that she is sitting with her husband under a myrtle tree. This brief dream is not only a smooth introduction to what this woman is about to find in the cradle when she opens her eyes; at the end of the tale, she and her husband will rest in peace under the myrtle tree, as she has asked in her prayer to God. Her dream thus foresees the joyous beginning and the peaceful ending of her pious existence and that of her husband. The German peasant’s dream is not just a prophetic vision; it is her divinely inspired conception. Like Basile, Brentano makes no mention of sexual intercourse leading to the plant’s birth. Basile, however, does not attribute this strange birth to supernatural causes. In Brentano, on the contrary, a dream announces that a myrtle has been conceived, though not in her mother’s womb, and has been brought to life without her mother’s intervention. “Das Märchen von Fanferlieschen Schönefußchen” (The Fairy Tale of Fanferlieschen Lovely-Little-Feet) Brentano’s lengthy and intricate rewriting of Basile’s “The Dragon” (fifth tale of the fourth day), depicts a very similar immaculate conception, with an unquestionably Catholic undertone. The virgin Ursula, whom the murderous king Jerum has locked up in a cold tower, says to some friendly birds that bring her food every day: “If only God would grant me a lovely child, I would be so happy, so happy!”39 One night, after praying to God, Ursula falls asleep and dreams that she sees the stars rejoicing in the sky and one falling into her womb. At that point, she experiences “such a powerful joy, such a sweet pain, as if all the joy of this world had pierced her heart like a golden arrow, and she puts her hands around it as if it were a marvelously colored bird that had settled in her breast.”40 Ursula feels a “bolt through her inner self.”41 When she wakes up, she finds a beautiful baby boy resting in her womb. In the Catholic tradition, numerous are the women mystics who feel penetrated by a sweetly painful arrow, an unmistakable allusion to God’s invasion of his human spouse, whose identity dies in order that she become a vessel for her divine groom’s will. In “Das Märchen von Rosen-

the fairy, the myrtle, and the myrtle-maiden

139

blättchen” (The Fairy Tale of Little Rose-Petal) based on Basile’s “The Little Slave Girl,” Brentano makes a clear connection between dreaming of giving birth and dying. A princess swallows a rose petal and one night dreams that “she must die.”42 When she wakes up, a baby girl is sleeping in a cradle next to her. In “Das Märchen von Fanferlieschen Schönefußchen,” Ursula calls her baby Ursulus. Like the myrtle-girl, the deeply religious and heroic Ursulus comes to life in a dream. Both births are accompanied by powerful flashes of lightning, in Ursula’s case in her dream. When, at the end of the tale, the wicked monarch repents and begs Ursula to forgive him, he kneels down, kisses her feet, and puts his head under her foot, to signify that “her sinless foot” is over “the snake’s head,”43 a clear reference to the image of the Virgin Mary crushing the demonic serpent with her foot. Both Ursulus, who fights a demon with a shield whose emblem recalls Christ’s crucifixion (a cross, four nails, a crown of thorns), and the myrtle-maiden are certainly magical creatures, but of a unique kind of magic.44 As far as “The Myrtle-Maiden” is concerned, from a strictly narrative standpoint the peasant woman’s brief dream is irrelevant. It is neither an ominous warning nor a riddle meant to solve a mystery, as dreams often are, when used in literary and biblical texts. In any case, dreaming is the only kind of magic that fairy tales tend to ignore. The world of oral fairy tales abounds with marvels of all sorts but only admits full wakefulness, for fairytale characters can scamper here and there, slay dragons, and get lost in the woods only if fully awake. Heroes and heroines only know what they see. In the Grimms’ tales—“The Devil with Three Golden Hairs” and “The Blue Light,” for example—when a character claims that she had a dream, she is either lying or mistaken.45 The peasant’s inconsequential dream in “The Myrtle-Maiden” certainly grants her a psychological depth that folk-tale characters usually lack. But her dream serves another purpose: it creates a paradoxical connection between what is real and what is magical, what exists and what is imaginary. Brentano’s tale is unquestionably a tale of magic, of sudden transformations and resurrections, but the real magic, that absolute marvel that gives life to a fairy tale, is presented as a future event, something that will take place in a future condition, after the ending of the tale. The appearance of the mysterious myrtle branch, the fair lady descending from the pot at night, her violent death and unexpected return to life, cannot compare, in her mother’s mind, to the magical moment when she and her husband will be able to step out of the tale and rest in peace under the protective branches of their

140 c h a p t e r f i v e

myrtle tree. That eternal condition is the real magic of Brentano’s story, as foreseen in the peasant’s fleeting dream. Brentano’s myrtle thus creates a fissure between the exterior narrative, which closely follows Basile’s outline, and the inner expectation, which cannot be narrated. This expectation is a silent space lying within the main characters, the myrtle’s mother but also the prince, who doesn’t simply “fancy” the plant, as Basile defines the young man’s odd obsession (“se ’ncrapicciaie”);46 when he first sees the myrtle, Brentano’s prince is so “enraptured” by the plant’s beauty that he forgets everything and, “totally amazed,” declares his love for the myrtle.47 The German prince is spiritually enraptured at the sight of the myrtle because it seems to reveal a beauty that transcends human understanding. The myrtle’s two lovers, her mother and the prince, experience their first encounter with the myrtle as a mystical disclosure.

t h e w e d d i n g o f a m e l a n c h o ly prince and a plant Only the myrtle’s mother knows that her daughter is not just a good-looking plant. The woman is aware that her offspring is a benign symbol of her own and her husband’s salvation. In this new interpretation, the myrtle is not merely Venus’s plant, the plant that induces and protects love, as we read in Basile. The original Italian version enjoys a narrative freedom that is indeed a magical accomplishment, in that its incomplete, incongruous unfolding is not sloppiness but, rather, faith in the mysterious power of what is left unexplained. The Neapolitan fairy comes out of the plant, has sexual intercourse with the prince, and then goes back into the myrtle. The prince first realizes that his night lover is a fairy when he caresses her incredibly soft and sensual pubic hair: “He found a little something that was more mellow and soft than Tunisian wool.”48 The fairy’s amazingly sexy body and totally submissive attitude makes her a perfect wife. But how this fairy got into that plant, or better yet, what kind of relationship she entertains with the myrtle, why she has to flee in the morning, and why the prince needs to hang a bell on the tip of the myrtle to call her up, all these questions go unanswered. Instead of a secretive night rendezvous, Brentano presents the prince’s appropriation of the mysterious plant as an official and immensely meaningful ritual. The German prince arrives at the peasants’ house in his royal coach, while holding a golden watering can, with which he waters the myrtle.49 This is the initial symbolic gesture of a sacred cortege centered on the myrtle resting on a canopy and escorted by four handmaids, while a crowd of faithful citizens can’t restrain their joy. We can’t help but associ-

the fairy, the myrtle, and the myrtle-maiden

141

ate this festive and respectful mise-en-scène with a Catholic procession celebrating the patron saint of a village. The German myrtle is not a fairy; she is not even human, as she explains to the prince when she first appears to him at night. A “sweet perfume” fills the prince’s room and “enraptures” him with an overwhelming joy that renders him speechless, as happened the first time he saw the myrtle.50 When she sits at his feet and takes his hand, this mysterious being explains to the prince that heaven has allowed her to present herself to the prince “in human form” from time to time because of the prince’s affectionate care for the plant in which she lives.51 “Don’t ask me who I am,” she insists. What prompted her to come out of the myrtle was that her “gratitude” for the great love shown her by the prince “had grown so much that the plant couldn’t contain it any longer.” The secret girl sitting in the dark beside the prince is thus the offspring of his care. She has burst out of the plant, as if the prince had inseminated it with his love. Love, so famously described by Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 13), is what called this spiritual creature forth. The girl shows up “in a human form from time to time”, Brentano writes, only to lavish the prince with thankfulness. She embodies a love that is boundless dedication and servitude. Hers is a love that asks for nothing in return, only to be allowed to exist. Unlike Basile’s aroused prince, who can’t wait to see his fairy’s body, the German prince is excited by his night visitor’s stunningly “wise” words, which, as we learn from their second encounter, also concern the best way to rule a country. He wants to see “the face” of love. After imparting her profound wisdom, the girl makes her lover fall asleep by reciting a poem about the moon leading “the clouds upward to the source of light.” The image of dark clouds rising toward the source of light, a clear allusion to the divine, evokes the peace that follows liberation from clouding thoughts, such as the desire to see what one is not intended or not prepared to see. When the prince finally catches the myrtle-maiden with a silk net and contemplates her face, his first words are: “Oh virtue! Oh wisdom! How beautiful is your appearance! Who can live without you, if he has seen you once?”52 The prince sees that the girl, still asleep, has her hands folded as if in prayer “like an angel” and that she is wearing a “myrtle-crown.”

an ‘oral’ myrtle versus a ‘literary’ myrtle A first consequence of wisdom’s transformation into a beautiful female is her becoming a girl of high morals and piety. To the prince carried away by his desire to marry her, she responds that he first needs to get her parents’

142 c h a p t e r f i v e

approval. Although at her first appearance she professed unconditional submission to the prince, the girl now sets the moral parameters of their amorous interaction. In Brentano’s literary fairy tale, the angelic messenger of wisdom soon acquires a cultural and thus historical identity. Wisdom first reveals herself as an angelic being that is and is not real; then this ethereal creature turns into a good German girl. For Basile, the fairy is just a fairy, that is, a vaguely more-than-human or nonhuman being who can act morally, immorally, or amorally, depending on her mood. What does the German girl mean when she tells the prince that she “lives in” the myrtle? How does the transference from Basile’s oral-like tale to Brentano’s explicitly literary version affect the relationship between the myrtle and the myrtle-girl? This question does not merely split hairs, because the two narrative modes engender two distinct plants and two distinct female residents, that is, two forms of inhabiting a tale. In oral fairy tales, objects are apparitions, transparent sketches similar to memories of objects seen in the past. But they are not mere abstractions, for they participate in the making of the story, and stories work only insofar as they activate the imagination, which stems from memory. In fairy tales, no object is free from the sedimentation of time. When a myrtle is transplanted into a literary composition, it is given a pseudo-body, as if the impalpable apparition of a beautiful bush has metamorphosed into a real thing, something external, and has ceased to exist in the mind only. As the German myrtle-maiden reveals herself “in human form,” her myrtle too must receive a physical form in order to adjust to the new narrative environment. The transformation of the myrtle becomes apparent when the nine evil women, who used to be the prince’s protégées, inadvertently call the poor myrtle-maiden out of the plant and then slaughter her. At first, Brentano seems to paraphrase Basile. The bloodbath follows the same gruesome script: the women first tear the myrtle apart, then the girl. The seven Neapolitan prostitutes and their nine German counterparts, however, attack the plant and the girl in two different ways. According to Basile, each prostitute snatches a branch of the myrtle; then, when the fairy comes out of the battered plant, they break her “into a hundred pieces,” and each of them takes “her share.”53 The prince’s servant gathers the fairy’s remains, puts them in the pot, and waters the plant. At the end of the tale, thanks to the prince’s care, the fairy herself begins “to sprout anew from the remains placed in the pot” and “like the light of a candle” appears before “his eyes.”54 Brentano’s nine wicked women don’t take away the myrtle’s branches; what they take are the girl’s fingers. The tenth, younger woman who has ac-

the fairy, the myrtle, and the myrtle-maiden

143

companied them refuses to participate in this barbaric gesture, so one of the myrtle-maiden’s fingers is among the remains that the servant buries in the pot. In the German tale, as the myrtle slowly regains its health, it progressively acquires a human appearance. The prince notices that the stem has two branches, like two extended arms, and that out of ten buds, only one is sprouting. This bud soon takes the form of a finger that is wearing—believe it or not—the ring the prince had given to his betrothed. Speaking from within the myrtle, the girl explains that she needs her other nine fingers to be buried in the pot before she can come back to life. This grotesque twist of events accords with Brentano’s radical interpretation of the Italian baroque tale. The nine missing fingers are relics of a holy presence that a young man’s pure love for a plant had summoned “in human form.” The girl and the plant are thus inextricably linked to each other, because, without the myrtle, Lady Wisdom would not have appeared to the pious prince at night. Therefore, if the signifier (the myrtle) is destroyed, its signified (the spiritual creature) must also be damaged. The nine missing fingers function as magical relics of a saintly figure whose body has endured hideous violence but still retains both the memory of its suffering and the divine grace that accompanied it through its martyrdom. The nine fingers have the power to restore the myrtle-girl’s life. The prince’s beloved is at once a dismembered martyr and a being who will resuscitate herself thanks to her own healing relics. “Oh, have mercy!,” the myrtle-maiden’s voice cries, “may my arms again have / their nine fingers!”55 Relics and religious amulets, present in Brentano’s other works, serve to summon an atmosphere of spiritual suspension. In his fragment Story from the French Revolution, an elderly priest wishes to bury some French soldiers in a village close to a convent containing a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary and a precious relic: Mary’s wedding ring.56 The young protagonist of Brentano’s Chronicle of the Traveling Student walks into a forest and comes across a solitary chapel housing a small box of relics.57 In The Numerous Wehmüllers, a distressed mother burns a candle beside her daughter’s corpse and makes a piece of it into the shape of the girl’s thumb so as to offer it to the image of the infant Jesus in a chapel.58

fingers, hairs, and other relics: brentano and the mystic anna katharina emmerick Brentano’s close interaction with the Catholic mystic Anna Katharina Emmerick during the last six years of her life (1818–24) is widely known because Emmerick described her powerful visions to Brentano either dur-

144 c h a p t e r f i v e

ing or after their occurrence. He then edited and translated them from the mystic’s Westphalian dialect into German. I don’t intend to posit a direct connection between Brentano’s life-changing relationship with Emmerick and his Italian Fairytales. My goal is simply to highlight the unquestionably spiritual, specifically Catholic, undertone of his tales. In Brentano’s narratives, magic is often a veiled allusion to Catholic religiosity. The artist’s Catholic sensibility certainly predated his fervent admiration for Emmerick. His ‘conversion’ to Catholicism resulted from a long gestation; since he was raised in the Catholic faith, it was perhaps less a conversion than a conscious return to his original religious upbringing. The mystical power of human remains plays an important role in Brentano’s devotional reportage of Emmerick’s insights. In an entry of his journal dated December 6, 1818, Brentano writes: “Evening. Confession. Request that her wounds be taken away. Relics. Spiritual Church. The new groom Feeling of being without hands. Fainting.”59 At the end of her confession, the mystic “was rapt in spirit and beat her breast with outstretched arms.” Brentano beats his breast as well, and then she takes his hands in hers. While in ecstasy, Anna Katharina reveals to him that the Lord will make her stigmata disappear, but her pain will become more intense. During her vision, she converses with Brentano, who tries to understand what she is seeing at that moment. He asks her: “Where are you now?” “Are you still in that meadow?” to which she responds that yes, she is still there, waiting for an imminent battle.60 “Beforehand,” Brentano writes, “I had given her the relics of Saint Clement and of another unknown holy person.” While still in the “beautiful meadow,” the mystic realizes that the unidentified relics belong to Saint Frances of Rome (1384–1440), who approaches her and says: “Don’t you know me? I am Frances of Rome.”61 In Emmerick’s vision, therefore, a relic is not only a magical tool against evil forces or tormenting illnesses, but also the living memory of a human being’s past. Frances of Rome herself helps Anna Katharina discover the identity of the “unknown holy person” by introducing herself to her, even though Anna Katharina already knows her in a sense since she holds a physical memento of the Italian mystic. From Brentano’s personal interaction with Anna Katharina, it becomes apparent that, in his view, all corpses in fact stay in contact with their departed souls. In 1820 and 1821, Brentano put some hairs of his deceased wife Sophie and their two children (all three of them died between 1804 and 1806) into a small paper bag and brought it to Anna Katharina, who in a vision saw “a mother and a couple of children” but was unable to reach them.62 They were in a “world of mist,” di-

the fairy, the myrtle, and the myrtle-maiden

145

vided into several “circles.” The children and their mother, whose voice was muffled, did not reside in the same circle. Anna Katharina repeatedly stated that the entire area was dark, cold, and bleak with a few glimmers of light, a sort of purgatorial landscape.

the purgatory of the myrtle-maiden The mysterious girl who used to step in and out of the plant as she wished, is now imprisoned inside the myrtle because parts of her body have been taken away from her. Remember that the girl had explained to the prince that she was allowed to take up human form in order to interact with him, as if she were an angelic being with an aerial body. The Neapolitan fairy, on the other hand, had a magical body, because, being a character in a tale of magic, she didn’t need to explain anything about herself (her origins, the nature of her body, etc.); she simply appeared and disappeared like a ghost, but she also had a very attractive body, which the prince enjoyed night after night. What is wrong with Brentano’s myrtle-maiden? Why does she need those nine fingers to come out of the plant if her body is just a “human form”? Her disembodied voice repeatedly pleads with the prince to retrieve her missing fingers. The prince does so and buries them in the pot. Once all the members of her body are buried together, the girl cries out: “Welcome, welcome, my flesh and bones [Fleisch und Bein]!”63 It is interesting to note that the expression Fleisch und Bein is present, with a similar miraculous undertone, in Luther’s version of the Gospel of Luke (24:39), when the resurrected Jesus invites his disciples to touch him. I am not a ghost, says Jesus, for ghosts don’t have flesh and bones. Although it would be wrong to believe that Brentano’s myrtle-maiden stands for Jesus, in Brentano’s rewriting of Basile’s tale the maiden does undergo a process of incarnation and transformation. She dies and comes back to life, and her body, which before her murder was just a beautiful manifestation of wisdom, now acquires a more complex texture: it is still spiritual (the girl materializes out of nowhere), but it is also totally human and carnal (“in flesh and bones”). In a like manner, after his resurrection, Jesus’s body is both purely spiritual and tangibly physical. Jesus even asks for something to eat, and he eats the baked fish in front of them (Luke 29:42–43). When at last the myrtle-maiden’s locks are buried with the rest of her body, she says: “Now I am fully / in my old splendor,” as if she had simply gone back to the way she was before her murder.64 But when she actually re-

146 c h a p t e r f i v e

appears, she is dressed as a bride. Earlier, the myrtle-maiden only wanted to sit with her prince in the dark, grant him some insights on how to rule his country, and disappear before dawn. Now, she is eager to become his wife.

the myrtle plant becomes a myrtle forest Basile, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, ends his tale with the wedding of the prince and the fairy and does not add, as Apuleius does in his Cupid and Psyche, that a baby is born to the happy couple. Unlike an oral-like tale such as Basile’s, which thrives in its incompleteness, Brentano’s literary rewriting calls for closure. This closure clarifies not just the plot but also, and more importantly, the author’s poetics. Unlike a folk tale, which doesn’t seem to need an author or a wide audience, a literary tale doesn’t write itself. Traveling through the air on a random narrator’s voice, oral tales resemble “the images of things” (rerum simulacra), which, according to Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, are thin films that originate in all objects and “flit about hither and thither through the air.”65 For a story to be incomplete is thus inherently natural because, like flimsy visual particles, scraps of narratives are captured at random, and at random are sent out again through the voice. Literary fairy tales are not nearly as natural or realistic, because they are monuments to a specific author’s biased view of reality. As a tale changes in the passage from an oral to a literary form, so its mystery, its “miracle” to use Lüthi’s term, also mutates. Brentano’s “The Myrtle-Maiden” is one of his most ‘miraculous’ and charming tales because it preserves a sense of spell, of magical suspension, quite different from Basile’s. Some time after the wedding, says Brentano, “the prince received from heaven a little myrtle-prince,” who was placed in the beautiful cradle the potter had made for his wife’s birthday.66 Soon, Brentano explains, the myrtle grows into a large tree that has to be taken out of the palace. The princess asks that the myrtle be planted next to the modest shack where the potter and his wife used to live and where she was born. Placed in this natural setting, the myrtle tree soon multiplies into a myrtle forest, where “the potter and his wife’s grandchildren played.”67 Brentano seems to forget that he has mentioned only one “myrtle-prince.” Yet this inaccuracy creates a charming relationship between the transformation of the myrtle tree into a forest and the increase of the royal spouses’ offspring. In fairy tales, forests are usually synonyms for darkness, danger, and loss, and often appear at the beginning rather than the end of a story. A dark wood is where everything begins. Brentano’s myrtle forest, on the

the fairy, the myrtle, and the myrtle-maiden

147

contrary, is a benign place where all the major characters of Brentano’s story gather and watch their children playing. This forest is also the place where the potter and his wife will rest in eternity. This pious woman knows that their happiness will be complete only after the end of the tale, when together they lie under the protective branches of the tree whose beauty signifies wisdom. Maybe the prince and his wife are buried there too, Brentano suggests, for this story took place a long time ago. The mystery of the fairy tale thus resides in that caring forest of wisdomtrees. The joy that will take place after the characters’ death is a miracle, though not described. The unsaid, the incomplete, the missing something that characterizes all oral fairy tales is also present in Brentano’s story, but it is jealously preserved in a forest where all the good characters take refuge. For Brentano, death is indeed the unexplained element in many of his tales, especially his Italian Fairytales. Death is the magic that accompanies human existence.

chapter six

How to Undo The Tale of Tales: Brentano and the End of Fairy Tales Yes, everything seemed to be lost.1

The missing fingers that the myrtle-maiden needs in order to reappear to her prince become relics of a martyr who gave up her life in the name of eternal love. The first finger sprouting from the renewed plant is adorned with the ring that the prince had given to his beloved myrtle-maiden, who, however, needs all her fingers to become a complete human being. Why this emphasis on the power of fingers? The special meaning of fingers is an important theme in the first pages of Brentano’s journal, starting on September 24, 1818. After his official return to the Catholic faith in 1817, he began recording his daily encounters with the bedridden visionary Anna Katharina Emmerick, whose mystical powers Brentano wished to validate through his careful transcriptions of her words.2 As he did in his Italian Fairy Tales, Brentano reported in his journal some of Anna Katharina’s mystical events more than once, introducing variations and corrections missing from a previous version.3 Read in this manner, his transcriptions of her visions remind us of the editing work that the Grimms did on their own ‘oral’ tales. Brentano was a complicated and sometimes tormented man. Prone to depression, he first left and then returned to Catholicism. He had two painfully unsuccessful marriages: the first ended with his wife’s death and the second by divorce.4 Brentano seemed fascinated by Anna Katharina’s strong attachment to relics, which at times he used as parts of his ‘scientific’ experiments meant to prove her sanctity.5 For example, he would hide relics in his pockets to see whether she could detect their presence and how, if she did, she would react to their healing power.

how to undo

t h e ta l e o f ta l e s

149

In his first journal entry, Brentano observes that if a priest bends over to bless Anna Katharina while she is rapt in spirit, she opens her eyes and follows the movement of his fingers, and when he withdraws she sits up in bed and watches him leave. At times, she takes hold of the priest’s fingers and hangs on to them. Even in hell, the mystic explains, a priest’s fingers are recognized and respected. For her, a priest’s hand is sometimes more precious than relics. When she is holding someone’s fingers, Brentano writes, she goes so far as to suck them, calling them “sweet,” because, in her words, they feed her. On one occasion (December 5, 1818), Brentano gave her some relics to hold, but she felt that her hand was missing. Two days later, in a rapture, she felt that both her legs and her hands were gone. God had given them to her and she gave them back to him, she said during the vision.6 In the first entries of Brentano’s diary, her hands and legs appear and disappear intermittently. Sometimes, while lying in bed Anna Katharina would take Brentano’s hands in hers and brings them to her bosom in a prayerful position. In Brentano’s fairy tale, the myrtle-maiden took the prince’s hands and told him many wise things during her first night visits, and later, by wearing his ring, she showed her commitment to his love. After her martyrdom, her executioners (the nine evil ladies) snatch the relics of her holy body (her nine fingers). Although her body is merely a shadow of her spiritual identity, her relics must not remain in the impure hands of her killers. Anna Katharina Emmerick, to whose raptures we will return, is essential to our understanding why Brentano wrote two very different drafts of Basile’s frame story about Zoza, the princess who is unwilling to laugh. The first draft, titled “The Fairy Tale of the Fairy Tales, or Dear-My-Soul” (“Das Märchen von den Märchen, oder Liebseelchen”), belongs to the first period of Brentano’s work on Basile’s Tale of Tales (1805–11) and testifies to his intention to write a new collection à la Basile, with a frame tale that would introduce a sequence of tales, plus a finale that would function as the conclusion of the original frame tale. The second version, titled “The Fairy Tale of the Laced-Up Girl” (“Das Märchen von Schnürlieschen”) belongs to a much later period of Brentano’s oeuvre (late 1820s or early 1830s), several years after his life-changing interaction with Anna Katharina, who died in 1824, and some twenty years after the first drafts of his envisaged collection.7 Between “Dear-My-Soul” and “Laced-Up Girl,” Brentano’s intention to compose a new Tale of Tales (or The Fairy Tale of Fairy Tales) failed to materialize. Whereas the first draft followed Basile’s model very closely and thus worked fine as a possible introduction to a sequence of tales, his later,

150 c h a p t e r s i x

more profound rewriting remained unfinished. The second version simply couldn’t lead to any additional story. To refresh the reader’s memory, let us look at the main elements of the Neapolitan frame tale. An old woman curses Princess Zoza (“May you never pluck a blossom of a husband unless you take the prince of Round Field!”) when Zoza laughs at her vulgar gesture. Zoza tries to fill up a pitcher with her tears in order to bring back to life the cursed prince of Round Field, who will lie in a tomb until a compassionate girl cries her eyes out into the jar.8 When the princess falls asleep after almost filling the pitcher, a black slave takes it from her and drops a few tears of her own to fill it up. The prince revives, and marries the slave instead of Zoza. Thanks to a magical doll, Zoza instills in the slave, now pregnant with the prince’s child, an insatiable longing for fairy tales. To please his spouse, the prince asks ten women to tell ten different stories every day, and this is how The Tale of Tales unfolds. Had Brentano stayed close to this story, he could quite easily have put together his rewritings of Basile along with some additional stories. Instead, in a later version he drastically changed the original setting. What exactly happened? One important clue is in the complete title of the first draft: The Fairy Tale of the Fairy Tales, or Dear-My-Soul. Unlike Basile, Brentano had envisioned a collection of tales highlighting the central role of the German Zoza. It is in this character, whom he rechristens Dear-My-Soul, that we find the key to the radical transformation of Basile’s frame tale. The second, incomplete draft of the tale has the working title “The Fairy Tale of the Laced-Up Girl,” even though the main character is still the princess who doesn’t feel like laughing. The new title alludes to a girl forced to wear a tight corset or collar, a character absent in Basile’s story. The main innovations of Brentano’s second draft are the explanation for the princess’s inability to laugh and the appearance of a bedridden girl who is slowly suffocating because of a tight iron band around her neck. The tale opens with a double ceremony: the funeral of the queen (the prince’s mother) and the baptism of the princess’s infant daughter. At the end of the tale, the unfortunate girl with the iron collar around her neck dies, and the good princess orders that the body be taken to her court.9

mourning without memories In “The Myrtle-Maiden,” a woman dreams of a peaceful future after her own and her husband’s death. The ‘memory’ of her future death, so to speak, leads her through the unusual story of the baby myrtle that she finds next

how to undo

t h e ta l e o f ta l e s

151

to her bed when she wakes up from the dream. The beauty of Brentano’s story lies in the never-ending sense of contentment that accompanies the modest and good mother from the moment of her unusual conception (the myrtle-baby) to the eternal present, which begins after the end of the tale. The mother’s joy is not the conventional “and they lived happily ever after” of so many fairy tales. Brentano depicts a myrtle forest where the souls of all the good characters (the parents, their daughter, her husband, their children) are living together now, after their death, as the mother had foreseen in her dream. Remembering the future (the mother dreaming about her life after death) and remembering the past (the mother and the other characters looking back on their lives after death) are the two sides of the same warm and reassuring experience that keeps Brentano’s charming tale alive. We don’t expect characters in oral fairy tales to remember anything. They may suddenly recall that they are betrothed to someone who has been waiting for their return for a long time, but rather than ‘remembering’ or ‘forgetting,’ most fairy-tale characters either know something or ignore it. The good mother in Brentano’s tale, on the other hand, carries the images of her prophetic experience through the entire story. The last scene of the tale is less an ending than the joyous disclosure of the good mother’s memory. The problem with Brentano’s two rewritings of Basile’s frame tale is that the new German princess carries a memory that is both mute and immutable. In the first version, the princess Dear-My-Soul can’t laugh because she “was born under a sad star”; in the second, much later version, the princess can’t laugh because her mother died giving birth to her. When the baby was brought to the church to be baptized, writes Brentano, “a sorrowful star was in the sky”; her mother lay in a coffin in that same church.10 What is also new in the second draft is the princess’s unequivocal difference from her father the king, who, unlike her, loves to laugh. He certainly helps the needy and the poor but can’t stand seeing people sad. If someone dares to look depressed for long, the king expels him from his kingdom. The opposition between forgetting and laughing, on the one hand, and remembering and mourning, on the other, couldn’t be clearer. While “The Myrtle-Maiden” presents the act of remembering as something joyful and hopeful, Brentano’s second draft of the frame tale for his projected The Fairy Tale of the Fairy Tales describes memory as an isolating and private duty. The remembrance of an enduring loss is in fact the real curse of the new story, which offers no tasks to overcome, no magical gifts, and thus no additional stories to tell. The princess Dear-My-Soul in Brentano’s first version laughs when the

152 c h a p t e r s i x

marquise Zephire de Pimpernelle, a pompous and arrogant old French lady “who kept the principal boarding-school in town,” stumbles and falls because of the oil gushing from the fountain placed at the center of the main square.11 When the princess bursts out laughing, the French noblewoman, who is also a witch, curses her: “No husband shalt thou have / than one who sleeps in marble grave,” which is close to what the old woman says to Basile’s princess Zoza.12 Brentano follows in Basile’s footsteps up to the very end of the tale, with only minor variants. The deceitful, ugly slave, called Russika, demands and obtains the good princess’s three magical objects, the last one being a golden doll that spins golden threads. But the doll refuses to spin gold for Russika and threatens to make public the slave’s dishonest actions unless someone tells her fifty tales. She will spin gold only under this strict condition. Brentano was fond of magical dolls. In “Gockel and Hinkel,” another of his Italian Fairy Tales, a speaking doll is actually a princess who has been turned into a mouse dragging a mechanical doll behind her.13 In Basile’s frame tale, the doll is a sort of mysterious talisman that Zoza uses to trigger the slave’s craving for stories. In Brentano’s more logical adaptation, it is the magical doll that asks for stories while spinning golden thread, spinning being a well-known symbol of storytelling. By threatening to kill her baby with a needle, even though the prince has only seen a golden cradle which, according to the ugly slave, belongs to their baby, Russika forces her husband to bring ten good female narrators together. We don’t know what was supposed to happen after the fiftieth tale, but certainly Brentano wouldn’t finish The Fairy Tale of Fairy Tales with the slave and her baby buried alive in the ground, as Basile does at the end of The Tale of Tales. Decades later, Brentano revisited this first draft and rewrote the character of the princess born “under a sad star.” What happened between the first and the second version of this story was his extraordinary encounter with Anna Katharina Emmerick, whose presence is reflected in the new princess who can’t laugh. To be more precise, Brentano splits the character of the unfortunate Dear-My-Soul into two new figures, both of them recalling the bedridden visionary. I have already mentioned the opening scene of “The Fairy Tale of the Laced-Up Girl”—a church in which the two rites of baptism and burial will be performed at the same time. The princess comes to life with the inner awareness of the sacred connection between birth and death, between the transience of human existence and the eternity celebrated within the holy space of a Catholic church. The king can’t stand sad faces because he is unwilling to acknowledge that he can’t fulfill all the spiritual and material needs of his people, whereas his daughter grows up

how to undo

t h e ta l e o f ta l e s

153

with a natural desire to care for the poor and the sick, and especially for the dying.14 She sits at their bedside, and her friendly gaze keeps them company until they breathe their last. Her compassionate presence is so healing that even people who aren’t sick seek her help. The king is oblivious to the malignant influence of the marquise de Pimpernelle, who returns in this new draft with her ridiculous attire and affected behavior. She wears a wig of goat hair and tight clothes that make her look as thin as a twig. One day, the French marquise shows up at the king’s palace and asks whether his daughter could take a look at one of the her students who has fallen ill. Wearing a black mantle and a black veil, the compassionate princess, accompanied by a swarm of maidens who can’t resist her virtuous charm, hastens to the noblewoman’s residence. When she walks into the infirmary, she is shocked to see a beautiful, pale girl lying in bed, stiff and immobilized. Her arms lie inert on each side of her body. The princess sits at the foot of her bed and “with loving, compassionate eyes” looks “deep into her heart.”15 Left alone with the sick girl, Dear-My-Soul asks her: “Oh you dear poor friend. What is your name and what is your illness?” The sick student can barely whisper that her name is “Laced-Up Girl” and that she must die. By this strange name, the princess realizes that the girl is wearing an iron collar that prevents her from speaking. She tears apart the tight band, and the girl, finally able to breathe, hugs her savior and bursts into tears. Brentano has turned the original tale upside down, but the bare bones of the first draft, which was so much closer to Basile’s model, are still there. An old woman compels the good princess to leave her father’s house so as to rescue someone who is under an evil spell. Both the prince lying in the sepulcher and the sick girl lying in bed are as if dead, but may come back to life thanks to the princess’s intervention. In both tales, tears must be shed in order to undo the curse. What differs is the nature of the tears, and the meaning of coming back to life. The new princess lives in the world, but does not belong to the world. She wears a black gown and a black veil, and like a nun brings solace and healing to those in need. An aura of sanctity surrounds her. Before being freed from the suffocating collar, the sick student’s statement that she “must die” is strange, since the compassionate princess is there to alleviate her pain and, as many people attest, could even restore her health. “Must die” unmistakably refers to a just punishment for a dire crime. Therefore, the new life granted by the princess’s kind gesture shouldn’t be taken literally, because the poor girl does die a few pages later in the story. What kind of freedom, what kind of new life does the girl receive from the prin-

154 c h a p t e r s i x

cess? Before dying, the student is freed to give voice to the guilt she feels for a wrong deed that she committed in the past and that caused the curse she is enduring. The act of freeing her neck from the iron band stands for the liberating power of confession, and her new life awaits her not in this world but in the next. Remember, in Brentano’s tale, baptism and burial are two mirroring moments of human existence. Why does the marquise’s student have to die if her sickness is due merely to her difficulty in breathing, which the princess alleviates by freeing her from the chain around her neck? “I am so sorry for you,” Dear-My-Soul reassures her; “you are more dear to me than any other young lady I have ever seen.”16 Please rest, the princess tells her, and if it is not too strenuous for you, please tell me what has befallen you. Still sitting at the girl’s feet and looking at her with her caring gaze, the pious princess folds her hands “as if in prayer,” while the girl, lying in the bed, closes her eyes as a flower closes up its petals at dusk, and narrates her sad story in the form of a rhymed poem of forty-six stanzas. One day, when still a child, she walked with her older brother to a meadow “that looked like Paradise” and picked some flowers. When the sun went down, her sensible brother insisted that they go home before it got too dark, but she refused because she needed to rip a small pimpernel out of the ground that was growing beside a well. She had dreamed that this plant wanted to bite her. Ignoring her brother’s request and deaf to the pimpernel’s desperate plea (“God helped me through the cold snow; only once do I look at the sun!” cries the plant), the insensitive girl uproots the pimpernel. Before dying, however, the plant curses her, vowing that “Pimpernelle” will avenge its death and break the girl’s savage character.17 Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the girl disregards her brother’s plea and disrupts the natural order. Walking in the peaceful meadow had been like strolling in Paradise, the girl confessed to the pious princess sitting at her feet. When she “murdered” the plant, a dark cloud arose, an ominous coach showed up. She tried to run away but tripped and fell, and the coach driver picked her up. Inside the coach, the marquise de Pimpernelle greeted the terrified girl. After a long journey through a hostile landscape, they finally reached the old lady’s house, where the girl was forced to wear an extremely tight corset and other agonizing clothes. This was the tenth year of her strict “education,” as the French lady called the cruel punishment she inflicted on this girl. Her selfishness was no more; she had even forgiven the marquise. Now the girl only wished to be buried beside the fountain where she had killed the small plant. When the French schoolteacher sud-

how to undo

t h e ta l e o f ta l e s

155

denly walked into the room holding a tray with an elegant breakfast for the princess, she accidentally dropped all the dishes. The noise and confusion killed the debilitated student. The princess then ordered that the girl’s body be brought to her castle. The other girls expressed the desire to follow their fellow student, but when Dear-My-Soul asked them to sing a song while marching to the castle, the girls answered that they were only allowed to sing in French. This is the abrupt ending of ‘The Fairy Tale of the Laced-Up Girl.” Instead of returning to life, like the prince buried beside a fountain in “The Fairy Tale of the Fairy Tales,” the student dies. Brentano could have had the girl’s fellow students become the female narrators of his projected Fairy Tale of Fairy Tales. While mourning their departed classmate, they could have told new tales exalting Christian virtues, tales about sin and redemption, saintly figures and their travails.

But no magic, no flight of the imagination, could compare with the marvels of Anna Katharina Emmerick’s visions, which Brentano had recorded like a faithful folklorist for six years, until her death in 1824. The “objective” transcription of her words, as Brentano himself writes in his diary, had been his life’s work for all those years.18 What he heard from Emmerick’s mouth was at once supernatural and real, deeply inventive and deeply troubling, for it concerned the true destiny of the soul in general and of his own soul in particular. For Brentano, Anna Katharina was a medium of divine revelation and also a sign of the contemporary darkening of spiritual life. Anna Katharina’s life testified to this troubling state of affairs. Even though she longed to become a nun, the modest and unassuming but deeply religious girl was repeatedly rejected by several institutions; the convent that finally accepted her was eventually secularized. Her frail health forced her to bed, and she ended up living with her rude, insensitive sister; her stigmata and revelations were questioned and scrutinized by the Church and physicians.19 In 1819, a Prussian government commission subjected her to a humiliating bodily examination.20

traveling through unknown lands in search of bethlehem Commenting on the vision she had received on December 23, 1818, Anna Katharina told her scribe, Clemens Brentano, that “in a dream she never

156 c h a p t e r s i x

saw any holy figure or angel praying with their hands crossed”21 but only with hands folded, arms crossed, or hands clasped. This remark about angels’ hands in the act of prayer must have been particularly striking to Brentano, since he felt compelled to add a visual representation of it. Elsewhere in his journal, he accompanies detailed narrations with drawings that aim to reinforce the reality of what he experienced in Anna Katharina’s presence. He gives sketches of her room; even a plan of her house; the posture of her body in bed (her arms and hands); and, above all, the landscapes, objects, and people she sees during her visions or divinely inspired dreams. Anna Katharina’s comment on saints and angels at prayer comes at the end of an important mystical dream, for Brentano interrupts his initial recording of her words with a parenthetical comment of his own: “This dream seems purely historical according to spiritual time.”22 This is the first time Brentano explains his view of his friend’s visions.23 “Historical” here doesn’t indicate historical reality, that is human time. The dream is historical in the sense that in her visions Anna Katharina participates in the sacred time of divine reality, which humans can only perceive in an allegorical way. In the higher reality of the divine, according to Brentano’s reporting of the mystic’s thoughts, events are both eternal and dynamic, as if they took place in time. A human being visits this higher form of time only for a short while and experiences it as the repetition of a historical event. This conflation of human and sacred time creates strange and inexplicable scenarios, in which, for example, episodes of the Savior’s past life present allusions to the mystic’s present existence. We could claim that Anna Katharina experiences a single vision with innumerable variations. Its main topic is a long journey through foreign lands in the Orient, which in nineteenth-century Germany was “the place of the highest Romanticism.”24 For the Romantic writers, the Orient symbolized an exotic land where human beings lived in uncorrupted harmony with nature.25 Anna Katharina’s narrations may be considered a unique form of travel writing, a genre that was extremely popular in nineteenthcentury Europe. She travels either alone or with others (her “guide” or her mother, for example) and on her way sometimes encounters unknown characters (for example, a man called “the pilgrim”); known ones, such as Clemens Brentano himself; and supportive or hostile figures. She sees churches where she attends Mass with many other faithful, clearings and trees with beautiful leaves. She goes through deserts and woods. Her guide lifts her up, and together they fly through the air. In a meadow she rests and prepares

how to undo

t h e ta l e o f ta l e s

157

for a fearsome battle, or she may face the battle after reaching her final destination, which is Bethlehem. At times, while still on the way, she encounters the Holy Family; at other times she arrives when the Virgin has already given birth. Bethlehem and its surroundings change. Joy or sorrow colors the landscape; the buildings shift, decay, or thrive. Terrifying beasts attack her. She fights a dragon. The risks of her voyage are well synthesized in this telegraphic reportage: “She is often led to foreign lands to caves and dungeons as toward Algiers and sees ships in a storm; she helps travelers who beg her; she helps in a place and suddenly sees a bigger need on the sea and it is as if she could stretch and spiritually extend her hands and bring help there too, and so she does.”26 Anna Katharina’s traveling begins with a sense of disorientation and urgency. Someone has taken her somewhere, an unknown land; she is on her way to Algiers, a place of mysteries preceded by lurking dangers. She must go through dark, deep recesses. She rescues someone “in one place” and at the same time she can’t ignore the pleas of travelers on a stormy sea. She stretches out her arms and saves them. Lying in bed, Anna Katharina relates to her friend—who she knows is a famous writer—bits and pieces of a fantastic tale in which she is the main character. Unlike the usual type of dream, Anna Katharina’s story is both imaginary and real, because all her narratives are also divine allusions to something else, to some kind of happening that transcends history. Being a divine vision it is the fragmented account of a voyage that takes place in the history of sacred time, according to Brentano’s definition. Anna Katharina is traveling toward Algiers, and the dangerous storm is taking place now and always. The desperate voyagers are screaming for help now and always. Anna Katharina’s journey to Algiers will never come to an end. The bedridden nun sometimes laughs at the strange attires and hairdos of the people she sees during her trips to foreign lands, which Brentano occasionally illustrates with simple sketches, as he does for the praying angels. “She tells me that during her journeys she has seen such bizarre people that she can’t help laughing when she thinks about them; she describes naked people with aprons, long earlobes with various things hanging from them, with feathers on their head and crosses and all sorts of designs in blue colors painted on their bodies . . . and then she describes beautifully dressed women, with tightly laced-up figures and rings on their bust . . . [these women] wear some kind of cap with a pigtail, and a short skirt and laced-up feet.” But Anna Katharina remembers these women with disgust when she thinks of the modest garments of the mother of Jesus.27 This is not

158 c h a p t e r s i x

the only unusual encounter recorded in Brentano’s journal. On a few occasions, Anna Katharina meets strange figures who are neither human nor angelic. When she got lost once on her way home and a woman offered her to be her guide, she suddenly saw “apparitions,” who were glowing presences with no specific sexual gender.28 The fairy-tale tinge of Anna Katharina’s report does not mean it is fictional in the sense of false. As we learn from Brentano’s journal, there are things that can be real without existing. One night, before going to bed, Brentano asks Anna Katharina if she has her hands back, since she had previously dreamed they had gone missing. Although he can see that her hands have always been there, he is wondering whether she has placed them in the hands of Jesus.29 The haughty women who prance through the streets of the exotic places the mystic visits during her visions or dreams present a stark contrast to the modest Virgin Mary. In her journey to Bethlehem, Anna Katharina relates, she also sees men wearing turbans in a vaguely Arab fashion.30 Brentano inserts comments on the historical accuracy of Anna Katharina’s words when she recounts the following experience in Bethlehem:

Her Tale Vision of Tuesday evening, December 23 I now entered Bethlehem, a wonderful old scattered place, squarish but irregular houses, ahead a flat and sprawling desert, and sinister, it was dusk, I saw all sorts of people, some arriving and again leaving and some seeking shelter, they spoke with one another, and then turned away as if reproaching themselves (This dream seems purely historical in spiritual time). No one noticed me and I felt that the Mother of God and Joseph were there, and I looked for them, and quietly went through that place and saw, at the end, under a large tree with a very clean, smooth trunk, its branches and foliage very round and unfurled downward like a beautiful linden tree, so that one could rest comfortably under it, an amazingly beautiful, noble, shining female figure and on her left an animal that I didn’t recognize. The animal, on which two chests had been loaded, one on its left side and one on its right side, stood with its head against the tree, it was shaped somewhat like a horse but it wasn’t one, one might think it was a donkey, its head was thin, its ears long and floppy. The young woman’s appearance was so shining that it was transparent. She wore a long robe with no girdle and evenly folded, not tied, her head covered with a veil that hung on her shoulders, her face was rather long, high forehead,

how to undo

t h e ta l e o f ta l e s

159

long eyebrows, slim nose, lovely mouth, the whole figure was incredibly lovely and gentle. While I was looking at her with wonder, I was told that she was Mary, she was waiting for Joseph, who was looking for shelter, and now I saw her sitting down under the tree with her legs crossed, her head down and her arms folded over her bosom. I drew closer and knelt before her and worshiped her with the following words: Marvelous magnificent Great and powerful Loving and spiritual Celestial Lady Here humbly I join you You carry such wonder Your dear little baby In your womb (I heard her speak these words in ecstasy, out loud) As I knelt down, I saw something bright shining next to me and calling me urgently and I saw the saints above me (I gave her the relics that lay at her feet). Now I thought that, since I couldn’t help the Mother of God because I saw her only by grace, I would like to make some clothes for poor children but I avoided all those people around me. I had the small parcel at my side; finally, close to a square house, I saw a small porch with a roof made of twigs; no one was there, so I sneaked inside and opened my package and scattered everything around.31

Anna Katharina begins working on some children’s shirts, but all of a sudden she stops:

It was as if I were being observed, as if someone were coming, and quickly I put everything away (she found everything exactly as she wanted in the cabinet close to her, which pleased and surprised her greatly). Now I went back to Mary and knelt down and commended many people to her, last of all our Luise; she gave me a lovely, kind smile and thanked me with a nod and I saw that she gladly accepted my prayer and that she knew Luise and loved her very much. Now I observed the people that the Mother of God had been waiting for there, and thought how poor my contemporaries were, who know everything, who through the Lord have been saved, and who now pay so little or no attention to him and his mother.32

160 c h a p t e r s i x

Falling into a state of deeper prayer, Anna Katharina sees the adult Jesus standing at a distance from the Virgin Mother and from herself. She explains that she didn’t look at him as if he were her husband. He was a tall shining figure, whom she contemplated in silence. Anna Katharina opens her account with the description of a vast, ominous landscape, with sprawling right-angled houses and an encroaching desert. She walks into this disorienting space, both impressive and alarming, when the sunlight is dimming. She is a foreign traveler who finally reaches her destination at night and feels lost and worried. What Anna Katharina recounts to Brentano is primarily a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Her vision is founded on a “historical” premise, Brentano remarks. The storyteller stresses that she has “now” arrived at Bethlehem, as if to say that what happened before was the journey there. What is troubling is that Anna Katharina has “now” entered the urban space where a miracle, Jesus Christ’s birth, took place almost two millennia ago. Moreover, her story also involves other contemporary characters, Brentano himself and Luise Hensel (1798–1876), whom the Virgin Mary knew even before hearing their names from Anna Katharina. Luise played a major role in Brentano’s life. Born into a Lutheran family, she converted to Catholicism on December 7, 1818, only a few weeks before Anna Katharina’s vision of December 23. Brentano had met Luise in 1816 and immediately felt deeply attracted to her. Although his feelings were unrequited, his heartfelt devotion for the sensitive and religious Luise is a frequent theme in the part of his journal dedicated to Emmerick’s visions. 33 Anna Katharina was fully aware of Brentano’s passion for Luise, and both figure prominently in the mystic’s visions. At the beginning of the vision in question, Anna Katharina finds herself in the midst of a throng of people in search of shelter for the night. She is alone and no one is paying attention to her, but she feels that Joseph and Mary are also there, and so she sets out to find them. We could translate Anna Katharina’s tale from a personal (first-person) account to a fairy-tale narrative by rephrasing her experiences as follows:

Once upon a time a young woman grew so melancholy that her parents feared her life was in danger. An angel appeared to her and told her that God’s son was about to be born. She took the irrevocable decision to leave her father’s house and journeyed through stormy seas and over rough mountains, but also offered compassion and help to those in need. She finally arrived at Bethlehem at dusk.

how to undo

t h e ta l e o f ta l e s

161

The young woman knew nobody there and was very tired and disoriented, but she couldn’t rest until she found the Holy Family. After walking alone through the town at night, she finally saw from afar a female figure shining through the darkness and a fantastic horse standing under a beautiful tree.

Our rewriting of Anna Katharina’s tale introduces the clichéd elements of a fairy tale: a sudden melancholy befalls the heroine; her parents are very concerned. An angel (it could have been a fairy) intervenes and invites her to embark on a risky but unavoidable journey. These clichéd aspects (deep melancholy, the angelic appearance, her firm decision to depart) are familiar elements of Anna Katharina’s daily life and mystical revelations. At times, especially before entering a vision, she falls prey to searing depression, physical suffering, and disorientation. She is constantly sick but expresses compassion and spiritual support to her neighbors. She sometimes feels abandoned by God. An angel often accompanies her through her mystical voyages. She calls him “my guide” (mein Führer). In her vision, the marvelous surprise (the shining figure under a large tree) leads the young traveler to pay homage to the mysterious lady (recall that Brentano heard Anna Katharina praying aloud to Mary); the lady, however, doesn’t respond to the traveler’s words, because she is visibly tired; she sits down under the tree and lowers her head, trying to rest. Unable to help the silent lady, Anna Katharina decides to do something for the poor children of that isolated town. In real life she was a seamstress, and in her vision she has brought along a box containing the tools of her trade. But isn’t the luminous but tired lady pregnant? Moreover, haven’t both Mary and Anna Katharina left their homes and traveled through inhospitable lands before reaching that modest town in the desert? Won’t Mary’s newborn child also be in need of some clothes? What the young traveler faces at this point is the traditional task of every fairy tale. The heroine has to prove to a royal family that her intentions are good and she is trustworthy. She hurries to a seemingly abandoned house and gets to work right away. After cutting out some children’s shirts, she has the clear impression that someone is watching her, is approaching, and so she puts everything aside and goes back to Mary, who is still under the tree. But what happened to the children’s shirts? Brentano writes that Anna Katharina was very pleased to find “everything” in perfect order in the cabinet next to her bed, as if by magic. After all, in her vision she had left them scattered on the floor. Was making shirts alone in an abandoned house at

162 c h a p t e r s i x

night, with hostile presences eyeing her, the same kind of task demanded of Psyche, who had to sort out countless seeds thrown on the ground? When she returns to Mary, whose beauty shines in the dark, the Mother of God is welcoming other people but finds the time to listen to Anna Katharina’s entreaties (please, Mary, remember my friend Clemens and his friend Luise) and to give her a bright smile. Anna Katharina’s behavior must have pleased the Lady of Heaven, who now reassures her humble visitor that her prayers will be granted. Anna Katharina has undoubtedly fulfilled her task and benefited her dear friends. But the challenging journey she has endured and her work in the dark house have also granted her the ultimate reward. Anna Katharina, the melancholy young woman of our fairy-tale version, had no choice but to leave her parents’ house and seek the Holy Family. Having proved her honesty and perseverance, she finally receives the object of her deepest affection, Jesus himself, but not as a baby in a manger (or under a tree in her vision), but as a gentle and handsome man who allows her to marvel at his unfathomable divinity. Anna Katharina’s heart almost bursts with her love for him as he stands at a distance from her. “My heart was like the entire world,” she explains, “and he took everything in.” What she experiences is certainly a love encounter. This is the happy ending of her adventurous journey.

a new psyche in search of the god of love “Her Tale” is the title Brentano chooses for Anna Katharina’s vision, but in his comments inserted within her story he also uses the words “dream” and “ecstasy.” The events in her story take place simultaneously here and there, ‘here’ meaning her room and ‘there’ the foreign journey culminating in the encounter with the Savior. They also happen both in the present and in the past, because although she tells her story in the past tense (“Now I entered Bethlehem”), Brentano says that he heard her recite her prayer to the Virgin out loud during her ecstasy. In other words, Anna Katharina speaks her pious words now but worships the Virgin then. The most interesting example of dialogue between present and past tense is her expression of great surprise at finding all her things nicely set in the cabinet next to her bed, since she had grabbed everything in a rush when she felt watched in the abandoned house in Bethlehem. “Her dream,” to recall Brentano’s definition, is “historical” because it pertains to the here and now of the dreamer’s life. It is a strange dream indeed; a dream in which being awake and being

how to undo

t h e ta l e o f ta l e s

163

asleep are not mutually exclusive because the tale is created only through their collaboration. Time past and time present work together to make the story of the German pilgrim’s tale effective. The immemorial time of the Gospel setting, the more recent past of the pilgrim’s travel to the Holy Land, the present of her telling the story, and her joy at finding her things as she had left before her journey, all these temporal categories are necessary for the success of this tale. But the tale wouldn’t be complete without its future ramifications. The tale doesn’t end, for it is both a personal and a universal story. Like a fairy tale, Anna Katharina’s narration has blurry details and a straightforward evolution. Her voyage happened sometime in the past, but her listeners, primarily Brentano, understand that it concerns them as well. As we have seen, in speaking to the Virgin, Anna Katharina also interceded on behalf of Brentano and Luise Hensel, whom Mary, even before giving birth to Jesus, already knew. The tale of Anna Katharina’s difficult and dangerous journey, her night walk through Bethlehem, the appearance of the magical lady under the tree, all these details, all the single episodes of her tale belong to Brentano and Luise as well. The basic traits of the tale, however, are shared by all readers, Christian and non-Christian alike. We can all identify with a pilgrim wandering at night through a foreign city in which something magical is happening. As is often the case in an oral tale, there are gaps in the account, unexplained shifts from one landscape to another, from one situation to another, but also truncated motifs, such as we find in Basile. For example, who was spying on the modest German seamstress in the deserted house? What happened to this intruder? Why did she bring her sewing tools on her long journey? How many shirts was she able to complete before hurrying out of the house and what became of them? We don’t know the fate of the shirts because Anna Katharina sees no children when returning to Mary. And a new trial awaits her. Looking at all the people gathered around the pregnant Mother of God, the German traveler feels sorry for all her contemporaries who have forgotten the shining lady, her husband Joseph, and their divine infant. Recall the desolate conditions of the temples dedicated to Venus, the goddess of love, and Psyche’s deep sorrow when her beloved disappears. Anna Katharina renews her search for her god by falling into a deeper state of prayer, a deeper state of longing, like Psyche begging her absent lover to reveal himself to her and grant her his help in times of need. And Jesus, the god of love, does permit the German pilgrim, who has endured so much, finally to see him.

164 c h a p t e r s i x

the beautiful tree at night where the mother of love and her magical horse take a rest Speaking of narrative holes, we failed to mention the most remarkable gap in Anna Katharina’s report: the birth of Jesus. This is what one could expect her to describe at the end of her adventure. Seeing the baby would be the happy ending, the apex of her entire experience. But she makes no mention of the baby, though she sees him in some other visions.34 In this tale, the beautiful linden tree takes center stage. Trees hold a magical power both in mystical narratives and fairy tales. Remember the finale of Brentano’s “The Myrtle-Maiden,” with all the members of the royal family living in eternity in a myrtle forest that sprang out of a magical tree. For Anna Katharina, trees are extremely important in some of her visions. She describes their bright foliage, their solid trunks, and their immense beauty. In a bleak vision of darkening skies and people scuttling here and there in a state of utter confusion, she sees a beautiful tree rising up from within a church.35 An indescribable sweetness takes hold of her when she looks at its luminous foliage. Her “guide” explains to her that the holy church resembles that growing tree. In Christian mysticism, the ‘tree of life’ signifies the divine that became incarnate in Christ. In another vision, Anna Katharina sees a tree that “dies more and more,” its flowers falling off its branches.36 Trees can hold the meaning of an entire tale. Both in fairy tales and mystical revelations, a tree appears to introduce a sense of magic and mystery. It is a living organism that ‘knows’ more than it lets on. Anna Katharina sees the linden tree as the resting place for the mother of love and her fantastic animal, neither a horse nor a donkey. We are reminded of the winged horses, descendants of Pegasus, that carry fairy-tale heroes through time and space. When, like a new Psyche, the mystic falls into a more profound state of desire and thus into a more intense search for love, the tree metamorphoses into Christ, a tall, imposing, and luminous figure who stands alone in the distance. If this were a fairy tale, we would say that the tree finally reveals its true identity, that it is indeed the tree of life, the word of God on earth. Read in this manner, the missing description of the birth of Jesus makes sense. Mary, her followers, and the German pilgrim all gather around the protective branches of the tree. This vision is nothing but a tale of wonder, we could conclude. There was no spell to break. Love can finally come out of the tree, so to speak, as Lady Wisdom comes out of the myrtle tree, thanks to the power of love, thanks to the pilgrim who, after a long and perilous journey, has overcame a number of tasks to reach her love.

how to undo

t h e ta l e o f ta l e s

165

mystical visions and fairy tales We need to clarify a few important points before we proceed. First of all, the goal of my analysis of Anna Katharina’s tale was not to show that mystical visions are sorts of fairy tales, in the negative sense of false and childish stories. I had no intention of belittling or even mocking the German mystic’s accounts. Nor did I wish to show that fairy tales have a religious foundation. In her visions, Anna Katharina focuses on a set of motifs, that she collects, scatters, and reassembles, as we find in the tradition of oral and written fairy tales. We have seen this process in the making and unmaking of the Cupid and Psyche tale, starting with Apuleius and moving on to Basile, Gonzenbach, and others. The intrinsic vitality of a tale resides in its restlessness, in its hiding within other tales, in its saying the opposite of what it seemed to be saying, in its dying and being reborn in new forms. The spell of storytelling is at work when the tale shows that it rests on no assured assumption and on no safe ground. The spell is complete when we no longer know what the tale is and what it means. Its message—whether moral or immoral, conventional or unconventional—appears and disappears by magic, for morality is not a narrative requirement. Although mystical narrative is usually associated with writing rather than speaking, many mystics write down their experiences of seeing or hearing something divine. We know that Anna Katharina defies this model, but she is not the first to embody an oral form of mysticism. Medieval and early modern women mystics, especially in Italy, manifested their supernatural experiences orally. Scribes (usually male, like Brentano), recorded what these mystics said both during and after their visions. At the end of a vision (what Brentano also calls a “dream”), the mystics would do their best to explain the unclear passages of their speeches. Anna Katharina was especially fond of an Italian ‘oral’ mystic, Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1566–1607), of whom she kept a precious relic. A relic of a given saint often led to the mystical encounter between Anna Katharina and that saint. When she lived in the cloister, Anna Katharina tells Brentano, she saw many paintings of Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, who “must have had many beautiful visions.”37 During a dramatic rapture in which she enters a church and suddenly feels she is missing both her legs and her hands, Brentano places a relic of de’ Pazzi (a piece of the saint’s shoe) on Anna Katharina’s blanket. It has an immediate soothing effect.38 In his biographical sketch of Anna Katharina, Brentano explicitly compares her to Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi.39 The Italian visionary, who spent most of her life in the Florentine monastery of Saint Mary of the Angels,

166 c h a p t e r s i x

gave voice to her visions as an oral storyteller. She enlivened her narratives by varying the pitch of her voice and adding expressive gestures and movements—for example, when she visits Purgatory, she sees her dead brother there, and asks him how she can alleviate his pain; or when she visits the places of Christ’s Passion and even enters his sepulcher. Like Brentano, Maria Maddalena’s fellow nuns transcribed the mystic’s words while she was uttering them, including her silences and repetitions, and then asked her to help them turn her statements into a coherent story.40 Also like Brentano, the nuns also added their own remarks and insights. Particularly relevant to this study is a basic similarity between de’ Pazzi’s oral narratives and Anna Katharina’s. Both visionaries rely on a limited set of motifs, which they repeat through a number of inventive variations. Their adventures are always the same, yet always new.

led by her guide toward bethlehem, anna katharina waits for the pilgrim under a tree In her numerous mystical journeys to the Holy Land, Anna Katharina encounters the same people and the same places, though nobody and nothing remain the same. What follows is my succinct paraphrase of a slightly earlier voyage. We recognize the same settings and most of the figures.

On the night of December 15, 1818, Anna Katharina found herself in a meadow, waiting for a battle to begin, when her guide asked her to follow him to the Virgin Mary’s shelter. They arrived at a square house similar to all the other houses she had seen in her previous journeys to the Holy Land. There was a thicket behind this house. They walked in, and by the tools hanging on the clay walls of this shabby, empty house she concluded that it was the home of a shepherd. A friendly old man welcomed the two visitors and took them, as if he already knew why they were there, to a dark room in which she recognized Mary and Joseph, who were sitting on the floor by the left wall. Although there was no light in the room, it was bright around Mary, who wore a veil on her head, sat with her legs crossed and her arms folded over her bosom. Mary looked humble, but at the same time she seemed to know something, yet dared not know it. It was like the expression on Luise’s face, but Mary was more beautiful. The Virgin and Joseph, a friendly elderly man, said nothing. Anna Katharina worshipped them and prayed. Then, passing through the thicket at the back of the house, her guide took her to another vast meadow, at the end of which she saw something that looked

how to undo

t h e ta l e o f ta l e s

167

like a city or a village, but was neither of them, and that was Bethlehem. She sat under a green tree and was to wait there for the Pilgrim, until the birth of the Savior. She was to beseech the newborn child that everything might flourish like the trees on the meadow. She understood that when her guide returned, she would follow him to Bethlehem again. When she woke up, it was dark. Still half asleep, she realized that she would have to fight two battles, one against temptation and the second would be victory or death!41

A sense of foreboding broods over this new tale. It opens and closes by announcing an upcoming conflict. The image of a meadow at the beginning and at the end of the tale recalls an empty battlefield in the tense moments preceding a war. This is not the story of a solitary traveler who finally arrives at a village where many other travelers are looking for shelter. The Virgin does not appear at night like a luminous presence in a clearing under a magnificent tree. The magic of that natural scenario is absent from this story. Mary still shines in the dark but is now hiding with her elderly husband in a corner of a modest, run-down house, like two refugees trying to escape an upcoming war. As in the previous journey, the Virgin, wearing a veil, sits with her legs crossed and says nothing. In this reportage from Bethlehem, Anna Katharina is the one who walks to a beautiful green tree and there waits for her guide’s return, as Mary had waited for her husband in the previous vision. In this tale the Virgin and the German mystic have switched places, so to speak: whereas in the first story Anna Katharina hides in a house to sew some clothes and Mary stands quietly outside, now Mary sits in the dark of an unlit room, with no additional explanation. This change is related to a major transformation of the main character: here the German traveler is not a poor seamstress who wishes to see the baby Jesus; she is a woman who has been drafted to fight a war against an ominous enemy. The tale has a dramatic beginning: although Anna Katharina is already on a battlefield patiently waiting for chaos to break out, her guide takes her away as if a more dangerous war requires her presence. She is the improbable heroine chosen by fate to restore order under fierce attack. The conflation of two or more historical and spatial levels is evident in this tale. The Virgin Mary reminds Anna Katharina of Luise Hensel, the only difference being that the Virgin is more beautiful. Moreover, in the second meadow Anna Katharina waits for her guide and for the “Pilgrim,” her nickname for Clemens Brentano. Finally, the nature of the two battles becomes clearer to Anna Katharina in the twilight zone between dream and wakeful-

168 c h a p t e r s i x

ness, as Brentano remarks. One conflict will be a test; the second will see life against death. The tale is unfinished, although its ending seems predictable: the birth of Jesus. But the tale presents Christ’s birth as a moot resolution. Anna Katharina contemplates Bethlehem from afar, as Jesus, in the Gospel account, looks at Jerusalem and mourns its sad future, when its enemies will besiege and devastate the city (Luke 19:41–44). The tale is not a predictable rewriting of the Gospel; it narrates something urgent and deeply personal. It eloquently tells a story at once universal and totally private. ‘Once upon a time’ a mysterious ‘guide’ visits a poor German seamstress whose destiny is to defend a besieged city from violent enemies. She crosses a meadow; then visits a poor family with magical powers living in a dark house; walks through a dark “thicket”; finally reaches an open space looking over the endangered city. There she waits for her ‘guide,’ who will lead her to the city, and for a pilgrim, who will accompany her in this final adventure. The pilgrim Brentano does arrive to meet her, but not on the meadow overlooking Bethlehem, but in her bedroom in Germany. The war will take place in the here and now of her present situation, although, according to her tale, its results will affect the battle there, in Bethlehem, the city awaiting the birth of the Savior.42 Rather than dismissing this narrative confusion as the product of a delusional mind (or, rather, of two delusional minds since Brentano took these tales very seriously and functioned as the narrator’s scribe), we should welcome its puzzling character as an insight into the nature and power of storytelling. The logic of the two tales may be problematic, but what is unquestionable is their urgency. These tales need to be told. Whatever their meaning may be, both narrators (the storyteller and the writer) believe that these stories have something pressing to communicate. The narrators are also characters in both stories. The war that the heroine is about to fight there, in the tale, will have consequences that are felt here. The vicissitudes of Anna Katharina’s long journeys, her encounters with strange figures, animals, and dragons, share something basic with the Grimms’ fairy tales and with Basile’s disturbing renderings of the Cupid and Psyche myth. Our own biographies contain echoes of these tales. The bedridden seamstress Anna Katharina Emmerick, whose life oscillates between a mythic past (Bethlehem) and a prosaic but nonetheless dangerous present (Germany), is someone we can identify with. In one of her most moving visions (during the night of December 13, 1818), she finds herself in a garden full of flowers and sees her mother, who, instead of her modest peasant clothes, is wearing a white gown and appears younger than her daughter. Anna Katharina marvels at this amazing

how to undo

t h e ta l e o f ta l e s

169

sight. Her guide and a pilgrim are standing next to her.43 Her mother tells her that she must travel for many hours and that the pilgrim will show her the way to the land of the Mother of God. But I can’t travel in my nun’s clothes, replies Anna Katharina, because they will get dirty. She goes to a square house, where some people give her a white gown, which is similar to a white blanket. She walks through the garden and notices that her mother doesn’t want to look at her. The pilgrim looks sad and walks ahead of her, while her guide is beside her. She and her two companions travel “through seas and woods and mountains,” and finally reach the Mother of God’s land. She sits down quietly in a meadow, and the pilgrim disappears. She realizes then that the pilgrim was Brentano, and wonders why he has left her alone there. At that point she wakes up.44 What is this tale about? Rather than leaving her mother, it seems like her mother wants her daughter out of the garden, which recalls the Garden of Eden. The mother refuses to say goodbye to her and pretends not to see her. Does the pilgrim look sad because of this expulsion? Fairy-tale heroines, more often than heroes, change clothes before or during their travels. Their journeys entail major identity transformation. Anna Katharina takes off her black religious habit and puts on a white gown. Her justification for this change, that her black clothes will get dirty, is illogical, but that is not unusual in fairy tales. Anna Katharina now looks like a messenger of peace. Once again, her ultimate destination is the Holy Land, but before getting there she must be kind and loyal to the pilgrim, who has been betrayed by others. Her trial is to wait alone for his return, not knowing if or when he will be back. All of Anna Katharina’s tales end before reaching a reassuring conclusion. This interruption corresponds to the passage from the there of a mythic, religious past to a here that is dominated by the lamentable distance from that pristine past. As she travels between these two temporal areas, she also travels between two identities, being both main character and storyteller of her own tale. In that regard, Anna Katharina embodies what the Brothers Grimm see as the core of Volk narrative: the contrast between the past time of poetic expression and the present time struggling to safeguard the remnants of that original narrative. By interrupting her storytelling and journeying back from the Holy Land to her modest room in Germany, Anna Katharina demonstrates that those original stories (the Gospel narratives) cannot end in the past. Her waiting for the pilgrim or for the imminent battle near Bethlehem cannot find its resolution there because the battle and the pilgrim’s arrival will take place

170 c h a p t e r s i x

here, in the future. Fairy tales too travel from ‘once upon a time’ to the present time of their reception; and their conclusions may correspond to their listeners’ hopes for the future. Fairy tales and mystical tales, while not belonging in the same literary genre, share some fundamental traits. Both forms of storytelling speak of a timeless reality and truth. When the Grimms or Perrault (though not Basile) transmit the story of a princess who lies unconscious until kissed by a prince, these authors are revealing a truth that, in their view, is natural and inescapable. Mystical tales, too, summon timeless truths that correspond to the laws of nature. It is imperative to understand that the Grimms’ search for original, natural Volk poetry corresponds to the retrieval of an original, natural order of things. In other words, as far as their tales are concerned, style and content go hand in hand. Fairy tales are hymns to nature, to its beauty and magic, and to its unfathomable truth. Although Anna Katharina’s visions manipulate and rewrite the major episodes of the life of Jesus, primarily his birth, from a spiritual standpoint these rewritings are historically accurate; temporally they are situated in the dialogue between the time Jesus was living on earth and nineteenth-century Germany. From Brentano’s point of view, mystical tales have the advantage over fairy tales that they are at once linked to history and free from history’s shackles. Unlike Cupid and Psyche, Jesus existed at a given time and in a given place, but, like the two lovers he seems to defy time and space without betraying his original significance. Finally, what fairy tales do not have is a sense of apocalyptic closure. No fairy tale foreshadows the end of time. As we saw in Anna Katharina’s visions, retelling the story of Jesus’s life means announcing the end not only of this story but of all stories, all characters, and all storytellers.

chapter seven

Where Are the Ogresses of Yesteryear? The Neapolitan Cupids and Psyches in the Hands of the Brothers Grimm

Basile’s Cupids and Psyches underwent new metamorphoses in 1822. In that year the Brothers Grimm published their “German adaptations” of all the stories included in Basile’s The Tale of Tales as an appendix to the second edition of their Kinder- und Haus Märchen (1819). Jacob wrote thirty-eight of these adaptations. Wilhelm later edited these and worked on the remaining twelve Neapolitan tales.1 Although the Grimms reduced a few of the tales to mere outlines, it is unquestionable that they took their editorial enterprise very seriously; their abbreviated versions of the fifty Italian tales take up a hundred pages of the 1822 volume.2 After the publication of Felix Liebrecht’s complete German translation of The Tale of Tales (1846), however, the Grimms realized that their summaries had become superfluous, and so they removed them from all subsequent editions of their famous collection.3 Despite their choppy syntax, typographic errors, misinterpretations, and significant alterations, some of the Grimms’ succinct rewritings are masterpieces of literary grace, synthesis, and simplicity, especially when compared with Basile’s exuberant style.4 Even though certain passages read like unpolished first drafts, many attain the stylistic lightness typical of the Grimms’ tales and rare in Basile’s. Moreover, in editing and summarizing Basile, the Grimms follow the same ideological strategies detectable in their own German tales. A relevant example is their treatment of female characters, who in Basile often show an active and courageous attitude. The Grimms tend to edit out women’s speeches and, when possible, their brave deeds as well, so as to bring them closer to the female identity typical of many of their German tales. When

172 c h a p t e r s e v e n

we look at the way they manipulate Basile’s stories, we realize that the alleged ‘universal’ message of some of the Grimms’ famous tales (“Cinderella,” “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” etc.) actually results from a conscious ideological decision.

In his introduction to an Italian translation of the Grimms’ volume, Italo Calvino praises Wilhelm Grimm, who “gave to their writing that lightness and spontaneity” that seem so “natural” to the reader.5 Calvino believes that Basile’s baroque, digressive style is often unbalanced and only works well when it creates “a sort of osmosis” between narration and linguistic expression.6 We could say that with their summaries the Grimms subject Basile’s storytelling to a discreet process of ‘universalization,’ which Calvino himself tried to accomplish when he put together his standard Italian translations of tales that had previously been recorded in their original dialects by nineteenth-century Italian ethnographers. Calvino’s interest in fairy tales is not “the result of loyalty to an ethnic tradition,” because his roots “are planted in an entirely modern and cosmopolitan Italy.”7 In Calvino’s view, Basile’s confusing and disordered tales (what I have called their oral-written style) cannot respond to the cultural needs of modern Italy. In order to become universal, Calvino maintains, a fairy tale must leave its oral, and thus provincial, origin behind, which also means that it needs to abandon its inconsistencies, its contradictions, and its obscurities. The result is Calvino’s Italian Folk Tales. The act itself of summarizing Basile involves a certain purification of the Neapolitan dross so unpalatable for Calvino and the Grimms. Even though the Brothers Grimm rarely insert new details or misrepresent aspects of the original Italian versions, they often manage to turn the obscure, disturbing Neapolitan cunti into Märchen like their own. For the Grimms, The Tale of Tales was not only the first book of European oral fairy tales and therefore an essential model for all possible subsequent works in this genre; it was also, and more importantly, “the best and the richest” collection ever produced in Europe.8 In particular, the Grimms held that the content of Basile’s book is almost “without inauthentic additions.”9 This is also how the Grimms wished their readers to see their own collection, that is, “as an independent source, complete in itself,” rather than as “a collection assembled by human agency.”10 It was thus of major importance for the two German scholars to show that Basile’s approach to the hypothetical oral tradition of fairy tales did not differ from theirs. And to a certain extent The Tale of Tales and Children’s and Household Tales share some fundamental traits.

where are the ogresses of yesteryear?

173

Like the Italian book, the Grimms’ collection is a “hybrid text,” manipulating its oral origins by means of a distinctly literary style, which nonetheless purports to reflect its allegedly oral source.11 As Maria Tatar points out, in successive editions of their work, the Grimms “widened the gulf between oral source (when it existed) and printed text.”12 Despite their significant stylistic differences, The Tale of Tales and Children’s and Household Tales position themselves at the crossroad between oral transmission and written interpretation. It is thus evident that the Grimms’ adaptations of Basile also served an ideological purpose:, they intended to prove that The Tale of Tales was the prestigious precursor of their Children’s and Household Tales. In their view, the unquestionable differences between the Italian and the German oral narratives of magic resulted primarily from the two very different national identities, but ethnic discrepancies could not affect the universal meaning and structure of a fairy tale. According to the Grimms’ introduction to their summaries, the knowledge of “ancient history and mythology” seems to be more widespread among Italians.13 The Grimms contend that Italians, with their humorous and vivacious nature, seem to be closer to those original myths that return in so many fairy tales. To fully appreciate the significance of the Grimms’ summaries of Basile’s stories, we must keep in mind that their interpretation of Basile was controversial. Clemens Brentano, Jack Zipes reminds us, “was originally responsible for the interest of the Brothers Grimm in the phenomenon of the folk tale,” for it was at the request of Brentano and Ludwig Achim von Arnim that they began collecting German oral tales in 1805.14 In 1810 they sent Brentano forty-nine tales, which Brentano intended to use for a future collection that never materialized; he even misplaced their manuscript, which strained his relationship with the young Grimms.15 When the first edition of Children’s and Household Tales came out in 1812, Brentano sent von Arnim a letter in which he expressed his disappointment with the Grimms’ work and also his deep disagreement with their view of Basile’s The Tale of Tales.16 Brentano’s assessment of the Grimms’ seminal volume is explicitly linked to their ‘wrong’ interpretation of Basile’s collection. “A few days ago, I bought the Grimms’ fairy tales,” writes Brentano. He finds the introduction well written but the book as a whole unsatisfactory. Some of the tales, Brentano complains, are boring.17 In particular, as far as the Grimms’ relationship with Basile in concerned, Brentano contends that “in The Tale of Tales, Basile, whom they [the Grimms] present as their model, chose not to be faithful in the way they think he is, because not only does he place his fairy tales

174 c h a p t e r s e v e n

within a narrative frame, but he also garnishes them with various elegant echoes and even with Petrarchan verses.”18 Brentano himself had grown up appreciating fairy tales as oral narrations. His mother told him fairy tales, and he had heard several oral tales from an elderly woman in the city of Marburg.19 It was Brentano who helped the Grimms approach the fairy-tale tradition as an essentially oral phenomenon. As the German philologist Heinz Rölleke points out, both the Grimms and Brentano see this genre as a conflation of oral and literary sources and styles: The Grimms edit their oral transcriptions to the point of turning them into artistic hybrids; Brentano’s Italian Fairy Tales are essentially based on Basile’s book, but his Fairy Tales from the Rhine borrow from the German oral tradition.20 What must not be forgotten is that the Brothers Grimm and Brentano, while regarding Basile as an essential model, draw very different, almost opposite conclusions about what the Neapolitan author does with his tales. The Grimms, on the one hand, see The Tale of Tales as the first, most powerful, rendition of European oral narratives; Brentano, on the other, highlights the literary nature of the Neapolitan collection. According to Brentano, Basile is “faithful” to the oral origins of his tales and thus also to the Italian Volk’s voice and wisdom, but not as the Grimms claim. For Brentano, in its passage from oral transmission to written page, a tale must turn into a literary product, without pretending to be what it is not. Brentano demonstrates this conviction in his Italian Fairy Tales, which is an inventive rewriting of eleven of Basile’s stories. A number of these ‘Italian’ tales underwent several drafts that significantly expanded the original Italian version. In Brentano’s hands, some of Basile’s brief stories became lengthy and complex novellas. Von Arnim, the discreet confidant both of Brentano and of the Grimms, is aware of their unflattering views of each other’s fairy tales. He confesses to the Grimms his own reservations about Brentano’s overembellished style, in contrast to the simplicity of the Grimms’ renditions, but he also identifies in Brentano’s highly literary elaboration a sincere and powerful “impulse” (Drang).21 With rare acumen, von Arnim tries to make sense of both approaches to fairy tales, conflicting as they seem. Brentano’s tales, unlike the Grimms’, are meant for parents and not for children. They trigger a mother’s imagination and thus reinforce her storytelling.22 “The story a child retells,” writes Arnim to the Grimms, “is very different from what he has just heard from his mother.”23 “Immutable fairy tales,” he insists, “would be the death of the fairy-tale world.” Arnim reconciles the Grimms’ and Brentano’s views by seeing them as the dynamic rapport between the impulse of an adult,

where are the ogresses of yesteryear?

175

thus self-aware, narrator (Brentano) and the spontaneity of a childlike listener, who retells the same story with unbridled enthusiasm (Grimms).

The Grimms’ summaries of The Tale of Tales are literary manifestos. The two German scholars achieve this process of ‘Grimmification’ (my neologism) not by adding but by omitting seemingly minor details from the original tale. At stake, for the Grimms, is the pursuit or the creation of an easily recognizable logic within the original Neapolitan stories, which is also a central concern behind the careful editing and rewriting to which they submit their own German tales. A stricter narrative coherence yields a sharper, more visible moral message, an element often lacking in Basile’s sprawling tales.24 As Louis Vax reminds us, ‘fairy tale’ does not necessarily equal ‘moral tale.’25 An apparently illogical, confusing tale obviously fails to communicate a simple moral message. The Grimms’ two editorial labors (the Basile summaries and the reshaping of their own German fairy tales) are mutually enlightening. Grimms scholars rightly define the fairy tale as Zielform, a goaloriented narrative perennially “on the way toward” its “ideal realization.”26 Of course, what “ideal” really means can’t be determined since it doesn’t yet exist. “Ideal” points more to the recalcitrant nature of the fairy tale than to a future literary object. Scholars have described the Grimms’ style as polished and simple, which results from their “habit of tinkering idly and uninhibitedly with the language of the text,” in an attempt to produce “a text that was maximally pleasing to them.”27 I would argue, however, that what pleased them was shaping a narrative that would be “more suitable for children,” for in so doing they would get closer to the alleged natural form of their tale, given that children are supposed to be the primary audience of fairy tales.28 In other words, the more appropriate for children, the purer and less defiled the Grimms’ tales would become. Their approach had a clear ideological component also, in that they regarded their work as an “educational project” intended to promote “the reestablishment of a value system based on morality and tradition in postNapoleonic Germany.”29 The trauma of the historical events that had shaken Germany could be healed by teaching people how to appreciate the morality of a “largely idealized bygone era.”30 Conjuring up the magic of a pristine era goes hand in hand with the evocation of a childlike openness to the unknown, the mysterious, but the intrinsically positive and moral. Style and content support each other. Their invention of a new literary style, at once polished, harmonious,

176 c h a p t e r s e v e n

and also simple like oral storytelling (assuming that oral narratives are always simple), recalls Francesco Petrarch’s creation of a new poetic style, which, like the Grimms’ book, influenced European culture for centuries. The comparison between Petrarch’s medieval canzoniere and the Grimms’ nineteenth-century fairy tales may sound outlandish, but it should be noted that Petrarch’s Italian melodious verses, its deeply simplified, pure lexicon and syntax, were the invention of a poet who didn’t even live in Italy. If all pious princesses, pleasant landscapes, swords and shields are “beautiful” (schön) in the Grimms’ collection and in their rewritings of Basile, Petrarch’s beloved Laura is often “vague” (vaga), an adjective that, far from indicating something negative, signifies the lady’s mysterious and indefinable charm. Everything in the Grimms’ tales is “vague,” but this all-encompassing vagueness is also a way of expressing and preserving the allegedly original purity of the tale, an atemporal narrative that only exists, paradoxically, in the here and now of its oral, transient, and thus ‘impure’ expression.

A fairy tale’s restlessness (its Zielform) destabilizes every aspect of its organism, from its narrative structure to the very nature of its characters, who are unable to keep a steady identity. “Fairy tales,” as Donald Haase puts it, “consist of chaotic symbolic codes that have become highly ambiguous and invite quite diverse responses,” and “these responses will reflect a recipient’s experience, perspective, or predisposition.”31 The restive figures of tales of magic can’t help but become something else in a sort of narrative mutation that has no conclusive incarnation. In Basile’s The Tale of Tales, the clearest example of an unfathomable and insecure creature is the ogress, who is and is not herself and can even give birth to creatures who are not ogresses or ogres but not totally human either. As a mother, the ogress literally embodies a mysterious process of generation that either upholds or rejects its genetic origin. A bestial creature with human traits or a human creature with bestial traits, in either case the ogress gives birth to a ‘marvel’ that is already visible in herself. The ogress is indeed a monstrum. An ogress can be both ogress and fairy in different moments of the same tale (“The Three Crowns”), or she can be the mother of a fairy (“The Dove”) or of a bunch of other ogresses plus a more-than-human man with a few ogre genes (“The Golden Trunk”).32 Perrault maintains the ogress’s unclear status in “Sleeping Beauty,” in which the queen, whom the king had married only because of her significant wealth, is “de race ogresse” and can’t wait to devour her grandchildren.33 Perrault may even have wanted his hero, the brave and

where are the ogresses of yesteryear?

177

handsome prince, to be a mixed-blood. His children, with such adorable names as “Aurore” and “Jour,” have ogre blood as well. It is not by chance, then, that in their adaptations of The Tale of Tales the Grimms often either give the Neapolitan ogresses new identities or fail to mention the ogre heritage of these women. Mixed-race characters are not welcome in the German tales, whose educational goals and rhetorical symmetries cannot tolerate unclear presences. The German word Menschenfresserin (literally, a female eater of people) doesn’t do justice to Basile’s mindtwisting orca.

What follows are my translations of the Grimms’ adaptations of “The Padlock” and “The Golden Trunk.” After reading each of the two versions, we will take a look at the subtle, and not so subtle, mutations undergone by the identities and biographies of the Neapolitan Cupids and Psyches. Reading Basile’s troubling tales through the lenses of the Brothers Grimm is like consuming a three-layered cake, in which three flavors, albeit still independently detectable, produce a new, at times odd taste. The three ingredients of the Grimms’ Neapolitan tales are: The Latin tale of Cupid and Psyche Basile’s versions of the Latin tale The Grimmification of Basile’s versions of the Latin tale

“The Little Magic Box”34 A poor woman with three daughters wants to cook something and tells her two oldest daughters to fetch water at a fountain. They refuse, so she decides to go herself, but the youngest says: “No, I will get the water; I am strong enough to carry it.” She takes the jug and walks out of the city to the fountain where she finds a manservant, who says to her: “My dear, would you like to go with me to my cave, so can give you something pretty?” “First I must take the jug of water to my mother and then I will come back right away.” She does so and the servant takes her through a cave into a marvelous underground palace. Everything is made of gold and silver; a table is set with fancy food. At night she is taken to a bed, its covers embroidered with pearls. When all the lights have been taken away, someone lies down beside her. This goes on for a while, and then she feels like seeing her mother. She says so to the servant. He gives her gold as a gift for her mother, but he tells her that

178 c h a p t e r s e v e n

she must be back soon and may not reveal anything to anyone about where she is living. She observes all his orders carefully. Her mother and her sisters want to go back with her, but she does not allow it. She returns a couple of times more and her sisters grow more envious of her good fortune. From a witch they finally learn everything, and on their sister’s next visit they reveal the secret to her, that at night the most handsome young man in the world lies at her side, but if she wishes to be perfectly happy she must follow their advice. When she lies in bed at night and the servant brings in her nightly drink, she must ask him to get her a napkin, and in his absence she must empty the cup. In this way she will stay awake, and as soon as her husband falls asleep, she must open the magic box (catenaccio, padlock), and then she will become the happiest woman in the world. She doesn’t recognize their deceit and does everything as she is told. She lights a candle and sees a most handsome young man, as radiant as a rose, sleeping beside her. She opens the magic box. Then and there, several tiny women come out of it. On their heads they are carrying the finest yarn, but when one drops a skein, the careless girl cries out: “Dear lady, pick up the yarn!” At her shout, the young man wakes up, becomes angry, and asks his servant to lead her out of the palace wearing the old rags in which she had arrived. She goes home, but her sisters send her away. She wanders through the world.35 Finally she arrives at a royal palace, where she rests on a bundle of straw and is looked after by one of the queen’s maids. She brings a wonderful baby boy into the world. At night, when everything is asleep, a young man walks into the room and says: “Oh, my dear son, you should be washed in a golden basin and swaddled in diapers interlaced with gold. If only no rooster would ever crow again!” At the crowing of the rooster he disappears. The maid relates this to the queen, who by way of punishment orders that all the roosters be killed. The following night the young man arrives. The queen recognizes him as her son and embraces him. The curse, which had been cast upon him, is thus lifted.36Because of this curse, he had to wander away from his paternal house until his mother embraced him and no rooster crowed anymore.

a new tale of magic Basile’s “The Padlock” is a tale of magic; the Brothers Grimm underscore this point by rechristening it “The Little Magic Box.” According to their new title, what lies at the center of their story is not just a banal “lock,” as they point out in the parenthesis inserted in their summary, but rather a mysterious small Pandora’s box, for the idea of some miniature ladies popping

where are the ogresses of yesteryear?

179

out of a lock doesn’t make that much sense. Parentheses with the original Neapolitan words or expressions are recurrent in the Grimms’ adaptations, but what is special in this case is that the reader is not told that the word catenaccio (padlock) is the real title, and that magic has little place in the tale, let alone in the title. In the Grimms’ reading, the lock is only a part of the strange box. The heavy lock is what keeps the box and its secrets safe. An additional magical touch is the replacement of the ogress, who in Basile reveals the “secret” to the two evil sisters, with the more appropriate “witch” (Hexe). Ogres and ogresses are present in the Grimms’ famous collection of fairy tales, but these monstrous creatures lose the protean and ambiguous identity that they had in Basile. Witches, and not ogresses, are the people who usually know about magic stuff and evil secrets.

the witch’s spell In this new literary context, Luciella (the Neapolitan Psyche) and her sad Cupid see their identities and destiny rewritten according to the changed narrative environment. The transformation of the ogress into a witch reinforces the idea that the tale revolves around a spell, which, however, in the German adaptation affects both the prince and the peasant girl. The ogress gives Luciella’s evil sisters the “magic box” that will put a curse on the girl. Where else would the jealous sisters find this magical object? We know that in Basile’s tale the girl is under no spell; she is simply drugged and sexually violated night after night. She only needs to know that the drink she is given at night is in reality a sleeping potion, which she should spit out in order to stay awake. The Grimms cut out the sisters’ allusion to the (nonexistent) ‘spell’ under which Luciella has supposedly fallen, and instead hint at a (new and real) spell that a witch casts on our heroine by means of the magic box. Her sisters’ recommendations are in reality instructions on how to produce the spell that will haunt Luciella for the rest of the tale. Their directives are parts of a magical ritual that the girl performs against herself. She bewitches herself, so to speak. Moreover, the Grimms say nothing about the nature of the “nightly drink,” simply that the act of refusing the drink is part of the process of becoming the “happiest” girl in the world. Read in this manner, the entire ritual is a symbolic mise-en-scène based on transgression: (1) don’t drink what you are supposed to drink; (2) look at what you are not supposed to look at; (3) open the magic box. Also keep in mind that in Basile a second ogress is responsible for the

180 c h a p t e r s e v e n

curse against the prince. The Grimms edit out this second figure as well, and mention that a “curse” is finally lifted only at the end of the story. Again, spells, curses, magic belong to witches, not to ogresses.

“the little magic box” is not the tale of cupid and psyche Basile’s first tale based on Cupid and Psyche mutates into a tale of magic, which tells how two unfortunate lovers overcome the curses that torment them. One curse (the prince’s) causes the other (the girl’s). The resolution of the first curse, however, also dissolves the second, because the first curse is the pivotal element of the entire tale. When the prince is welcomed back to his “paternal house” (väterlichen Haus), as the Grimms render the Italian casa (house), the disgraced girl recovers her dignity and does become the “happiest” girl in the world by marrying a prince.37 The Grimms do not need to mention “the thousand torments” of the Neapolitan Psyche after her exile from the underground abode, for in their hands this tale is not about a modern Cupid and Psyche. Their inclusion of the adjective “paternal,” absent from the original Italian, is particularly significant given that the German summaries usually shrink rather than expand Basile’s generous descriptions. There is no father, no king, in Basile’s tale. A less disrespectful rendition would be “maternal house,” since the queen is the one who owns the castle and hugs her estranged son. Having ceased to be the narration of the soul’s inner transformation thanks to its encounter with Eros, “The Little Magic Box” recounts the hero’s return to his ‘fatherland,’ from which the curse had banned him. In this new retelling, “The Padlock” becomes the story of a male initiation into adulthood, which requires the presence of a son and obviously some kind of wife. The unspecified “curse” afflicting the prince is in essence the isolation of the hero who can embark on a journey toward manhood on his own. The German “Padlock” has one and only one main character, the prince, who is allowed to embrace his mother when he has completed his solitary task. In his solipsistic quest for maturity (his return to the ‘land of the father’), the hero does not need to be in a love relationship with a young woman. A woman’s love is not a prerequisite for male adulthood. This is why the prince becomes so incensed when the girl dares to disturb his night visits. The woman (especially an indigent girl) doesn’t need to know. It is telling that “The Little Magic Box” also deletes the final allusion to the bride’s joy (“Luciella found herself with a fairy of a husband”) and the harsh rebuke

where are the ogresses of yesteryear?

181

of her envious sisters.38 Not once do the Grimms mention the girl’s name, Luciella. For them, the tale ends with the embrace with which the mother welcomes her son back to the “paternal house.” The mother, like the bride, ‘owns’ neither the tale nor the house; she serves as an ambassador of the king, the absent father.

“The Golden Trunk”39 A poor gardener buys a piglet for each of his three daughters. The two older ones take their animals to a good pasture, but they don’t let the youngest daughter go there. So she takes her piglet to a forest, where she finds a fountain and a tree with golden leaves. She brings one leaf back to her father, who turns it into a lot of money, and little by little she brings him all the other leaves. In consequence, the tree stands totally bare, but when she notices that the bark too is made of gold, she gets an ax and hacks the tree down. Under the tree she finds some stairs, goes down them, and arrives at a magnificent palace. A table has been set. Parmetella—this is the girl’s name—takes a seat. While she is eating, a handsome young man walks up to her and says: “You shall become my wife and the most joyful woman in the world.” She is seated in a carriage made of gemstones and four golden horses lift her up. At night, he says to her: “When you lie in bed, put out the lights.” But as soon as she closes her eyes, he lies next to her, and departs at the crack of dawn. The second night, she stays awake and lights a candle and sees the astonishing beauty of the young man. At that point he wakes up and laments her ruinous curiosity, because of which he will be cursed for seven more years, and disappears from her sight. She goes away, and in a cave she finds an enchantress. This merciful woman gives her a spindle, seven figs, a pot of honey, and a pair of iron shoes and says: “Walk and never stop, until these shoes are worn out. Then you will find seven women, sitting on high and spinning, with the thread hanging down and wound around the bone of some dead person. Quietly creep up close, take the thread off the bone and attach it to the spindle, which you must smear with honey and stick the figs onto it. When they pull it up and taste its sweetness, they will want to see who did that. They will make all sorts of promises, but don’t trust them and don’t come out until they swear by Thunder-andLightning (pe Truone e Lampe) that they will not eat you.” Everything takes place as announced. As soon as Parmetella reveals herself, the women say: “Traitor, it is your fault that our brother must be a slave for seven years.” After giving their word, they explain how she can save herself from their mother. “Hide behind this kneading trough. When she comes, grab her breasts from behind, which she has thrown her shoulders like satchels, and pull them and don’t let them go until she swears by Thunder-and-Lightning

182 c h a p t e r s e v e n

(this is her son’s name) that she will do you no harm.” The girl does as suggested, but for that very reason the old woman torments her. She mixes up twelve different kinds of vegetables and says: “You wretched girl, sort these out for me, otherwise you’ll pay dearly!” Parmetella is unable to do it and starts to wail. Then Thunder-and-Lightning (the handsome young man) arrives and tells her to throw all the vegetables on the ground; then he gets a huge number of ants to separate them. The old woman is angry when she finds the job done. She gives her twelve quilts, which she must fill with feathers. Thunder-and-Lightning comes to help. He says that she needs to cry out loud: “The king of the birds is dead!” As soon as she does this, clouds of birds, covering the sky, arrive. They flap their wings and enough feathers fall to fill all the quilts. The old woman plots something new: “Run to my sister. She wishes to send me some music. I want to get Thunder-and-Lighting married and to give a royal party for him.” Through someone else, however, she tells her sister that she should kill Parmetella and cook her. They will eat her together. But Thunder-and-Lightning meets her on the way and gives her a loaf of bread, a bundle of hay, and a stone, and tells her: “In that house you will find a dog, to which you will throw the bread; then a horse, to which you will give the hay. Finally you will arrive at a door that always slams. You will steady it with this stone. The ogress will be sitting upstairs with her child in her arms. She has heated up an oven to roast you. She will tell you: ‘Hold my little girl and wait. I will go upstairs and get the music,’ but be aware that she will only be sharpening her fangs to tear you apart. With no mercy, throw the baby into the oven; she is the offspring of an ogress. Take the music that lies behind the door and hurry out before she comes back. But I tell you, do not open the box that contains the music.” Everything happens as predicted. The problem is that Parmetella is too curious, and on her way back she opens the box. At once the music flies out and makes the hell of a noise. As soon as the ogress hears it, she comes running down, and when she can’t find the girl, she shouts out of the window: “Kill the traitor!” But the door answers: “Why should I hurt her if she brought me rest?” The horse: “Why should I kill her if she gave me hay?” The dog: “I let that poor girl go, she gave me bread!” In tears, Parmetella runs here and there after the tunes. Thunder-and-Lightning meets her again and rebukes her for her curiosity; then he calls the tunes back and locks them in the box. When she gets home, the old woman complains about her sister, who has acted against her will. In the meantime, the bride arrives and has every possible bad quality. A big party is prepared. Parmetella is seated on the edge of a pit, because the old woman hopes that she will fall into it. Thunder-and-Lightning asks her to give him a kiss; she refuses. The bride says: “Why do you refuse to kiss such a beautiful young man; for two chestnuts I let a shepherd smother me with kisses.”

where are the ogresses of yesteryear?

183

After the dinner, while going to bed, she says again: “For two chestnuts, I let a herdsman who tended sows kiss me.” Thunder-and-Lightning can’t contain himself any longer: he kills her with a knife and then embraces Parmetella and says: “You are my wife and the flower of all women.” They lie down; in the morning the old woman comes and, as soon as she sees her son in Parmetella’s arms and learns the entire course of events, she runs to her sister to consult with her. But out of sorrow for the loss of her baby the sister has burned herself up as well, and the old woman has no option but to slam her head against the wall.

where are the ogresses of yesteryear? This second adaptation is wanting in more ways than one. Here, the Grimmification of the Basile tale creates more problems than solutions, and the characters themselves seem much less sure about their own identities. For one thing, almost all the ogresses have become “women.” This new Cupid’s mother is not an ogress but an “old woman”, and so her daughters are not ogresses either. They are very sinister, since they spin with the bones of dead people and would eat Parmetella if they could, but they are women nonetheless. The harm that the prince’s mother would like to inflict on Parmetella remains undefined until the end, when the old woman asks her sister to kill the girl and cook her. As in the adaptation of “The Little Magic Box,” the echoes of the Cupid and Psyche myth are devalued to the point of being barely detectable. Psyche’s entrance into the realm of the netherworld, powerfully staged in Basile’s rewriting, is turned into a narrative platitude; Parmetella’s vicissitudes are now the usual three trials a Grimms’ heroine must overcome in order to attain love, which is synonymous with marriage. In the Grimms’ version, no fairy waits for Parmetella outside the cave to warn her of the terrifying “bridge of hair” that she is about to cross. The fairy and the netherworld have disappeared from the tale.

from fairies to wise women to fairies The Neapolitan fairy has become a German “wise woman,” or soothsayer, who assists the heroine in her journey toward marriage and eventually motherhood. But another essential, though almost imperceptible, shift has taken place. Unlike the Neapolitan fairy, the wise woman doesn’t wait outside the cave to warn Parmetella about her upcoming dangers; Parmetella

184 c h a p t e r s e v e n

finds her in a cave. This accidental encounter is more typical of a Grimms tale. The heroine, lost in the woods, runs into a mysterious woman (some sort of good witch living in a cave), who grants the hapless girl some magical gifts. In Basile, the presence of a fairy, eager to support the girl outside the cave that connects the outer world to the underground palace, makes Parmetella’s future ordeal much more dramatic and the fairy’s intervention more urgent. The fairy is anxiously waiting for the girl because she knows how deadly her ordeal is going to be. Her sincere compassion is detectable in her words. The German weise Frau, which in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s dictionary is defined as Wahrsagerin, Zauberin (female soothsayer, or enchantress), embodies a clearer, more recognizable, individual.40 Still capable of playing magical tricks, this woman is wise because she is able to foresee the future. Weird as they are, the Grimms’ women are still human. Fairies, like ogres, are of an indefinable nature. Zipes is right to emphasize that “there are hardly any fairies in the Brothers Grimm’s collection; rather, there are witches, who function as fairies or sorceresses. They all owe their existence to pagan goddesses.”41 The passage from “fairy” to “enchantress” also occurs in the first two German versions of “Brier Rose” (1812 and 1819). In the 1810 manuscript version and in the first edition of Children’s and Household Tales (1812), the thirteen ladies invited to the party were Feen (fairies), who turned into weisen Frauen in the second edition (1819).42 Without greeting or looking at anyone, we read in the Grimms’ final version of “Brier Rose,” the thirteenth weise Frau disrupts the feast and has only one thing to say: The princess will drop dead at the age of fifteen.43 It is telling that, in the Walt Disney film version, the three chubby old ladies retrieve their original status of “fairies” because their role is not only to bestow gifts and foretell the baby girl’s troubled future; their magical powers are active and decisive (for instance, despite their weight, they fly like butterflies; they have magic wands; they fight the evil witch; etc.); indeed, they become the protagonists.

In the Grimms’ rewriting of Basile’s story, Parmetella is one of many anonymous girls from Children’s and Household Tales, whose journey toward to the happy ending of marriage requires the unexplainable support of older women who know how to stave off life’s perils. The Grimms mistranslate Thunder-and-Lightning’s final words to Parmetella “You are my joy” (Tu sì la gioia mia) as “You are my wife” (du bist meine Frau), as if, at the end of the tale, Thunder-and-Lightning and Parmetella were finally exchanging wedding rings and what happened before (the night Sabbath with the sacrificial

where are the ogresses of yesteryear?

185

victim holding two candles and sitting on the brink of an abyss) had been nothing but a mock marriage to test the girl’s piousness.44 But who are these new, Germanized, Thunder-and-Lighting and Parmetella? If, in the Grimms’ interpretation, the prince welcomes the indigent girl into his underground residence in his true identity, and not as a “handsome slave,” why does he rebuke her for taking a look at his amazing beauty at night? Hasn’t she already seen his body? Why should his curse be doubled (seven more years of some unclear curse) if the girl has already seen him? Thunder-and-Lightning is not transformed, doesn’t hide; he simply doesn’t want her to light a candle at night. By removing the prince’s double identity (handsome dark-skinned slave → handsome white prince), the Grimms also deprive the Neapolitan tale of its fundamental link to the Latin myth, whose essence is the prohibition against looking at Eros face to face. The prince’s sisters do say that, because of Parmetella’s disrespectful behavior, their brother will have to be a “slave” for seven years, but in this new context “slave” is more a metaphor than a new identity. The prince will be enslaved to the negative consequences brought about by the girl’s unbecoming behavior. The word “slave” is absent from both German adaptations of Basile’s tales on Cupid and Psyche. In “The Little Magic Box,” a “servant” (and not a “slave”) approaches Luciella in the wood; in “The Golden Trunk,” a “handsome young man” tells Parmetella that he wishes to marry her. There are no dark-skinned slaves in the Grimms’ retellings, only good-looking white young men.

determining the curse The German Parmetella simply disobeys an order, and we know that disregarding a commandment is the point of departure in a fairy tale that will conclude with the reestablishment of an original, temporarily disrupted, order. At the end, the German Parmetella shows that she is in fact a good young woman who knows her place in society and respects its family values and customs. For instance, she knows that she can’t question the puzzling demands of a man who has chosen her as his wife. The young man does mention some kind of curse when he yells at her; he does say that because of her he will be under an evil spell for seven more years, but no one knows how many days or years have gone by between Parmetella’s departure from the prince’s palace and her encounter with his seven sisters. Parmetella doesn’t know how long her heavy shoes will last, and when Thunder-and-Lightning shows up to help her out, neither Parmetella nor the reader knows that his exile has come to end. What we do know

186 c h a p t e r s e v e n

is what Thunder-and-Lightning’s sisters tell Parmetella, that because of her unbecoming behavior he will have to endure seven years of suffering. The real curse of the tale seems to be caused by Parmetella herself, because she is the one who has disobeyed an order, a typical fairy-tale motif à la Grimm.

throw the baby into the oven and walk away If the Grimms’ “Golden Trunk” is about the triumph of marital love, their tale also reveals that the ogre race exists merely to be erased. Thunder-andLightning’s aunt, the only ogress in the German tale, lives alone, isolated, because ogres cannot mingle with humans. This lonely ogress does what these creatures are supposed to do: eat humans and inspire terror. She signifies a perverted motherhood that must be eradicated. Hence, the act of throwing her baby into the burning oven acquires a new meaning in the Grimms’ retelling of Basile. According to their process of narrative normalization, ogres and ogresses can only live outside the boundaries of society and its norms. This is why this particular ogress, the prince’s aunt, is allowed to remain in the tale. She shows up at the end, as the final trial that the girl on her way to marriage has to overcome. The ogress is an abomination, more particularly because in the Grimms’ adaptation her family is entirely human. The ogress is also a single mother, an additional source of shame and dishonor. Causing the death of the ogress and her baby clears the path to the final happy ending, the wedding of the prince and his beloved Parmetella. The ending of this Germanized fairy tale is a happy one in part because the ogress and her child end up dead in a symbolic act of ethnic erasure. The ogre race, and what it means, has come to an end, because this time the honest girl has followed her soon-to-be husband’s order and has brought about the death of the evil creature and her baby threatening their happiness. In this new tale, the girl’s original transgression (she dares to look at her lover, who doesn’t want her to see him at night, even though she already knows what he looks like) is reestablished at the end when she finally leads an ogress mother to desperation and death.

what happened to apuleius’s cupid and psyche, and their neapolitan heirs? The German Cupid and Psyche remind us of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. They are two people who were first given a script and

where are the ogresses of yesteryear?

187

then suddenly told they would play other roles in a different drama altogether, moving from one genre to another, first a baroque drama with abundant scenes of blood, terror, and despair, and then a reassuring nineteenthcentury play exalting the magical institution of marriage. In Charles Perrault’s view, the myth of Cupid and Psyche doesn’t make much sense. “I know very well that Psyche signifies the soul,” he writes in his preface to the novella Grisélidis, but what he can’t comprehend is why Psyche is supposed to be happy so long as she doesn’t know that Love himself loves her.45 Why should discovering his love make her unhappy? This is “an impenetrable enigma” for Perrault. Arturo Graf, an illustrious Italian scholar and artist of the early twentieth century, cuts this Gordian knot by ditching most of Apuleius’s myth: “The only true moments of this fairy tale,” Graf writes in Ecce homo (1908), “are the visits in the dark and the prohibition,” which is, in Graf ’s view, nothing but an “experiment” because, deep down, Love can’t wait for Psyche to disrespect his order.46 The whole thing (the mysterious palace, sexual intercourse in the dark, the incomprehensible command) is just a game of seduction. No exile, no trials, only immense joy and peace ensue from Psyche’s misbehavior, and the real name of the couple’s baby is “Happiness,” not “Pleasure.”47 If we take out the entire second part of the myth, the story resembles a nineteenth-century romance; but if we keep the girl’s ordeals and final redemption, the story becomes a gloomy hymn to moral integrity. Unlike the ancients’ unclear myths, concludes Perrault, “our” modern tales for children know how to show the advantages deriving from virtuous, “patient,” and “obedient” conduct. 48 For Perrault, the joy of righteousness is the real message of the Latin tale, and from the way the Brothers Grimm treat the first two modern Psyches and Cupids (Luciella and her sad prince, Parmetella and Thunder-andLightning), we can safely conclude that they couldn’t agree more.

chapter eight

Beauty, Zulima, and Aline: The Marvel Preceding and Following the World According to Novalis

The myth of Cupid and Psyche dramatizes a journey, the abandonment of what is known for what is obscure and terrifying, and the repeated challenge of life-threatening risks. In Apuleius and Basile alike, the disquieting, disorienting moments of the tale remain with us more than its happy ending. Cupid and Psyche usher in the theme of a radical, unimaginable, and enduring change. In The Tale of Tales, Basile shows that the myth works as a marvelous narrative engine based on two main characters who embody a cluster of clear-cut contrasts that fuel the dynamic unfolding of the tale: beauty–ugliness; light–darkness; human–divine; human–bestial; visible– invisible; real–apparent; seeking–hiding; knowing–ignoring. These oppositions spawn an infinite narrative progeny, which lie dormant within the original tale. By stressing that “Cupid and Psyche” is an ancient tale and Basile is its first modern narrator, I don’t mean that this Latin story is historically the mother of all other tales, as if it had generated the innumerable tales that bear some vague resemblance to it. “Cupid and Psyche” is the crystallization of a narrative model, the perfect synthesis of opposites. All subsequent tales focus on a narrower set of contrasts (beauty– ugliness, for example, or apparent–real) and only from this point of view they can be seen as the offspring of “Cupid and Psyche.” Even a tale such as “Beauty and the Beast,” whose similarities to “Cupid and Psyche” are unquestionable, can be considered an adaptation of the Latin myth only if we use the term ‘adaptation’ loosely.1 “Cupid and Psyche” is not just about transformation; it embodies transformation.

beauty, zulima, and aline

189

Transformation is central to the thinking of the Romantic poet Novalis (1772–1801) as he explains in his encyclopedic work The Universal Brouillon (Das allgemeine Brouillon), a collection of philosophical fragments composed between September 1798 and March 1799. Let us a read an entry that focuses on the meaning of fairy tales: ROMANTICISM, ETC. Fairy tales. Nessir and Zulima. The romanticization of Aline. Novellas. Thousand-and-One Nights. Ginnistan. The Beauty and the Beast. Musaeus’s folk fairy tales. The romantic spirit of the modern novels. Meister. Werther. Greek folk fairy tales. Indian fairy tales. New, original fairy tales. In a genuine fairy tale, everything must be marvelous—mysterious and unconnected—everything animated. Each in a different way. All of nature must be intertwined with the world of the spirits in a peculiar way. The age of universal anarchy—lawlessness—freedom—the natural state of nature—the age of before the world (the state). This age before the world provides, as it were, the scattered characteristics of the age after the world—just as the state of nature is an odd image of the eternal kingdom. The world of the fairy tale is the complete opposite of the world of truth (history)—and precisely for that reason so completely similar to it—just as chaos is similar to the complete creation. (On the idyll) In the future world everything is as it was in the former world—and yet everything is completely different. The future world is Reasonable Chaos—chaos that has permeated itself—that is inside and outside of itself—chaos or ∞. The genuine fairy tale must simultaneously be Prophetic Representation, ideal representation, absolutely necessary representation. The genuine creator of fairy tales is a seer of the future. Confession of a true, synthetic child—an ideal child. (A child is far cleverer and wiser than an adult—this child must be a thoroughly ironic child.) A child’s game—imitation of adults. (In time, history must become a fairy tale—it will be again as it was when it began.)2

As a law student at Jena, Friedrich von Hardenberg (whose pseudonym Novalis means Virgin Land) developed a deep interest in philosophy. Subsequently, along with intellectuals such as Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel, he became a key member of the Jena circle of German Early Romanticism, whose main aspiration was to identify a clear, unifying structure of human knowledge.3 Novalis’s emphasis is on a never-ending search for the dynamic similarities existing among things, for the hidden harmony that sustains the creation.4 For Novalis, poetry and imagination play an essential role in this quest; being both poet and philosopher, he seeks to attain a “feeling for the transformation” that rules over all things and all disciplines, and which can never be fully understood, even though any

190 c h a p t e r e i g h t

philosophical exploration is founded on the dialogue between perception (or feeling) and understanding.5 In Novalis’s view, the poet’s mission is to operate a process of completing or linking up (Vergänzung) that is essentially an artistic enterprise.6 The imagination, writes Novalis, always tends toward unity and completion.7 Transformation is thus the ‘magic’ that unites seemingly disparate, even opposite, things. Novalis’s The Universal Brouillon testifies to the complexity of this philosophical project. Rejecting the concept of encyclopedia according to the French Enlightenment, Novalis sets out to construct an intentionally fragmentary work made of hundreds of entries, whose overarching unity may be unclear because things and our way of categorizing them are in constant mutation.8 Even his concept of encyclopedia changed while he composed his magnum opus.

The main goal of The Universal Brouillon is the healing of the modern fracture between nature and human identity.9 Novalis contends that a new universal harmony will result from the channeling of all intellectual disciplines into a new aesthetic form, which for the German poet can only be the fairy tale. “Everything poetic,” we read in one of his fragments, “must be like a fairy tale.”10 For Novalis, the marvel of the creation is revealed and “animated” in the fairy tale. That which is marvelous, however, is also “mysterious and unconnected”; the marvelous manifests the “lawless,” anarchical age preceding history and civilization. In this context, Basile’s The Tale of Tales perfectly embodies the anarchy preceding modern civilization, or, better yet, speaks to us from the transitional time between chaos and order, between the obscure ‘before’ and the clear ‘now.’ His obscene, vivacious, and sprawling storytelling reflects the marvel of this liminal moment. Basile’s language is indeed “animated,” as Novalis would say, and his narrative style is “obscure and unconnected.” As we would expect from spontaneous, oral storytelling, Basile’s tales have unexplained passages, crude details, unclear characters who may be at once ogresses and fairies, and puzzling endings. The Tale of Tales, however, also harbors the kind of correspondences we saw in his two retellings of Cupid and Psyche, which should be read as the two halves of the same tale. Opposites merge in The Tale of Tales. Basile’s “mysterious and unconnected” book, we might say, foreshadows the “reasonable chaos” of the “future world,” as Novalis writes in The Universal Brouillon. In Novalis’s words, a fairy tale narrates the “natural state of nature,” the

beauty, zulima, and aline

191

“chaos” that existed before the present “world of truth.” Novalis sees the fairy tale as a mirror that reflects two opposites, which end up resembling each other: the chaotic age before history and the age of the future. According to Novalis’s daring interpretation, a fairy tale has nothing to do with our common view of this literary genre (a simple and straightforward story for children with a clear moral message). Instead of being a tool used by adults to educate the young, Novalis’s fairy tale is “a child’s game,” an “ideal” child’s playful, ironic, and imperfect imitation of the grownup world. Basile’s book, with its subtitle Entertainment for the Little Ones, is certainly characterized by childish playfulness, which mocks adult society yet enhances it by introducing elements of surprise and marvel. Novalis’s “ideal child” brings together the anarchy of the origins and the lawfulness of the present time. In this play of opposites, the creator of fairy tales foregrounds a possible future synthesis. In the future, Novalis holds, “history must become a fairy tale.” A fairy tale is a “prophetic representation,” and thus its narrator (the “poet”), whom Novalis often defines as “magician,” has also a messianic role.11 A striking aspect of Novalis’s concept of fairy tale is its seemingly paradoxical nature. For him, a fairy tale is a “mysterious and unconnected,” anarchical harmonization of opposites. In the three complex fairy tales he composed during his life, he was faithful to the philosophical view laid out in The Universal Brouillon. These three tales, which he placed within his unfinished novels The Novices of Sais and Heinrich von Ofterdingen, describe a three-stage process, from an original, pure unity, through a state of division, to new unification.12 In the above fragment from The Universal Brouillon, however, Novalis explains that the concluding moment of a fairy tale shouldn’t represent the resolution of all tensions. In his view, a fairy tale must bring two conflicting poles together but without resolving the uncertainties and irregularities that had kept them apart.

“beauty and the beast” as a template for all the other tales To elucidate his interpretation, Novalis lists titles of single tales and of collections of tales. Along with generic allusions to well-known books such as A Thousand-and-One Nights and Musaeus’s important anthology of German folktales, Novalis mentions three specific stories: Johann Georg Jacobi’s “Nessir and Zulima,” Stanislas-Jean de Boufflers’s “Aline, Queen of Golconde,” and “Beauty and the Beast.” These three tales stage in three different

192 c h a p t e r e i g h t

ways a profound longing for symmetry, union, harmony, which in fact lies at the core of all fairy tales. The connection among these tales goes beyond a vaguely philosophical agreement. Novalis mentions them one after the other because he reads “Nessir and Zulima,” “Aline,” and “Beauty and the Beast” as variations on the same theme. In all three tales, a female character embodies the struggle and the solution of a dramatic and far-reaching division. Zulima, Aline, and Beauty share some fundamental traits. The details of their biography vary but their identity and the meaning of their lives is the same: the reconciliation of a fracture that has poetic, religious, and moral connotations. Moreover, “Aline” and “Nessir and “Zulima” refer to two clearly identifiable stories, whereas Novalis sees “Beauty and the Beast” as the name of a tale that transcends a particular edition, given that this fairy tale already existed in multiple versions in his time. It is as if “Beauty and the Beast” were the purest and most accomplished rendition of a universal tale that finds in “Nessir and Zulima” and “Aline” two inspiring but flawed examples. When I say that the German and the French tales are imperfect versions, I mean that, in Novalis’s view, “Beauty and the Beast” conveys a spiritual and philosophical message that is also present in “Aline” and “Nessir and Zulima” but with less clarity and sharpness. In Novalis’s encyclopedic work, he discusses these tales in the entry “Romanticism,” and he initially stresses the concept of the “romanticization” of a fairy tale, the French “Aline.” For the German poet, “Romantic” indicates a dynamic process of transformation, from a particular to a universal condition. In his usual fragmentary style, Novalis contends that “Romanticism” means “making absolute—making universal . . . See Meister. Fairy tale” (Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister, is mentioned in the same entry), and fairy tales are primary examples of the universalizing process called “Romanticism.”13 “To make Romantic,” Novalis explains in another fragment, means to “endow the commonplace with a higher meaning . . . the known with the dignity of the unknown.”14 “Everything visible,” Novalis reiterates in Studies in the Visual Arts, “cleaves to the Invisible . . . perhaps the Thinkable to the Unthinkable.”15

“ n e s s i r a n d z u l i m a” : t h e ‘ f i r s t version’ of “beauty and the beast” Jacobi’s “Nessir and Zulima” (1782), the first title in Novalis’s list of fairy tales, is not, strictly speaking, a magic tale, but it does focus on the theme of the reconciliation of opposites that lies at the core of Novalis’s poetics. Johann Georg Jacobi (1740–1814) was a prominent literary figure in the

beauty, zulima, and aline

193

1770s and 1780s. What follows is my summary of his novella, which is set in fifteenth-century Persia.

Nessir is the son of a pious Zoroastrian priest who, every morning at dawn on the top of a mountain, praises the sun and Zoroaster, the “magician” who brought “spiritual life, fire” to humankind.16 Zoroaster’s priests, however, are slowly becoming less able to understand his sacred word.17 After his father’s death, Nessir becomes a priest, as if his father’s spirit were still hovering over him. Nessir gets married, but his wife dies giving birth to their only child, Zulima. Nessir teaches his daughter his religious beliefs, and she becomes a beautiful and devout girl. In the meantime, a Greek Orthodox priest called Diodorus, living in the city of Smirna, comes to the conclusion after reading Homer, the stoics, and Plato that although all people, both before and after Christ, who are faithful to their religious creed are to be considered Christians, yet parts of divine truth reside in all religions, and only God owns truth in its entirety.18 Diodorus decides to retrieve the traces of pristine wisdom still present in Persia and India. Following a rug merchant, the Greek priest arrives in Kirman, where he meets Nessir and Zulima. The two priests realize that they need each other and engage in mutually enlightening conversations. Diodorus and Nessir represent a slowly dying religiosity that believes in open dialogue among diverse creeds, in contrast to the contemporary emphasis on the legalistic and secretive aspects of religion. In his journey through India, Diodorus encounters a Parsi priest who takes him to his temple. Although Diodorus states that all religious places are sacred for him, other Parsi priests ban their colleague, who has betrayed the secrets of their religious practices, and ask Diodorus to leave.19 A similar harsh destiny soon befalls Nessir and Zulima as well. In their journey, father and daughter encounter the ruins of a Greek temple. On its altar, Nessir lights a fire in honor of Zoroaster and, like Diodorus, comes to believe that the altars of all religions prove that men naturally seek God.20

The altar is thus for Jacobi the atemporal symbol of the pristine universal religiosity that is now in decline (in the novella the Zoroastrian priests are losing touch with their original holy scriptures) but may attain a renewed purity in the future. The crucial role played by Zulima becomes apparent in the last pages of the novella. My summary continues:

While traveling through Georgia, Nessir feels that his life is coming to an end. One evening his daughter finds him dead on the top of a mountain where he

194 c h a p t e r e i g h t

had gone to perform his religious rituals. Six days after his death, Zulima is kidnapped by three men who take her to the house of the local landowner, a handsome young Christian man named Mehru, who some days earlier had spied on Zulima while she was bathing in a secluded pond. His servants make Zulima wear seductive clothes for their master, who wishes to compare her beauty to that of a Georgian girl who has no qualms about showing her naked body to the young landowner. “Let us see who is more beautiful,” says the young lord.21 Zulima covers her face with a veil, and when Mehru tries to force her to comply with his orders, she chastises him harshly and demands to be set free. Zulima tells him that her father had chosen Georgia because he knew that Christians lived there, but now she is being treated like a slave. Her stern words have a deep impact on the young man. He first leaves the room, and when he returns he begs Zulima to forgive him and to respond to the sudden and overwhelming love he feels for her. Zulima tells him that she will let him know her decision the following day. But while she is resting by a quiet river surrounded by Mehru’s slaves, a horde of Tartars descends on them, kills the slaves, and abducts her. On a market square, she is given to some Armenians. In despair, Mehru goes in search of his beloved Zulima. Finally, “like the rejoicing of the resurrection,”22 Mehru hears that Armenians have brought the slave girl back. The Zoroastrian Zulima marries the Christian Mehru, and their firstborn’s name is Nessir, the symbol of a new religious accord.

“a l i n e , q u e e n o f g o l c o n d e ” : t h e s e c o n d version of “beauty and the beast” The explicitly theological message of “Nessir and Zulima,” the revival of a universal and peaceful sense of the sacred, clashes somewhat with the ironic and immoral tone of “Aline, Queen of Golconde” (1761), the second title in Novalis’s list of fairy tales. Its author, Stanislas-Jean de Boufflers (1738–1815), served as governor of the French colony of Senegal. His popular novella, which like “Nessir and Zulima” is not a magic tale, is written in the first person; in the following summary I refer to the male protagonist as “the narrator”:

A young nobleman, at the age of fifteen, deflowers a young peasant girl while he is hunting in England. The young man has just woken from a nap on an idyllic lawn when he sees an attractive peasant girl, whose name is Aline, carrying a jar of milk. After a quick conversation during which they mutually promise to

beauty, zulima, and aline

behave like brother and sister, the nobleman kisses the girl, who falls back on the grass and breaks the jar. Overwhelmed by desire, with no further ado they make love.23 Before leaving, the young man gives Aline some money and a ring. She tells him that she forgives him and goes home. Back in Paris, the narrator forgets about the young peasant. But several years later, after serving his country in the war, he runs into Aline again outside the Opéra. She tells him that when her mother realized she was pregnant, she kicked her out of the house, and an old woman took care of her. This “aunt” then took her to Paris because Aline was attractive and could easily become the mistress of many men.24 Her profession was very remunerative, but Aline found it rather monotonous. Although she knew that the life of an honest woman could also be tedious, she had ended up marrying a nobleman and hence had become the marquise of Castelmont; but for the narrator she is still Aline. She adds that she can’t love anyone; her affected behavior and her faked feelings for her lovers have cooled her heart.25 Her first lover is the only man she has ever loved. She invites him over to her house, and since her husband is away on business, they end up in bed. Reluctantly, the following morning the narrator leaves the marquise’s house, and for the next fifteen years he fights for his country, ending up as Lieutenant General in the distant Asian colonies. He stops at Golconde, the most flourishing state in Asia.26 Its ruler is a woman renowned for her beauty and wisdom. The queen, with her face covered with a veil, and her husband the king receive him. Later, a soldier leads the narrator to a marvelous wood, which reminds him of the place where many years before he met the young Aline. It looks like the same valley, the same river, the same path. He even sees a girl carrying milk. Is this a dream?27 No, answers the lady with the milk, I am your Aline. The queen gives him a quick summary of her adventurous life: after her husband’s death in a duel, she sailed toward Sicily to reclaim a part of her late husband’s assets. Unfortunately, due to strong contrary winds, her boat was led off course and was attacked and seized by a Turkish ship. Dragged from Algiers to Alexandria, she was finally sold as a slave to an Indian merchant, who took her to Golconde. One day, she was seen by some royal eunuchs; they thought her very beautiful and thus led her to the king, who couldn’t contain his passion and possessed her. Remembering the past days when she was still pure and innocent, the queen wished to recreate the places in which she, as the poor and naïve Aline, had spent her childhood. She is also determined to treat her people with the kindness and respect that she had at the time. Needless to say, the queen and the Lieutenant General become lovers, and after fifteen days, when the king finds out what is going on, the queen’s French lover has to jump out of a window to escape the king’s fury.

195

196 c h a p t e r e i g h t

At this point we find out that the narrator hasn’t been telling his story to us, the readers, but rather to an old lady he encountered in the “desert” in which he finds himself after his return to France.28

The old lady tells him that what she likes the most about his tale is that everything he has said is true, because she is Aline and can prove it. She shows the narrator the ring he gave her the first time they made love in the meadow in England. She leads him to a high, isolated mountain and asks him to spend the rest of his life with her in that idyllic space. He kneels before the elderly Aline and accepts her offer. At the end of the tale we learn that he has already been living there for several years, and that only now, at the end of his life, does he feel he has begun to live.

Aline and Zulima couldn’t be more different from each other and thus are relevant to Novalis’s ideal of a universal harmonization of opposites. The lives of these two antithetical women, however, have a similar trajectory: Zulima and Aline both experience exile and even slavery; both suffer the vagaries of fate; both are kidnapped and sold in foreign countries. But their personalities are totally different. On the one hand, we find the moral and combative Zulima, who challenges her abuser, the young and lustful Mehru, whose life is changed forever thanks to Zulima’s honest reproach. In reading Aline’s story, on the other hand, we encounter a girl who accepts her status of high-class prostitute and takes advantage of her suitors. Paradoxically, it is this loose woman who persists in an enduring love for a young man who violated her when she was fourteen, whereas the honorable Zulima seems unable or unwilling to feel any erotic passion.

zulima is the beauty who comes from the golden-age land For Novalis, both Aline and Zulima need to undergo a process of transformation. Aline must be ‘romanticized,’ as he writes in The Universal Brouillon; that is, she must be raised “to a higher power” so that her immoral and adventurous life, her unflinching dedication to her true love, can reveal its secret harmony, its ‘magic.’29 Romanticism and magic are synonymous here, because to romanticize means to gently place a tale in the flow of a neverceasing motion, a dynamic disclosure of its inner marvel. A romanticized

beauty, zulima, and aline

197

tale has no closure. In a like manner, Zulima too becomes a romantic figure in Novalis’s hands. He was so impressed by Jacobi’s novella that he gave the name Zulima also to a gentle and enigmatic Arab girl in his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (published posthumously in 1802). The young poet Heinrich, who seeks a mysterious blue flower, “out of a deep vale” hears “the tender, affecting singing of a female voice.”30 He sees “a pale, careworn girl sitting under an old oak tree. A beautiful child clung to her, weeping.”31 The image of this beautiful girl holding a child is highly symbolic. Remember that Novalis, in The Universal Brouillon, makes a connection between the fairy tale as “ideal representation” and the “ideal child” who, in play, imitates the adults’ world. Here is a summary of the rest of the story:

Exiled from her fatherland, Zulima, holding the child close to her, tells Heinrich about her people, “their magnanimity and their pure, great sensitiveness to the poetry of life and to the wonderful, mysterious charm of nature.”32 In Arabia, says Zulima, “nature appears to have become more human and intelligible,” and “thus one enjoys a double world in which in that very way sloughs off its crude and violent nature and turns into the magical poesy and fables of our senses.”33 Before departing from Heinrich, Zulima gives him her lute as if she were symbolically sharing with him her poetic powers.

Like Aline, Novalis’s romaticized Zulima becomes someone else; she is now the emissary of a distant Golden-Age land where nature and humanity share the same language.34 Nature is more human there, Zulima tells Heinrich. The humanization of nature is the goal of the poet who, as Novalis explains in his unfinished book The Novices of Sais, “never wearies of contemplating nature and conversing with her.”35 By learning human emotions, nature becomes “more joyful” and slowly brings back “the old golden age, in which she was man’s friend.”36 At the end of the French tale, Aline invites her lover to spend the rest of his life in a natural setting where for the first time in his life he begins to feel alive. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Zulima offers her lute to her young German friend as if to introduce him to that natural language the Arab people speak in their dialogue with nature. It is evident that Novalis intends the act of romanticizing (a character, a tale, nature) to be a powerful and boundless metamorphosis that transcends any facile dichotomy (lover–beloved; man– woman; German–foreigner; nature–humanity; moral–immoral).

198 c h a p t e r e i g h t

a new tale of two beauties and two beasts on the island of the imagination Imagination is the engine, so to speak, of this dynamism. Before introducing “Beauty and the Beast” in The Universal Brouillon, Novalis mentions the mysterious name “Ginnistan,” which is a key character in the long fairy tale he inserts in Heinrich von Ofterdingen. In the first part of the tale, we read: “The beautiful boy Eros lay in his cradle, slumbering gently, while Ginnistan his nurse rocked the cradle and nursed Fable, his foster sister, at her breast.”37 In Novalis’s complex and highly metaphorical narration, Ginnistan stands for the imagination, which nurtures and connects Eros (love) and Fable (poetry).38 Ginnistan bends an “iron rod” and gives it “the shape of a snake, which suddenly bites its tail.”39 A snake biting its tail is a wellknown symbol of eternity. Imagination has the power of transforming (or bending) time and thus changing oblivion into eternity. Novalis borrows the name “Ginnistan” from Christoph Martin Wieland’s collection of fairy tales titled Dschinnistan (1786–89). Wieland (1733–1813) found his source of inspiration in the enormous French collection Le cabinet des fées, a landmark of Western fairy-tale tradition. A major figure in eighteenth-century German literature, he was the first to translate Shakespeare into German, brought out seminal versions of Latin classics, and introduced The Tale of Tales to Germany by publishing a three-part poem based on Basile’s “Pervonto” (1778–79).40 In the preface to the third part of his fairy-tale collection, Wieland writes that “Dschinnistan (or Ginnistan)” is the name of “a famous land of fairies and genii.”41 Western “genii” recall the Arab demons “jinn,” the root of the name Ginnistan. Imagination comes from the land of fairies and demons, the land where love and poetry grow together, the exotic (Arab) land where humans and nature speak to each other and oblivion turns into eternity. It is the land of the reconciliation of all divisions. The “island” of Ginnistan appears at the end of a much earlier tale in Wieland’s collection, “Adis and Dahy” (book one, tale two), which is in fact a variation on the Beauty and the Beast story. Wieland’s story is set in the “kingdom of Golconde,” the same exotic land where Queen Aline is reunited with her French lover in the homonymous tale.42 Thus, the seemingly scattered titles in Novalis’s fragment on fairy tales in The Universal Brouillon are related to each other through a web of implicit allusions that give “Beauty and the Beast” a new and more complex meaning, for this story lies at the core of Novalis’s fascinating view of fairy tales.

beauty, zulima, and aline

199

Wieland’s story “Adis and Dahy” takes place in the kingdom of Golconde and revolves around two charming but indigent girls, Fatime (seventeen) and Kadidsche (twelve), whose mother dies suddenly of a snake bite. Here is a summary of what transpires:

One day, on their way to the city, the girls encounter a hideous, deformed, and very old man who declares his love for the young Kadidsche and offers to take care of her. He wishes to satisfy all the girl’s desires. Although Kadidsche is disgusted by the old man’s appearance, her older sister persuades her to follow him to his home. He treats her with affection and respect, but Kadidsche can’t bear being separated from her sister and cries all day long. When she asks the old man to take her back to her sister, he complies with her wish, but Fatime is nowhere to be found. In a dream, Kadidsche sees an amazingly beautiful young man who tells her that if she wants to find her sister, she must go to the island of Sumatra.43 Kadidsche shares her dream with the old man, who offers to take her there, but first he wishes to reveal his true identity. “I am immortal,” he confesses to the skeptical girl.44 His name is Dahy and in reality he is a very handsome young man who belongs to the race of “genii.”45 He has a twin called Adis, who like him is incredibly beautiful. His race is under the power of a Brahmin who chose as their guardian a woman whom he deeply loved. This woman fell in love with the two handsome twins and succeeded in seducing both of them. The Brahmin had an ugly black slave, who became very attracted to the deceitful woman, but she didn’t return his feelings. Out of revenge, the slave revealed to the Brahmin the secret between his beloved and the twin genii. Furious, without giving them a chance to justify themselves, the Brahmin transformed the two brothers into two deformed old men. After hearing his two victims’ story, however, the Brahmin felt deeply sorry for them but could not undo the curse. He told them, however, that they could regain their original youth only if two women, younger than twenty, fell in love with them in their present repulsive appearance. After telling his story, the old Dahy and the young Kadidsche travel to Sumatra as the handsome young man had suggested in her dream, but a terrible storm leads their ship to an island inhabited by strange creatures, small and ugly like monkeys.46 This people’s concept of beauty is reversed: for them, the older the better. Kadidsche is mistreated and taken away, whereas the old genius is led to the queen, who can’t hide her attraction toward him. Since he rejects her overt advances, she orders that he be imprisoned in a dark tower. There, however, the old man finds his brother Adis, who had also turned down the queen’s sexual requests. Adis explains that the people of that

200 c h a p t e r e i g h t

island have a temple where they worship the image of an ugly monkey. Like his brother, Adis had intended to reach Sumatra, because in a dream a beautiful young girl had foretold that only there he could find the solution to his curse. Suddenly, the door of their jail opens, and a high officer announces that, given the extraordinary beauty of the two old men, the queen has decreed that they be the new priests of their religion and from now on reside in the temple. During the official celebrations in the temple, the two genii unexpectedly acquire their original youth and beauty. The Brahmin who had transformed them into old men arrives, accompanied by Fatime, Kadidsche’s sister. The Brahmin had taken Fatime with him after her separation from her sister. He had also caused the two dreams and the storms that had sidetracked the two genii’s journey. It was through these girls’ love that the genii had broken the evil spell. The two happy couples fly to “the island of Ginnistan,” which thanks to them becomes “an image of the earthly paradise.”47

Wieland’s tale is a convoluted retelling of “The Beauty and the Beast” in the tradition of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French fairy-tale genre whose virtuosity relies heavily on multiple mirroring subplots, as one can see also in Caumont La Force’s interpretation of the Cupid and Psyche myth (“More Beautiful Than a Fairy”).48 But we usually think of “Beauty and the Beast” as a short and explicitly moral tale, whose simplicity is one of the main sources of its enduring success. All modern visual and written retellings of this famous story stem mainly from Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” published in 1756, even though this is not the first version of the story.49 Thanks to its brevity (some ten pages), its streamlined plot, and its simple characterization, Leprince de Beaumont’s fairy tale has become an “archetypal” story.50 Beauty is “the standard female child protagonist,” whose “inner goodness [is] manifested by outward appearance,” even though modern feminist writers have expressed our uneasiness with the facile identification of goodness and beauty.51 Modern retellings have rethought the nature of the transformation affecting both protagonists. The need for a final and mutual change is still present in these late versions, but it is not a matter of literally turning a bestial male into a charming prince. At the end of her astute “Ugly and the Beast,” Barbara Walker has the unattractive girl (the former Beauty) express her gratitude to the kind, bestial prince, who confesses: “The truth is that I’m a Beast. This freakish appearance is the real me.”52 In Angela Carter’s even more radical interpretation, it is Beauty who turns into a beast and not vice versa. She awakes to her sexual identity when, in his private room, the

beauty, zulima, and aline

201

Beast (called “La Bestia,” since the tale takes place in Milan) finally takes off the mask “with a man’s face painted most beautifully on it” and reveals his true nature.53 The girl sees “the tip of his heavy tail twitching” and fears that her death is imminent.54 But when the monster kisses her hand, “each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs.”55 The most recent retellings of “Beauty and the Beast,” however, are marked by a general sense of fatigue, as if all possible variations had been exhausted. The preciosity of Jean Cocteau’s film version, for example, inspired other rewritings, which give extensive descriptions of the dark mysteries of the Beast’s castle, as in Robin McKinley’s Beauty.56 But the tale itself seems to have reached an impasse. “When he leaned to pluck [the rose],” Francesca Lia Block writes in “Beauty,” “the inevitable happened. Didn’t he realize? How often has this been told?”57 Remarks of this kind, which explicitly refer to the repetitious nature of any new interpretation of a classic fairy tale, have become a frequent rhetorical device in literary and filmic adaptations.

We don’t know if Novalis, when he speaks of “Beauty and the Beast” in The Universal Brouillon, is thinking of the 1756 version or the one printed several years earlier, in 1740, by Madame Gabrielle de Villeneuve, on which Madame Leprince de Beaumont based her much more successful rendering. Moreover, from a formal point of view de Villeneuve’s version more closely recalls the intricate plots of “Nessir and Zulima,” “Aline,” and “Adis and Dahy” from Wieland’s Dschinnistan. Unlike Leprince de Beaumont’s succinct retelling, de Villeneuve’s version is some two hundred pages long, presents innumerable human and nonhuman characters, and strives to construct a complex narrative structure in which all mysteries and unclear points are finally explained and all narrative tensions reconciled.58 Some modern retellings of Beauty and the Beast borrow from this lengthy tale its detailed description of the marvelous entertainments that Beauty finds in the Beast’s castle. These disappear from Leprince de Beaumont’s later version, in which Beauty more modestly spends her time reading in a “large library” and playing a harpsichord.59 De Villeneuve’s 1740 version of “Beauty and the Beast” is a tour de force, which resembles a mystery novel with an inexplicable crime that can only be resolved if its secret logic is revealed and understood.60 This kind of perfect narrative structure, however, clashes with the view of fairy tales outlined by Novalis in The Universal Brouillon. His concept of marvel in literary

202 c h a p t e r e i g h t

fairy tales (“Everything must be marvelous—mysterious and unconnected— everything animated. Each in a different way”) is similar to what Max Lüthi says about marvel in oral fairy tales. Neither Leprince de Beaumont’s nor de Villeneuve’s version of “Beauty and the Beast” is “mysterious and unconnected”; both, for example, provide a reasonable justification for the handsome prince’s metamorphosis into a beast. So neither of these authors wrote the kind of tale Novalis was thinking of. It is also true that European readers have essentially forgotten the 1740 version and have embraced the subsequent, much shorter retelling of 1756. Leprince de Beaumont reduces de Villeneuve’s two-hundred-page novella to a ten-page short story by deleting entire segments. Echoes of these deleted parts linger in the new version and thus do provide a certain mystery. A few questions will exemplify the problem we are facing. Why does the Beast get so angry with Beauty’s father when he plucks one rose from his garden? After being so gracious and welcoming to the tired merchant, the Beast’s reaction seems greatly exaggerated. He does say that he loves these flowers “more than anything else in the world.”61 But does stealing a rose really deserve the death penalty? Is it possible that somehow the Beast already knew the merchant’s family and used the rose as an excuse to force Beauty to go to his castle? And what about the mysterious fairy who shows up in Beauty’s dream—who is this lady? She only comments on the girl’s proper behavior (“Your kind heart pleases me,” the fairy tells Beauty, “The good deeds you’re performing to save your father’s life shall not go unrewarded”).62 Did Leprince de Beaumont really need to include this character, who plays no active role in her tale? Where does this fairy come from? Finally, who decorated the Beast’s majestic and magical abode, where roses bloom in wintertime? These unclear elements are residues from the older tale.

a truncated, “unconnected” french edition of the first “beauty and the beast” This is not the place for a detailed comparative analysis of the two French tales. Marvel as resulting from what Novalis calls the “unconnected” is what I am investigating here. This is why, after familiarizing the reader with the 1740 and the 1756 tales, I focus on a bizarre French reprint of the 1740 tale included in an extensive anthology of French fairy tales, from Perrault to Cocteau, titled Si les fées m’étaient contées . . . , edited by Francis Lacassin and published in 2003. This collection of 140 French fairy tales arbitrarily abridges de Villeneuve’s extensive story by chopping out one-third of her tale

beauty, zulima, and aline

203

without warning the reader of this radical editorial choice.63 The result is a new tale, which loses its coherence, lacks a clear finale, and inadvertently brings about a sense of magical secrecy that was certainly not Madame de Villeneuve’s intention. The long deleted part is of pivotal importance because it reveals the real identity of the two lovers, Beauty and the Beast. In de Villeneuve’s version, the male protagonist is not an ugly beast, and the female is not a merchant’s daughter. Both the prince and the girl have been cursed. Faithful to the French tradition of literary fairy tales, de Villeneuve’s “Beauty and the Beast” strives to find a perfect balance between the girl’s biography and that of the Beast, something that feminist and postmodern rewritings of this tale, such as Tanith Lee’s futuristic “Beauty” (1983), do not attempt.64 To attain a ‘perfect’ structure, a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century French fairy tale frequently rests on two parallel tales that reflect and complement each other, as we find in Charlotte-Rose Caumont La Force’s The Tales of Tales, which presents two Psyches and two Cupids. The original “Beauty and the Beast” is no exception. The truncated version in Lacassin’s modern anthology first of all cuts out the moment in which, immediately after the prince has regained his human form, Beauty can’t wait to learn his story. The 2003 abridged reprint does not reproduce the following passage:

The happiness in store for them filled both lovers with equal delight, for they had not the slightest doubt of the other’s affection. Their conversation was confused and unconnected, and they mutually pledged their troth a hundred times . . . After having exhausted all that love prompts to those whose hearts have truly been touched, beauty asked her lover to tell her not only about the misfortune that caused him to be so cruelly transformed into a beast, but also about all the events of his life before that shocking metamorphosis . . . Without further ado, he began his story.65

At this point in the tale we are reminded that the two lovers feel “equal delight” and “mutually” pledge their devotion. De Villeneuve stresses the equality of the protagonists’ feelings and stature. In all later versions of the tale, from Leprince de Beaumont to Walt Disney’s film adaptation, Beauty’s love seems to stem from her compassion for the Beast; their relationship remains unbalanced until the end. De Villeneuve, on the contrary, envisions her story as a harmonious reconciliation of opposites.66 The interaction

204 c h a p t e r e i g h t

between Beauty and the Beast being still “confused and unconnected,” writes de Villeneuve, two tales will provide the necessary order and coherence in the two lovers’ relationship. As the first tale will narrate all the events in the prince’s life,” the second will relate Beauty’s own misadventures, her birth and childhood, her curse, and her final liberation. In essence, the first version of “Beauty and the Beast” ends with the parallel biographies of its two main characters. “Without further ado, he began his story,” is de Villeneuve’s announcement of the former Beast’s autobiography. The problem is that whereas the handsome prince tells the story of his life, Beauty is told the story of hers. First, the Beast gives the details of his ordeal, and then a good fairy who has orchestrated the two lovers’ encounter reveals Beauty’s true identity and explains why she ended up living with the merchant’s family, since the merchant is not her real father. At the end of her extremely complicated narrative, de Villeneuve fails to maintain a perfect balance between the two main characters. She has to introduce a fairy who is familiar with Beauty’s biography. Even when he was the Beast, the prince knew who he was, whereas Beauty has to wait until the end of the story to realize who she really is. But another way of looking at this seeming imbalance is to emphasize the clever reversal between who is the mysterious character in the tale and who is not, which identity is known and which is unknown. Throughout the novella until the good fairy’s revelation, we think we know Beauty, and we regard the Beast as an ominous creature who hides some terrible secret. When at the end, however, the fairy recounts Beauty’s touching story, we understand that the girl, and not the Beast, is the character who holds the ultimate secret of the entire tale. We finally learn that Beauty is in reality half-human and half-fairy. She is indeed a mysterious, though hardly a monstrous creature. Here is a summary of the prince’s life, as told by de Villeneuve but omitted in Lacassin’s collection published in 2003:

Complying with his beloved Beauty’s request, the prince starts his story from his birth: “The king, my father, died before I was born, and the queen would never have been consoled for his loss if her concern for her child had not triumphed over her sorrow.” The queen charges “a fairy of her acquaintance” with the prince’s education, even though this fairy has a bad reputation. When a powerful neighbor invades her kingdom, the queen leaves her baby in the hands of this fairy, who takes good care of him. One day, the fairy takes off. When she returns after several years, the ugly old fairy’s attitude has changed dramatically. She reproaches the prince, who

beauty, zulima, and aline

205

is no longer a child, when he called her “mama,” and makes it clear that she wants him “to love her not as a mother, but as a mistress” because she hopes to marry him.67 Shocked by this absurd demand, the prince replies that he can’t make any decision about his future without his mother’s approval. The fairy takes him to the battlefield where the queen is still fighting the invader. In his mother’s presence, the prince refuses to marry the evil woman, and the outraged queen, pointing to a mirror, tells the fairy to look at the mirror without any bias, “and it will speak for me.”68 Offended by the queen’s obvious reference to her advanced age and ugliness, the wicked fairy transforms the prince into a beast and tells him: “You will remain in this condition until a beautiful girl comes to seek you of her own free will, even though she’s fully convinced you’ll devour her.” Devastated by sorrow, mother and son are about to kill themselves when a new fairy appears and promises the queen to take care of her son and do everything she can to break the spell, although by the fairies’ law she is not allowed to challenge the evil fairy, who is older than she. The good fairy decorates the Beast’s palace “with everything that her imagination could conceive and her art could provide.”69 She also grants the Beast permission to add whatever he desires. For example, he decides to cultivate a garden where everything, including roses, grows to perfection within a day. One day, the good fairy returns and tells the Beast she has thought of a “scheme” to release him from the spell. She tells him about the impoverished merchant, his journey through the forest, his daughters and his gifts for them, and especially about the rose that he is supposed to take to Beauty, his youngest daughter and the one who is capable of breaking the Beast’s spell. “Hide yourself in this arbor,” the good fairy tells the Beast, “and grab [the merchant] the moment he tries to pick your roses. Threaten him with death as punishment for his audacity unless he gives you one of his daughters.”70 To save his life, the merchant promises what the Beast requires and a month later returns with his youngest daughter. “To see you was to love you,” the former Beast confesses to Beauty. The prince explains that, thanks to the good fairy, he had been able to be invisible and to see her attended by other invisible spirits. He also reveals to the girl that he was the handsome young man who had appeared to her in several dreams and had asked her to see beyond the physical appearances that masked his true identity.71 In dreams the prince could be himself and address his beloved openly. When she left to visit her family, the prince tells Beauty, he felt terribly sad and wandered through the places that she had frequented. Waiting for her had been excruciating, and fearing that she had forgotten him, he had grown so weak that he was close to death, but her sudden return and her heartfelt tears had made him realize that she really cared for him. He fell into a coma, and when he regained his senses, he was no longer a beast. The prince ends his story and proposes to Beauty.

206 c h a p t e r e i g h t

But the chunk of Madame de Villeneuve’s tale removed from the 2003 French edition does not end here. Her “Beauty and the Beast” would be imbalanced without the story of Beauty’s true identity, since both lovers are not who they seem to be.

When the prince concludes the story of his tribulations, a fanfare announces the arrival of a king, who doesn’t know that he is Beauty’s real father. “Beauty is your daughter,” the good fairy tells the king, and adds, “I alone can explain all the adventures to you.”72 The king admits that Beauty resembles his wife, whom he thinks she is dead. After the welcoming ceremonies due to a king, the company falls silent and gives the fairy its “rapt attention.” The fairy then begins Beauty’s story. The king is the ruler of the “Fortunate Islands,” whose inhabitants are free to marry whomever they love with no regard to wealth or social status. “The monarch in our presence,” the fairy explains, chose to marry a charming shepherdess, who gave birth to Beauty. This shepherdess was in reality a fairy, the sister of the fairy narrating Beauty’s story. After the birth of his daughter, the king had to go to a distant region of his land to repress a revolt. In the meantime, Beauty’s mother tried to keep her marriage a secret because fairies are not allowed to marry anyone who possesses less power than they. Three times a year, fairies must attend a general assembly and are obliged to disclose only those actions that disrespect the law. The wicked fairy, the one who turned the prince into a beast, finds out about the fairy’s illegal alliance with the king of the Fortunate Islands. As a consequence, Beauty’s mother is imprisoned, and one of the oldest fairies puts a curse on her human family: “Let her husband mourn her! Let her daughter, the shameful fruit of her illegal marriage, become the bride of a monster in order to make up for the folly of a mother who allowed herself to be captivated by the frail, contemptible beauty of a mortal!”73 Locked up in the fairies’ prison, the fairy queen cannot return to the Fortunate Islands. So when the king gets back, his servants tell him the queen has died. The same evil fairy who fell in love with the Beast develops the same feeling for the king, who has no desire to remarry. Out of malice, the wicked fairy decides to kidnap Beauty and kill her with the help of the girl’s governess. When the good fairy, the sister of Beauty’s imprisoned mother, learns about this evil plan, she takes the form of a she-bear and strangles the governess, who has taken the little girl into a forest to murder her. The good fairy decides that the girl is not safe in the Fortunate Islands and places in the care of the honest merchant, who has an infant of his own. The infant, however, is gravely ill, and dies just at the moment when the good fairy enters its nursery. The fairy lays the little Beauty in the dead child’s crib.

beauty, zulima, and aline

207

Later, back in the fairies’ land, the good fairy goes to the general assembly and reveals the evil fairy’s immoral and illegal desire for two human beings, the young prince and the king. The wicked fairy is arrested, as had happened to the fairy queen of the Fortunate Islands. Here the good fairy’s account ends. All of a sudden, the fairy queen appears. She has been released because she had offered to risk her own life to save another fairy’s life.

At this point, after the arrival of the fairy queen, the 2003 French edition resumes the tale, which is close to its ending. The good merchant, with his other daughters, arrives at the palace, embraces Beauty, learns about Beauty’s true identity, and blesses her union with the handsome prince. Let us take a close look at the suture that in the 2003 reprint is meant to hide the excision of more than seventy pages of the original tale. The narrative scar coincides with the overlapping of Beauty’s two fathers: the king and the merchant. At this point of the tale the Beast has just regained his human form, and the good fairy and the prince’s mother have just arrived in his palace. The queen at first contends that Beauty can’t marry her son since she does not come from a noble family. The good fairy reassures the queen that Beauty is not of an inferior status: the girl is actually the fairy’s niece and a king’s daughter:

See how satisfied we all are!” says the fairy. “And now, to terminate this happy adventure we only need the consent of the princess’s royal father. But we’ll soon see him here.” Beauty asks her to allow the person who raised her, and whom she has regarded as her father until now, to witness her happiness.74

After the word “happiness” the 2003 French edition omits the seventy or more pages that I have summarized. Following this lengthy gap, the narration resumes with this sentence: “She was still speaking about it, when from the window they saw sixteen people approach on horseback.”75 “She was still speaking about” leads the reader to believe that Beauty simply keeps on demanding that the merchant attend her wedding, as if nothing happens between her request and her “still speaking about” it. Two distant passages in which Beauty speaks about the same topic, her desire to see the merchant at her wedding. are cunningly stitched together. Those of us familiar with the original tale know that she is talking about the prince’s and her own tortuous past.

208 c h a p t e r e i g h t

But let us consider the disconcerting rhetorical effect of the omission. Right before the narrative fracture, the fairy says that for the happy ending of their story they only need the consent of the princess’s father, the king, and adds: “We’ll soon see him here.” The “him” that they soon see, however, is not the king but the merchant, for the arrival of the king was in the omitted part. In the complete version of the tale, a fanfare announces the arrival of the monarch, whose demeanor “had a majestic air that corresponded to his magnificent entourage.”76 In the 2003 edition, the king never arrives. Beauty looks out of the window and spots sixteen people, the merchant plus his sons and daughters, approaching the palace on horseback:

Everyone but the fairy was surprised at their abrupt appearance, and those who appeared were just as astonished at finding themselves carried by the speed of their unmanageable horses to a palace utterly unknown to them . . . The moment he saw her, he ran to her with open arms, blessing the happy occasion of seeing her again, and he heaped praise on the generous Beast who had permitted him to return.77

After this effusion of affection, the fairy steps in and tells the merchant that he shouldn’t be too happy because Beauty is not his real daughter; she is the princess of the Fortunate Islands, “daughter of the king and queen that you see here.”78 “We’ll soon see him here” and “that you see here” indicate a character, the king, Beauty’s real father, whose presence is limited to a “here” with no further description. The king is invisible but “here.” The monarch, whose arrival had been foreseen by the fairy, is “here,” like a ghost hovering over the emotional reunion of the false father and his false daughter. The real father is an empty presence, who at the very end of the story rejoices at the handsomeness of his young son-in-law and blesses the happy marriage.79 The tale ends by noting that the young spouses frequently go to the Fortunate Islands to visit Beauty’s father, as if this mysterious presence has moved from one location (the Beast’s palace) to another (the Fortunate Islands) with the speed of light and the lightness of a fairy. But the 2003 abridgment has also modified the role of the good fairy, who throughout de Villeneuve’s tale is discreetly pulling the strings. The good fairy turns the Beast’s palace into a magical place; she comes up with the “scheme” that leads the merchant to the Beast’s palace; she suggests that the Beast exaggerate the

beauty, zulima, and aline

209

importance of his roses so as to force the poor merchant to return with his youngest daughter; she also saves the infant Beauty by placing her in the merchant’s hands when the wicked fairy threatens to murder the child. In Andrew Lang’s popular The Blue Fairy Tale Book (London, 1889), we find another abridged version of de Villeneuve’s lengthy tale. Instead of merely truncating the original, however, Lang tells the story in a simplified format and stops at the moment when the Beast turns into the prince and Beauty recognizes him as the young man who visited her in her dreams.80 The good fairy and the queen, the prince’s mother, suddenly arrive on a chariot; the fairy introduces Beauty to the queen, who immediately consents to her son’s marriage to the lovely girl, “and the marriage was celebrated the very next day with the utmost splendor, and Beauty and the Prince lived happily ever after.”81 The story ends here. Lang condenses more than two hundred pages into less than twenty. In this Victorian adaptation, the prince’s and the good fairy’s long flashbacks are omitted; the king doesn’t appear, and the merchant with his large family never makes it to the castle. Lang has the good fairy ask Beauty: “I suppose you would like me to send for all your brothers and sisters to dance at your wedding?” This sentence, which is not in de Villeneuve, postpones the arrival of the merchant’s family to a later moment, after the end of the story, even though in the original French they reach the castle before the conclusion of the story. De Villeneuve’s tale seems to call for revisions and modifications. Its Byzantine structure is close to perfection, but this complex mechanism somehow prevents the tale from breathing. By striving to show how every detail fits neatly into a vast and meandering tapestry, the author has subtracted from her tale the depth that comes from what remains untold and unexplained, such as we find so frequently in Basile’s The Tale of Tales. The dynamism of a tale could be said to lie in that chiaroscuro so essential for the definition of the narrative form. The harmony of opposites, which is such a central element of early modern French fairy tales, doesn’t necessarily mean a quasi-mathematical correspondence of contrastive parts. An inadvertent result of the shortened 2003 version is to bring de Villeneuve’s long and complicated “Beauty and the Beast” closer to Leprince de Beaumont’s slim and much more popular version of the tale. Many of the enigmas of the latter version invade and contaminate the 2003 abridgment of de Villeneuve’s older tale, which had striven to resolve all issues and answer all questions. The roses reacquire their unexplained power over the Beast; the good fairy sees her influence in the story weakened and blurred; the wicked fairy is mentioned in passing when we learn about her curse. It is as if, para-

210 c h a p t e r e i g h t

doxically, the 2003 French edition tried to reinstate the secrets that de Villeneuve worked so hard to dispel. Thanks to its draconian editing, however, this recent reprint unsettles an immensely popular and seemingly ‘perfect’ tale of magic and romance. As in an oral fairy tale, a major character, the king, is suddenly and magically “here” even though neither his arrival nor his figure are described. Nor are we told that Beauty is not fully human or that the merchant’s accidental arrival at the Beast’s house was a set-up. The narrator, in this case the editor of Si les fées m’étaient contées . . . , ‘forgot’ parts of the long story. We might conclude that this flawed French edition brings about the same effects of confusion and imperfection that we could expect from an oral tale. What is even more remarkable is that the unraveling of the tale takes place at the end, when all obscurities are usually clarified and all things finally make sense.

The act of making sense, of conjugating disorder and ideal representation, is indeed the challenge that Novalis lays out in the passage from The Universal Brouillon that opens this chapter. Chaos and creation are meant to coexist in a fairy tale. For Novalis, a fairy tale brings together the lawlessness of nature and the rational evolution of history, and in this dynamic blending of opposites it projects itself onto the future. For Novalis a fairy tale feeds on its incompleteness and contradictions; it is a “prophetic” text, in that it foreshadows the universal harmonization of nature and history. The “future world,” he writes, is a chaos “that has permeated itself—that is inside and outside of itself,” a “reasonable chaos.” A reasonable chaos sees no contradiction between what is revealed and what remains secret, between being a fairy and being a human like Beauty, who is the daughter of a fairy and a king. This magical transformation of history into a fairy tale, similar to a beast that finally regains his original human identity, is “a child’s game,” says Novalis. Imitating the world of adults, children inject mystery and desire (chaos) into a world that distances itself from the lawlessness of nature. “In the child,” writes the physician Félix Martí-Ibáñez, “to wish, which is to dream, is more important than to want, which involves action . . . If the adult mind makes history, that is, reality, the child’s mind makes legends, or the desirable . . . Fairy tales appeal to the child because their fabric is similar to that of his thought.”82 Novalis’s “ideal child” is thus a state of mind that focuses on what is desirable while narrating what is real.

chapter nine

“You Will Never Awaken Because the Story You Were In No Longer Exists”: Coover, Postmodernism, and the End of an Era

In 2002, Robert Coover, one of the most original contemporary writers, published a slim book titled The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell), a sequence of imaginary hotels inspired by the wooden boxes created by Joseph Cornell suggestively juxtaposing small objects and images. Reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, The Grand Hotels is also a fascinating synthesis of Coover’s poetics and, in particular, of his interpretation of classic European fairy tales.1 Coover introduces the second imaginary hotel as follows:

At the very heart of the Grand Hotel Penny Arcade, encased in blue glass and pale as porcelain, floats a sleeping princess, gracefully coiling, clothed only in her purity, her eyes open but unseeing. Her slow liquid movements . . . are those of a sleepwalker . . . Though she is, as seen, a lonely figure, she does not seem to suffer from loneliness. She appears much of the time to find herself amid imagined multitudes, waving, greeting friends, dancing, eating, posing . . . or being lifted . . . She is both utterly exposed yet secretive, transparent yet evasive and mysterious. The princess of solitude.2

The image of a sleeping princess oblivious of the external world is the most popular and most powerful symbol of Western fairy tales.3 Falling asleep and awakening lie at the core of the classic fairy-tale tradition. In the story of Cupid and Psyche, which has accompanied us throughout this book, Cupid suddenly wakes up when Psyche pours a drop of scalding wax on

214 c h a p t e r n i n e

him, and later Cupid wakens Psyche when she opens the jar containing the beauty of Proserpina, goddess of the netherworld. The sudden metamorphosis from bestial to human form and the sudden breaking of an evil spell are further instances of awakening to a new reality. Magic is in essence a matter of seeing and unseeing, of letting a hidden reality make itself visible. Marvel, a cornerstone of baroque sensibility as we saw in reading Basile’s fairy tales, is indeed a visible dialogue. Coover’s “Grand Hotel Penny Arcade” is certainly marvelous, but something seems to have gone awry. The sleeping princess “at the very heart” of this bizarre hotel “floats” in midair as the embodiment of a fantasy shared by all the hotel guests. “The guest rooms,” writes Coover, “all decorated in marine blue and permeated with the faint sweet aroma of youthful flesh, encircle the sleeping princess on several levels.”4 The visitors admire this beautiful figure and are intrigued by the fact that she sleeps with her eyes open as if she were awake.5 It is not uncommon in fairy tales to find eerie creatures whose eyes are closed when they are awake and open when they are asleep, reminiscent of the mythic monster Argos, who always kept some of his multiple eyes wide open even when asleep.6 But there is something incredibly sinister about this Sleeping Beauty who stares at her visitors with a blank gaze. In the Grimms’ “Brier Rose,” when the prince’s “lips touched hers, Brier Rose opened her eyes, woke up, and looked at him fondly.”7 The act of opening her eyes as if resurrected to life announces the happy ending of the tale. A Sleeping Beauty is supposed to keep her eyes closed. Staring at the mysterious lady through the “coin-operated peephole viewers” installed in each room, the guests are “thrilled by the illusion that the dreamer is sometimes gazing directly at them as if in recognition.” This charming creature recalls the uncanny vitality of an accurate waxwork, like the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in Madame Tussaud’s museum in London. In Marina Warner’s words, this female figure, the oldest of the entire waxwork collection, lies “in a pose often called abandoned; as if spellbound rather than asleep, she seems suspended for all eternity.”8 Like a guest in the strange hotel, “the spectator looks at the Sleeping Beauty,” writes Warner, “and while the expectation of a prince’s kiss interrupting the eternity of sleep dominates the familiar plot, the museum spectacle draws the spectator into wonder about her inner life.”9 “Stays at the Grand Hotel Penny Arcade seem more like séances,” remarks the narrator in Coover’s novel.10 Looking at the Sleeping Beauty gently moving in midair, the guests imagine what she may be seeing and doing in her dreams, if she is indeed dreaming, and they go so far as to fantasize that she

“you will never awaken”

215

stares at them “in recognition.” “Is she alive?” is a legitimate question, “and if alive, how did she come upon her strange fate?”11 “A tragic estrangement” is the pervasive atmosphere of this hotel, for the visitors strive to conjure up (to awake) the main character of a story that is somehow essential to them.12 As in a séance, the interaction between the viewers and the Sleeping Beauty is marred by the tragic awareness that no substantial connection can be established, and that the story that was so crucial to them and to the dead, which was dramatically interrupted, cannot be restored. What remains is a fantasy that has all the loneliness of a porn flick. Unlike a performer in an adult video, however, the sleeping woman in Coover’s story seems to be totally unaware, not even dreaming. The paradox of this situation, in the case of both the Grand Hotel Penny Arcade and Tussaud’s museum, is that Sleeping Beauty is no longer the heroine of a tale; she is the image of a body lying unconscious without history and without future. The beautiful lady lying deeply asleep on a bed is the image that most powerfully synthesizes the entire fairy tale, but the beginning (her birth, the curse, the old lady with the spindle, etc.) and the ending (the chaste kiss, the awakening of the other characters, the wedding), have been cut out. “Blessed be all those who, dreaming of Sleeping Beauty, died in the hedge,” writes Günther Kunert in his brief essay “Brier Rose” (1972), “for when the victorious prince finally reached her room, he saw “her toothless mouth half opened, slavering, her eyelids sunken, her hairless forehead crimped with blue, wormlike veins.”13 “Only [her] flesh existed,” Kunert states in another essay.14 In Greg Costikyan’s “And Still She Sleeps,” a female “living body, clad in flesh” is literally dug up during an archeological excavation in a medieval English fort.15 Once a person, she is now an “artifact” displayed in a museum, and no medical procedure can wake her up.16 We can look at Sleeping Beauty’s static image through the lenses of our projections or through the gaze of reason. In either case, the picture of this woman lying in bed in a cataleptic state grants no insight. We can cling to the Sleeping Beauty of yesteryear and admire her magical hanging in midair, as in Coover’s hotel. The ‘faithful’ and repetitious retellings of the fairy tale (especially in children’s books) strive, and often fail, to retain the charm of the ‘original’ Sleeping Beauty, which is in fact a mixture of the Disney film version and the Grimms’ rewriting of Basile’s and Perrault’s earlier story. It is commonly believed that this ‘original’ tale has always existed and in a sense doesn’t even need to be told, even though it is in reality a literary invention with no substantial link to oral transmission. Or we may choose to attack and undo the immobile lady by approaching her figure from a real-

216 c h a p t e r n i n e

istic, and thus anti-fairy-tale standpoint. With this approach, we can only come to the sensible conclusion that the body we imagine immaculate and frozen in time has in fact decayed, and that she is dead by now or in an enduring coma. Entering the enchanted castle, the prince in Patricia Wrede’s retelling (1994) first encounters “two skeletons [lying] sprawled across the table in the center of the room” and can’t help but notice a “sweetish odor of decay” and “a broken spinning wheel.”17 One popular and cheap way of deconstructing Sleeping Beauty is to sexualize her story, as Anne Rice does in her soft-core The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1999). Ronald Keller’s less subtle short story “The Princess and the Penis” interprets the same fairy tale as a sexual game. A girl whose on-line name is “Princess” emails a guy “on the Sleeping Beauty Web site” and tells him that her fantasy is “to be made love to while asleep.”18 Practically all characters of classical fairy tales (Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Cinderella, etc.) have been turned into highly sexual creatures, especially in comic books and collections of erotic retellings, in an alleged act of modern, risqué, and enlightened breaking of their spell, even though, as the Sleeping Beauty hovering in Coover’s hotel proves, peeping into her body’s “intimate parts” leaves her invulnerable image and mystery intact, and our supposed gesture of defilement reveals itself to be nothing more than a form of obtuse and ostentatious onanism. Our approach to fairy tales is pornographic, Coover’s story seems to be saying, not only because of our misguided obsession with sexual versions of these tales, but primarily because it is founded on a nonrelationship, on the passive assumption that these tales hovering in our minds are at the same time potent and withdrawn presences. Coover is usually defined as a postmodern author with a keen interest in “pre-novel forms,” such as fairy tales, legends, and myths.19 Critics have debated ad nauseam the meaning of the term ‘postmodern’ in relation to ‘modern,’ and especially its use of irony, pastiche, satire, parody, and narrative perspective.20 What most scholars seem to agree on is that no unified definition can satisfy all the nuances of this cultural trend.21 Nor is there any standard postmodern view of fairy tales. John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover, just to mention three major examples, have shown a striking interest in this genre, but their poetics vary significantly. Whereas Coover emphasizes the mutual contamination and depletion of classic fairy tales, Barthelme fractures these stories into abstract and static images to the point of making the original tale almost unrecognizable. Halfway through Snow White (1965), for example, Barthelme inserts a questionnaire for the reader, in which one of the questions is, “Have you understood, in reading to this

“you will never awaken”

217

point, that Paul is the prince-figure? Yes ( ) No ( ).”22 The answer is far from being an obvious yes. In “Postmodernism Revisited,” John Barth opts for a broad, even generic, definition, first coined by Umberto Eco, which in Barth’s view synthesizes the disparate manifestations of literary postmodernism: a postmodern author “is ‘double-coding . . . He is having it both ways with illusionism and anti-illusionism. That strikes me a legitimate Postmod.”23 The fact that some postmodern writers “have looked to various sorts of myth for their material . . . as well as to premodern narrative forms, like the tale, the fable,” says Barth, is not in itself an exclusive sign of postmodern poetics.24 The so-called double-coding (Eco’s illusionism merged with anti-illusionism) is the quintessence of a postmodern sensibility, even though double-coding is not in itself an exclusively postmodern practice. This is because, in Jessica Tiffin’s clear analysis, fairy tales are so precious for postmodern authors: “Fairy-tale narratives deny reality not only in their calm acceptance of the magical but also in their refusal to provide any sort of realistic detail or conventional causal logic to the worlds they describe. In their deliberate problematization of reality they thus further demonstrate some aspects of metafictional writing,” which is also the landmark of postmodern literature.25 Metafiction indicates a technique through which a narrative text reveals its fictional nature by referring to itself26—for example, the irruption of the narrator’s voice to comment on or disrupt his or her storytelling. When using that voice, a postmodern author often chooses a colloquial and fragmented tone that explicitly mimics oral speech. For example, John Barth’s Lost in the Fun House: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice and Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants (a title denoting types of musical composition) openly “invoke the oral and even musical storytelling tradition.”27 In Coover’s book the sudden presence of the author’s colloquial voice troubles the flow of his storytelling by creating tension between a literary and an oral timbre, which coexist in the text. In “The Magic Poker,” an amusing and obscene parody of the fairy-tale genre, Coover’s “overt presence” guides the reader through the very act of composing the tale, as if he were making up the story while he tells it to us.28 “I wander the island, inventing it” is the story’s first sentence, and soon afterward we are told that in his story “anything can happen.”29 The fairy tale becomes progressively more incoherent, as if its narrator had lost the thread of the story he had in mind.30 “The tendency toward the dissolution, uncertainty, and collapse of narrative authority” in postmodern storytelling, Tiffin explains, “seems a strange companion to the highly structured, formalized, and patterned conventions

218 c h a p t e r n i n e

of the fairy-tale form.” When she speaks of the highly “formalized” and conventional fairy-tale form, Tiffin implicitly refers to literary tales of classic authors such as Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, and not necessarily to Basile’s disruptive, disrespectful, oral-like tales.

A clear synthesis of Coover’s postmodern poetics can be gleaned from his astonishingly funny and obscene novel Pinocchio in Venice (1991).31 The elderly Pinocchio, now an emeritus Italian-American professor returning to Venice after a brilliant career as art critic (he received two Nobel Prizes), fondly recalls the daring ideas he expressed in his best-selling The Wretch, “his first essay in unabashed autobiography, stark precursor to Mamma, his current work-in-progress.”32 Pinocchio’s cutting-edge scholarly book had been an “assault upon all the heretical modern and eventually postmodern (he was a man ahead of his time) denials of what in a famous coinage he called ‘I-ness,’ a masterpiece whose single message . . . was that each man makes himself and thus the world.”33 The old scholar Pinocchio revisits his central concept of “I-ness” in several other passages of the novel, and during a highly academic debate about the location of the soul (the rectum too must be considered a possible location because of man’s so-called “gut feeling”) Pinocchio concludes that soul and “I-ness” are synonyms.34 Pinocchio’s “I-ness” is founded on the character’s experience of transformation from puppet to human being, as he had detailed in his groundbreaking “prose epic” titled The Transformation of the Beast.35 There is a close connection, in Pinocchio’s philosophical views, between “I-ness” and his obsessive memory of the inscrutable Blue-Haired Fairy, whose intervention in the young Pinocchio’s life was crucial for his later mutation into a human being. The remembrance of the elusive fairy is in fact what holds Pinocchio’s “I-ness” together. Pinocchio is so vociferous in his opposition to postmodernism because it challenges not his “I-ness,” but the fantasy that sustains it. Unfortunately, however, his “I-ness” literally falls apart through the novel. The emeritus professor first can’t find his penis; then his ears fall off; and finally he cries out: “I can’t move without fracturing and splintering, my cords and ligaments have rotted out, and my insides are nothing but wet sawdust!”36 “I-ness is an illness,” the despondent academic is compelled to conclude.37 The postmodern in Coover’s depiction of the elderly Pinocchio is not his slowly being undone, his slowly returning to his original, and now decaying, nature (a piece of rotten wood). The splintering of the subject’s “I-ness” and the revelation of his intrinsic fictional character (Pinocchio has never ceased

“you will never awaken”

219

to be a puppet) can’t be fully understood unless we place it in relation to the image of the Blue-Haired Fairy. Upon arriving in Venice, Pinocchio muses over his on-going project Mamma and remembers: “Mine was the discovery that the Blue-Haired Fairy was pretending not to be dead, but to be alive, that in fact it was not she who had given me a place in the world . . . but I who had called her into being.”38 The elderly Pinocchio in Coover’s novel understands that the fairy had pretended to be alive, as if she had been alive only insofar as she persisted as the living memory of someone who may never have existed. Pinocchio had become a man thanks to this paradoxical conviction, which constituted both his soul and his “I-ness.” In Carlo Collodi’s classic book for children, The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), the puppet has a dream in which the fairy kisses him, following which he wakes up to his new identity.39 Reversing this situation, Coover turns this encounter into a Sleeping Beauty moment. It is Carnival time in Venice when the old Pinocchio arrives. He runs into a former student of his, a friendly and attractive young woman who reminds him of his beloved fairy. He falls in love with her and calls her “Bluebell.” Like the fairy, this woman shows up at random in Venice’s crowded streets, leading Professor Pinocchio to utter despair. Suddenly, in a mask shop, he sees what he thinks is her dead body:

He fell out onto the floor of the mask shop . . . crawled toward her . . . he dragged himself on up to her precious face, ghastly in its ashen pallor, and kissed tenderly her cold lips . . . Her lips moved beneath his lips. They stretched into a smile. A miracle! She opened her eyes, sighed, gave him a little smack on his behind, and said: “Now, now, teach! Be nice!”40

The naughty American student has chosen those “grave clothes” as her Carnival costume and also to scare her former teacher, whom she has seen coming into the shop. The Blue-Haired Fairy and Sleeping Beauty have thus become the same character. The reason for this identification is evident: Sleeping Beauty and the Blue-Haired Fairy together grant the subject (Pinocchio) an identity because they are living fictions in which the subject chooses to believe.

“Sleeping Beauty” lies at the core of Coover’s oeuvre. Sleeping Beauties are central characters in several of Coover’s novels and short stories, not only of his more overt rewritings of fairy tales. His Sleeping Beauties are sup-

220 c h a p t e r n i n e

ple and secretive presences that in his more explicit retellings mutate into a variety of other fairy-tale female figures. In Coover’s view, for example, “Beauty and the Beast” and even “Cupid and Psyche” function as variations of “Sleeping Beauty.” Coover’s first Sleeping Beauty shows up forcefully in his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, published in 1966, which instantaneously established him as a new master of fiction.41 The Origin of the Brunists lies at the intersection of nineteenth-century realism with postmodern innovation, and Sleeping Beauty is at the very center of this junction. The novel narrates the birth of a Christian cult in a small coal-mining town where an explosion has claimed the lives of ninety-seven miners. Striving to give a meaning to this sudden tragedy, the town slowly comes to read the event as a sign of the forthcoming end of the world. Giovanni Bruno, an Italian-American misfit who has ‘miraculously’ survived the blast in the mine, is seen as the prophet charged by the divine to lead his people in the last days preceding the Apocalypse. Mentally damaged by the inhalation of carbon while trapped in the mine, Giovanni has a lengthy recovery and can only express himself in obscure and incomplete statements. In this barely veiled satire of misguided religious beliefs and deranged visionaries, Coover introduces a different, pivotal character: Marcella Bruno, Giovanni’s sister, whose accidental death is narrated in the introductory chapter (“The Sacrifice”), even though it takes place after the cult has coalesced around the mysterious prophet Giovanni Bruno. In the evening preceding what the cult members believe will be the Apocalypse, the Brunists gather to rehearse the procession, due to take place the following day, to the “Mount of Redemption,” a nearby hill that some of their prophecies have identified as the place where the divine will reveal itself.42 Wearing white robes, the cult members perform that “pilgrimage” primarily “to familiarize the new people,” and they decide to drive there because their cars, “they reasoned, would permit them a quick removal in the event the enemy—any enemy—should appear.”43 And the “enemy,” a flurry of unexpected cars in the night driving up the mine road, appears to disrupt their preparatory ritual. The Brunists jump into their cars and drive hurriedly down the hill, while the unbelievers and the press drive up the road. The result is mayhem. The young Marcella Bruno, uninformed of the rehearsal, runs toward the hill so as not to miss the religious experience but is fatally hit by a car and falls into a ditch. Instead of leading to the undoing of the new cult, Marcella’s death is interpreted as the sacrifice that the divine has demanded of his new chosen

“you will never awaken”

221

people. The deceased girl becomes the cohesive symbol of the new religion, and the expected Apocalypse turns into the dramatic funeral of the sacrificial victim. What is relevant for our study is Coover’s masterly treatment of this beautiful girl, who dies in the first chapter of the book but continues to speak posthumously in independent, italicized scattered quotations throughout the novel. The narrator of the introductory chapter (one of the newer adepts) relates his enduring memory of the dead girl: “He saw her body hurtling by . . . Another picture, but this one was at the end: the girl’s body in the back seat of a car. Her right arm hung off the seat, her left lay pinched between her body and the back of the seat, her eyes opened. He could never forget this.”44 Like the sleeping woman floating with “her eyes open but unseeing” in the Grand Hotel Penny Arcade, the dead Marcella is described as if she were still able to see. In the ditch where she lay “face up” unconscious, she was “lovely . . . Her face was serene.”45 She takes part in the story as if she were at the same time dead and alive. She has died as the sacrifice that gives meaning to what has preceded her death, namely the miners’ violent death, her brother’s raving words, and the subsequent formation of the new cult. The Marcella we are asked to recall is the lifeless, “lovely” body lying faceup, looking and not looking at the stunned bystanders. But her thoughts and fantasies (printed in italics) appear in the book as narrative suspensions, as quotations from another possible text that often betray a magical, fairy-tale tone:

Marcella, digging in the dewed earth by the old apple tree, sings revival songs of her own make. She punches open the gaily colored seed packages. Thirty days! The sun is gloriously hot on her spring-frocked back. He comes!46

Resembling the beautiful and virtuous heroine of innumerable nineteenthcentury fairy tales, Marcella seems to be living in a world that is at the same time idyllic and haunted by hostile presences; and she is alone in experiencing this marvelous reality. This is how she perceives the sect’s preparation for the forthcoming apocalypse:

She perceives, out of the corner of her eye, a shadow- but when she looks more closely, there is nothing there. This sensation of being pursued by something incorporeal has

222 c h a p t e r n i n e

been with Marcella for two or three weeks now. Shapes in dark rooms. Shadows falling across her path. Disembodied sounds on stairways and under her bed at night . . . Well, perhaps she is being childish.47

Marcella lives within the scary and challenging world of a fairy tale, in which she, as the heroine, will have to face unimaginable challenges alone. And she feels like the boundaries between being awake and being dead are porous:

Marcella wakes from a distant place. An inexplicable chill. She supposes that, kissed by Death, she is dead . . . The house is filled with noise. Her wake? Yet, when she rolls her ear into the pillow, she hears the beating of a heart. Can it be hers? Has she returned?48

When we read these passages inserted in the novel as excerpts from a different text (at times a diary, a memoir, or fragments of fairy tales), we must bear in mind that they are glimpses into the psyche of a sacrificial lamb, so to speak, who addresses us from “a distant place,” the land of the dead, the land of magic and fairy tales. Marcella “has returned,” as she says when waking up from her deathlike sleep to grant meaning and validity to the story in which she is the ‘dead’ character. The sleeping body in The Grand Hotel (of Joseph Cornell) seems to be mimicking meaningful acts. Marcella recalls her past after being killed in a car accident. Unaware of the women’s inner tales, the men contemplating these female bodies turn them into main characters of their own stories. This unbridgeable divide characterizes an impossible form of storytelling in which the narrator has no listener or, rather, no interlocutor, since an oral narrator usually molds his tale according to his audience. Being the hero of his own tale, the male narrator facing his Sleeping Beauty concocts a clichéd story of quest and sexual satisfaction, of search and appropriation, even though he remains aware of its fictional, sterile, and unsatisfying nature. The object of his desire is either dead or in a coma. Western culture used to see folk and fairy tales as the fulfillment of universal (or national) desires and ideals. Coover, on the contrary, presents fairy tales as empty shells, formulaic fragments of tales told by a narrator who is also the hackneyed hero of his own tale. He writes parodies of fairy tales in the sense defined by Tania, a painter in Coover’s novel Gerald’s Party (1985): “the intrusion of form, or death (she equated them) into life. Thus the mir-

“you will never awaken”

223

ror, the parodist, did not lie—on the contrary—but neither did it merely reflect: rather, like a camera, it created the truth we saw in it, thereby murdering potentiality.”49 According to this powerful definition of parody, the parodist reflects what he or she sees as infused with death, for the parodist sees reality as a truth structured by form. Paradoxically, instead of vivifying the reflected image, parody mirrors its death. Parody, then, potentially murders the very reality it reflects, because it reproduces the death the parodists sees in reality. The death of the reflected reality is a fairy tale. In Gerald’s Party, Coover’s hilarious, obscene, and incredibly fast-paced description of a chaotic suburban cocktail party, a woman named Ros lies in a puddle of blood on the living room floor without being noticed by the distracted, sexually promiscuous, and often drunk guests, until her anxious husband walks into the room and asks about her.50 Most of the men at this social event have been the victim’s lovers at some point in their lives, including Gerald, the party’s host, who, after seeing Ros’s dead body, recalls how he first met her, years before: “He’d found her, as though in a fairy tale, in a chorus line, a pretty blonde with nice legs and breasts.”51 And the fairytale allusion crops by throughout the novel. During his frequent moments of intimacy with her, Gerald used to call Ros “Princess.” And later in the novel, an intoxicated guest enthusiastically declares that Gerald is a “Prince Charming.”52 The murdered young woman “loved all men,” including those who fail to notice her dead body and are not particularly interested in having it removed. Ros had given herself to all men who desired her as if she were nothing more than their imaginary self-gratification, the embodiment of the male’s sexual fantasy: the totally available, dimwitted, and nonjudgmental woman who happily satisfies all male desire. In that regard, she is another Sleeping Beauty whose body is ready to be possessed, even if lifeless in the middle of a living room. Excited, one of her ex-lovers “pressed his head against her breast. When he straightened up there was fresh blood dripping down his forehead between his eyes.”53 The man is visibly aroused, and mimicking a sexual act, he ejaculates in front of the party guests. Necrophilia is an appropriate term to define the relationship between the male narrator and the sleeping princess. Gerald remembers that “one of the best times I ever had with [Ros] was the day I arrived to find a photographer there shooting stills . . . What the photographer was after were simple straightforward publicity stills of Ros in rapture.”54 In order to facilitate her performance, the photographer said that he would be “glad to help her work up the real thing.” Reading rapture as a synonym for orgasm,

224 c h a p t e r n i n e

the three of them (Ros, Gerald, and the photographer) locked themselves up in a rehearsal room and “enjoyed an enchanted hour of what I came to think of as an erotic exploration of my own childhood . . . I played Comedy to Ros’s Tragedy, Inquisitor to her Witch, Sleeping Beauty to her Prince Charming . . . The best was probably one of the simplest, a variation on Beauty and the Beast in which Ros wore only a little strip of diaphanous white cheesecloth and I dressed up in a gorilla suit.”55 For the photographer, Ros’s facial and bodily performance was successful insofar as it repeatedly led to her ‘little death,’ her ‘rapture,’ her leaving this world for a few instants, which would be immortalized by the photographer’s camera. Ros and Gerald performed a sequence of tableaux vivants from classic fairy tales, thanks to which Gerald could at once satisfy his sexual drive and revisit his childhood, as if one thing couldn’t happen without the other. Fairy tale and childhood are two sides of the same sexual fetish that is pleasurable insofar as it remains unmodified. In Gerald’s Party, we learn that one of the murdered woman’s most successful performances had been in Lot’s Wife, a free interpretation of the well-known biblical story. In this play, “after being turned into salt and abandoned by Lot, she was supposed to get set upon by ecstatic Sodomites, stripped, stroked, licked from top to bottom, and quite literally reimpregnated with life.”56 In a much later passage in the novel, a character who has seen the play shares his ideas about its possible meaning. Why does God save Lot, who later has sex with his daughters? “The radical message of that legend is that incest, sodomy, betrayal, and all that are not crimes—only turning back is: rigidified memory, attachment to the past. That play was one attempt to subvert the legend, unfreeze the memory, reconnect to the here and now.”57 We can connect this statement to Coover’s poetics by assuming that what the postmodern writer, and Coover in particular, intends to accomplish is “to subvert the legend,” to turn it (whether myth, sacred narrative, fairy tale) upside down, to tear it apart by revealing its outdated status. But the same character who has shared his view of Lot’s Wife adds: “And maybe . . . maybe her murder was another . . .” In the play, the Sodomites, who in the biblical story perish in the destruction of their city, bring Lot’s wife back to life by violating her, as if she were another version of Sleeping Beauty (the still, defenseless female body awakened by male desire). Lot’s Wife, Coover’s imaginary play, changes the destiny both of the Sodomites (the Prince Charming of this tale) and of Lot’s wife (Sleeping Beauty). The Sodomites are alive because they are meant to “reimpregnate with life” the petrified woman. Rather than “unfreezing the memory,” Lot’s Wife turns the biblical episode into a sexual reading of a fairy tale. We are still within the realm of fetishism.

“you will never awaken”

225

The character sharing his view of Lot’s Wife contends that Ros’s murder itself is somehow “another” form of subverting the legend, or unfreezing the memory. How can he possibly connect the resurrection of Lot’s wife to the stabbing of a woman in a living room during a crowded party? Aren’t the two actions exactly the opposite of each other? Doesn’t death freeze memory rather than unfreezing it? We can hypothesize that murdering the girl meant freeing her from her repetitious ‘tale,’ according to which she embodied the assured, fairy-tale-like satisfaction of men’s desire. Her dead body wouldn’t change the men’s memory of their sexual intimacy with her, but would make explicit its fictional nature, because Ros was a dead object of living desire. In Coover’s short story “The Marker,” Jason sits comfortably “in an armchair with a book in his hand,” while his beautiful wife “moves lightly about the room . . . folds the blankets of the bed (which is across the room from Jason), fluffs her short blonde hair, crawls onto the fresh sheets . . . gazing across the room at Jason.”58 When the husband turns off the light, “the image of his wife, as he has just seen her, fades slowly . . . gradually becoming transformed from that of her nude body . . . to that of Beauty, indistinct and untextured . . . an abstract Beauty.”59 When he leans down to give her a kiss, Jason perceives a very unpleasant odor. “She is rotting,” he comments.60 His wife has been dead for three weeks. We could go so far as to say that the wife was alive as long as her husband saw her gazing at him from the bed. It is not just that the husband keeps a fantasy alive and then loses it in the metaphorical darkness of the night. Like the elderly puppet’s Blue-Haired Fairy in Pinocchio in Venice, it is Jason’s wife who keeps his fantasy alive; she “pretends to be alive,” like the Blue-Haired Fairy. The two tales exist only on account of their deceased characters. Again, this paradox must not be reduced to a simple matter of male subjectivity’s projection. The agency is in the fictional character, not in the subject who reads about or fantasizes about her.

“Are you not the condemned woman?” three brothers ask an unattractive girl “squatting on a branch” of a great oak in Coover’s Stepmother (2004).61 “I am that,” the girl replies, “but I was hoping I might find a loving prince to rescue me.” This damsel in distress is the well-known ugly and unpleasant girl who vomits toads every time she opens her mouth.62 “Condemned” for some unspecified crime, she has taken shelter in the woods, where all fugitives from fairy tales gather: “The woods harbor witches, murderers, robbers, dwarves and giants, savage beasts, elfin angels . . . poor woodcutters, adventuresome tailors, lost minstrels, prophesying birds and bewitched

226 c h a p t e r n i n e

frogs.”63 The “condemned” young woman, who speaks as little as possible so as not to vomit toads, symbolizes the “isolation and despair” that reigns among the inhabitants of the woods. At the beginning of Stepmother, we find the same girl shackled to the floor of a cell, waiting to be executed. Her mother, the witch, the wicked stepmother, the “long-nosed toothless crone” of so many tales, has come to save her, even though the old woman is aware of her limited power.64 She has already witnessed the sad destiny of innumerable other girls: “How many I’ve seen go this way, daughters, stepdaughters, whatever . . . I know where they go: to be drowned, hung, stoned, beheaded, burned at the stake, impaled, torn apart, shot, put to the sword, boiled in oil, dragged down the street in barrels studded on the inside with nails.”65 As Marina Warner reminds us, the cruel or merely insensitive stepmother makes “her first appearance as a mother-in-law” in the Cupid and Psyche tale.66 The character of the old crone appears in several of Coover’s writings, and not only in his explicit retellings of fairy tales. In Gerald’s Party, the murdered woman’s husband suddenly remembers that one night he had found an “old hag” with “a hunched back . . . dressed in pitiful old rags” waiting for him in his house.67 Knowing that he was a successful lawyer, the witch wanted him to take action against her wicked son, who had taken from her the “fabulous wealth” that she wanted to share with the whole world, and was trying “to have her declared mentally insane and put away.”68 When the lawyer refused to help her, the old witch had cursed him. Maybe his wife’s murder was a result of this witch’s evil spell. It would be a mistake, in my view, to see Coover’s old witch as an alter ego of the defenseless girl perennially subjected to male abuse, or as the strong-willed woman who undermines the male logic of fairy tales. In Coover, the beautiful young woman and the ugly old witch are two opposite sides of the same female character. Both are unable to change the narrative that has defined their roles. One seems to foster and sustain male desire (his gaze, his fairy tale) and the other seems to oppose it. The old hag cynically highlights the violence behind the relationship between prince and Sleeping Beauty, between narrator and his tale; in other words, the old witch rejuvenates the old tale and at the same time discloses its injustice.69

Coover’s view of the old hag finds in his brief, masterly Briar Rose (1996) its most powerful representation. In this book, the old witch is the storyteller who lies within Sleeping Beauty’s mind and entertains her with varia-

“you will never awaken”

227

tions of her story. Sleeping Beauty’s inner narrator blends in Basile, Perrault, and the Grimms in a disquieting process of narrative regeneration.70 Briar Rose is the most striking and most successful modern reading of Sleeping Beauty, which, as we said, for Coover comes to embody the concept of fairy tale tout court. In my view, Cristina Bacchilega’s insightful definition of postmodern fairy tales as “wonders in performance” finds in Coover’s short book its most successful example.71 The Coover version of the tale is made of a sequence of forty-two short chapters (none more than a page and a half ), each depicting only one (failed) event, either the prince hacking away at the brier hedge that surrounds the enchanted castle or the beautiful lady sleeping on her royal bed. The two scenes alternate and describe no resolution: the prince will never reach the castle and the princess will never wake up. The two characters are stuck in two frames,’ so to speak, of the famous tale. In the Grimms’ version, the thick fence spontaneously opens up to let the prince through, and the lady eventually wakes up and sits up in bed. Rather than seeing Coover’s strategy as a way of deconstructing the tale, we could see it as a way of isolating and highlighting the two key moments that indicate the beginning and the end of the tale’s conclusion. The tale begins to end with the prince’s arrival and ends when the princess wakes up. As we know well, however, this tale does not really end, because it lives in us as a static and immutable tale frozen on the two indelible images that are meant to announce its conclusion. It is certainly possible to claim that in the spirit of postmodernism, as several critics have pointed out, Coover’s obsessive rhetoric reveals that the traditional tale has exhausted its magic. I would rather emphasize a major consequence of this “literature of exhaustion,” to borrow the title of John Barth’s famous essay on postmodern writing.72 We, the readers, live within this exhausted narrative; rather than indicating a way out of this suffocating space dominated by failure and death, Briar Rose brings to the fore the addictive, and thus frustrating and despairing, reiteration of our act of reading a tale that stands still and has no ending. We are both the prince who can’t pass beyond the thorny barrier and the princess who can’t wake up.

In the opening segment of the book the prince reminds himself that “he has undertaken this great adventure . . . in order to provoke a confrontation with the awful powers of enchantment itself.”73 Echoing Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, the prince wishes “to tame mystery”; that is, he desires, in the famous psychologist’s words, “to understand himself in this complex

228 c h a p t e r n i n e

world with which he must learn to cope; . . . to create order in his life.”74 The prince is thus someone who willfully mythologizes his quest, which could have taken up a different narrative form. He could have gone after “the Golden Fleece” or “another bloody grail,” for example, without changing the meaning of his tale. In essence, all these myths are variations of the same story. The image of the prince as a naïve young man attached to a clichéd fiction has been used in contemporary retellings of “Sleeping Beauty” that seek to shift the enchantment from the princess to her rescuer. In Cameron Dokey’s Beauty Sleep (2002), the princess cursed by the evil witch is banned from her father’s kingdom, and in a forest she encounters a young prince who is seeking a lovely princess who lies asleep somewhere in the woods. “I’m going to bring her the kiss of true love,” the prince declares. “You’re talking like a story,” the princess scolds him, “a romantic fairy tale told to you by your grandfather.”75 In Dokey’s retelling, the princess pricks her finger and falls asleep while stitching up the prince’s cheek, which has been deeply wounded by the thorny hedge of a mysterious maze. Modern retellings of “Sleeping Beauty” frequently seek to reverse the contrast between male activity and female passivity. In Coover’s Briar Rose, on the contrary, the prince and the princess are equally unable to step out of the story (or, better yet, the narrative type) that enslaves them. In Briar Rose, the first obstacle in the prince’s adventure is the “odor of decay” coming from the corpses of those who, before him, faced the same challenge. The decay at the beginning of the prince’s tale seems to be counterbalanced by the “fragrances of fresh tansy and chamomile, roses, lilac and hyssop, lavender and savory,” which seemingly indicate that “perhaps he has been chosen.”76 The two contrasting smells, the stench of decomposed bodies and the perfume of blooming flowers, could be taken as symbolic signposts of the prince’s mythic tale: the psychological death preceding the hero’s new beginning. In the Grimms’ version of the prince’s story, however, the bushes covered with blooming flowers open up magically to let the hero walk toward the enchanted castle because he is indeed the “chosen” one. For this modern prince, who knows what kind of tale he is trying to perform, these fragrant flowers work in a different manner. Instead of celebrating the hero’s arrival, the flowers bloom for no declared reason, and they actually seem to snare the prince into their inescapable and deadly labyrinth. Whereas the Grimms’ prince doesn’t wonder about the significance of the colorful flowers and simply keeps walking until he reaches the lady’s bed, our modern prince can’t help but give the flowers a tentative meaning: “perhaps” they mean that he has been chosen.77 In other words, the prince tries to reassure him-

“you will never awaken”

229

self that what he is experiencing is readable in the light of a mythic narrative that is familiar to him and in which he plays the central role.78

In an oft-cited interview, Coover discusses the role of myths, legends, and fairy tales in contemporary American society: “We have come to the end of a tradition . . . We are the outpost of Western culture, and it is here that we sense collapse because the waves are beating on our rocks”; Europe is the “further inland” that hasn’t been yet “washed over.”79 Coover’s apocalyptic metaphor conjures up the image of a sort of biblical deluge that is erasing Western culture as we know it: “Our old faith—one might better say our old sense of constructs derived from myths, legends, philosophies, fairy stories, histories, and other fictions which help to explain what happens to us from day to day . . .—has lost its efficacy. Not necessarily is it false; it is just not as efficacious as it was.”80 In stark contrast to Coover’s bleak view, Jacob Grimm takes an optimistic and inspired approach to myth, which he sees as intrinsically connected to history and legend. For Grimm, myth is not a mere necessity for human survival but a live presence within history. In German Mythology, he contends that legend is “like a glow” (Schein) or “like a fragrance” (Duft) that enlivens history. But history has a mutually supportive relationship with myth. When myth is weakened, Grimm writes, history rushes to help.81 He believes that history, legend, myth, and epic poetry cannot be separated from one another; together they represent a living, spontaneous, and powerful force in human society.82 Coover, while sharing Jacob Grimm’s belief in the vital importance of myth, uses a mythic image to visualize the contemporary crisis of myth itself, seeing himself and his fellow American writers as vigilant sentinels facing the impending flood that will blot out Western culture. Speaking of fairy tales as well as myths, Coover makes a fundamental distinction between being inefficacious and being false. He is not interested in unmasking the alleged falsity of our “myths, legends, philosophies, fairy stories”; he merely underscores that these narratives have become less effective. Coover contends that our cultural climate resembles that of Cervantes, because in Don Quixote “fictions . . . are full of ‘code words’ that point to a significance beyond themselves.”83 Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things (1966), argues that Don Quixote’s journey “is a quest for similitudes.”84 Addressing Cervantes in Pricksongs and Descants, Coover states: “Like you, we, too, seem to be standing at the end of one age and on the threshold of another.”85

230 c h a p t e r n i n e

Coover makes it clear that myth does not mean false story, as some critics have him say. “The force of myth and mythopoeic thought is with us for all time,” writes Coover, because “the crucial beliefs of people are mythic in nature; whether at the level of the Cinderella story or of the Resurrection, the language is mythopoeic rather than rational.”86 Coover’s discourse appears contradictory and probably couldn’t be otherwise. On the one hand, he claims that “we are no longer convinced of the nature of things . . . everything seems itself random.”87 The tales we used to live by are no longer working or are working less well. On the other hand, he claims that “under these conditions of arbitrariness, the artistic impulse is directed toward putting the random parts together in any order which provides a pattern for living.” The problem is that his writing, like the writing of most postmodern authors, does not provide “a pattern for living.” The process of “putting the random parts together” does not necessarily translate into the creation of new mythic narratives, which is what we need the most at the moment, given that the old tales have done their time. In an important essay on cybernetics and literature, Italo Calvino goes so far as to say that myths arise by chance from the persistent “playing” with storytelling, and not vice versa.88 This statement reinforces Coover’s belief in the contemporary author as someone who tries to put narrative pieces together to offer some kind of guideline for his readers. In Italo Calvino’s unconventional view, fairy tales come before, and not after, myths. Calvino imagines a hypothetical storyteller from a primitive society who keeps telling “his innocent little stories,” when suddenly “a terrible revelation emerges: a myth, which demands to be recited in secret and in a sacred place.”89

In Coover’s Briar Rose, what the prince and the sleeping princess share is their being abandoned: “She dreams, as she has often dreamt, of abandonment and betrayal, of lost hope.”90 They act alone; alone they perform the story of their abandonment. In her dreams, the princess sees her parents leave the castle, and her only feeling is despair, which she links to the image of “being stabbed again and again by the treacherous spindle, impregnated with despair.”91 “I am that hurts,” she says of herself.92 Also abandoned is the Sleeping Beauty in Anne Sexton’s homonymous poem: “I was abandoned. / That much I know. / I was forced backward. / I was forced forward.”93 In both Sexton’s and Coover’s versions, the young woman has been the object of an unbearable abuse, which in Sexton’s unsettling poem is incest. These doleful princesses survive in an atemporal condition. “She is

“you will never awaken”

231

stuck in the time machine,” writes Sexton, “she’s on a voyage.”94 In Coover’s Briar Rose, the princess is restless in her dreams and unable to sleep peacefully. She dreams of innumerable indistinct princes who stop by her room, but only fragments of those male figures remain in her memory. Innumerable are also the “familiar faces” that greet her while she dreams of walking alone through the hallways of the solitary castle, but even those individuals fade away, “except for one perhaps: a loving old crone.”95 The old crone, however, is not a loving or compassionate companion for the lonely princess; she is closer to an ominous witch than to a reassuring mother figure, though the princess incessantly relies on the old woman in her dreams.96 In this modern Briar Rose, the princess never conjures up the protective image of her mother or father, but only the disturbing figure of the old woman. In one instance, the princess sees herself in the kitchen with the old crone who is slitting the throat of a piglet. This is a traditional setting for the act of storytelling, an elderly narrator entertaining her younger audience while taking care of her daily chores. The princess is full of anxiety and keeps asking the old woman: “Who am I? . . . What am I?” The princess has “no memory.”97 While hanging the “gurgling piglet by its trotters on a beam to let it drain,” the crone tells the anguished girl: “Calm down, child. Let me tell you a story . . .”98 The crone’s attitude and words closely recall the character of the old woman in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses. In that work, a group of thieves kidnap a young girl, Charite, who is later haunted by terrible dreams in which she sees the same robbers kill her beloved husband. In order to calm her down, an old woman, who is in league with the criminals and often scolds the girl because of her weeping, tells her: “Cheer up, my mistress . . . I shall divert you with a pretty story and an old wife’s tale.”99 The “pretty story” is Cupid and Psyche. Neither Apuleius’s nor Coover’s crone takes the girl’s side. In the Metamorphoses, she just wants the girl to stop weeping because her tears annoy her; in Briar Rose, she is annoyed by the princess’s persistent questions (Who am I? What am I?). Keep in mind that Coover’s old crone is within the sleeping princess; the old woman is a figment of her imagination. But everything is happening right now. The princess’s dreams, the old crone’s stories within her dreams, and the prince’s frustrating attempts to cross the briar hedge take place now, in the present tense, and not in the indistinct past usually associated with fairy tales.100 The traditional “once upon a time” creates an unbridgeable distance between the tale and the listener or reader. The tale is out of reach, and its characters existed a long time ago. But “once upon a time” also indicates that someone, some un-

232 c h a p t e r n i n e

named person, is repeating this old story now. This very old story must have something important for us if someone has chosen to revamp its memory. In this ambiguity lies the power of what we usually consider a traditional fairy tale. Coover’s prince and princess, however, experience their ordeal in the present time, in front of our eyes, deprived of the privacy that only the past could grant them. The innumerable variations of their failures (she will never wake up; he will never reach the castle) seem to be happening all at the same time. Like Basile’s stories, which resemble transcriptions of oral performances, Coover’s brief and ingenious variants of the same narrative fragments create a symphonic effect in which these new short tales seem to gush out of an old source all at once.

A constant present is also the tense of all dreams. A dream, writes James Hillman, “is stuck within the limits of its framework, like a painting in which nothing comes first and nothing comes later.”101 In Briar Rose, the princess can’t help but dream, and in her dream an old woman tells her innumerable variations of a single story, which is the princess’s biography. The old crone’s first narrative is closely based on Basile’s version of Sleeping Beauty titled “Sun, Moon, and Talia.”102 “There was once a beautiful young princess,” the crone, now called “fairy,” begins, “who, for reasons of mischief, her own or someone else’s, got something stuck under her fingernail, a thorn perhaps, and fell asleep for a hundred years.” This is an astute way of summarizing the initial part of the Italian tale and focusing on the part that concerns the princess. Basile doesn’t say that she slept for a hundred years, but that “some time later” (after her falling asleep) a king walked into the palace where her family had abandoned her.103 The version of the tale familiar to Coover’s princess is the more traditional one: “How did she wake up? Did a prince kiss her?”104 “Ah. No. Well, not then,” is the crone’s curt reply. The old crone, who is also a witch, is the recipient of all primeval stories; she knows how the princess’s tale originated, developed, metamorphosed. In Coover’s Briar Rose, two leading versions clash in the young lady’s dream: a false fairy tale, the well-known Perrault-Grimm-Disney rendering, which is what Sleeping Beauty spontaneously remembers, and the true fairy tale, which the old crone presents as in direct opposition to the other one. The tale of the princess awakened by a loving prince is a deeply ingrained story that survives in the young woman’s psyche even though most of her memories have disappeared. The prince’s chaste kiss is a naturally false image that is an intrinsic part of the sleeping

“you will never awaken”

233

woman’s identity. The crone rectifies her false memory by describing a radically different setting:

There were little babies crawling all over her when she came to. One of them, searching for her nipple, had found her finger instead and—Babies? Yes, it seemed that this Sleeping Beauty had been visited by a number of princes over the years . . . and so there were naturally all these babies. The one that sucked the thorn out died, of course . . . Many of them must have grown old and died meanwhile, there must have been old dead bodies lying around. Well, maybe it wasn’t exactly a hundred years, Rose, who’s to say, maybe it was more like a long winter, what’s time to a dreamer, after all?105

The old woman expands Basile’s crude tale, in which a married king, finding the sleeping girl by chance, is “enflamed” by sexual desire, rapes her, and then goes back to his kingdom where his wife is waiting for him.106 After nine months, “Talia unloaded a pair of babies, one a boy and the other a girl.” Coover’s crone turns Basile’s Sleeping Beauty into a sexual commodity for innumerable princes on their way to “royal hunting parties.” The murdered Ros in Gerald’s Party used to play the same role. Princes and sleeping princesses are characters of two distinct fairy tales that do not coincide but nonetheless feed on each other. “The princes were married?” asks the stunned girl in her dream.107 “Of course, what did you expect my child?” the crone replies. In Basile, the king frequently returns to Talia’s palace (Talia is Basile’s Sleeping Beauty) because he is very fond of her and their two children, whom he calls Sun and Moon. The king’s wife becomes suspicious; she sends her secretary to Talia’s house and invites her and her kids to her castle with the intention of killing them all. The queen orders that the children be slaughtered and cooked for the king’s dinner, but the cook cooks two goat kids instead. Then the queen “had a huge fire lit right there in the courtyard of the palace and then ordered that Talia be thrown into it.”108 The king’s sudden arrival saves the girl’s life and leads to his cruel wife’s execution. According to Coover’s old crone, Sleeping Beauty and her children became the sacrificial victims of a bloody ritual performed by all the wives of the princes who had had sexual intercourse with the sleeping girl. These resentful women “threw a big party at Beauty’s place and cooked up all her children in a hundred different dishes, including a kind of hash, sauced

234 c h a p t e r n i n e

with shredded onions, stewed in butter until golden, with . . . a little mustard added.”109 With a fleeting allusion to the “sauce Robert” (the mustard) with which Beauty’s two children are supposed to be cooked in Perrault’s version of the fairy tale, the old crone in Sleeping Beauty’s dream portrays a devastating scene of revenge reminiscent of a Greek tragedy.110 The girl herself, the crone adds, is murdered and cooked. “But it’s horrible!,” the girl cries out in her dream, “she would have been better not waking up at all!”111 The elderly narrator makes sure that the girl understands the brutal differences between the false tale she tells herself and the true tale. In the beginning lies Basile’s harsh story of rape and abandonment. Despair is the emotional residue of the original tale that the princess has sugarcoated and rewritten through a sentimental editing process. The essential distinction between Basile’s and Perrault’s versions of Sleeping Beauty is of great relevance for Coover, since we find another explicit allusion in Gerald’s Party, when Gerald finds his mother-in-law speaking in a “moralistic tone” to the despondent detective in charge of unraveling the mystery of the girl murdered in the living room.112 Gerald overhears the old woman talk about the concept of “sucking the mother’s finger” and explain to the attentive detective that “he [the prince or king] was married . . . and raped a woman who was as well as dead.”113 Defending a member of her own class but also giving the detective an important clue about the possible murderer, Gerald’s mother-in-law insists that the accusations against Sleeping Beauty’s motherin-law are unfair, because “it was his wife who, with good reason, put in execution those so-called ‘horrible desires.’” The policeman concludes: “Funny how, with repetition, it gets all turned around.” It is indeed a matter of repetition, of slightly different variations that slowly lead to the formation of a seemingly new story. By reading The Arabian Nights and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Coover states in the 1973 interview, he came to understand the meaning of transformation: “I turned to the ancient fictions to research what had already been done also to see what new ideas they might engender. The Arabian Nights, I discovered, was a gold mine of formal possibilities . . . Going back to Ovid produced a similar response. The Ovidian stories all concern transformation . . . I suddenly realized that the basic, constant struggle for all of us is against metamorphosis.”114 With respect to narrative metamorphosis, in Coover’s Briar Rose, the old crone’s first tale is a retelling of Basile’s Sleeping Beauty which, however, betrays the Italian version in one fundamental aspect: the sleeper and her (numerous) children die. This is not just a morbidly not-very-happy ending.

“you will never awaken”

235

Old crones show up in other of Coover’s rewritings of fairy tales and always reveal a macabre interest in gruesome tales. In “Grandmother’s Nose” (A Child Again, 2005), Red Riding Hood fondly recalls her grandma, who “had lots of stories about being hungry or about eating too much or the wrong things. Like the one about the little girl whose father ate her brother. He liked it so much he sucked every bone.”115 What the old crone in Briar Rose and the grandma in A Child Again have in common is their insistence on the literal undoing of the characters in their stories. Instead of stressing the recreation of a disrupted scenario—the stepmother in the Grimms’ “The Juniper Tree” turns the little boy into “stewed meat,” but he comes back to life at the end of the story; Basile’s Sleeping Beauty is not boiled to death in a cauldron—the two old women describe an ultimate and irreversible metamorphosis, the kind that appears in Ovid’s often chilling stories: the characters and thus their stories are literally disintegrated, processed, and devoured.116 “I don’t know if I want to hear the rest,” the princess tells the old crone in the following dream.117 Despite the grim tone of the old narrator’s story, the ambience of this new dream, the princess thinks, is “vaguely reassuring, not unlike a happy ending.”118 The young woman finds herself in the kitchen while the old woman is “gutting a plucked cock” and then “ripping out the cock’s inner organs.”119 What makes this scene something like a happy ending is its homeliness, its repetitive and familiar atmosphere, even though the old woman’s action is repellent and highly symbolic, as we will see in a moment. The old woman resumes the Basile version of Sleeping Beauty and expands on the gruesome ending she had created for her first retelling. The prince’s wife, she says, “was not the ogress everyone said she was.” In Perrault’s version the prince’s mother is indeed an ogress.120 The old crone repeats that Sleeping Beauty’s and the prince’s babies were murdered and cooked, but when she comes to describe the young woman’s execution, she borrows directly from Basile the description of Talia slowly undressing before “the huge fire lit right there in the courtyard:”

Talia fell down on her knees before the queen and begged her to at least give her the time to take off the clothes she was wearing. Not so much out of pity for the poor girl as to retrieve those gold-and pearl-embroidered clothes, the queen said, “Get undressed; that I will allow you to do.” Talia began to undress, letting out a shriek with every piece of clothing she took off.121

236 c h a p t e r n i n e

Coover’s old crone rephrases Basile as follows:

Sleeping Beauty was wearing a beautiful jewel-studded gown her friend the prince had given her and his wife wanted it, so she ordered Beauty, before being thrown on the fire, to strip down, which she did, slowly, one article at a time, shrieking wildly with each little thing she removed, as though denuding herself was driving her crazy.122

The old crone makes Sleeping Beauty into a totally passive woman who, instead of asking the queen to let her take off her clothes so as to delay her execution, is forced by the queen to undress because the wicked woman wants to save the girl’s bejeweled clothes from the fire. In this way, Sleeping Beauty becomes closer to the other Sleeping Beauties present in Coover’s books, defenseless and sexually arousing women who survive in a state between life and death. In the old woman’s retelling of Basile’s story, Sleeping Beauty shrieks because undressing makes her feel violated, and her slow execution turns into a sexually titillating ritual, like a sadomasochistic performance. In her dream, Sleeping Beauty sees the old woman telling her fairy tale and slaughtering a cock at the same time, with an undeniable sexual undertone. While mentioning that the prince’s wife planned to serve him his own children for dinner, the old crone has her hands “braceleted in pink intestines” and then “sniffs at the cock’s tail.”123 Correcting her previous version of the tale’s finale, the crone specifies that the prince did arrive at the end, but couldn’t save his beloved because “before he knew it he found himself in the middle of a huge briar patch,” as if the briar hedge that prevented the prince from reaching the enchanted castle at the beginning of the tale was related to this new “briar patch” preventing him from stopping Sleeping Beauty’s execution, as the prince himself realizes at the beginning of the following narrative segment: “He is caught in the briars. The gnarled branches entwine him like a vindictive lover, the thorns lacerate his flesh.”124 Modifying Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” the old crone tells the anguished princess—who in her dream has just left her bedroom where a “band of ruffians [are] having a go on her lifeless body”—a new story, which blends in two fairy tales, Basile’s “Sleeping Beauty” and “Beauty and the Beast”: “She tells her about a poor princess married to a wild bear who smelled so bad she had to stuff pebbles up her nose . . . But the worst thing was his she-

“you will never awaken”

237

bear.”125 In the crone’s tale, the bear’s wife is outraged at her husband’s betrayal and cruelly attacks the princess lying naked in bed. The metamorphosis of the prince into a wild bear had been foretold in a previous dream, in which the princess saw her “true prince” as half-man and half-beast, “lean and strong with flowing locks, just a little hair around his snout and dirt under his nails, but otherwise a handsome and majestic youth, worthy of her and her magical disenchantment.”126 Variations of well-known fairy stories mushroom from the tale in a process of continuous proliferation. Sleeping Beauty dreams that her lover the Beast tries “to push another painful spindle into her from behind,” while he explains to her that “natural processes” are the only kind of story that the old crone, the “enchantress,” knows.127 In this context, “natural processes” seem to refer to sexual intercourse, and this connotation is unquestionably central, but what is also natural in the old crone’s storytelling is the undoing of her tales, their natural metastasis: her tales end with the destruction of its characters and the failure of happy resolution. In Briar Rose, the restless reproduction of variants that complement, contradict, or echo each other recalls Coover’s fascination with hypertext, the “writing done in the nonlinear or nonsequential space made possible by the computer.”128 In “The End of the Book” (1992), Coover makes it clear that what interests him are the theoretical suggestions rather than the actual practice of this new, and by now defunct, computer-generated narrative.129 In Umberto Eco’s words, “playing creatively with hypertexts—changing old stories and helping create new ones—can be an enthralling activity, a fine exercise to be practiced at school.”130 Briar Rose, we could claim, is Coover’s convincing response to the “endless expansion,” the “dimensionless infinity” of hypertext. What is missing in hypertext but dominant in Briar Rose is a unifying, pervasive tone of mirthful gloom, amused despair: “I am that hurts,” the princess says about herself, and the spindle, symbol of the act of a spirited storytelling, is also what constitutes her identity, the memory of her fatal wound. The multiple versions of her story are indeed the varied memories of a wound. The princess’s dream and the prince’s imagination at times seem to converse with each other as if trying to weave a coherent narrative, as if this common endeavor were the only possible solution to their unbridgeable distance. The prince himself, forever fighting against the briars surrounding the castle, suddenly thinks about the tale of Beauty and the Beast, imagining what will happen when he finally wakes his princess up: “She holds the mirror up to his face and he sees something hairy and toothy, halfway between a

238 c h a p t e r n i n e

wolf and a bear, and he feels overwhelmed by lust and stupidity.”131 In the prince’s and the princess’s minds, the metamorphosis of the beast–human being is either permanent or reversed, and in any case it does not coincide with the happy closure of the tale. Seen both from the prince’s and from the princess’s perspectives, the story of Beauty and the Beast symbolizes an act of violence, humiliation, and repulsion, the opposite of what this classic fairy tale is meant to convey. The encounter between the two hypothetical lovers can’t even happen in the realm of the imagination.132 In Briar Rose the sleeping girl holds onto a conventional tale about herself that the old crone seems unable or unwilling to recount. The princess does not recall the details of her reassuring autobiography but feels that what her elderly entertainer narrates is not the right story. “It just doesn’t sound right,” the girl comments more than once, “real stories aren’t like that.”133 What she means by “real stories” are in essence the Perrault-Grimms-Disney retellings of her story, not the original one told by Basile. “I hate this story!” cries the princess when the old crone once again begins a new tale with the image of Sleeping Beauty waking up with two babies suckling at her breasts, “and one of them . . .”134 Speaking to the old crone in her dream, the princess insists that the prince is supposed to kiss Sleeping Beauty: “But didn’t the prince kiss her? Didn’t he break the spell and wake her up?” The princess vaguely knows that transformation and kissing are meant to go together. For her, “Sleeping Beauty” is somehow the same story as “Beauty and the Beast.” Before rushing to the old crone for a disturbing variation of Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” the princess comes out of a bad dream in which “she was kissed by a toad and turned into one herself.” In this dream within a dream she evoked another familiar fairy tale (“The Frog King”), a variation of Beauty and the Beast, which in turn is a variation of Cupid and Psyche.135 These stories simply don’t work; they are “nightmarish.” She doesn’t want to hear them any longer. “What do you know about it, you little ninny?” the old woman ripostes.136 To calm her down, the old crone gets rid of Basile (“You’re right . . . when she woke up there weren’t any children, that’s a different story”) and opts for a seemingly reassuring beginning. Sleeping Beauty does wake up without children, but instead of one prince she finds three princes beside her bed. Rather than multiplying her babies, the new version has multiplied her rescuers: “A wizened old graybeard, a leprous hunchback with a beatific smile, and the young hero of her dreams.” All three princes have kissed her, and the young lady is now asked to determine which one is the truly beautiful one. Is beauty a physical or a spiritual attribute?

“you will never awaken”

239

“Oh, I don’t know,” the sleeping princess complains to the old crone, “and I don’t care . . . Tell me about the babies again.” The girl had first rejected the image of the babies lying next to Sleeping Beauty because they interfered with the reassuring tale of the amorous prince leaning over his sleeping beloved. The dreaming girl changes her mind and wishes to return to the version with the children because, unable to experience romance, she can at least cling to the familiar concept of motherhood. Still slashing away through the briars, the prince comes to the same conclusion: “What is happily ever after, after all, but a fall into the ordinary?”137 Imagining “the delirium of their union,” the prince sees in his mind the rapid unfolding of his hypothetical married life, its “tedium,” but also “the disfigurement of time, the draining away of meaning and memory, the ensuing silences, the death of dreams.”138 The stories that are meant to instill magic into the dreamer’s and her savior’s lives are the same stories that drain meaning away from them. It should be evident by now that the two main characters of this unsettling retelling of the classic tale are being tortured not by external forces but by the stories that define their own identities. What would the prince be if he weren’t struggling through the thick hedge? Could the princess do anything else but prick her finger and fall into a comatose sleep?

“You will never awaken because the story you were in no longer exists.”139 This harsh sentence does not come from the “practical” old crone, who doesn’t mince words when forcing the sleeping princess to confront the cruelty of her biography.140 The prince himself generates “this illusion” (or is it “fairy magic”?) in an instance of clear insight into his desperate condition.141 He sees that he will never come out of the briars. His despair creates an illusory happy ending for the familiar tale that he is enacting. In his fantasy he reaches the castle, enters the princess’s bedroom, and finds her awake even before kissing her. The princess, however, tells him that in the morning a “plucked goose” had flown by her room and had revealed to her that her story “no longer exists,” and thus waking up is out of the question.142 The prince and the princess used to share a history even though they had never met. The prince can’t get out of the briars because the princess’s story, which is his own story, no longer exists. We have reached a critical point in our reading of Coover’s Briar Rose. The story we are reading no longer exists. This is also a critical point of Coover’s poetics, which we need to understand before we proceed. In the important 1973 interview, Coover refers to

240 c h a p t e r n i n e

two texts that had a serious impact on his work: Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and the debate between the German theologians Karl Jasper and Rudolph Bultmann on the meaning of myth in the Christian faith.143 We could synthesize the core message of these texts as follows: Myth (and by extension fairy tales, fables, etc.) is historical by nature and rests on an essentially social foundation. Durkheim contends that “religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities; rituals are ways of acting that are generated only within assembled groups and meant to stimulate and sustain or recreate certain mental states in these groups.”144 Speaking in particular about animism, Durkheim recalls the important role played by “the double,” the individual’s mirroring self, which, for example, travels to distant places during dreams.145 In Durkheim’s view, “the primitive himself probably does attribute his dreams, or some of them, to the wanderings of his double,” but this view of dreams is also “the result of a religious system already in place.”146 Coover states: “Dream time is an act of artistic creation, and I realize now that’s what I’m doing.”147 The importance of dreams and daydreaming in Coover’s oeuvre is hard to miss. They are in all his novels and short stories.148 In Briar Rose, the prince and the princess could be seen as each other’s “doubles,” wandering to distant fairy-tale places without being able to return to wakeful reality. It is from a similar standpoint that Coover reads the dispute between Jaspers and Bultmann. Jaspers rejects Bultmann’s “demythologization” of Christianity, with its aim of “exposing a historically obsolete form of thinking, which has become false.”149 Bultmann hopes that, by stripping the biblical tales from their outdated mythic layer, the Christian message will retain its valuable message of salvation. Jaspers, on the contrary, emphasizes that “mythical thinking is not a thing of the past, but characterizes man in any epoch . . . The myth deals with sacred stories and visions, with stories about gods rather than with empirical realities.”150 For Jaspers, “the splendor and wonder of the mythical vision is to be purified, but must not be abolished.” Instead of clinging to the image of Christ as “a fairy tale hero”—as, in Jaspers’s view, Bultmann does by attaching the highest value to the Pauline letters and the Gospel of John—Jaspers endorses a radical approach to the Christian narrative.151 According to Jaspers, the whole Bible, including the Resurrection, is a mythic story, but its “splendor” and “wonder” respond to a real human demand for the divine, which remains “hidden” to us.152 A crucial aspect of Jaspers’s radical approach, which Coover finds extremely appealing, is his conviction that the biblical message can survive

“you will never awaken”

241

insofar as we accept that the Bible is a collection of myths and that “mythical language always has an uncertain character” that cannot be translated into “mere ideas” because it “is present only in the images themselves.”153 If we apply Durkheim’s and Jaspers’s conclusions to Briar Rose, we could conclude that the wandering prince and the sleeping princess are indeed each other’s ‘double’ in a dream whose dreamer, however, is missing. In two significant moments of their imaginary interaction, first the prince and then the princess literally hold a reflecting surface in front of the other’s face, with devastating consequences. The princess dreams that she is again in the kitchen while the old crone is cooking some unspecified meal. Suddenly the prince, like a new Perseus, flies into the room “with the head of a lady with snaky hair that turns everything into statues.”154 Her loving prince wishes to save her from a dragon that happens to be in the kitchen as well, but when he aims Medusa’s eyes at the beast, it “ducks and looks away and the head stuns the princess instead.” “She’s useless to anyone,” the princess thinks of herself. The princess’s Perseus, “the father of all dragon-slayers” as Coover calls him in A Child Again, turns the young lady into stone instead of waking her up.155 The princess tells the old crone, who is still busy with her cooking, that the story of a princess turned into a statue sounds familiar to her. The princess may be alluding to the Greek myth of the virgin Aspalis as recorded in Antoninus Liberalis’s Metamorphoses (second century AD). Aspalis hangs herself to avoid being raped, and her body, turned into a statue, miraculously appears in Artemis’s local temple.156 Coover’s sleeping princess unconsciously connects Basile’s version of her biography with Aspalis’s tragedy. Both women have to confront the ultimate sexual violence, and the disturbing irony of Coover’s sleeping girl is that she imagines her prince as the rapist who will force her to turn into a statue, as if the princess’s sole possible defense were the numbness that often befalls victims of rape. The possible offspring of this rape can only be a dead child. The old crone, now recalling the old witch from the Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel,” “ladles something out of the cauldron that looks like another baby.”157 The encounter with her prince perpetuates a perennial death that results from that very encounter. The princess falls asleep because of the prince’s arrival. And the bestial nature of this intruder becomes evident when, in his fantasy, the prince sees his beloved holding a mirror in front of his face, which shows him that he is half bear and half wolf.158 “When will this spell be broken?” the exasperated princess asks herself repeatedly in the final part of Briar Rose, both in the prince’s imagination and in her own dreams.159 The prince fantasizes again about finally reaching

242 c h a p t e r n i n e

the castle, entering her bedroom, and finding her already awake, combing her hair in front of a mirror. Coover defines the princess as “the doubled redoubled,” a fascinating allusion to Durkheim. The princess, the prince’s double, is “redoubled” because reflected in her mirror, which is also part of the prince’s private fantasy. In asking herself when the spell will be broken, she denies her dreamer (the prince) the resolution he is seeking in his journey. He can’t help but conclude that “he is not the one,” but then goes on to imagine that he becomes “the imagined prince,” and that the princess dresses him up “in pretty clothes with all the needles left inside” and takes him “into the great hall for the castle ball.”160 In great pain, the prince suddenly realizes that not only has he not been reunited with his double the princess but that she has actually led him to the “perilous edge of the world,” and that he will never be able to leave.161 The characters in Coover’s fairy-tale retellings are at once pathetic and comical, tragic and conventional. In a short piece he wrote to commemorate the late Angela Carter (“A Passionate Remembrance”), Coover inadvertently presents the author of The Bloody Chamber as the heroine of a tale who challenges and transcends the trite conventions of its plot. Facing her ultimate trial, her death, Angela Carter was able to break the “metaphor” sustaining human existence: “She met her final illness as though it were another metaphor to be wrestled with: terrifyingly true, yet oddly funny somehow, a joke at the core.”162 Unlike the heroine of Briar Rose, who keeps lamenting her inability to wake up, Angela Carter “wrestled with” the texture of her “terrifying” story and was not entrapped by it. Unlike Psyche, who constantly needs to be rescued by her divine lover and whose meaning is defined by her willingness to learn from her repeated failures, Angela Carter rewrote her own tale and dared to show that nothing was to be learned from her labors, which only pretended to be meaningful. In Coover’s depiction, Carter becomes the quintessential postmodern autobiographer, who is at once inside and outside her own tale, who makes sense of her story and unveils its meaninglessness.

“She awakens to repeated awakenings as though trapped in some strange mechanism,” the sleeping princess realizes in a significant narrative shift in the final part of Briar Rose.163 She “longs now to bring it to a standstill, to put an end once and for all to all disquiet.” The princess’s intense desire to lead her story to a conclusion, “even if it means to sleep again and sleep a dreamless sleep,” coincides with her acceptance of her original story

“you will never awaken”

243

based on Basile’s ‘old’ version of “Sleeping Beauty.” She doesn’t expect to be awakened by a loving prince’s kiss any longer; she just wants to bring everything to an end. Of the conventional Grimm-Disney “Sleeping Beauty” the princess only remembers the existence of a “spinning room” at the top of a spiral staircase where something decisive happened or will happen. On her way to that mysterious room, the princess sees her beloved prince in the arms of a “scullery maid.” The unfaithful prince justifies himself: “Oh, sorry, . . . but she was asleep and I was only trying to—“ It goes without saying that this new incident is also part of the princess’s dream. At this point, not only does the princess disregard the fantasy of the liberating kiss, but she comes to identify with the prince’s resentful wife, a character that exists only in Basile’s “Sleeping Beauty.” Before she can “scratch his eyes out,” the princess hears the prince galloping away from the castle and thinks that maybe he is returning “to his ogress wife or riding off to new adventures.”164 The princess herself, however, has turned into the “ogress wife” (a combination of the prince’s jealous wife from Basile and the prince’s ogress mother from Perrault) because, left alone with the pregnant “scullery maid,” she decides that she “will have the girl’s throat slit tomorrow and serve her up to him when he returns, his unborn between her jaws like a baked apple.” The princess embodies the ruthless wife from Basile’s tale because she shares with the betrayed woman a similar condition of loss and abandonment. Instead of clinging to an impossible romantic tale of eternal love and dedication, the princess chooses to appropriate the character of the revengeful woman, for by acting like the prince’s childless wife, she can play out a fiction that better suits her identity. Remember that the first chapter of Briar Rose opens with the sentence: “She dreams, as she has often dreamt, of abandonment and betrayal, of lost hope.”165 These must have been the feelings of the prince’s estranged wife in Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia.” The princess dumps her old self onto the naïve maid, who tells her: “Sometimes I think it was better when we was all asleep, mum, . . . I had such pretty dreams then.”166 The maid is speaking as a minor character from the Grimm-Perrault story, someone who woke up along with all the other people living or working in the castle when the prince kissed the princess. It is significant that at this point of her oneiric fiction, Coover’s heroine recalls that in the story she likes, the one with the kiss and final romance, her entire world was asleep, and so her awakening entails a universal change with significant consequences. The sudden arrival of the simpleminded, and now pregnant, maid would seem to reinforce the princess’s deep-seated wish

244 c h a p t e r n i n e

to be awakened by an amorous kiss, but her previous story (Basile’s tale) creeps into her oneiric fantasy again and again as the disturbing memory of an original trauma. Even though the whole castle is now awake (in her dream), she finds herself alone again, “like an abandoned child,” and in the attempt to finally make sense of her biography, to discover its hidden coherence, she “continues her lonely exploration,” which can only mean going back to the spiral staircase, “her eyes closed,” and ready to restart her tale from the beginning and feel again her most intimate feeling, her “spindled pain.”167 Her feeling of “being stabbed again and again,” of being “impregnated with despair,” is in fact the enduring memory of a story that continues to live within her.168 In the closing chapter she realizes that, “if she is still asleep, it does not feel like sleep, more like the opposite, an interminable wakefulness from which she cannot ease herself, yet one that leaves no residue save echoes of an old crone’s tales, and the feeling that her life is not, has not been a life at all.”169 Not even her life is certain anymore. The princess is eternally awake, without being necessarily alive, within a dream, and thus no prince and no kiss are required to wake her up. She can’t bring her persistent wakefulness to an end because she is already asleep. In this state of torturous wakefulness, the girl doesn’t know if she is dead or alive, but what she does know is that the old woman’s stories, or at least remnants of them, are unquestionably present. What remains are “residues” of stories about someone who is no more. These variations on Basile’s tales exist in stark contrast to subsequent stories, those fakes, as the old crone would consider them, which have imposed themselves and their noxious influence. We could go so far as to say that, by misleading the inexperienced prince and the comatose princess, these later fabricated tales (Perrault, the Grimms, the Disney film) have ended up killing their own characters. “No prince comes to rescue you,” writes the German poet Josef Reding, “no prince comes to embrace you . . . no prince comes with a kiss to end all your worries.”170

Chaos and disorientation dominate the present condition of our allegedly eternal tales of beautiful young women lying immobile on a bed and their dedicated suitors. But the trajectory of the female and male characters’ destiny is not equal: the princess, as she confirms in Coover’s Briar Rose, embodies a biography that expects to be activated by someone else. The princess is a story that awaits a narrator, her prince, who is supposed to tell her story with his mouth; as in an oral performance, his mouth is meant to set

“you will never awaken”

245

the princess’s biography in motion, to bring her up from the dead, and to waken her entire world, the castle, her family, high dignitaries, pets, and servants. The awareness of her ultimate failure comes from her understanding that that story can’t be told anymore. A collapse of all temporal and spatial categories ensues. Some of the most successful and, in my view, long-lasting fictions in the postmodern era are short, allegorical descriptions of states of utter meaninglessness, of perfect obscurity, of wanderings in landscapes resisting any detectable orientation, in the spirit of Samuel Beckett’s poetics. Take, for instance, John Barth’s short story “Night-Sea Journey,” the first tale in his well-known collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968). This tale, which is deeply indebted to Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories in Ficciones (1944), could be considered the manifesto of American postmodern fiction.171 In his “Author’s Note,” Barth explains that this story “was meant for either print or recorded authorial voice.”172 The first-person narrator introduces us to the strange practice, shared by countless people, of swimming in a perennial night through a vast and seemingly infinite sea in a dubious attempt “to reach the shore,” even though no one is certain of the existence of an actual shore.173 And even if “there were a Shore,” comments the narrator, “whatever would a swimmer do there?”174 The night swimming is never ending. The narrator paces himself: he swims, rests, and resumes swimming. Innumerable, less cautious people have drowned in their journey. We are reminded of the confusion of Coover’s princess at the end of Briar Rose, when Barth’s narrator asks: “Is the journey my invention? Do the night, the sea, exist at all, I ask myself, apart from my experience of them? Do I myself exist, or is this a dream?”175 Like the young woman and the old crone in Briar Rose, the narrator in Barth’s story discusses with his companions the nature of true storytelling. In particular, they try to determine what religious story might plausibly lie in their seemingly meaningless activity. It is impossible for the swimmers to agree on a single coherent myth of the creation and thus of their relationship with a possible god or gods. “A favorite theory,” explains the narrator, is that “the Father does exist, and did indeed make us and the sea we swim—but not a-purpose or even consciously; He made us, as it were, despite Himself, as we make waves with every tail-thrash, and may be unaware of our existence.”176 But if they consider the numerous people who drown every night while trying to reach the hypothetical shore, they come up with slightly different stories: for example, they posit a series of “impotent Creators, Makers unable to make.”177 Instead of a unifying myth of a rational divinity, if not a concerned one, the night swimmers fluctuate

246 c h a p t e r n i n e

between meaning and meaninglessness, between the order granted by some mythic story and the failure of all narratives: “Can it be,” asks the narrator, “that only utterest nay-sayers survive the night?”178 The night swimmers have no choice but to swim and, at the same time, to go through the wreckage of their implausible, always mutable, always unstable stories, in search for the best, if not the true, myth of their origin. They need a new fairy tale, as Coover would say, since all the available ones fail to reassure or, better yet, give purpose to the night swimmers. Italo Calvino, who, like Coover, believed in the essential role of myths and fairy tales, rephrases this issue as follows: “The fairy tale restores a vision of the whole universe, as long as this all-encompassing vision is possible.”179 Echoing the Brothers Grimm, Calvino holds that “the fairy tale dies with the disappearance of a natural-cultural archaic totality . . . Other all-encompassing representations of the world based on a sequence of events arise, multiply their variants, die, are partially reborn, and partially die again. In so doing, they always repeat something of the first narrative forms, and thus in every coherent tale one can recognize the very first and the very last tale, after which we won’t be able to narrate the world through a tale anymore.”180 We have seen this process of perennial reproduction, multiplication, and dissolution, starting from Basile’s first appropriations of the Cupid and Psyche myth; its transformation into a myriad of new tales within The Tale of Tales itself and in several later collections; its mutation into “Beauty and the Beast” from the French conteuses to Novalis’s meditations and beyond; its echoes in countless other tales, including “Sleeping Beauty.” This narrative residue links one story to another in an infinite chain of metamorphoses. In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino stresses that Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things “is the first great work of poetry in which knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world, leading to a perception of all that is infinitely minute, light, and mobile.”181 The world, like a narrative continuum of interconnected tales, is made of infinite and minute entities, fragments of images, which travel through the air, forming and unforming new pictures, things, and stories. “For Ovid, too,” Calvino contends, “everything can be transformed into something else, and knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.”182 Ovid “knows in advance what man has in common with dolphins, as well as what he lacks compared to them.”183

In his 1973 interview, Coover remarked that thanks to Ovid’s tales of metamorphosis he had understood how resistant we are to change, even though

“you will never awaken”

247

change is the essence of our existence. We want to believe that we are formed by natural and eternal tales of brave princes and sleeping princesses, and that these tales are more real than our transient identities. We may no longer like them, yet we embrace the reassuring belief that our tales precede their narrators. We may be swimmers doomed to drown in the night sea we are compelled to cross, but in our senseless act of swimming we also cling to perpetual stories on which to anchor our life, even though, unbeknownst to us, we have already mutated into something else, dolphins maybe, and the stories we believed eternal are no more.

chapter ten

“Disney World Has Become a Kind of Reverse Lourdes”: From Stanley Elkin back to Basile

The Magic Kingdom, the heart of Disney World in Florida, presents itself as a bulwark protecting the realm of children’s imagination against all apocalyptic claims that the end of Cinderella and Snow White is near. The Magic Kingdom is supposed to incarnate fantasy untainted by adult disillusionment. Those who hold that classic fairy tales have done their time and that Sleeping Beauty, as the old crone says in Coover’s Briar Rose, will never awaken because her tale no longer exists, need only visit Disney’s resort or look at glossy photos of its offerings to be forced to rethink. The marvel of the fairy tales reflected in familiar Disney movies, we are given to understand, is forever stored within the walls of the Magic Kingdom. Those who travel to the Kingdom, however, encounter a different reality. Fairy tales are barely present; the few shows that are based on Disney’s film adaptations are unimpressive. Impersonators of the Disney characters (Cinderella, Snow White, along with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck) stand next to their young admirers in silence because they are not allowed to speak, while the kids’ parents immortalize that moment with snapshots. A major aspect of Disney World that is usually overlooked by European intellectuals who have visited and studied this theme park is that its experience differs according to the age of its visitors. The soul of Disney World lies in the memory of our fantasies. The theme park is based on a set of shared recollections, which go from our childhood (Disney’s fairy tales along with other animated Disney films) to our adulthood (exotic countries, romantic European places, futuristic settings). And it should also be noted that at this point in the history of the Disney empire, actual fairy tales play a minor role.

“disney world has become a kind of reverse lourdes”

249

Disney World, as Umberto Eco observes, is “the quintessence of consumer ideology,” because “within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced.”1 More than just fantasy, it is the memory of fantasies that Disney World enacts within its enclosure. Children entering the magic space recall images of the Disney fairy-tale films they have seen, and adults accompanying them, or the young or not-so-young couples expecting some childlike fun, try to suspend disbelief as they assume children do. Disney World is not a static place; its attractions mutate since they must respond to the current fantasies of its young and middle-aged visitors. Attractions based on Toy Story characters or the Star Wars films, for example, are far more alluring than the one based on Snow White, a residue of a past era. “The dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imagination of children and adults is a waste product,” remarks the philosopher Jean Baudrillard.2 Fantasy products are constantly used up, discarded, and replaced. A child and an adult share one basic experience in Disney World: the realization that Sleeping Beauty or the Venetian St Mark’s Square are not really there in Orlando, Florida. The child and the adult walking through an unfamiliar place become aware that their desires or memories (meeting Snow White or walking into a Parisian café) can’t be satisfied in Disney World, despite its attempt to stimulate those desires and memories.3 At every corner of the vast Kingdom, children longing for more intimacy with their beloved characters can purchase t-shirts, earrings, books, clothes, all kinds of gadgets reproducing the images of those figures. Like characters in a fairy tale, visitors of all ages are given the opportunity to acquire (or purchase) ‘amulets’ (like the magical chestnuts or rings of so many fairy tales) that will help them on their journey through Disney’s kingdom. Disney World expresses a central meaning: Disney possesses the magic of fairy tales. Whatever fairy tales mean, whatever fantasizing and dreaming mean, can supposedly be found in Disney World or Disneyland. And it is not by chance that Disney is an American institution. The United States is not just the land of opportunities; it is the land of imagination and fairy tales. In July 2012, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, opened an impressive exhibit titled “Treasures of the Walt Disney World Archives,” which was entirely controlled by the Disney Company.4 Memorabilia such as the storybook used in 1937 to film the opening sequence of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and a reproduction of Walt Disney’s office were made visible to the public in the building that celebrates an American president who, like Disney, is regarded by many as an almost mythic figure.

250 c h a p t e r t e n

In Louis Marin’s opinion, Disney World is “a fantasmatic projection of the history of the American nation, of the way in which this history was conceived with regard to other peoples and to the natural world.”5 What is “natural” is what American culture perceives as such. Disney not only owns fairy tales, it also owns the magic residing in foreign (that is, not American) cities and countries. Paris, Venice, Morocco, Mexico, Japan, and other foreign places are magical only if America labels them as such. Symbolic spaces recalling exotic countries or cities are reconstructed in Disney’s amusement parks according to a simplistic equation of the foreign with the exotic. Taming and dominating the foreign, which is the intrinsic goal of all forms of imperialism, is an abomination that couldn’t be more distant from the aspiration of all tales of magic: the celebration of the unexpected, the unclassifiable, the inappropriate and the dirty that we have associated with orality. “There is something sad,” writes Jack Zipes, “in the manner Disney ‘violated’ the literary genre of the fairy tale and packaged his versions in his name through the merchandising of all sorts of books, articles, clothing, and records . . . He employed animators and technology to stop thinking about change.”6 Throughout this book, I have emphasized repeatedly that change lies at the core of the fairy tale. To stay alive, a tale of magic must be allowed to give free reign to its magic; it must be allowed to change, mutate, transform to the point of becoming unrecognizable, to the point of dissolving into other tales. Although many film adaptations of fairy tales have followed or questioned Disney’s, it is unquestionable that no new film version has exerted a similar influence over our globalized society. Younger generations still tend to know only the Disney version of the major tales, even though these animated movies were made several decades ago. Few realize that these stories may once have been very different. As the sleeping princess complains in Coover’s Briar Rose, her ‘real’ story can only end with a brave prince giving her a chaste kiss. In Zipes’s words, “Disney wants the world cleaned up” and presents “antiquated views of society,” not so distant from the Grimms’ nineteenth-century patriarchal ideology, in order to achieve “a domestication of the imagination.”7 In the US, many of those who express their infinite love for fairy tales are also resistant to basic notions of transformation and change. These admirers of Snow White and Cinderella revel in their domesticated—and reassuring—imagination. The Disney phenomenon corresponds to the final stage in that process of narrative paralysis that has plagued Western tales of magic from the late seventeenth century. Paradoxically, many contemporary attempts to ‘subvert’ the tales of

“disney world has become a kind of reverse lourdes”

251

Cinderella or Snow White still implicitly posit the Grimm-Disney versions as the ‘real,’ ‘correct’ ones. These tales can be attacked and insulted, but their monumental stature can’t be chipped. The “domestication of the imagination” has done its sad work.

Given that Disney World celebrates a form of “modern imperialism,” those who visit it are not mere tourists. They support and keep this imperialistic ideology alive. The visitors are “on stage themselves,” says Marin; they “are put in the place of the ceremonial storyteller . . . They are led from the pirates’ cave to an atomic submarine, from Sleeping Beauty’s castle to a rocket-ship.”8 In viewing the visitors of Disney World as active performers in the American realm of dreams and fairy tales, we can better understand the demise of fairy tales themselves. And it goes without saying that taking part in a decaying performance inevitably affects the performers themselves. A place is plagued only insofar as someone gets infected. Minnie Mouse, Peter Pan, Aladdin, Goofy, and Snow White, ghosts from different and unrelated tales, are brought together in Disney’s enclosure and wander around to feed the visitor’s yearning for something that doesn’t seem to be there. The white Sleeping Beauty Castle in the center of the Magic Kingdom celebrates a magic that is never awakened. It reminds me of the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City with its impenetrable narrow windows, its two sets of austere towers, and the small statue of the Angel Moroni with a trumpet in his mouth announcing the end of time. But whereas the apparently unwelcoming Mormon temple harbors religious mysteries for its elect, the Sleeping Beauty Castle hides nothing. Like the silent entertainers dressed as Disney characters, the castle is a mute construction in which no princess lives. Rather than fulfilling a desire, the Magic Kingdom postpones it. If we have any doubts about the irreversible coma of Sleeping Beauty, we only need to visit the Magic Kingdom, the cemetery of fairy tales.

“I am the spokesman for death,” said the writer Stanley Elkin (1930–95) repeatedly in a 1985 interview.9 Who better than death’s “spokesman” could describe the funereal charm of the Disney Empire? In the same interview, Elkin described how, while in a hotel room in England, he saw a BBC program about seven severely ill children who were getting ready, moving with walkers or “practically on all fours,” to depart for their “dream holiday,” a visit to Disney World in Florida.10 If it was a dream, it had to be “a bad

252 c h a p t e r t e n

dream,” Elkin comments, but the eerie images of the British children on their way to the United States gave him the idea for his deeply disturbing, albeit morbidly amusing novel The Magic Kingdom (1985). It is the story of Eddy Bale, who, after the death of his twelve-year-old son, against all odds succeeds in organizing a ‘dream vacation’ for a group of seven terminally ill British children. Bale, the children, a doctor, and some nurses fly to America to let the children taste the eternal charm of the Disney magic world. This novel has “a note of almost unbearable cruelty,” writes Thomas Pughe, but in “its desire to gather in all that is horrible and outcast or trite and vulgar, it also wreaks vengeance in the name of suffering and ugliness.”11 The true paradox of the novel is that the magic, absent from the American resort, is instead evoked in the children’s bodies. Elkin’s sick kids are monsters who, like princes turned into ugly beasts or girls vomiting snakes and rotten flowers, reveal nature’s real magic, its real power of self-deformation, rather than mere self-transformation as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These children are living characters of fairy tales; they, and not the impersonators in the Magic Kingdom, are incredible, amazing, and disquieting presences. Janet has “a hole in her heart and a transposed aorta, a heart like one of those spectacularly deformed vegetables one sometimes sees on Fairy days,” and because of this deformation she “had been cyanotic from birth, her skin everywhere an even, dusky bluish color, dark as sea-water”;12 Tony, “dying of leukocytes, of clear, white, colorless cells watering his blood and turning it pale,” has “many false freckles” across his face;13 Charles suffers from “progeria,” which “shrivels me up like a little old man” and is seen by a gerontologist;14 Rena has cystic fibrosis and for this reason constantly secretes too much “clear, cystic fibrotic phlegm”;15 Lydia at the age of eleven has ovarian cancer, which has “punched up her belly to something like the appearance of a seventh- or eighth-month pregnancy.”16 The child ‘pregnant’ with a deadly tumor and taken to Disney World is the most powerful synthesis of Elkin’s Magic Kingdom, not only because, as we shall see, the topic of a monstrous pregnancy is concretely evoked in the novel, but also because the seven young visitors look like the offspring of a cancerous and invasive fairy tale. The act of giving birth (to a marvelous or monstrous baby, or a beast as in many variations on “Beauty and the Beast”) is a cornerstone of the fairy-tale genre. Infinite are the tales beginning with a birth or lack thereof, like the barren queen or the peasant who gives birth to a plant. The seven British children, cursed at the moment of their birth, were born to die before reaching adulthood, which could be also seen as another well-known fairy-tale motif. Sleeping Beauty is only one example.

“disney world has become a kind of reverse lourdes”

253

The seven children bear the marks of their ‘fictional,’ ‘magical’ identity: their skin is totally blue like an evening sky or totally pale, strangely freckled and brittle; they are aging quickly, or are incessantly dripping mucus. We could say that for these ‘marvelous’ kids to fly to Orlando should be a way of returning to their fatherland. As Eddy Bale, the trip organizer realizes, “Disney World has become . . . a kind of reverse Lourdes” for terminally ill children.17 The Magic Kingdom could be read as a parody of the Snow White tale, in which the seven children play the role of the seven dwarfs.18 One evening, the seven children are permitted to stay up to watch the daily parade. They see “Alice perched on her mushroom like the stem of a fruit; Pinocchio in his avatar as a boy . . . ; Snow White flanked by her seven dwarfs; Donald Duck, his sailor-suited, nautical nephews.”19 If the children are the seven dwarfs, their Snow White is Mary Cottle, one of the staff members accompanying them from England. Mary is “neither nanny nor nurse, a woman in her thirties . . . who would herself bear no children, who could conceive them readily enough and even carry them to term, but who wore a poisoned womb, a terrible necklace of tainted genes that could destroy any child.”20 Mary is also the only heavy smoker in the group, and her habit is harmful to the children. In establishing a parallel between the seven sick children and the seven dwarfs, The Magic Kingdom emphasizes the maternal role played by Snow White, who arrives at the dwarfs’ cottage and promises, as we read in the Grimms’ tale, “to keep everything neat and orderly” in their house.21 In Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the tall young woman easily dominates the much older but child-sized men, as if these freakish creatures were her kids. In a famous scene, we see the girl, like a caring mother, sitting on the bed that the seven little men share. A key moment of the Grimms’ and Disney’s tale is the dwarfs’ stealthy entrance into the room where the girl is sound asleep. The Magic Kingdom reshapes this scene as follows: the seven children find out that Mary Cottle, who is paid to take care of them, has secretly rented a private room in their hotel so that she can freely give herself some sexual pleasure, given that she can’t have intercourse with a man because she could give birth to a deformed fetus. Years before, a surgeon had suggested that she have a hysterectomy because, he told her, “you can only bear monsters. Your kids would be kraken, children chimeras, and basilisk babes . . . Generations of vipers.”22 Thus, her only sexual outlet is masturbation, including sex toys that she brings with her on the Disney trip. The seven children could indeed be the offspring of Mary’s infected

254 c h a p t e r t e n

womb. They are the chimera babies that the surgeon has warned her about. For these kids, sneaking into the woman’s secret room “was quite a performance, one of the best-yet illusions in the magical kingdom.”23 It was a daring adventure, much more exciting than most of the attractions in Disney World. The room where their uncaring mother masturbates becomes the place of a grim sort of magic, when suddenly two impostors, two hotel employees (or ‘cast members’ as they are called in Disney World), dressed up as Mickey Mouse and Pluto, walk in and cruelly mock the stunned children. Mickey is the one who does the talking. Addressing the seven children, he asks them bluntly: “Who wants to be cremated? What, nobody? All right, who’s for being planted? Hands? Anyone? Buried at sea then? Recycled? We’re running out of options here. Boy, you’re some tough kids to please.” As the children soon realize, Mickey “had not come with a message of hope for them.”24 The wicked mouse makes a direct comparison between the children and the dwarfs of Disney’s Snow White:

How about those Seven Dwarfs? Yeah, how about them? Sneezy, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, and Doc. Cholers and pathologies. Wasn’t there an analogue to be discovered between the dwarfs and these wise-guy kids? . . . The little girl who looked like she’d gotten herself knocked up? Happy? Which left the blue kid [who] was the very color of choler. Grumpy to the life! So something to do with death.25

At the end of the mouse’s tirade (“You kids, you poor kids. I don’t think I ever saw such losers”), Rena dies.26 The famous mouse, the ‘king’ of Disney’s fairyland, is the one who derides and rejects these children, who in their magical identities as the seven dwarfs are no longer welcome. Elkin describes a cultural moment in which myths and fairy tales not only have stopped working, as Coover says, but have even turned against those who are traditionally meant to benefit from them. The seven British ‘dwarfs,’ who go back to the origins of their tale before disappearing from the stage of the world, are polluted, and killed, by their own original story. The young Rena dies in the room of her Snow White, Mary Cottle, whose womb is not merely sterile, a dead source of tales, but can also give birth to monsters. In the last scene of the novel, Mary finally has sex with a man, Eddy Bale, who had organized the journey to Orlando. This is not a happy ending, as some critics and Elkin himself claim, since both Mary

“disney world has become a kind of reverse lourdes”

255

and the reader know that only a repellent form of life can come out of her genitals. While she “positions herself to take Bale’s semen,” Mary thinks of “monstrosities, freaks, ogres, and demons, conjuring wolves, vampires, harpies, and hellhounds [and] at last, a lame and tainted Mickey Mouse.”27 This modern Snow White, a perverse witch, imagines spawning the entire bestiary of the fairy-tale and mythic tradition, from ogres to Mickey Mouse, in an act of repulsive defiance.28 It is of immense importance to note that at the end of its relatively short life (less than five centuries) the fairy-tale genre seems to be going back to its original dirtiness, its vulgarity, its disquieting tones, a narrative form that we unscientifically called orality. Contrary to what many think, the time of the literary fairy tale, though not of the oral, may be up. Reaching its end, the fairy tale returns to its oral origins. Now that the belief in its intrinsically moral and didactic nature is faltering, the fairy tale survives not in its unbearably repetitive or superficially controversial retellings, which either ignore the stench coming from the carcasses of these tales or wrestle with them as if they were still alive, but from those narratives that expose the malign consequences of once-alive tales. More than a perverse Snow White, Elkin’s Mary Cottle recalls the old woman from the beginning of Basile’s The Tale of Tales, who lifts up her skirt and shows her unattractive vagina to the kid who has broken her jar of oil. “Ah, you worthless thing,” the angry old woman yells at the kid, “you dope, shithead, bed pisser, leaping goat, diaper ass, hangman’s noose, bastard mule! . . . Go on, may paralysis seize you, may your mother get bad news, may you not live to see the first of May!”29 And then “she raised her stage curtain and revealed a woodsy scene.” The seventeenth-century Neapolitan book begins the Western tradition of literary fairy tales with an old witch who curses a boy and then a princess who dares to laugh when the old woman shows her flabby vagina in an open square. In Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom, the modern, maybe the last, Snow White opens up her legs to let a man infect her with his semen, knowing that she will give life to a progeny of monsters.

Why did those stories work in the past but not now? Why do things come to an end? Elkin has God himself give the answer in The Living End (1977), a novel whose first part narrates the story of a decent man who, although he has only committed trivial sins, is doomed to hell. Before reaching his final destination, he is granted a visit to heaven. “Only blocks away” from paradise, he realizes that “it looked more like a theme park than ever,” a sort

256 c h a p t e r t e n

of Disney World.30 In particular, heaven resembles Epcot, the Disney park in which the pavilions of major nations of the globe (Mexico, Japan, Italy, France, etc.) are placed next to each other with no clear order: “Beyond the fence,” the visitor doomed to hell sees “golden streets, a mixed architecture of minaret-spiked mosques, great cathedrals, the rounded domes of classical synagogues, tall pagodas . . . white frame churches.”31 God the Father himself speaks at the end of the book and explains the motives behind his seemingly unreasonable and even chaotic decisions: “You have wondered,” God says, “why things are as they are. You have wondered, you have speculated. You have questioned My motives . . . Why so piecemeal? . . . Can’t he make up His mind? . . . Why a serpent, why a tree? . . . And then a flood. A flood! . . . And then the covenant again.”32 Why so piecemeal? God goes through the mythic stories that he himself has composed through time, from Adam and Eve, to Moses, and beyond. Was it his infinite goodness that led to his deeds?: “Goodness? No,” God confesses, “it was Art! It was always Art. It works by the contrasts and metrics, by beats and the silences. It was all Art. Because it makes a better story is why.”33 And on the spur of the moment, he decides that Doomsday should end his story.34 God speaks of contrasts and metrics, of a basic cadence that rules the coming and going, the approaching and distancing, of stories, events, characters. Elkin’s God envisions a sort of universal symphony whose melody is known only to him. Why the flood and then another covenant? Why create a perfect garden and then add a snake? Why let us believe in the eternity of our tales, our myths, our fairy tales, and then let them rot and become infectious? Because these “beats and silences,” these “contrasts,” make a better story. According to Elkin, goodness, morality, decency, the ‘eternal’ values of the Grimms’ and Perrault’s tales, are not part of God’s grand scheme.

chapter eleven

“A Benign Fairy Tale out of the Brothers Grimm”: Memoirs and the Magic of Reality

“There’s something frightening, and magical, about being on the ocean, moving between the heavens and the earth, knowing that you can encounter anything on your journey.”1 This is not the beginning of a literary fairy tale in which the heroine is imprisoned in a barrel and thrown out at sea or kidnapped by pirates and taken away to foreign lands. We have encountered more than one example of such a story in Basile’s The Tale of Tales, and even in Anna Katharina Emmerick’s oral accounts of her mystical journeys to the Holy Land through tempestuous seas and mysterious lands. This is, instead, the opening page of Lynne Cox’s brief memoir Greyson (2006), which narrates the extraordinary events that occurred one early morning when, at the age of seventeen, she went swimming “outside the line of breaking waves off Seal Beach, California.” It was early March; the cold sea and the sky were still pitch-black when she ventured outside the safe boundaries of the ocean. What Cox experienced that early morning changed her life forever. Swimming alone away from the shore in the dark preceding the dawn, the young girl was led into the secrets of nature, as the brave heroine of a fairy tale enters a dark forest (in search of her lost brothers, for example) and realizes that untamed nature (the dark ocean, the dark forest) speaks its own language, possesses infinite unexpected marvels, and is populated by infinite unknown creatures. Lynne suddenly felt the water below her “shudder” and heard a sound “coming from the ocean’s depths.”2 She was being followed by an infant gray whale that had lost his mother. To keep the young whale away from the shore, which would be fatal to him, Cox continued to swim and at the same time sought his mother.

258 c h a p t e r e l e v e n

Not only did the infant whale follow his human friend, he played with her and spoke to her: “He grunted softly, squeaked, paused, then grunted softly again. He paused longer this time, as if he was waiting for me to respond. Then he clicked and chirped. He made a small symphony of underwater sounds . . . For the first time in my life, I heard a baby whale speak.”3 His voice was like a symphony, writes Cox, and the ocean itself was an immense symphony, which human ears usually ignore. After a sequence of mesmerizing views (“there were zillions and zillions of light-emitting zooplankton and phytoplankton in the ocean . . . they left trails of bright shimmering light”), the key revelation took place when the baby whale made eye contact with her: He “looked at me. In his eyes, I saw a brightness, a sense of vitality, and a gentle sweetness. I held him in eyes and in my heart.”4 The little whale was finally reunited with his mother, and together they disappeared into the distant ocean. There is so much brightness, so much luminosity in the dark setting of this memoir, which narrates only a few hours of its writer’s life. Children were not the original target audience, but the memoir’s fairy-tale unfolding, its magical events, its marvels, appealed to adults and “young people” alike, as Cox stresses in the epilogue.5 It would be a gross exaggeration to contend that all contemporary memoirs are fairy tales in disguise, and it could easily be argued that my emphasis on the charming Greyson is misleading. “Memoir” is in essence an umbrella term that encompasses a vast variety of autobiographical writings. It may refer to Madeleine Albright’s Madam Secretary, her experience as Secretary of State (2005); to Condoleezza Rice’s No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (2011); to autobiographies of famous personalities (TV or movie stars, athletes, etc.), which are often written in collaboration with a professional writer and whose primary goal is to celebrate the author’s life and reveal until then well-kept secrets; to literary autobiographies, which also work as commentaries on the artist’s poetics, such as the Nobel prize-winner Tomas Tranströmer’s Memories Look at Me, which, like Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, starts from the author’s very first memory and in its linear progression identifies his dedication to artistic expression as the unifying coherence of his existence (“‘My life.’ Thinking these words, I see before me a streak of light,” is the first sentence of Tranströmer’s book); to volumes that are also memoirs, such as Kathleen Norris’s powerful Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993), which, reminiscent of Thoreau’s writings, describes the Great Plains as the author’s unique “monastery,” or Joan Didion’s Where I Was From (2005), which reconstructs the history of California and of Didion’s family; but also to autobiographical texts

“a b e n i g n fa i ry ta l e o u t o f t h e b ro t h e rs g r i m m ”

259

that focus, like Greyson, on one specific issue, event, or problem, a trial, as we read in fairy tales, that deeply affected the memoirist’s life.6 In her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal (2011), Jeanette Winterson defines the clichéd distinction between an all-encompassing autobiography and a one-trial memoir as a reflection of male versus female literary work: “I was trying to get away from the received idea that women always write about ‘experience’—the compass of what they know—while men write wide and bold—the big canvas, the experiment with form.”7 The focus of Winterson’s memoir is her hostile adoptive mother, who was “out of scale, larger than life. She was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable.”8 This ‘ogress,’ whose form “expanded,” threatened Winterson’s very existence. By reading her moving ‘fairy-tale’ memoir we understand that this painful trial molded her entire identity. “I can’t remember a time,” Winterson states, “when I wasn’t setting my story against hers.”9 Detractors of the contemporary memoir form rightly stress that this “desire to understand” reflects our widespread use, or overuse, of psychotherapy. But isn’t psychology also the approach that many take when they read fairy tales, as Bruno Bettelheim or Marie-Louise von Franz have done in their problematic but popular books? If we live in the time of antidepressants and psychotherapy, aren’t fairy tales also part of this ‘psychological’ culture?

In this chapter I am not offering a comprehensive survey of recent memoirs, nor do I focus on the best books published in the twenty-first century. “The boom” of the memoir genre in recent times, Ben Yagoda writes in his informative Memoir: A History, “has spawned hundreds—if not thousands—of worthwhile books. Many have shed light on an impressive variety of social, ethnic, medical, psychological, regional, and personal situations.”10 I concentrate here on the basic correspondences detectable between some forms of contemporary memoirs and the fairy-tale genre, and try to show their significance. The books I analyze are samples of a vast, almost boundless, literary phenomenon. It is often said that fairy tales are everywhere in contemporary America, but so are memoirs. “Memoir,” Sven Birkerts believes, “is the genre of our time.”11 The sheer volume of memoirs published every year in the United States is an indication of its amazing significance in our culture. It would be fair to say that the most popular subject of literary writing today is the life of each individual, regardless of his or her fame. Let us remember briefly the scandal caused by James Frey’s controversial memoir A Million Little Pieces

260 c h a p t e r e l e v e n

(2003), which details his victorious battle against addictions. Frey first tried to publish his manuscript as a novel, but, because of the popularity of the memoir genre and the public’s seemingly dwindling interest in fiction, his book was finally labeled as memoir and immediately became a phenomenal bestseller.12 But when it turned out that he had tweaked some events in his book, intense moral outrage was expressed by Oprah Winfrey and others against Frey. His numerous readers felt that there was something sacrilegious in his ‘betrayal.’ In a culture now drawn toward what is real and not imaginary, Frey had dared to taint reality with fiction. Most of us want to believe that all memoirists are innocent until proven guilty; we assume that memoirists strive to be as faithful as possible to the actual events of their past, and not just to the ‘spirit’ of their past, keeping in mind, however, that the memoir is essentially a form of fiction. As readers, we share a basic act of faith—that the memoir is ‘real’—and our faith is shattered when reality proves otherwise. We approach a book labeled ‘memoir’ with an unconscious suspension of disbelief, hoping that that book will support our conviction that it is possible to give a narrative structure to reality. We wish to believe that we can transform the debris of emotions, images, and thoughts stored in our memory into coherent tales, into music scores that we can play and vary at will. Magic occurs when we turn reality into fiction. Especially magical are books such as Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights (1979), which blends in memories and fictions. The main character of this journal-like book shares the name of its author (Elizabeth) and relates events and circumstances close to the author’s life. The opening lines directly evoke the powerful ambiguity of the book: “It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today.”13 Hardwick writes as an astute alchemist intent on mutating her memory into a new life, the one she wants to lead now.

As Joyce Carol Oates writes in A Widow’s Story: A Memoir (2011), “the memoir is the most seductive of literary genres. For the memoir is a repository of truths, as each discrete truth is uttered, but the memoir can’t be the repository of Truth which is the very breath of the sky, too vast to be perceived in a single gaze.”14 Memoir is “seductive” because it leads its reader to believe that, by the magical power of memory, the bare facts of life can be brought back from the past unscathed, reassembled as a complete puzzle (not just the exact dialogue we had a certain day of our childhood, but also the color of the sky, the temperature, and the noises that surrounded us in that mo-

“a b e n i g n fa i ry ta l e o u t o f t h e b ro t h e rs g r i m m ”

261

ment), and transferred onto the page in an orderly fashion. A memoir selects memories and operates omissions, even crucial ones, as we find in Oates’s A Widow’s Story, which doesn’t mention that eleven months after her husband’s death in 2008 she was engaged to another man.15 A memoir is particularly seductive when, as in A Million Little Pieces, it purports to report the real defeat of an ominous and life-threatening danger (a trial), which represents the core of its author’s life (Frey’s face-off with the evil of drugs, for example), but also the basic structure of so many fairy tales. These memoirs often, but not always, focus on traumas that occurred in the family. Many readers cling to the reality of memoirs, just as many hold onto the notion that classic fairy tales are immutable and will always be with us as the Brothers Grimm or Disney told them because they embody eternal, even religious truths, although “Sleeping Beauty” has a clearly literary origin. Memoirs and fairy tales both tell us the “Truth,” as Oates says, about our human nature. The paradox of this sort of memoir is that it is a fiction that claims to be real, and its audience is eager to believe in this magical contradiction.

In his provocative Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010), David Shields contends that “living as we perforce do in a manufactured and artificial world, we yearn for the ‘real,’ semblances of the real.”16 Paintings and novels “aren’t as central to the culture as they once were.”17 In Shields’s view, many contemporary novelists “no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe.”18 Biographies and autobiographies are “the lifeblood of art right now. We have claimed them the way earlier generations claimed the novel.”19 The enormous success of so-called reality shows and the irreversible decline of soap operas confirm the current contrast between reality and fiction. “Suddenly,” Shields concludes, “everyone’s tale is tellable, which seems to me a good thing.”20 Today everyone has a tale to tell, and this tale is his or her own life. When a contemporary memoirist begins to recount his life, he sets out to unveil the core of his own identity, which often involves a painful and powerful secret. To define a book as memoir grants it a degree of sacredness that no other form of fiction enjoys today. These are tales of metamorphosis, in which evil may be present from the beginning of the storyteller’s life or may suddenly disrupt it. The writer of this kind of autobiography cannot remain the same but is compelled to undergo a process of transformation. Frequently this sort of memoir centers on family, especially the author’s relationship with one or both parents, a daughter or a son, a sibling, or a spouse. Memoirs of

262 c h a p t e r e l e v e n

this kind closely recall the beginning of countless fairy tales (a king who wishes to get his daughter married; a jealous mother or stepmother who harms her daughter; parents who abandon their children in the woods; a prince who becomes deadly sick when his beloved disappears). To liken the memoir, which seeks to express reality, to the fairy tale, which celebrates unreality, may seem far-fetched. Yet the memoir inevitably absorbs not only certain basic themes and motifs of the fairy tale but also its magic, its fundamental unreality. To defeat evil in all its possible manifestations, the memoirist must recognize that reality and unreality, bare facts and ‘magical’ occurrences coexist in his or her life. Even in fairy tales, magic is only a means and not an end in itself. Magic happens in order to help the hero or heroine overcome ominous dangers, but the ending of a fairy tale usually reestablishes a ‘natural’ order.

The absence or disappearance of one or more characters is a frequent theme of fairy tales. A curse may turn seven brothers into ravens that fly away; a sorceress kidnaps a young girl on her way home; a poor young man is exiled because he has offended a nobleman; a mother dies and leaves her daughter in the hands of a cruel stepmother; seeing drops of his own blood, a young man is suddenly reminded of a beautiful girl he has never encountered. Loss and longing are the bedrock of fairy tales; abandonment, deprivation, and abuse mark the beginning of countless tales. Translated into a memoir, these events may be the death of a parent or spouse; the sudden outburst of a serious disease; a traumatic event that changes the course of the author’s life; the struggle with poverty and loneliness. In real life, the unexpected death of a loved one is often perceived as an unreal, unimaginable event. It is a transformation that cannot be grasped. I would like to address this theme, beginning with Joan Didion’s acclaimed memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which despite its title strives to be as unmagical as possible, as close to the bare facts as possible, with few frills and little poetic license. The book opens with these italicized lines: Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.21

As Joan Didion explains, these were the first words she wrote in a file titled “Notes on change,” a few days after her husband, John Gregory Dunne,

“a b e n i g n fa i ry ta l e o u t o f t h e b ro t h e rs g r i m m ”

263

suffered a massive coronary event and died while sitting at the dinner table with her.22 These few lines written while the shock of his death was still overpowering, show how Didion’s mind was transfixed by the revelation that life and change are virtually synonymous. By magical thinking Didion seems to intend delusionary thinking, because until she read the autopsy report she believed that somehow she would be able to save her deceased husband.23 But ‘magical’ harbors crucial meanings that stand in stark contrast to ‘delusional.’ After the night that changed her life forever, Didion “needed to be alone so that he could come back.” The dead would feel safe and come back to life only if his beloved wife were waiting for him alone. “This,” Joan writes, “was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.”24 This time, ‘magical’ signifies a private ritual, a solitary quest, in which the bereaved spouse defies all received ideas about life and death, about social duties and interactions, and alone embarks on a silent, desperate search for her missing husband. If she is alone and in silence, she will be able to hear the signs that he may send out to her; alone she may find the path that leads to him. Like Psyche traveling down to the netherworld, “I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power of the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole.”25 ‘Magical’ thus indicates a dramatic shift in Didion’s life. She leaves what she knows as reality and enters the realm of fiction. Fiction is the magical realm in which she may be able to restore the reality that has been unjustly disrupted. Fiction here means that the bereaved wife senses that the world is sustained by hidden correspondences, by concealed “symbols,” by an invisible coherence that is undetectable in what we call reality. In a world ruled by fiction, everything has a meaning; everything is a clue.26 Didion suddenly remembers that “a week or two before he died, when we were having dinner in a restaurant, John asked me to write something in my notebook for him.”27 John always carried cards on which he jotted down notes for a new book, but that day he forgot them. Even more troubling was that the next day, when she gave him the note, he told her, “You can use it if you want to.”28 This seemingly random event acquires powerful significance when Didion transfers it from the world of reality to that of fiction: “What did he mean? Did he know he would not write the book? Did he have some apprehension, a shadow? . . . Was something telling him that night that the time for being able to write was running out?”

264 c h a p t e r e l e v e n

The note John asked her to write down for him was both a warning (an “omen,” as she writes in another passage) and a posthumous message.29 He gave her his note to let her know that he would have to leave soon, but since she remembers that note after his death, it is also a communication from him taking place now. The note secretly points to the place where she can find him. Joan misquotes a long passage from Philippe Ariès’s The Hour of Our Death, in which the French scholar explains that in medieval culture the dying knew how much time they had left. Didion writes that, according to Ariès, “the essential characteristic of death as it appears in the Chanson de Roland is that the death, even if sudden or accidental, ‘gives advance warning of its arrival.’ Gawain is asked: ‘Ah, good my lord, think you then so soon to die?’ Gawain answers: ‘I tell you that I shall not live two days.’”30 Gawain’s baffling statement “I tell you that I shall not live two days” is repeated four more times in The Year of Magical Thinking as an ominous refrain, but it doesn’t come from the Chanson de Roland.31 It is taken from La Mort d’Artus, another medieval epic.32 In La Mort d’Artus, after a fierce confrontation with Lancelot, the gravely wounded Gawain is placed on a stretcher, and when day has broken, King Arthur and the unconscious Gawain sail away on the same boat.33 When they reach the open sea, Gawain opens his eyes and sees where they are. At this point he reveals that his death is imminent. Didion’s quotation from the first pages of The Hour of Our Death is significant: Ariès stresses that in the Middle Ages the dead were “always present among the living,” for “the boundary between the natural and the supernatural was indefinite.”34 What is relevant in this context is not only that Ariès—and thus Didion, who quotes him repeatedly—reminds us of a time when the dead continued to interact with the living, but also that he uses a fictional text to elucidate this important point. Fiction supports Didion’s ‘magical’ quest for her husband because she identifies similarities between his unusual behavior and the fictional knight Gawain’s statement about his impending death. As the natural and the supernatural were united in the Middle Ages, so reality and fiction, reality and magic, coexist in this memoir of unbearable loss. The Year of Magical Thinking is not the story of a temporary psychosis. A memoir being always the story of a private and solitary journey, the author must walk a path whose signposts (its “symbols,” as Didion says) are real and imaginary, certain and unstable. In this sense, the memoir is indeed a magical tale. And each heroine or hero is different, each path different, each transformation unique. “Some people who have lost a husband or wife,” Didion writes, “report feeling that person’s presence, receiving that person’s

“a b e n i g n fa i ry ta l e o u t o f t h e b ro t h e rs g r i m m ”

265

advice. Some report actual sightings . . . I experienced neither.”35 But Didion still believed that “given the right circumstances he would come back.”36 Fiction again came to her aid: “One day it seemed important that I reread Alcestis. I had last read it at sixteen or seventeen [and] recalled it as somehow relevant to this question of the ‘divide.’”37 Didion felt drawn toward Alcestis because Euripides’ play tells the story of a brave wife who dies in the place of her husband, who had been “condemned to Death to die.” Alcestis finds a solution to the “question of the ‘divide’” between the world of the living and that of the dead, for she is allowed to come back from the land of the dead, even though she “does not speak.”38 The resurrected wife’s silence is a clear sign, in Didion’s view, that death irremediably changes the deceased, but silence is also the condition of the solitary traveler who passes through unknown and unimaginable lands and walks beyond the ‘divide’: “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”39 For Didion, Alcestis’s silence ‘proves’ that the Greek heroine traveled to the netherworld, the land of grief, and came back. Didion reads in Alcestis that it is the wife’s duty to bring the dead husband back from the dead. The “right circumstances,” which would allow John’s return, depend on her, a new female Orpheus. Only the wife can travel, rescue the deceased from the clutches of Orcus, the god of the netherworld, and return transformed. Both the living and the dead must change in order to live. At the end of The Year of Magical Thinking, the wife succeeds in her quest: “There comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead . . . Let go of them in the water.”40 This may sound like the recognition of a failure. Letting go of the dead in the water is the ultimate erasure, because in the sea “the site of disappearance remains unmarkable. There are no gravestones on the sea.”41 But the sea, the place of disappearance, is where the ultimate transformation can take place. Didion remembers the time when she tried to swim with her husband into the cave at Portuguese Bend in California, where they lived at the time. She remembers “the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right . . . Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that.”42 Husband and wife could swim into the dark cave only if they caught the right tide. They entered the darkness together. The sea, which is where the

266 c h a p t e r e l e v e n

deceased disappears, is also the open space where the memory of the husband now speaks to the fearful widow and encourages her “to go with the change.” The husband has turned into change itself. The memory of him is the force that sustains the bereaved wife (“He told me that”). Maybe, like the medieval knight Gawain, John was aware of his imminent death and was not afraid of it. In change, in letting themselves be transformed by death, husband and wife are reunited. the year of magical thinking

as oral storytelling

The Year of Magical Thinking is the story of a quest. It opens with a beloved husband’s sudden disappearance and unfolds as his wife’s sorrowful journey through a solitary world of hidden symbols and unclear communications. Constant references to fictional texts (medieval epic, Greek tragedy, etc.) comfort and support her in her search. Her journey actually becomes clearer insofar as it becomes more fictional. It is highly significant that Didion turned her memoir into a one-character play, for in its new version it becomes oral storytelling, which is traditionally associated with folk and fairy tales. The ninety-minute play, starring Vanessa Redgrave, opened in 2007 at the Booth Theater in New York.43 The opening lines have changed and have become a dramatic warning: “This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you.” 44 The details of her tale will change, as all stories change in their transmission from one audience to another, but its basic structure will remain the same: a painful loss, a disoriented journey, the search for meaningful clues, some sort of conclusion. “I warned you. I’m telling you what you need to know,” the storyteller repeats.45 In her new version, Joan Didion is not only the heroine of her tale; she also plays that familiar character who warns the hero or heroine about the trials soon to be faced. When she introduces her “year of magical thinking,” Joan can now better express how she waited for her husband alone in her bedroom: “When I wake up and he still isn’t here I try not to move. I lie very still. I analyze the situation. Maybe it takes time for people to come back. Maybe you have to wait.”46 “Magical thinking,” she tells her listeners, “is a phrase I learned when I was reading anthropology. Primitive cultures operate on magical thinking. ‘If ’ thinking. If we sacrifice the virgin—the rain will come back. If I keep his shoes—”47

“a b e n i g n fa i ry ta l e o u t o f t h e b ro t h e rs g r i m m ”

267

Magical thinking is also the stuff fairy tales are made of, and we know that most fairy tales derive from preindustrial cultures and often echo agricultural practices and rituals. Magical thinking is about sensing that things have hidden powers, and that hidden ‘sympathies’ (the term used in the Renaissance) link one thing to another. Human beings wear shoes when they walk, and if Joan preserves her husband’s shoes, he will be able to return. ‘If ’ also indicates an impossible task, not just a magical possibility. If you are able to sort out that motley mass of seeds, Venus tells Psyche, your life will be spared. If you are able to bring some of the freezing water from the swamps of Styx, you will not die. The brave knight Gawain and the heroine crossing the river Styx are still in Didion’s ‘oral’ version, as well as the cave in which the protagonist used to swim with her husband, along with his reassuring words about change. But the meaning of Joan’s story has also begun to change from the first version, a memoir, to the second, a monologue. John, who taught Joan how “to feel the swell change,” is also the one who christened their adopted daughter Quintana in 1966 when she was five days old, “just in case she didn’t live until we could do the ceremony.” Thirty years later, in 2003, when John suffered the heart attack that killed him, Quintana was lying unconscious from pneumonia and septic shock in a hospital. She survived for twenty months but died in August 2005 at the age of 39. Didion’s profound relationship with her daughter is the subject of her subsequent memoir, Blue Nights (2011).48 Between the two versions of The Year of Magical Thinking lies the death of Quintana, whose illness in the first version lies in the background. Her character acquires a much more significant stature in the play, whose ending evokes the same symbolic image of the two spouses entering the dark cave together, but it now communicates a new meaning. Joan reveals to her listeners that when they brought their infant daughter home from the hospital, they laid her “in the bassinette that overlooked the point where the sea ran into the cave. The cave into which we never again swam after the day we brought her home.”49 Her husband used to check “every few minutes to see if she was breathing,” and decided to baptize her to safeguard her even in the afterlife. In the monologue, the memory of the cave is now extended to the daughter, to her safe journey beyond this world, thanks to her father’s love and care. The bassinette was placed overlooking the entrance to the cave, as if the baby were watching over her parents’ love scene and fulfilling its meaning.

268 c h a p t e r e l e v e n

the journey and the basilisk In A Widow’s Story, Joyce Carol Oates addresses the same mystery: writing one’s own life as a function of someone else’s. In 2008, she rushed her husband, Raymond Smith, to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with pneumonia but died of a hospital-acquired infection just a few days later. Speaking about herself in the third person, Oates remarks that “the widow inhabits a tale not of her own telling. The widow inhabits a nightmare-tale and yet it is likely that the widow inhabits a benign fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm in which friends come forward to help.”50 Seeing herself as a character in a “benign” tale is not just an act of the imagination that eases her despair; it also corresponds to a narrative sequence that the widow, who recounts her suffering as if it were part of a magic tale, can use to make sense of her disorientation. “This memoir is a pilgrimage,” Oates writes. “All memoirs are journeys, investigations. Some memoirs are pilgrimages.”51 Recalling the linear outline of a fairy tale à la Propp, Oates explains: “You begin at X, and you will end at Z. You will end—in some way.” In her traveling, the widow repeatedly confronts the sudden appearance of a monster, “the basilisk,” the beast whose gaze kills whoever makes eye contact with it.52 “I am trapped,” the widow states, “the reptile thing—the basilisk—has been regarding me all this time with its glassy-bead stare.” The basilisk prevents the widow from proceeding in her pilgrimage; it wants her dead. “Like the Cheshire cat in Wonderland—first, Alice sees the maddening grin appearing in mid-air; then, by degrees, the outline of the large, graceless cat fills in. So too the basilisk. The dead stare, that comes first; then, the rest of it.”53 The basilisk wants her to believe that her existence is not a pilgrimage because there is no path to follow and only death would be the sensible conclusion of her tale. But what is the final destination of her pilgrimage? What kind of holy place is awaiting her? The widow knows that her late husband is alive; she knows that she can defeat the basilisk if she replaces its deadly gaze with her husband’s life-affirming one. She will live insofar as she finds her husband. Her “magical thinking,” as Oates writes at the beginning of her memoir, turns into the revelation of an overwhelming beauty.54 The last chapter begins with these lines:

Last night the garden was suffused with light—a strange sort of sourceless sunshine that seemed to come from all directions. I could not see clearly but the garden seemed both my garden—ours—Ray’s and mine—and a larger, less culti-

“a b e n i g n fa i ry ta l e o u t o f t h e b ro t h e rs g r i m m ”

269

vated setting. And Ray was—somewhere?—Ray was close by—Ray was turned to me, though I could not see his face clearly—and I felt such relief, saying You’re all right, then. You’re here.55

The night garden flooded with a mysterious and peaceful light is the place where her transformed husband finally reveals himself to his wife and reassures her. The garden itself has changed. It is and is not the garden the couple has known for so many years. It has become “larger, less cultivated.” The garden has retrieved its pristine character; nature has regained control over it. In this magical garden, which evokes the ending of “Beauty and the Beast” and so many other fairy tales, the widow is saved from the basilisk by her husband’s gaze (“Ray was turned to me”). She lives because her husband, whose death she has mourned throughout her pilgrimage, looks at her.

the hero wanders from forest to forest Magic is realizing that you live as the reflection of someone else. “Whatever you do in your life, you have to do it twice as well now.”56 These are the words that, according to Darin Strauss’s memoir Half a Life (2010), a distressed mother told him at her daughter Celine’s funeral, after Strauss had accidentally killed the girl while driving his father’s car. He was eighteen; she was sixteen. They attended the same high school. The girl had suddenly swerved her bike into his lane, and he hadn’t been able to avoid her. When he stepped out of the car and walked to where Celine was lying, Strauss “noticed the peculiar stillness of her face. This stillness transformed her—I didn’t even recognize her. The eyes were open, but her gaze seemed to extend only an inch or so. This openness that does not project out is the image I have of death: everything present, nothing there.”57 Looking down on the lifeless body, he is amazed to see that a rare metamorphosis has just taken place: the girl, her body, has become totally open; it is totally visible and nonetheless not there. Celine, whose “face looked relaxed, as if she were lost in thought,” exceeds the magic of a Sleeping Beauty lying in her royal bed for a century. The task that the dead girl’s mother imposes on Darin is far more daring, more impossible, than the one faced by the prince in order to awaken the princess. Fairy tales abound with impossible trials (make the bed and don’t make it; build a castle in the air), but they can’t compare with the one imposed on Darin by Celine’s mother. She demands that the young man live

270 c h a p t e r e l e v e n

two lives at once. “I realized I’d absorbed Celine’s mother request,” Strauss writes. “When I thought about her now, it was about trying to live well enough for two . . . Celine herself started coming with me, on job interviews, dates, everywhere.” Celine is not only a haunting presence, an obsessive memory; she has taken possession of his identity. Being possessed by another made Strauss literally sick. At the age of twenty-eight, his hair was grey; he had lost a lot of weight and had to undergo stomach surgery; “I was eating myself from the inside.”58 “In fiction classes,” Strauss explains, “at the end, the hero finds himself standing under just the right tree, reaches up without quite meaning to, and plucks down just the right fruit.”59 In fiction, epiphanies frequently occur. Fiction classes teach you how to come up with a fake epiphany. But when the hero strives to tell his own story “honestly,” he finds out that “there is no fated grab . . . You try every fruit, or forget there even are trees, and wander from forest to forest.” Strauss summons a basic image of fairy-tale narratives: destiny leads the clueless, two-dimensional hero through a dark forest to a magical tree holding a magical fruit, which he will need in order to bring his tale to a happy closure. Strauss conjures up the basic storyline of a hero’s quest and denies its reality. He contends that the fairy tale about a solitary knight wandering alone in the woods can never become a real event, because epiphanies don’t happen in real life. But the ending of Half a Life reverses this conclusion. Strauss held this despondent view before writing down his story. From a 2009 article in the New York Times, he learned that a new psychotherapy compelled patients afflicted by a tragic loss to “repeat the minutiae of their pain into a tape recorder in front of an analyst. The patient then replays this tape—this doting agony chronicle—at home every day.”60 The patient had to become at once storyteller and listener of his oral tale. Having to recount his tragedy to an audience (his psychologist), he turned his experience into a coherent tale, after which the tale was told back to him as if it belonged to someone else. The therapist functioned as the ethnographer who hears priceless tales from the mouth of the Volk, which is usually identified with the underprivileged, the poor, the peasants, those who live on the fringes of society. Those who experience an unbearable loss share a similar peripheral condition, as Joan Didion says in The Year of Magical Thinking. They have crossed the river Styx, which separates the living from the dead. Like the Volk, these people have something unique to communicate. After reading about this treatment, Strauss decided to make his book his “tape.”61 And his ‘taped’ tale did lead him to an epiphany. One cold February day, he drove with his wife and two infant sons to the spot where the

“a b e n i g n fa i ry ta l e o u t o f t h e b ro t h e rs g r i m m ”

271

tragedy had taken place many years before. “If Celine lived anywhere, it was there. If the person I’d been before colliding with Celine was anywhere, it was here.”62 Returning to the road where his car had hit Celine’s bicycle was a way of welcoming the memory of the young girl and of his young self, which he now perceived as two halves of the same identity: “It’s not that I outran Celine, or that half of my life. It’s the reverse . . . Things don’t go away. They become you . . . So it’s an epiphany after all.”63 Strauss succeeded in performing his impossible task (living for two people) when he realized that the two identities had become one and only one. He couldn’t outrun Celine because her violent death had transformed her into a part of him. His fear of failing in his trial (his guilt) was what had prevented him from receiving the epiphany that awaited him all along. Strauss didn’t own the tragedy, because he was not responsible for it, but he did own the memory of the girl, who had changed him forever. The solitary knight in the dark forest found the magical tree after all, and plucked the magical fruit.

All the memoirs we have read so far share two basic concepts: (1) the narration of our life has to be a dialogue with someone or something else (for example, a deceased person or an animal, a baby whale); (2) the narration is naturally drawn toward the fairy-tale genre. This doesn’t mean that memoirs are fairy tales, but only that the fairy tale is a narrative model that memoirists have in the back of their minds. The idea that narrating a life is a dialogue suggests that the sense of our existence depends upon the participation of others, who, however, escape our control. In her beautiful Composing A Life (1989), Mary Catherine Bateson holds that “the knight errant, who finds his challenges along the way,” is a suitable model for our times, and also for the kind of memoir I am discussing.64 In our journey dominated by serendipitous events, Bateson says, “we grow in dialogue” with others.65 Many fairy tales open with a dialogue between two or more characters, and this conversation often takes place within the family nucleus (a king and a queen lament the absence of an heir; a dying father speaks to his sons and sends them on a journey; a wife tells her husband that they can no longer feed their children). Many memoirs written today in the United States are based on the problematic relationship with a parent or both parents, whose malevolent presence plays a double role: (1) the parent is the initial conflict that causes the hero’s or heroine’s travails; (2) the parent is the trial that the hero or heroine needs to overcome to reach a successful ending. In other words, the parent is at the beginning and at the end of the tale. For example, the first lines of Laura M. Flynn’s memoir Swallow the

272 c h a p t e r e l e v e n

Ocean are: “When I was nine my mother explained the world to me. ‘There’s a battle,’ she said, ‘between good and evil. And some of us—the strong—have a special role to play.’”66 Flynn’s book opens with her mother disclosing a secret conflict of apocalyptic proportions, in which her little daughter is already involved. But the child senses that this universal war is at once an objective reality and a tale that her mother loves to tell her: “I had a special place in my head for the things my mother told me. I knew a thing could be real and not real at the same time. I was a big reader—I took in what she told me like a book or a story, undiluted, caught up in the moment of the telling.”67 Reality had the consistency of an oral fairy tale in the process of being told. Her mother was the storyteller and a major character of this grim tale, to which the child listened carefully while “edging toward the front door, slowly, the way you move away from a dangerous animal.” Being in and out of a tale of magic that mysteriously identifies with reality is a recurrent theme of memoirs based on an initial conflict with an abusive or mentally ill parent, especially the mother. An additional level of ‘real unreality’ is experienced by the author of an autobiography, which, as Oates points out, is made of a number of true fragments that result in a fictional unity. Once again, the fairy tale is the genre that supports this disorienting interaction between fiction and reality. Mira Bartók’s The Memory Palace (2011) is an eloquent example of such mixing. The title alludes to the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who “possessed great mnemonic powers” and, when he traveled to China in 1596, “taught scholars how to build an imaginary palace to keep their memories safe.”68 Defined as “almost a fairy tale,” The Memory Palace recounts the ordeal of two sisters who flee their schizophrenic and tormenting mother, whom they unsuccessfully try to declare incompetent. According to a judge, since their mother “could buy cigarettes, manage her checking account and cash her disability checks,” she was obviously able to take care of herself.69 To prevent her mother from finding her, the memoirist even changed her name, assuming the name Mira Bartók.70 The Memory Palace begins twice. Both beginnings refer to the same event but from two different perspectives and narrative modes. The first beginning, a sort of introduction titled “Homeless,” shifts from a realistic to a literary fairy-tale style:

A homeless woman, let’s call her my mother for now, or yours, sits on a window ledge in late afternoon in a working-class neighborhood in Cleveland . . .

“a b e n i g n fa i ry ta l e o u t o f t h e b ro t h e rs g r i m m ”

273

She is five stories up, and below the ambulance is waiting, red lights flashing in the rain. The woman thinks they’re the red eyes of a leopard from her dream last night . . . In her story there are leopards on every corner, men with wild teeth and cat bodies, tails as long as rivers. If she opens her arms into wings, she must cross a bridge of fire, battle four horses and riders. I am a swan, a spindle, a falcon, a bear . . . She opens her arms to enter the land of birds and fire. I will become wind, bone, blood, and memory.71

Although the first sentences describe the setting in a realistic manner, we are soon led to see the situation from the delusional view of the mother, whose words, italicized because they are citations from her journal, lend veracity to her vision. If she jumps off the window ledger, she will transform herself into a swan, a spindle, a falcon, a bear, all words typical of a tale of magic. This intense beginning, the first of the two, grants great power to the character of the mother, whom we see at once as insane and so immensely gifted (a sorceress or a witch). It’s easy to imagine her magical mutation into a bird. The second beginning, which is the first chapter of the book, focuses on the daughter at the present time, after the ending of her long struggle with her destructive mother:

Even now, when the phone rings late at night, I think it’s her . . . The last time my mother called was in 1990. I was thirty-one and living in Chicago. She said if I didn’t come home right away she’d kill herself. After she hung up, she climbed onto the second floor balcony of my grandmother’s house in Cleveland, boosted herself onto the banister, and opened her arms to the wind. Below, our neighbor . . . and two paramedics tried to coax her back inside.72

“Even now” makes it clear that her trial is over, and yet every time the phone rings it is as if the past were calling her back to start the excruciating game again. After calling her daughter for the last time, her mother did risk hurting herself because she sat on the banister of a balcony, but in this second rendering she was only two, and not five, stories up, and her metamorphosis into a bird was just the miming of a deeply disturbed woman. The two beginnings of The Memory Palace seem to present two opposite and easily distinguishable styles: the mother’s delusional, albeit powerful

274 c h a p t e r e l e v e n

flights of the imagination versus the daughter’s realistic reconstruction. It is worth noting, however, that before publishing her memoir Mira Bartók authored several children’s books, and always felt a great interest in the fairytale literature. The Memory Palace abounds with direct references to fairy tales or situations reminiscent of fairy tales. Dreams and fantasies play a fundamental role in Bartók’s memoir, because, like real events, they affected her daily life and her rapport with her mother. For example, she remembers telling her mother that in a dream she was a knight who saved her from her illness with a sword.73 But the first and most powerful oneiric image in her memory palace, which she visualizes next to a photo of her mother holding the baby Mira on her lap, comes from Caravaggio’s painting of the Gorgon Medusa, right after her beheading by Perseus. “I remember,” Mira writes, “someone reading Medusa’s story to me when I was a child, about how men turned to stone when they looked at her and how the hero, Perseus, with his helmet of invisibility, his winged sandals, and sword, slayed the terrible Gorgon.”74 Pegasus, the winged horse, was born of Medusa’s spilled blood: “For years I dreamed I was a winged horse, watching, from the sky, my mother’s serpentine head float away from her body.” This recurrent dream is a variation of the much later dream that informed her that she had finally ‘beheaded’ her mother, cleaned up her squalid past, and flown away. Bartók’s Memory Palace is deeply indebted to the fairy tale style. Bartók had a chance to see the Caravaggio painting in the Uffizi museum when she fled the United States and moved to Florence. Looking at the image of the shield with Medusa’s face, she felt that the monster was staring back at her and saying: “How could you leave me? I sleep on benches, on bridges.”75 Even though she had been on the move for years like a modern Snow White in the hope of escaping her mother’s devastating irruptions into her life, she dreaded every unexpected knock on the door because “Medusa might show up.”76 Bartók’s journey, however, was fraught with dangers. After spending several months in Italy, she moved to Israel, where an Israeli soldier harassed her sexually. A woman gave her a “small silver charm in the shape of hand pointed downward,” which would protect her if she hung it around her neck.77 But one night on her way home, she realized that the soldier was hiding inside her house. She ran away, crossed a parking lot, and reached the entrance of a forest. A woman had previously warned her: ‘“Whatever you do, don’t go into the forest,’ just like in a fairy tale.”78 But to save herself from the man who was running after her, she had no choice and walked into the dark woods.

“a b e n i g n fa i ry ta l e o u t o f t h e b ro t h e rs g r i m m ”

275

Bartók’s return to the United States announces the ending of her tale. She and her sister drive to the hospital where their mother is dying of cancer, and assist her in the last days of her life. “In a long night of waiting, there are no crows taking flight, fairy tales, wild horses, wolves, or red and yellow firebirds. There is no palace of memories.”79 As her dream had predicted at the beginning of her memoir, Bartók’s tale ends with the death of the Gorgon Medusa, and she herself flies away. After cleaning the filthy house of her memories and having her mother’s body cremated (for the mother had to disappear), she leaves with her sister. “Later, on the plane,” Bartók writes, “I try to summon the Russian fairy tale about the prince in exile and his beautiful swan-princess but all I can see is a drawer of dead trumpeter swans . . . Did my mother read the story to me before she became too sick?”80 The famous Russian tale “The Frog-Tsarevna” tells the story of a king who orders each of his three sons to travel in a different direction and to discharge their arrows at random. In whatever court their arrows fall, there they must choose their wives. The youngest prince’s arrow falls into a swamp and is grabbed by a frog. The king forces this son to marry the creature. But at night, while the prince is in bed, the frog casts its skin and turns into a maiden, Vasilisa Premudraya.81 However, when the prince burns the frog skin, the lady scolds him, turns into a white swan, and flies out of the window.82 Devastated, the prince sets out on a long and painful journey to find his lost lady. This tale, reminiscent of the Cupid and Psyche myth and of many Western fairy tales, takes us back to the beginning of The Memory Palace, where we hear the disturbed mother say she will turn into a swan if she opens her arms and lets herself fall from the window. At the end of Bartók’s memoir, the daughter is still the knight, as she frequently dreamed when she was a child, fighting to rescue her mother. The roles are now reversed: the daughter is the one who has turned into a swan, and her mother is no longer a monster to be fled from but a princess to be sought and liberated from an evil curse.

The family as the primary place where the magic of one’s life first appears is a trait shared by fairy tales and many memoirs. The family, after all, is the first reality we experience. The memoirs I have discussed borrow from the fairy-tale genre the fundamental belief that magic is a natural, even obvious presence in all lives. We all experience the magic of a sudden absence, the sudden metamorphosis of a loved one who was here a moment ago but has disappeared. A parent’s or sibling’s body lying dead in front of our eyes is a

276 c h a p t e r e l e v e n

mystery that defies scientific explanation. The abuse, insanity, or disrespect of those family members who fail to love us are among the first forms of magic we experience in our lives. When those who are expected to be on our side turn against us, abuse us, or lie to us, they become monstrous. Yet for some of us, these creatures are our first magical encounters, our first disorientation, which adulthood cannot heal but can only hide under the veneer of ‘reality.’

The dirtiness, the obscurities, the inconsistencies that are a crucial aspect of Basile’s Tale of Tales marvelously reflect the horrors and traumas, the losses, the transformations, the magic that occurs in all lives. The proliferation of memoirs narrating traumatic childhoods is not, in my view, an unfortunate aspect of our literary culture. Numerous articles have been written on the alleged uselessness of memoirs that recount no extraordinary events but only common, widespread abuses, daily offenses against children. I used to share this negative opinion, but the more memoirs I read, the better I understood that they are written and read because we need them. How many folk and fairy stories have been written or told on repetitive subjects and with repetitive plots? Yet we don’t question their need to exist. They are part of our cultural tradition. We have so many stories to tell, so many magical occurrences to share. Our childhood is where our magic began, and to our childhood we return. At the beginning of Who Do You Think You Are? (2008), Alyse Myers describes in a truly fairy-tale style how, after the funeral of her hateful mother, she walked into her house with her two greedy sisters and found a mysterious box with a golden padlock, which she had received from her mother when she was thirteen.83 Her mother had told her that she could only open that box after her death. Alyse hid the box from her sisters. After reconstructing her painful childhood, she finally dared to break the lock and open the box. She knew that “the contents would change everything about how I felt about my mother.”84 The box preserved a batch of passionate love letters that her parents had exchanged when they first met and had not yet become the parents she knew, and it also contained the letters she herself had sent to her mother from her trips abroad when she was a college student. We could object that this kind of ‘revelation’ doesn’t deserve to be turned into a book, for children often find it difficult to reconcile the image of their middle-aged parents with the young couples smiling from framed pictures. But this seemingly banal revelation hides a sense of estrangement, of for-

“a b e n i g n fa i ry ta l e o u t o f t h e b ro t h e rs g r i m m ”

277

eignness, which fairy tales translate into physical mutations (remember that the queen in Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty” is a woman of the ogre race). Michael Greenberg’s harrowing Hurry Down Sunshine (2008) opens with the sentence “On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad.” The fifteen-yearold girl suddenly felt she was on a solitary journey (“I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go”), and her father “had the sense of being in the presence of a rare force of nature.”85 His daughter was convinced she “could see the hidden life in things, their detailed brilliance,” the “genius” that lives inside every human being but is constantly being “suppressed.”86 “Genius,” she explains, “is childhood.”87 Her distressed father recalls that, according to Balinese culture, “during our first six months we are literally gods, after which our divinity dissipates, and what is left is a mere human being.” 88 Her father can’t help but read his daughter’s precipitous transformation as a “yearning” for the brilliance that lies dormant in human beings and nature: “She’s gone away like the dead, leaving the false self of herself to talk at me.”89 Hurry Down Sunshine is indeed the story of a girl’s journey and of the journey of her father, who tries to bring her back to his world.

The memoirs discussed in this chapter all share a yearning for the luminosity of our daily magic. At the same time, they all share “reality hunger,” to borrow the title of Shields’s provocative book. Let us bear in mind that originally fairy tales were not necessarily meant for children, as demonstrated by Basile’s tales. But the disturbing Italian tales were magical nonetheless in that they portrayed heroines and heroes who somehow prevailed over the chaos of human existence. These characters reached some sort of closure, not necessarily a happy ending. Sometimes their travails had a moral meaning, sometimes not. Many of our contemporary memoirs attempt to recapture that original, traumatizing, and upsetting magic in a new narrative format. If magic tales are about transformation, they often, but not always, reflect intrinsic parts of our own biographies. They become real insofar as we perceive their magic.

chapter twelve

“Everything Beautiful Is Gone”: Beasts of the Southern Wild and a New Beginning

The first and enduring impression that the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild makes on the viewer is of something overwhelmingly new and unexpected, as if this low-budget film were the first magic tale ever told, preceding all other classic and nonclassic tales in the Western tradition. This film seems to have discovered a new and eternal heroine, the little black girl named Hushpuppy who, in her own words, once upon a time “lived with her daddy in the Bathtub.” We have learned to associate all forms of fairytale storytelling with a set of motifs and allusions firmly linked to a handful of classic types, and the sole freedom we are granted is parody. Beasts of the Southern Wild wipes the slate clean and tells a story so absorbing and in such a fresh and new style that leaves us speechless, as all magic tales should do. First of all, this is not an animated film in the tradition of Walt Disney and his many followers. Set in the Louisiana bayous, Beasts of the Southern Wild looks like a documentary shot just before and just after the devastating hurricane Katrina. It could also be compared to an unconventional TV reality special which, by focusing on an indigent African-American man and his little daughter, shows a secluded society of outcasts and drunks. The film is loosely based on the play Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar, who also authored the screenplay with Benh Zeitlin, the film’s director. The play is very different from the film; we will refer to it only when it helps us clarify some of the film’s unclear aspects. Hushpuppy is a boy in the play, even though the playwright states that this character could be also a girl.1 In the film, Hushpuppy and her father live in a chaotic shack placed on a pair of oil drums in the company of chickens, dogs, birds, and other eatable ani-

“everything beautiful is gone”

279

mals, which live beneath and around the shaky house. The crude quality of the cinematography and the brutally realistic settings of Beasts of the Southern Wild seem to ignore the conventional guidelines of a fairy-tale film. The poor and marginalized characters of this film, the wild nature in which they survive, are ‘unpoetic’ and ‘un-fairy-tale-like’; they lack the dignified ‘magic’ of so many contemporary retellings of classic fairy tales. Moreover, the men and women of this Louisiana bayou express themselves in a coarse and unrefined English rooted in its local inflections. Inevitably, we recall the colloquialism and crudity of Basile’s tales, with their wretched characters at the mercy of an unfathomable destiny. As in Basile’s masterpiece, Beasts of the Southern Wild contends that reality is far more ominous and hostile than any magic. We could hypothesize that, like the seventeenth-century The Tale of Tales, the twenty-first-century Beasts of the Southern Wild indicates a new beginning in the art of storytelling. In the opening scene, alone in the house, Hushpuppy waters a small clod and places a chick on top of it. The soil and the chick are connected to each other, given that both are meant to produce or to change into something else. “The whole universe,” Hushpuppy explains, “depends on everything fitting together just right.” The little girl brings the chick’s chest to her ear because “everything’s hearts are beating and squirting and talking to each other the ways I can’t understand.” Hushpuppy is convinced that all things are alive and have hearts that beat in “codes.” Her father once told her that the first time her mother looked at her when she was a newborn, “it made her heart beat so big that she thought it would blow up. That’s why she swam away.” Hushpuppy’s story, her longing for her disappeared mom, whom she calls at night from her open window and to whom she talks while preparing her meals, has a universal scope; her story reflects the stories unfolding in the universe. By listening to the chick’s heartbeat, the girl also evokes the heart of her absent mom, since hearts constantly speak to each other in “codes” that the girl can’t understand. Father and daughter live in a self-reliant community of cheerful outcasts of all ages and races. Known as the Bathtub, this little settlement lies “on the wrong side of the levees,” as the director defines the imaginary location (see figure 5).2 In one of the first and most symbolic scenes of the film, Hushpuppy and her father, who is prone to sudden outbursts of rage and drinking bouts, approach the levees on a makeshift boat and look at the industrial landscape on the other side (see figure 6). The contrast between modernity and the atemporal wilderness of the Bathtub couldn’t be more explicit. “Daddy says, up above the levee on the dry side,” Hushpuppy’s

280 c h a p t e r t w e l v e

voice-over says, “they’re afraid of the water like a bunch of babies. They built the wall that cuts us off.” Unlike the nineteenth-century Volk who lived in nature and knew nature’s eternal tales, the people of the Bathtub are not just isolated geographically or socially; they survive on the other side of a “wall” that has been built with the intent (according to Hushpuppy and her daddy) of separating the Bathtub tribe from the rest of modern society. We could say that paradoxically the Bathtub people inhabit a past created by modernity. Modernity has pushed this community back in time. The people living on the dry land, Hushpuppy continues, “got fish in plastic wrappers” and “got none of what we got.” The Bathtub community feeds healthily on the natural resources of the sea; their large, dirty tables abound with a variety of fresh fish, and each meal looks like a luscious banquet. But their privileged condition is about to end. The universal harmony of the world, the infinite correspondences that hold the creation together, are in danger. “The fabric of the universe is coming unraveled,” we learn from Miss Bathsheba, the healer, teacher, and witch of the Bathtub people. She has a large tattoo on her right leg with the images of the so-called “aurochs,” ferocious beasts “that walked the face of

“everything beautiful is gone”

281

the earth back when we all lived in the caves” (see figure 7). These beasts, Miss Bathsheba explains to the Bathtub children, “would gobble cave babies down right in front of their cave parents.” The beasts were frozen in time in those prehistoric times, and now, since the ice caps on the South Pole are melting, they are coming back to life. Moreover, the “water is gonna rise and everything south of the levee is going under.” According to this modern witch, we have to understand, modernity itself through global warming has triggered this violent return to an ancient past. The monsters that once wolfed down children like so many folk- and fairy-tale ogres, are coming back with a vengeance. Their return also signifies the brutal irruption of that original magic that has been frozen for centuries. This temporal dynamic (prehistory, history, posthistory) recalls what Novalis writes about fairy tales in The Universal Brouillon. In the fragment “Romanticism,” which we quoted when discussing “Beauty and the Beast,” Novalis contends that the “age before the world” (the age of ogres and wild beasts devouring children outside caves) was a time of chaos and lawlessness.3 That time mirrors the “age after the world,” which he defines as the time of “reasonable chaos.” The present time, the time of levees that separate modernity from the past—that is, from the Bathtub—is naturally drawn toward transformation and renovation because it is a time of tension and division. A “genuine” fairy tale, Novalis holds, is a “prophetic representation” because it is told now but looks to the future. The leitmotiv of Beasts of the Southern Wild is a forthcoming apocalypse. Hushpuppy perceives the harmony that rules over the creation but also senses its pending catastrophe. Although this apocalyptic future is attributed to the arrival of wild monsters, no magical event is its real cause. Nature, which is real and not imaginary, unleashes a violent attack against this unstable community and wipes it off the earth. The wild, magical monsters from the prehistoric past

282 c h a p t e r t w e l v e

arrive in conjunction with nature’s brutal intervention. Magic ratifies what reality has decreed and implemented. In the original play, Juicy and Delicious, Miss Bathsheba’s cautionary tale is significantly less scary because it ends with the cave babies’ parents defeating the monsters. That shows, Miss Bathsheba points out to the children, that “someone was taking care of you before they even knew you.”4 This reassuring note is missing from Beasts of the Southern Wild, which omits all reference to parental concern for the Bathtub children. Because of her father’s erratic behavior, Hushpuppy is often alone. She knows that her world is coming to an end. The ice caps are melting; monstrous creatures are waking up from their long hibernation; the Bathtub will be flooded; her father is sick with a mysterious disease that makes him disappear for a while, and when he comes back he yells at her to leave him alone. Echoing the abandoned child usually associated with the Hansel and Gretel tale, Hushpuppy muses that “kids that got no mama, no daddy and nobody they got to live in the woods and eat grass and steal underpants.” What is in danger is the world of childhood, the Bathtub itself, where a girl’s disappeared father “could have turned into a tree or a bug,” though “there wasn’t any way to know.” The Bathtub, a place of magic and longing, lies outside the boundaries of modernity and risks being flooded and forgotten. We noted the same concern in the Brothers Grimm, who strove to collect as many oral tales as possible before they would be erased by encroaching industrialization. Hushpuppy is the spokesperson of a world on the brink of an apocalyptic disaster and, in her father’s words, is destined to become its savior and “king.” Like a nineteenth-century anthropologist transcribing an oral tale, Hushpuppy draws the main figures of her story on the inside of a cardboard box while hiding from her daddy’s fury, for she has set the stove on fire. “If Daddy kill me,” she explains, “I ain’t gonna be forgotten. I’m recording my story for the scientists in the future.” The monsters (or ogres) from prehistoric time bring both devastation and renewal. In announcing the end of the present time and the founding of a new, ‘magical’ eternity, they are indeed apocalyptic creatures. When a dangerous storm approaches, many people decide to leave the Bathtub, but not Hushpuppy’s father, who is determined to fight the elements. After a long night of thunder and lightning, father and daughter climb onto the roof, while the rest of the house lies underwater. In the meantime, we see that the aurochs are awakening and the ice that enclosed them is crumbling. We see a foggy landscape and the beasts checking their barren environment. A pack of these dark beasts (in reality, magnified images of

“everything beautiful is gone”

283

Vietnamese potbelly piglets) run through deserted fields and destroy everything they encounter. The beasts and the storm work together to erase the present and reinstate a chaotic past, when the aurochs dominated a world at once brutally real (they devoured children in front of their powerless parents) and intrinsically magical. The beasts bring with them the magic that Hushpuppy senses when listening to a chick’s heartbeat or thinking of her mother, who, according to her father, “was so pretty she’d never have to use a stove. She’d walk into a room and all the water would start boiling.”5 As we would expect from a fairy tale, the past is also the time of the mother, who is the most magical creature for all children, including Hushpuppy. At night, when the little girl sees a faint light at the end of the horizon, she wonders whether that light is her mom, and calls to her. Beasts of the Southern Wild is thus also a quest in which a ‘princess’ (or future ‘king’) from a Louisiana bayou travels through a deserted land devastated by a hurricane in search of her missing mother. After the terrifying night of rain and gales, Hushpuppy and her daddy get into their boat and assess the grim situation in which they now find themselves. Looking at the destroyed houses, the twisted trees, the dead animals lying on the shore, Hushpuppy concludes: “For the animals that didn’t have a dad to put them in a boat the end of the world already happened.” Her world, her dad’s world, is now underwater. When the survivors gather around a crowded dinner table, Miss Bathsheba explains that “everything beautiful is gone. Man, you know they got salt in that water, done ate everything up. Trees are gonna die first, then the animals, then the fish.” The teacher concludes that the only solution is to move somewhere else. But neither Hushpuppy nor her father is willing to accept this defeatist view. A group of the Bathtub people, including Hushpuppy’s father, go to the levee with a bomb, so as to destroy the wall that separates the good water from the bad. When they lose the switch that activates the bomb, Hushpuppy rescues the mission by finding the switch and defiantly tries to blow up the levee. Beasts of the Southern Wild not only discovers an ‘eternal’ magical character, Hushpuppy, who had been hiding until, as the Grimms did with innumerable figures, the writers and the director of the film brought her to light; it also narrates a story deeply rooted in contemporary American folklore rather than appropriated or remade from European material. Furthermore, this film recounts a story closely linked to contemporary history, the devastation brought about Katrina, the miserable conditions of marginalized Louisiana bayou dwellers living in the present time. The magic we witness

284 c h a p t e r t w e l v e

on the screen takes place in a specific area of the American landscape, just as Basile set many of stories in Naples and its surroundings. The longing for reality, which we have detected in so many contemporary memoirs but also in the postmodern novels of Robert Coover and Stanley Elkin, all deeply influenced by the Western European tradition of fairy tales, finds in Beasts of the Southern Wild a new and truly marvelous response. Nonetheless, the raw, unmagical material of the film, along with its choppy, unrefined, and at times incoherent story line, recalls the ‘oral’ unfolding of The Tale of Tales. After the seemingly successful destruction of the levee, the police fly down to the Bathtub in helicopters, force the isolated community to move to a shelter, and declare the Bathtub a “mandatory evacuation area.” The inhabitants are totally lost in the aseptic shelter and rebel violently against the doctors and nurses who keep them ‘imprisoned.’ When his daughter refuses to leave without him, Hushpuppy’s bedridden father confesses to her that he is deathly sick, and that his blood “is eating itself.” All of a sudden, for no clear reason, we see the girl and her adult friends carrying his weak body back to the Bathtub. Moreover, the film abruptly passes from the image of a rainy day to a clear afternoon, with Hushpuppy and other disheveled girls standing by the shore and looking toward a blinking light in the middle of the ocean, which Hushpuppy hopes is the place where her mother lives. The girls plunge into the waters and swim, supposedly toward that distant light. Suddenly we see them on board a tugboat called “Grumpy,” Hushpuppy standing beside the old “Sergeant Major,” who is steering the boat. When he asks Hushpuppy where she is headed, she replies: “I’m going by my mom.” “That’s a good place to go,” the sergeant replies. That far-away light turns out to be the “Floating Catfish Shack,” a bar and brothel where scantily dressed women entertain their male clients. The Bathtub children walk down the “shack,” while the suggestive song “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” plays in the background. Hushpuppy sees a young woman who reminds her of her mother. “Do you need something, baby?” the woman asks her. Like her mother, this woman is magical. She is so strong that she opens a beer with her teeth, blows off the top of an egg shell, and cuts open the belly of a gator; Hushpuppy’s mother had shot a gator dead when it threatened her sleeping father. This incident happened the day before the child was born, according to her father’s account. The child later dances in the woman’s arms on the dance floor and whispers something in her ear. The woman finally puts Hushpuppy down and walks away. For Hushpuppy’s quest, this is the beginning of the end. As the woman who might be

“everything beautiful is gone”

285

her mother disappears, her father abandons her when defeated by his insidious illness. Hushpuppy already knows that “everybody loses the thing that made them,” as she previously remarked when looking at the remains of an animal lying on the shore with its belly open and its intestines missing. Beasts of the Southern Wild ends with the child’s parents leaving her to face alone the monsters from the South Pole, which finally reach the Bathtub, where the child’s father is breathing his last. He sits up on his bed by the shore in time to see the beasts kneeling before his brave child. “You’re my friends, kind of,” Hushpuppy tells the monsters, “I gotta care of mine.” And the beasts withdraw. If we had to identify the moral of this tale, we could point to the girl’s final expression of maturity and responsibility. The ogres from the past acknowledge her superiority. The girl’s victory (she is now ‘king’ of the Bathtub) announces a new future. The film reveals that the real destruction of the isolated community (the destruction of a world, in a child’s eyes) takes place not because of some monstrous creatures from the past, but because of the inscrutable decision of nature. After turning her back to the beasts, Hushpuppy feeds her father his last meal. The collapse of the world is the end of childhood, the death of

286 c h a p t e r t w e l v e

the family nucleus, and the facing of the real devastation of that powerful storm that has all the evil magic of Katrina. The Bathtub is not destroyed; a new sort of magic begins at the end of the film. Discussing the film in the New York Times, A. O. Scott writes that “the magic of Beasts of the Southern Wild is that it does not worry too much about distinguishing among the elements of [Hushpuppy’s] quest.” 6 The child searches for the mother who swam away from her, but she is also the king destined to save the Bathtub and the world from wild beasts and flooding. The fairy-tale quest of the little girl does not take place in an unknown land. Some of the most powerful stories in Basile’s The Tale of Tales are set in Naples or other places that unmistakably evoke the brutality of seventeenthcentury southern Italy. The storm that drastically changes Hushpuppy’s life recalls the trauma of Katrina, and aspects of our most recent history, both visually and emotionally. Students of fairy tales have lengthily debated the relationship between reality and magic tales. For Andrés Jolles, for example, the fairy tale is “in opposition to the world of ‘reality.’” By ‘reality,’ he means a world that we perceive as amoral and thus “tragic.”7 But couldn’t we claim, rather, that the fairy tale reflects reality? If we put aside the questionable emphasis on morality (a fairy tale always contains moral teaching), we understand that the fairy tale shows what reality can be, what its potential is. Destruction, transformation, violence of all sorts, unexpected apparitions take place in reality if we only allow ourselves to perceive them, as children do. This could be the real meaning of the title of Basile’s book The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment of the Little Ones. A magic tale doesn’t have to have a happy ending. Recall, for example, the sad heroines of Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tales. Does Beasts of the Southern Wild have a moral message? Does it have a happy ending? It doesn’t seem to matter. What this tale offers is a brutal and magical portrait of potential reality. The Bathtub is a fruit of the screenwriters’ imagination, but it could exist in the Louisiana bayous. Its people certainly exist; one need only take a walk in New Orleans to see them everywhere, and not just in the devastated Ninth Ward. Hushpuppy is a new Cinderella, a new Snow White.

Appendix

The Grimm Brothers’ Adaptation of Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales

introduction1 A king has an only daughter who, to his distress, has never laughed. Nothing can arouse her. Finally, he has a fountain erected in front of the palace, with oil cascading from it. An old woman comes by and a boy breaks her jug. She curses and the boy pays her back in her own coin. She becomes so enraged that she grabs her skirt and lifts the curtain from her artwork.2 That makes serious Zoza laugh, but the angry witch turns to her and curses her.3 Zoza will have no husband unless she is taken by a king’s son who is now bewitched and is lying as if dead in a coffin outside his city and will not be awakened until a woman weeps into a jug hanging from a hook next to his grave until she fills it with her tears. Whoever fulfills this condition he will take as his wife. Zoza sets out on her journey and arrives at the house of a fairy, who at her departure gives her a nut to open only in a dire emergency, and sends her to another fairy. This one gives her a chestnut, and a third gives her a hazelnut under the same condition. Zoza finally reaches the grave. She weeps into the jug for two days, and it is almost full of her tears when she falls asleep, exhausted. A black slave woman comes by, picks up the jug, and fills it up with tears. At once, the king’s son awakes from his deathlike sleep, takes the black woman to his palace, and marries her. Zoza wakes up and sees what has happened. She goes to the city and rents a house across from the king’s son. He notices her but the black bat keeps flying around him and threatens him, unless he moves from the window.4 Now Zoza cracks open the nut. A little doll comes out. She puts it by the window and it sings most sweetly. The black woman demands it and

288 a p p e n d i x

receives it. Zoza cracks open the chestnut. A mother hen comes out with twelve golden chicks. The black woman takes those too. Finally, Zoza cracks open the hazelnut. Out comes a doll spinning gold. The black woman must have this marvel as well. However, it makes her want to hear fairy tales. Ten young women are selected and Zoza is among them.5 Every day, each of them must tell a fairy tale and this entertainment lasts five days.6

first day I. 1 The Ogre 7 Antonio is simpleminded; his mother boxes his ears,8 and he runs away from home. He reaches a mountain where an ogre is living in a cave, and starts to work for the ogre. After a couple of years he yearns to go home; the ogre gives him a donkey as farewell gift, telling him he mustn’t say “Bricklebrit!” to it.9 Antonio has walked less than a hundred steps when he says to his animal, “Bricklebrit!” upon which the donkey immediately discharges pearls and precious stones from its rear end. Full of joy, Antonio arrives at an inn and says to the landlord: “Take the ass to the stable but don’t say “Bricklebrit!” The wily landlord says it anyway, and when he sees the result, he switches the wonder donkey with a common one. Antonio returns home with this donkey and shouts to his mother: “We are rich, rich!” She spreads some rags on the ground, and he says “Bricklebrit!” but to no avail. The donkey does nothing but soil the rags. The mother thrashes Antonio, who runs back to the ogre. Though ugly, the ogre has a kind heart; he reproaches the boy for his imprudence but gives him a dishcloth to which he must say: “Open, my little dishcloth, and close!” but not before he gets home.10 Not far from the cave, however, Antonio tries it out and the little dishcloth is covered with the most precious things. He takes it with him into the inn and is cheated once again. He hurries to the ogre for the third time and works for him for three more years, but then he is overwhelmed with homesickness. The ogre gives him a fine-looking club, telling him he mustn’t say to it, “Up, little club! Down, little club!”11 Along the way, however, he says, “Up, little club!” Immediately the club raises itself up and thrashes him, and doesn’t stop until he says, “Down, little club!” He goes to the landlord, asks him to keep the club for him and forbids him to say, “Up, little club!” But the landlord disregards the prohibition; the little club attacks him and beats him so mercilessly that he calls Antonio for help. The boy first demands the donkey and the tablecloth back and when he has both of them, he orders, “Down, little club!” Then he joyfully goes home.

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

289

I. 2 The Blueberry Bush12 A man and wife are going through life without children. The wife prays: “Oh God, if I could only give life to something in this world, even just a blueberry bush!” After nine months, she gives birth to a blueberry bush, plants it with great care in a nicely decorated pot and sets it at the window. On his way to the hunt, the king’s son notices it and asks to buy it. She refuses for a while but finally consents. She asks him to treat the bush with care. He takes it to his chamber and looks after it and waters it himself. One night, when all the lights are out and all have just fallen asleep, a young girl gets into his bed, and leaves early in the morning.13 She returns for seven nights; on the eighth night he ties one of her braids to his arm so that she can’t get away, asks for light, and sees the greatest beauty in the world. He promises her that she will become his wife. Soon afterward he has to go hunt a wild boar that is ravaging the land. He tells her that he must leave her for three days. She asks him to tie a silk thread holding a little bell to the top of the bush. She tells him that if he pulls the thread and rings the bell, she will come. The king’s son calls his servant: “Open your ears and listen: while I am away, make this bed as if I were sleeping in it and water this plant, whose fruits have been counted; if one is missing, that will cost you your head.” Then he rides off. There were seven harlots with whom the prince had previously done business; they couldn’t understand why he had grown so cold.14 They paid a mason to make an underground passage for them to the prince’s chamber. But all they found there was the beautiful blueberry bush. Each of them plucked a berry, except for the youngest one, who took the whole top of the plant, from which the bell hung.15 As soon as it was touched, it began to ring. The fairy thought the prince had done this, and appeared. “So it is you who are diverting the water from our mill,” shout the harlots, “you deserve a good welcome.” They attack her and tear her apart.16 Each of them takes a piece; only the youngest doesn’t want to, although the others try to persuade her, and all she takes is a lock of the fairy’s golden hair. Then they leave. When the servant arrives to make the bed and water the bush, he discovers the dreadful thing that has happened. He picks up what is left of her flesh and bones, wipes the blood off the floor, and piles everything into the pot. The king’s son returns from hunting and pulls the thread, but his beloved doesn’t appear. He opens the window and sees that the top of the bush has been destroyed. His wailing could move a stone to compassion. He won’t eat or drink. Finally the fairy reappears, having revived from the remains left in the pot, and tells him everything.17 The marriage is celebrated festively. The seven harlots are also invited. Point-

290 a p p e n d i x

ing to his beautiful bride, the prince asks what someone who had hurt her would deserve. They answer: that person should be thrown alive into the private latrine. The sentence is carried out; only the youngest one is pardoned and is married to the servant. I. 3 Pervonto 18 Pervonto, a terrible dawdler, is sent by his mother to chop some wood. On the way he finds three young ladies who have made a bed out of grass and a pillow out of flint and are asleep under the heat of the sun.19 Out of pity, he takes his hatchet, chops some shrubs, and makes a lovely bower around them. In the meantime, they wake up and are pleased by his courtesy. Since they are the daughters of a fairy, they decree that everything will happen as he wishes. Pervonto then goes into the wood and chops a bundle of wood, and since it’s a burden to carry, he cries out: “I wish this bundle could take me home like a horse!” Immediately the bundle of wood begins to carry him like a horse. Vastolla, the king’s daughter, looks out of her window, sees that amazing ride, and begins to laugh; because of her sad disposition she had never before laughed in her life. Pervonto looks up and says: “Vastolla, may you become pregnant by this horse!” He spurs the bundle of wood and, had his mother not unlocked the door right away, he was racing so fast that he would have been knocked dead.20 Vastolla gains weight and becomes pregnant; the king gathers his counselors, and they counsel him to await the outcome. She gives birth to two baby boys as beautiful as golden apples. When they turn seven, the counselors suggest to the king that he throw a big party and invite all the noblemen in his kingdom so that the boys can perhaps identify their father. The king does as suggested, but nothing comes of it. To a second party, commoners and merchants are invited, but again with no results. To a third party, all the humble and the poor are called. Pervonto goes as well and as soon as he shows up, the two boys run to him and hug him. As soon as the king sees this, he is outraged and tears his beard out and orders that Pervonto and his daughter and the children be cast out to sea. Some young ladies, out of pity, give them a small cask of raisins and dry figs in the little boat just drifts along wherever the wind blows.21 Vastolla weeps and complains: “Tell me, cruel man, how did you cast a spell on me and lead me to such misfortune?” He answers: “Give me figs and raisins, and I will serve you” (“si vuoie che te lo dico, tu damme passe e fico”).22 She gives him a handful of both. After eating them, he tells her everything that happened to him. She takes heart and says: “Oh my companion, but

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

291

must we spend our lives in this miserable boat? Wish us a beautiful ship and make sure that it takes us to a port.” He answers: “Give me figs and raisins, and I will serve you.” He then transforms the boat into a marvelous ship provided with a crew and everything else. Now she says: “Dearest, transform this ship into a marvelous castle.” He repeats his phrase and does as she wishes. Afterwards, she asks to become a queen and asks him to acquire a handsome figure instead of his hideous one. Everything happens and they live content together. The old king gets lost while hunting and arrives there, and the two boys call him grandfather, grandfather! He is magnificently entertained and reconciles with Pervonto and Vastolla. I. 4 Vardiello 23 An intelligent woman had a son by the name of Vardiello, who was the dumbest simpleton in the land, but she thought him the most wonderful young man in the world.24 She had a hen that was sitting on eggs, and when one day she had to leave she said: “Sweetheart, keep an eye on the hen so that she doesn’t get out of the nest, otherwise the eggs will get cold and we will get no chicken.” “I will take care of it; I do have ears and I’ve heard everything.” She leaves, and the dumb simpleton nags the hen so long that it dies.25 He thinks: “You must make up for the loss, the eggs shouldn’t get cold, you must sit on them.”26 As soon as he sits on them, he crushes the whole batch. He feels like banging his head against the wall, but after a while his stomach is grumbling, and he decides to eat the hen. He plucks it and sticks it on a spit, lights a good fire, and roasts it. To have everything ready in time, he decides to tap some wine. When he turns the peg and the wine flows, he hears a loud noise. He checks what is going on upstairs and sees that the cat has snatched the hen off the spit. He runs after it to get the prey but forgets to turn the peg back and all the wine flows out.27 His mother must not see that, so he takes a sack crammed with flour and sprinkles it around. But he gets scared and doesn’t want to fall into his mother’s hands alive. He decides to eat the preserved nuts, which his mother had told him were poisonous, fills up his stomach with them, and crawls into the oven. His mother comes back, doesn’t see her young son, and calls out; finally he answers timidly: “Mother, I’m in the oven and I’m poisoned.” She asks again, and little by little he tells her everything. She frees him of his delusion and tells him that the nuts are not poisonous, just a stomach tonic, and pulls him out of the oven.28 Then she gives him a piece of fine cloth, which he must sell, but he shouldn’t get involved with people who talk too much.

292 a p p e n d i x

He goes to the city and says: “Cloth, cloth for sale!” But when someone asks: “What kind of cloth?” he wants nothing to do with him because he uses too many words. Finally he sees a plaster figure in a courtyard, and since it is mute, he sits down below it. He begins to talk to it and says: “Tell me, good friend, is anyone home?” Receiving no answer, he thinks this is a man of few words and says: “Won’t you buy this cloth? You may have it at a good price.” Since the figure keeps silent, he thinks he has found the right buyer, puts the cloth down, and says: “Give me what you want, I’ll come back tomorrow to collect the money.” He goes home, and the first smart person to pass by makes off with the cloth. Vardiello reassures his mother, and very early in the morning takes himself back to the figure and demands payment. But since it doesn’t answer, he takes a club and hits it in the chest with all his might, so that it breaks apart, and inside he finds a jar full of gold pieces; delighted, he goes back home and cries out: “Mother, mother, look at all these red beans!” His mother, who understands that it is another one of his larks, tells him that he must sit below the front door, goes upstairs and for a good half hour throws raisins and dry figs down on him. The dumb simpleton cries out: “Mother, mother! Spread out a large cloth, when the rain stops we will be rich.” Once he has eaten enough, he goes to sleep. One day two laborers happen to be arguing in court over a gold piece found in the ground. Vardiello comes by and says: “You fools, why do you fight over such a thing? The other day I found an whole jar full of red beans.” The judge is stunned and asks: “How? Where? When?” He answers: “By a palace, inside a silent man, when it was raining raisins and dry figs.” When he hears that, the judge sentences Vardiello to a madhouse. But the son’s stupidity made his mother rich. I. 5 The Flea 29 A king is bitten by a flea, catches it deftly, and since it is so beautiful, he has qualms about squashing it and puts it in a cage. He feeds it for a couple of days with his own blood, and in consequence it grows so much that he has to enclose it in a bigger cage. It keeps growing, and so the king has it killed and its skin dressed. Then he announces that whoever can guess to which animal this skin belongs will have his daughter as wife. Suitors come from all corners of the world; one says that it is the skin of a wolf, another that it belongs to a crocodile, and so on. Finally an ogre arrives and says that the skin belongs to the greatest braggart of all fleas. The king cannot break his word and gives him his unlucky daughter. The ogre takes her to his dark

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

293

house, which is in a remote and wild region and is adorned with human bones.30 Quite soon, the ogre brings the bodies of four slaughtered people to eat. When he is in the woods again, she sees an old woman passing by, to whom she complains of her unhappiness, and this woman is so touched that she wants her seven sons to come to the princess’s aid. These seven sons have amazing powers: every time Mase puts his ear to the ground, he hears everything that happens up to thirty miles away; every time Nardo spits, he makes a vast sea of soap; every time Cola throws a piece of iron, he makes a field full of sharpened razors; every time Micco throws a twig, he makes a thick forest; every time Petrullo pours some water, he makes a fearsome storm; every time Ascaddeo throws a stone, makes a sturdy tower; and finally Ceccone with his crossbow hits everything a mile away. The following day the old woman arrives with her seven sons and takes the princess away. Soon after their departure, the distance-hearing Mase hears the ogre going home, not finding anything, and chasing after the princess. Nardo spits and makes a sea of soap, but the ogre makes his way through it. Cola makes a field of sharp blades, but the ogre clothes himself in iron from head to toe and walks through it. Micco then makes a terrifying forest, but the enemy chops his way through it. Petrullo makes a huge storm, but the ogre undresses and swims through it. Ascaddeo makes a tower, and all of them rush to it and lock themselves in, but the ogre takes a ladder and is about to climb up. Ceccone is their last resort; he shoots at the ogre, who falls from the ladder. Then they cut off his head and take it to the king, who rejoices greatly because he has regained his daughter. He soon finds her a handsome husband, and bestows rich rewards on the seven sons and their mother. I. 6 Ash Kitten 31 A widower has a daughter whom he loves dearly, and also a remarkable governess. When he remarries, the girl complains to the governess about her stepmother, who treats her harshly. “Well, if I were your mother, you would be the apple of my eye.”32 “Oh, please tell me what I should do.” “Courage, my dear,” she replies, “asks your stepmother for an old dress, so as to save the one you are wearing, and when she goes over to the chest, she will tell you: ‘Hold the lid,’ and when she bends over, push it down hard enough so that it chops her head off. Then, don’t give your father any peace until he marries me.” The girl does what she asks, and her father, who is a prince, finally marries the governess.33 At the wedding, the girl notices a little bird, which flies over the wall and says to her: “If you have a wish, tell it to the

294 a p p e n d i x

bird of the fairy of Sardinia, and it will be fulfilled immediately.” The new stepmother treats the girl well for six days: she gives her the best place at the table and gives her the best morsels. But then, unexpectedly, she fetches her six daughters and turns her husband’s favor toward them. As a result, the unlucky girl is isolated in a corner of the kitchen, where she has to do all the menial work and gets the name of Ash Kitten. It comes to pass that the prince must travel to Sardinia. He asks his six stepdaughters what they wish him to bring them. They request expensive clothes and similar items. He asks Ash Kitten also what she desires. She answers that he should say hello to the fairy’s bird and ask it to send her something. “But don’t forget,” she adds.34 The prince completes his business in Sardinia, buys his six stepdaughters what they had requested, but forgets his own child. He is about to travel home, but the ship cannot be taken out of the port. The owner of the ship grows desperate, and an enchantress35 reveals to him that it is the prince’s fault, because he hasn’t kept the promise he made to his daughter. He has thought about everything but has forgotten his own blood. He hurries to the fairy’s cave, gives her his daughter’s regards, and asks her for something to take back to her. The fairy reveals herself as a beautiful woman, it touched her that the girl remembered her, and rejoices at her love. She sends her a date, a hoe, a golden bucket, and a silk cloth, and says that she should plant the first and take care of the plant with the other things. The prince brings the gifts home. Ash Kitten plants the date in a nice pot, works the soil with the hoe, waters it with the golden bucket, dries it with the silken cloth, and after four days the date palm has grown so much that it is becoming as tall as a woman, and a fairy comes out of it and says: “What is your wish?” “Every time I leave the house, I want my sisters not to know it.” The fairy replies: “Whenever you desire something, come to the pot and say ‘My golden date, I have planted you with the golden hoe; I have watered you with the golden bucket; I have dried you with the silken cloth; strip yourself and dress me!’ And when you want to strip yourself, you need only say ‘Strip me and dress yourself.’ A big party is thrown; the six stepsisters go; Ash Kitten hastens to the pot, is adorned like a queen, and shows up at the party. Impressed by the girl’s beauty, the king asks his servants to find out where she lives. But she throws out some gold that she obtained from the date palm, and in this way she is able to leave the house unnoticed. Even more richly dressed and as beautiful as the sun, she arrives at the second party in a coach driven by six horses and with numerous attendants. The king again sends his staff after her, but she throws out jewelry and precious stones, and again escapes. To the third party she is driven by a golden

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

295

coach and accompanied by even more attendants. The king threatens his staff with harsher punishments if they let her go this time as well, but still can’t obtain any information about her. She asks her coachman to drive away as fast as possible so that no one may follow her, but in the rush she loses a shoe, which the servants pick up and take to the king. He announces that all the women in his land are to attend a party. All the women and girls arrive. The noble and the humble, the beautiful and the ugly, all of them try on the shoe, but it doesn’t fit any of their feet. The king asks whether all the women have come and no one has been left behind. The prince then says that the king has another daughter who only knows the ashes in the hearth and doesn’t deserve to present herself there. The king demands to see her. The shoe fits her perfectly, and the king takes her into his arms and puts a crown on her head. Enraged, her stepsisters hurry home. I. 7 The Merchant 36 A rich merchant has two sons who look so much alike that people can’t distinguish one from the other. Cienzo, the older one, hurts the king’s son. His father gives him an enchanted horse and an enchanted dog,37 and he rides away with them.38 He rides the entire day, and at night he arrives at a wood, where a decrepit house stands next to a tower.39 Since it is already night, the tower’s owner does not want to let him in. Cienzo throws himself on some straw in the house to get some sleep, but as soon as he closes his eyes his dog barks and he feels someone pulling him. He strikes around in the dark and falls back asleep. For a second time, something pulls his foot, and he yells and asks the invisible presence to reveal himself. Laughter follows and a voice says: “Come down and I will tell you who I am.” Cienzo finds a ladder and climbs down to a cellar, and there he sees three people sitting by a lighted lamp, which is placed on treasure.40 They tell him to help himself as he wishes. He sees the daylight and wants to climb out but can’t find the ladder. He begins to scream, and the owner of the tower hears him, comes down, and helps him to get out.41 When he finds the great treasure, he wants to give Cienzo his share, but Cienzo doesn’t want anything, and rides away with his dog. Soon afterwards he saves a sleeping fairy from the danger threatening her honor; gratefully, she invites him to her castle nearby, but he says he will accept this favor another time and keeps going.42 He reaches the castle of a king who is deeply distressed because a dragon with six heads has arrived in the country.43 The dragon eats a person a day and demands the king’s daughter. Cienzo chops off his six heads and cuts out

296 a p p e n d i x

his tongue and takes a handful of dragon herb.44 He lets the king’s daughter hurry home and goes to an inn to rest. The king announces that whoever has killed the dragon will receive his daughter as wife. A rascal gathers the dragon’s heads, brings them to the king, and demands his daughter. The king takes off his crown and puts it on this man’s head. Hearing about the imposter, Cienzo writes the princess a letter and has his dog deliver it. He is then called to court, and with the dragon’s tongues he proves that he is the winner and marries the princess. The morning after the wedding he sees a new beauty, whose hair has such magic power that she can charm and bind whomever she wants. He follows her, and as soon as he steps into her house he stands still, unable to move. Meo, the second brother, has had no news of him and decides to look for him. His father gives him too a magic horse and a magic dog. He encounters the tower’s owner, who, believing that he is Cienzo, receives him with great courtesy and wants to give him some gold. He also finds the fairy, who welcomes him. He apologizes hastily, promises to stop by on his way back, and arrives at the king’s palace on the same day that Cienzo is charmed by the fairy’s hair. He is received by the servants with great honor and embraced by the princess as her spouse. At night, he divides up the sheets so that they are separated from each other and pretends to feel unwell. In the morning he sees the fairy with the magic hair.45 Meo goes to her house, but takes his dog with him. When he walks in, she says: “Hair, bind him!” But he cries out: “Dog, eat her!” He goes inside and places two hairs from his dog on Cienzo, who is then aroused from his sleep. Meo tells him everything, how he got there, how the princess was resting at his side, and also tells him that he divided the linens. Jealous, Cienzo cuts off Meo’s head. Cienzo goes home, and his wife soon reveals the innocence of the beheaded.46 He deeply regrets it, remembers the dragon herb, and thus brings Meo back to life; and everything ends well. I. 8 Goat-Face 47 A poor farmer has twelve children and has a hard time bringing home bread.48 One day he is working at the foot of a mountain. A green lizard comes out of a dark hole and begins to speak to the terrified farmer, saying: “Don’t be afraid, I am here for your good.” “What do you want?” says the farmer; “Have mercy on this poor fellow, who has twelve children to feed.” It answers: “Bring me your youngest child, I will raise and love the girl like my own life.”49 The farmer obeys, and early in the morning he takes his youngest child to the cave.50 The fairy raises her in a palace like a princess.51 It

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

297

happens one day that the king is hunting in the woods and gets lost; guided by the light, he reaches the palace, where he falls in love with the beautiful girl.52 She is given to him as his wife and leaves with him, without a word of thanks to the fairy. Enraged by this ingratitude, the fairy puts a curse on her: that she may have a goat face, with a beard and horns.53 Terrified by this transformation, the king places her in a small room with a maid and has them spin flax.54 The maid obeys, but the queen, who hasn’t noticed her transformation, is too arrogant to work. When the appointed time arrives for the work to be finished, she gets scared and rushes to the fairy to tell her about the misfortune she has encountered. The fairy embraces her out of her deep love and gives her a sack full of spun linen. The queen takes it, without a word of thanks. Afterwards, the king gives her and the maid two dogs to care for. The maid obeys, while the stubborn queen throws her dog out of the window and runs to the fairy, but an old man is standing by the door and doesn’t let her in; he asks who she is.55 She answers: “You old goat’s beard, don’t you know me?” “I’m a goat’s beard? You are a goat’s beard!” He fetches a mirror and holds it in front of her. As soon as she sees herself in that horrible form, she screams and is beside herself with dismay. The old man reproaches her for her ingratitude toward the fairy, who had welcomed her as a poor peasant girl and was solely responsible for the king having chosen her to be his wife. She reflects on this, rushes to the fairy, and asks her to forgive her. The fairy grants her forgiveness, gives her back her beautiful human form, and lets her return, dressed in the most splendid dress, to the king, who welcomes her with great joy and love. I. 9 The Enchanted Doe 56 There is a king who wishes to have a child, but his desire is not fulfilled. In vain he does good to pilgrims, until he reluctantly closes his door. At last, an elderly man gives him a piece of advice, that he should take the heart of a sea dragon and have a pure young woman cook it, and she will become pregnant just by smelling it, and the queen by tasting it. The king has all the necessary things fetched; a beautiful young woman cooks the heart in a secluded room, and it so happens that not only the girl but all the furniture in the room becomes pregnant.57 The queen eats some of the heart, and after four days, both she and the young girl both give birth to beautiful baby boys at the very same time, and the babies are so similar that it is impossible to distinguish one from the other. The furniture gives birth to little ones as well: bed, chair, table, to a small bed, a small chair, a small table,

298 a p p e n d i x

and so on. The two boys grow up together and love each other so much that they are inseparable. The queen’s son is named Fonzo, and the other Canneloro. The queen becomes jealous of Canneloro, because Fonzo loves him more than her. She plots his death, and when she one day finds him alone, she throws red-hot iron at his face, but she only hits his eyebrow and has to stop because Fonzo is arriving.58 Canneloro pulls a curl over the mark, and without revealing the real reason to Fonzo, he asks the king permission to leave.59 He takes a suit of armor and a sword, which was born with him when the dragon’s heart was cooked, and a horse. Fonzo asks him for a sign of his love.60 Canneloro drives his dagger into the ground, and a beautiful fountain springs forth. Then he says: “As long as it is clear, I am doing well; if it becomes murky, I am in trouble; if it stops flowing and dries up, I am dead.” He drives his sword into the ground, and a blueberry bush sprouts.61 From the bush, whether it is green, limp, or withered, Fonzo will know his friend’s destiny. Canneloro arrives at a kingdom, where the king’s daughter is promised to whoever wins the joust.62 He is the winner and the wedding is celebrated, but after four months he is taken by an overwhelming desire to go hunting.63 The king warns him about an ogre in the forest, who assumes different forms. Canneloro, however, pays no attention to it, and is enticed the whole day by a beautiful doe, the form the magician has assumed, and at night he ends up in the magician’s cave.64 Since it is cold, he makes a fire, and the doe says: “Oh, sir, please allow me to warm myself up, I’m shivering from the cold.” “Please come,” says Canneloro kindheartedly. “Yes,” she answers, “but I am afraid you will kill me.” “Come over, you have my word,” he says. She asks him to first tie up his dog and his horse and then to fasten his sword. As soon as he does this, the ogre takes up his true form, grabs Canneloro, and throws him into a pit to preserve such a good morsel. Fonzo, who tends the fountain and blueberry day and night, finds the blueberry limp and the fountain dark. Without asking his parents for permission he hurries away, but takes two enchanted dogs with him. He reaches the kingdom of Canneloro’s father-in-law, which is in deep grief. Everyone thinks Fonzo is the one they had given up for dead, and the princess hugs him: “Sweetheart, where have you been for so long? Hunting led you to a great danger!”65 Fonzo, immediately understanding the situation, places a sword between the young lady and himself at night, and at the first ray of the sun hastens into the forest. The beautiful doe entices him too, and when he sees Canneloro’s armor lying by the cave, and the dog and the horse tied up, he liberates him.66 Together they go back, but the princess can’t distinguish them until Canneloro lifts up his hair and shows the mark on his face.67

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

299

I. 10 The Skinned Old Woman 68 Two terribly ugly old women lurking in the bushes under the king’s windows tell lies about their shoulders and hips, and the king, who can’t see that it is all pretense, believes that he has found divine beauties.69 He lusts after their looks and their favors. They don’t want the bird to slip away, so one of the women calls to him through the keyhole of the door; for eight days she tells him she would like to show him one of her fingers.70 When the desired moment finally arrives, one of the hags sticks a finger through the keyhole.71 Enthralled, the king reveals to her who he is and asks for her favors. She shows her willingness, but insists that she be taken to his bed at night and that no light burn, for she cannot tolerate anyone seeing her without clothing. The king promises her everything, but as soon as she falls asleep at his side, he lights a light and looks at her. At the sight of her ugliness he is filled with rage; he calls servants and with no hesitation has her thrown out of the window. Fortunately, she remains hanging by her hair from a fig tree and is not harmed. Early in the morning three fairies walk by, and the sight of her makes them roar with laughter, so they good-naturedly turn the old woman into a young, beautiful, rich, and noble fifteen-year-old girl, sitting on a velvet armchair. Now the king really falls in love and celebrates the marriage with a magnificent party, to which everyone is invited. The other old woman attends it as well and keeps asking her sister: “How did you do it? How did you do it?” Her sister avoids her, but finally, since she persists and keeps coming back with the same question like a fly that you can’t get rid of, she answers: “I had my skin peeled off.” Then the other woman says: “I will try my luck too.” She runs to a barber, gives him fifty gold pieces, and compels him to peel off her skin. He has her sit on a stool and skins her until the blood flows from her and she collapses.72

second day II. 1 Petrosinelle 73 From her window, a pregnant woman sees a fine bed of parsley in a witch’s garden, develops a great craving for it, and, since the witch is away, goes in and gets some of it for herself.74 The witch comes home, and doesn’t know who has taken her herb. The woman keeps taking parsley until one day the witch catches her. She justifies her craving with her condition, but the angry witch doesn’t want to hear about it: “Your life is forfeited if you don’t promise me the child that you are bearing.” Out of fear, the woman promises

300 a p p e n d i x

everything, and then gives birth to a beautiful girl, who has a sprig of parsley on her chest and thus is called Petrosinelle. When she is six years old,75 the witch takes her,76 drags her by the hair to a dark forest, and leaves her in a tower with no door and no staircase but with a small window, from which the girl must dangle her marvelously long hair, which the witch uses to climb up and down. One day, when the witch is away, the girl looks out of the window and sees a prince passing by. He falls in love, and after a few days they share that feeling.77 Wishing to be together, one night she pulls the prince up, and in the morning lets him down. An old woman betrays the love affair. “Thank you for the information,” says the witch, “but they can’t escape me, I have cast a spell. There are three acorns on one of the rafters in the kitchen, and as long as they don’t have them, they can’t run away.”78 The girl has heard everything, and the following night she reveals the secret to her lover. Luckily, they find the three acorns, make a rope ladder, and flee toward the city. The old woman tells the witch about their escape, whereupon the witch climbs down the same rope ladder and follows them. Petrosinelle, seeing her enemy approach, throws one of the acorns onto the ground. Immediately a ferocious dog comes out and attacks the witch, but she throws it a piece of bread and calms it down. Then the girl throws the second acorn, from which a wild lion shows up and pounds the ground with its tail, but the witch turns around, takes the skin off a donkey, and puts it on. When it sees this, the lion gets scared and runs away. Then Petrosinelle throws the last acorn onto the ground, and a wolf comes out, and the witch, still wearing the donkey’s skin, is torn apart. The lovers hurry to the king and obtain his consent to their marriage. II. 2 The Green Meadow 79 A woman has three daughters. The two older ones have no luck and no skill, whereas the youngest, whose name is Nella, achieves everything she undertakes, and for this reason she is deeply envied by her sisters but loved by others.80 The king’s son, who understands the art of magic,81 falls in love with Nella and wins her over. In order to be together without letting her evil mother know about it, he builds a crystal passage, eight miles long, which starts from his palace and ends under her bed. He has also given her a powder; when she wishes to be with him, she sprinkles a little powder on the coals, and he arrives at once. The envious sisters overhear the secret, destroy the crystal passage, and then throw the powder into the coals. The lover rushes to the passage, but having no clothes on he is seriously injured by the glass and is confined to bed.82 The doctors’ treatment is useless, so the

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

301

king announces that whoever heals his son, if it is a man, will have half of his kingdom, and if it is a woman, will have the hand of the prince, once he has recovered. Nella sets off, and the night overtakes her in a forest, not far from a hut where an ogre lives; to be safe she climbs up a tree.83 The ogre sits with his wife at dinner; Nella hears what they are saying to each other. The conversation moves to the prince’s illness, which no doctor can cure. The ogre says that he knows the only way to beat it, but doesn’t want to mention it. With his wife pressing him about it, he finally reveals that it would be his and his wife’s fat. Nella waits until they are done with their dinner, then comes down, knocks on the door, and asks if she could please be welcomed out of pity. The wife would like to eat up that good morsel, but the husband lets her in.84 As soon as they fall asleep, Nella slashes their necks, puts their fat in a pot, and with that goes to the king. He lets her into the prince’s room; she anoints his wounds, which heal up straight away, so he is as healthy as a fish. The king now demands that he take her as his wife, but the prince initially refuses until Nella washes her face clean and he recognizes her as his love. As a punishment, the sisters are pushed into a fiery furnace. II. 3 Viola 85 A man has three daughters, of whom the youngest, by the name of Viola, is so beautiful that she wins every heart. Even the king’s son falls in love and often passes by where the three sisters work; he says to her: “Good morning, good morning, Viola.” She answers: “Good morning, good morning, son of the king. I don’t care about you” (bonnì, figlio de lo Rrè, io sacchiu cchiù de te).86 Her sisters rebuke her for her disrespect, because she will make the prince angry, and they tell their father, who sends her away to an old aunt. As soon as the prince sees the nest empty, he weeps, but he spies her out and bribes the old woman, who hides him in a room where later she will send Viola with an excuse. Then she tells her: “Go downstairs and get me the measure.” Viola does it and so swiftly that she gets away like a cat. Again she says: “Get me the yarn.” She does it and slips away like an eel. Finally: “Get me the scissors.” Viola fetches them without the prince being able to grab her, but she cuts off the old woman’s ear: “You have deserved this because of your trading. And if I don’t cut off your nose it is only so that you can smell what kind of reputation you have.”87 Then she returns to her father, and the prince again passes by, greets her, and she gives her saucy response. The evil sisters think of another trick; their window overlooks the garden of a monster to whom they wish to deliver the little one.88 They

302 a p p e n d i x

drop a skein of thread, which is part of an exquisite piece of work for the queen, and say: “If Viola, who is the smallest of us, doesn’t go down with a rope and take the skein back, we can’t finish it in time.” She is ready and is lowered down, while the wild man goes to his garden and discharges such a violent wind that Viola is terrified by the noise.89 The monster gets closer, sees the pretty girl, and thinks that his wind must have generated her with some tree; he rejoices greatly and embraces her affectionately and says: “My dear daughter, who could ever think that I was the father of such a beautiful face?” Then he hands her over to three fairies, who are to take care of her. When he doesn’t see Viola anymore, the king’s son thinks she is dead, and he grows so sad that he falls sick. Finally he learns her whereabouts, sends for the wild man, and tells him that he is sick and that, in order to get some fresh air, he must spend one day and one night in his garden. As a vassal of the king, the wild man must allow it. At night, the prince has a room very close to the one in which the wild man and Viola sleep. In the dark, the prince sneaks in and pinches Viola on the side twice. She jumps up and cries out: “Oh father, what a flea!” The wild man puts her in another bed; the prince comes back and pinches her, and she shouts again: “Oh father, what a flea!” The wild man changes the mattress and sheets, but the prince keeps coming back, and in this way the entire night goes by. In the morning the prince walks up to the man’s house; Viola is standing by the door, he greets her, and she answers as usual. Then he shouts to her: “Oh father, what a flea!” Viola immediately realizes what happened, rushes to the fairies, and tells them everything. They say: “Wait, we will repay him as he deserves; ask the wild man for the shoes with the bells.” At night they go there, and no one notices them in the house and bedroom of the prince, and as soon as he closes his eyes the fairies make a dreadful noise and Viola stamps the bell shoes together. The prince wakes up with a loud scream and cries out: “Oh mother, mother, help me!” At that point they slink away. The following morning, again the same snide remark, but when the prince says: “Oh father, what a flea!,” Viola answers: “Oh mother, mother, help me!” He declares himself defeated and asks for Viola’s hand. The wild man, when he hears who Viola’s real father is, finally gives up his belief that his wind generated her.90 II. 4 Gagliuso 91 A poor man lying on his deathbed calls his two sons and tells them: “I can’t leave you anything as a sign of my love. To the oldest, Oratiello, I bequeath

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

303

the sieve hanging there on the wall; the youngest, Pippo, can take the cat.”92 Oratiello tries to make a living with the sieve. Pippo takes a look at his cat and says: “What an inheritance has my father left me!” The cat stands up and states: “You don’t know your luck; I can turn you into a rich man!” Each day early in the morning the cat goes to the sea, catches some expensive fish, brings it to the king and says: “Lord Gagliuso sends to his majesty this small gift.” The king thanks him kindly. Another time, he brings a fine bird from hunting, and so forth and so on, and the king finally expresses his desire to see the giver, in order to thank him in person. “My lord’s sole desire,” the cat replies,” is to give his life and blood for the king’s crown. Early tomorrow morning he will certainly come to pay homage.” But the following day the cat comes in a hurry and says that his lord apologizes, his valet robbed him of everything, even his shirt, in the night. At once the king sends him clothes from his own wardrobe. Then Gagliuso dresses up royally and is seated at the king’s table. Whenever he says something inappropriate, the cat embellishes it and emphasizes to the king his lord Gagliuso’s intelligence, bravery, and most of all his great riches.93 When the king expresses the desire to learn more about this wealth, which probably has no equal in the world, he sends out faithful servants to inquire about it. Making an excuse, the cat runs out first and orders everybody in the field, shepherds and herders, to say under penalty of life and limb that everything belongs to Lord Gagliuso. The king’s servants receive the same answer everywhere and report the great wealth of Lord Gagliuso. The king promises the cat a fine reward if he arranges a marriage between his lord and the king’s daughter. It takes place, and the king’s daughter receives a fine dowry, and with that, on the cat’s recommendation, her husband buys goods abroad and becomes a nobleman. After making his fortune, he thanks the cat and tells him that if the cat dies in a hundred years, he will embalm him and place him in a golden coffin in his room, so as to think about him forever. Three days later, the cat pretends to die. The wife cries out: “Oh, dear husband, it’s dead! What should we do?” “Well, grab him by the leg and throw him out of the window.” At these words, the cat jumps up, scolds Gagliuso for his ungratefulness, runs away without looking back, and shouts: “Beware of the peasant who becomes a nobleman!” II. 5 The Snake 94 A woman would like to have a child, as a sick person longs for a glass of water, but her desire is not fulfilled. One day her husband, who works in

304 a p p e n d i x

the forest, brings home a bundle of wood from the mountain; inside it they find a beautiful little snake. When she sees it, she sighs and says: “Snakes have little snakes, but I am not so lucky. My husband is a gardener but can’t plant a twig.” The little creature says: “Since you have no children, take me as your son, you will not regret it.” She puts it in a corner of the room, feeds it, and is very fond of it. Day by day it grows; when it has grown up, it tells the man: “Oh, I want a wife.” “Well,” he says, “I’ll go look for another snake for you.” “Listen, I want the king’s daughter. Go and tell the king that a snake desires his daughter.” The man presents its request. The king thinks that he must be out of his mind, and to get rid of him says: “Go and the tell the snake that it must first turn all the fruits in my garden into gold, then it will have my daughter.” The snake tells the man: “Go now and collect all the fruit pits you can find and sow them in the king’s garden.” He obeys and immediately trees with golden fruits spring up. But the king doesn’t want to give his daughter yet: “The snake must first cover the walls and the ground with precious stones.” The snake says to its foster father: “Get all the broken pieces you can gather and throw them onto the walls and the ground of the garden.” He does so, and they turn into magnificent gems: emeralds, rubies, carbuncles. The king, however, does not give in, and his third demand is that his entire palace be coated with gold. Again, this is not difficult for the snake: his foster father must varnish the palace with a bundle of herbs and it is immediately covered in gold. Now the king can’t demur any longer; the snake arrives at court in a golden carriage pulled by four golden elephants to take away his spouse. Everyone is trembling with fear, and the king and queen hide themselves. Only the bride remains; the snake embraces her with its tail and takes her to the bedchamber.95 There it sheds its skin and is a handsome young man with golden hair, and the princess is smitten with him.96 The king, who has seen the snake locking itself up with his daughter, says to the queen: “May the heavens have mercy on our poor child!” They look through the keyhole and see the handsome young man in bed and his skin on the floor. They burst the lock, walk inside, grab the skin, and throw it in the fire, which burns it. As soon as the youth becomes aware of it, he cries out: “Oh, what have you done!” At once he transforms himself into a dove and flies away. It knocks its head against the window until it breaks, but while pushing its way out it is deeply wounded by the glass. The king’s daughter plunges from the greatest happiness to the greatest unhappiness and doesn’t know how to console herself.97 Taking all her precious stones, she leaves, prepared to wander until she finds what she seeks. By moonlight she encounters a fox, which says: “I will accompany

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

305

you.”98 They reach a forest and rest there. The princess takes delight in the birds’ singing. “Oh,” says the fox, “if you could understand what they say as I do, it would be an even greater delight for you.” The princess asks the fox to explain it to her; after some hesitation, the fox says: “They are talking about a prince who was desired by a sorceress on account of his great beauty; but given that he didn’t respond to her wish, she turned him into a snake for six years.99 At last he was approaching the end, but his parents picked up the snakeskin lying on the floor and burned it. He flew out of the window in the form of a dove, but the smashed glass wounded him in the head, and no doctor knew what to do.”100 The princess realizes that they were talking about her sweetheart; she first of all inquires where his father lives, and then asks whether there is any way to cure him. “Only one,” the fox says: “his wounds must be smeared with the blood of those very birds.” The fox now has to catch the birds; it waits until it gets dark and the birds fall asleep and then grabs one after the other and pours their blood in a small bottle. When this is done, the fox says: “Oh you poor soul, this won’t help you at all if my own blood is not mixed with it!” and as soon as it says that it flees. The princess resorts to ruse: “Dear godmother, please stay, you don’t need to worry about your skin, there are others like you in the world; you can be sure that I don’t mean to do anything to you; stay with me and show me the way.” The fox lets itself be fooled; after no more than fifty steps the princess gives the fox such a blow with a club that the animal falls dead. Then she takes some of its blood and pours it in the small bottle and rushes to her sweetheart’s father. She promises to cure his critically wounded son if he becomes her spouse. The king answers: “Give him to me free and healthy so that I can give him back to you free and healthy; you give me a son, I will give you a husband.” As soon as she rubs him with the mixed blood, he is cured as if he had never had anything wrong with him. At that point the king demands that his son marry her, but he doesn’t want to, because he has given his word to another woman. Then she reveals herself, rejoices at his faithfulness, and the wedding is celebrated.101 II. 6 The She-Bear 102 On her deathbed a queen makes her husband promise not to marry again unless he finds someone whose beauty comes close to hers.103 Since he can’t find anybody, he decides to marry his own daughter, who is the only one as beautiful as her mother.104 She despairs of finding help, when an old woman arrives: “Apart from death, there is a remedy for everything.” She gives her a

306 a p p e n d i x

small piece of wood; as soon as she pops it in her mouth, she will turn into an ugly bear; as soon as she takes it out, she will regain her human form. At night, when the king wants to take her by force, she puts the stick in her mouth, and a fearsome she-bear appears, scaring him. He runs away, but the girl goes into a forest and lives in the company of other bears. A prince finds her there, takes her with him, puts her in a garden, and takes care of her.105 Once, when everyone is away and he is at home alone, he looks out of the window where the bear is kept and sees a wonderful girl combing her curly golden hair; to arrange her hair, she has taken the small stick out of her mouth. Astonished, he rushes down, but when he walks into the garden she has already resumed her bearish form. He grows melancholy and sick, and constantly cries out: “My she-bear! My she-bear!” His mother believes that the she-bear has harmed him and orders that she be killed; but the servants have mercy and take her into the forest. The prince, when he hears about the she-bear’s death, gets out of bed and finds out the truth from the servants; he rushes out into the forest, where he searches until he finds his shebear again. He addresses her as a divine beauty and asks her to throw that horrible skin of hers away. Since she doesn’t answer, he becomes sick again, and the doctors predict that he will die. His mother tries to understand and asks him if there is anything she can do to alleviate his condition. He answers: “Nothing can console me like the sight of my she-bear. Let her come to my room; I want her alone to take care of me, cook for me, and make my bed.” The queen thinks he is talking nonsense, but does as he wishes. The she-bear walks in, approaches the prince’s bed, raises her paw, and checks his pulse. At his request, she prepares something to eat in the fireplace, makes his bed, and brings some roses from the garden to put under his pillow.106 The queen is totally astounded. Then the sick man also requests that the she-bear kiss him. The queen says: “Dear animal, do it.”107 While kissing him, the little stick falls out of her mouth, and the queen’s son holds a most beautiful girl in his arms.108 II. 7 The Dove 109 An old woman full of wrinkles lives in a forest, and one day she wants to eat some beans.110 She fetches a worn old kettle, cleans the beans, adds herbs, and places the pot on the windowsill; then she goes look for some twigs so she can cook the meal. In the meantime the king’s son passes by with his hunting equipage, sees the pot sitting there, and has the malice to knock it over. When the old woman comes back, she is overwhelmed by fury and

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

307

utters the curse that whoever has broken her pot may fall in love with a witch’s daughter and endure all kinds of suffering from her.111 The curse begins to work, and the prince gets lost in the forest. All alone, he encounters a beautiful girl collecting snails and saying: “Stick, stick the horns out; mother cuts them off in the sunshine, so she gets a baby boy.”112 He speaks to her with loving words and she shows herself equally gracious. At this point the mother arrives like a wild beast;113 the prince shows his sword, but his strength recedes, and he remains captivated like a sheep when it sees a wolf, and the old woman takes him home. Then she says: “You must work like a dog, cultivate and sow a piece of land today, and if I come back and find that it hasn’t been done, it will be bad for you.”114 She hurries into the forest, where she does business with another witch.115 The young woman consoles her beloved and accomplishes the work for him. When at night the witch comes back, she calls to her daughter from outside: “Let your hair down!” Since there is no other staircase, she always climbs up on this golden one. Astonished, she sees that the task has been completed; it seems impossible to her that such a delicate youth has accomplished the heavy work. The following morning she asks him to chop six piles of wood, and each log into four pieces. The young woman carries out this task as well. At dusk the old woman comes up on the usual staircase; when she sees the wood all chopped she becomes suspicious, and the third day she orders the prince to fill up a dry well with a thousand barrels of water.116 The young woman says: “Here my art ends, we must escape.”117 They manage to get away through a tunnel in the garden.118 Not far from the city, he says: “Wait here a moment, you can’t enter in the royal palace on foot, I will accompany you in a magnificent procession.” In the meantime the old woman comes home and calls, but her daughter doesn’t answer. She finds the tunnel through which they have escaped and as soon as she becomes aware of their flight she utters a curse against her daughter, that her lover may forget her the first time he receives a kiss. His mother welcomes him with great joy and tenderness, but as soon as she kisses him on the lips, the witch’s curse comes into effect.119 Now his mother can easily persuade him to marry. But the abandoned young woman puts on male clothes, goes to court, and gets hired as an apprentice cook.120 During the wedding banquet, the prince cuts a cake, which she has prepared, and a beautiful dove comes out of it, which amazes everyone. It begins to speak and reminds him of his beloved and the promise he made to her, and then it flies out of the window. Everything comes back to the prince’s memory; he calls for the apprentice cook who has prepared the cake, and she reveals herself as his beloved.121 So he marries her, and dur-

308 a p p e n d i x

ing the celebration the spirit of the old woman, whose pot of beans he once broke and who died of hunger, appears. She explains to him the connections between all the things that have happened to him.122 II. 8 The Kitchen Maid 123 Some girls are playing, and they bet on who will be able to jump over a rosebush without touching it. No one succeeds; but when Lilla jumps over, she plucks a petal, which she quickly swallows without anyone noticing, and so she wins the challenge. After three days she feels her condition changing.124 She hurries to a good fairy, who tells her that the cause of this change is the petal. She secretly gives birth to a beautiful daughter, whom she brings to the fairies. Each of them gives a gift to the child, but being in a hurry the last fairy breaks her foot, and because of the pain she utters the curse that in six years, while the mother is combing her daughter’s hair, the comb will get entangled in the child’s hair and get stuck in it, and as a result the child will fall into a lethal sleep.125 Everything comes to pass. The child’s mother encloses the corpse in seven crystal coffins, one within the other, and places it in the most remote chamber of the palace, to which only she has the key. And because she soon feels that her own death is approaching, she gives the key to her brother, who must promise her never to open that chamber. One day, he goes hunting and leaves the house in charge of his wife, but he implores her not to open that chamber, the key to which is in his cabinet. She grows jealous, and when she sees the beautiful girl seemingly asleep in the crystal coffers that have grown like her, she believes her to be her husband’s secret lover, flies into a rage, and tears the girl’s hair. The comb comes out and the girl awakens to life. The woman mistreats her, dresses her in poor clothes, and relegates her to the kitchen as a common maid. At his return, her husband inquires about the girl. His wife answers: “Nothing more than a common kitchen maid.” It happens that the lord travels to a fair, and before leaving he asks all the people living in his house what they would like him to bring them. When it is finally the girl’s turn, she asks for a doll, a knife, and a grindstone, and if he forgets about them, may he be unable to cross the first river. He does indeed forget, but when he reaches the first watercourse and can’t cross it, the girl’s curse comes to his mind. He rushes back, buys what she asked for, and resumes his trip without any impediment. Once home, he gives her the three things she asked for. She hastens to the kitchen, puts the doll in front of her, and begins to recount her painful story, as if the doll were a living person. Since she receives no answer,

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

309

she takes the knife, sharpens it with the stone, and says: “If you don’t answer me, you leave me no choice but to kill myself.” The doll rises up and says: “Yes, yes, I heard you. Thank God I am not deaf!” The lord has a private room next to the kitchen, and hearing the incredible dialogue one day, he peeks through the keyhole and sees the girl telling the doll her entire fate, from the moment her mother swallowed the rose petal to her degradation to kitchen maid. “And as you don’t answer, doll, I’ll stick this knife into my heart.” Then she begins to sharpen the knife with the stone. The lord jumps out, embraces her as his beloved niece, banishes his heartless wife, and marries the girl to a handsome man. II. 9 The Little Magic Box 126 A poor woman with three daughters wants to cook something and tells her two oldest daughters to fetch water at a fountain. They refuse, so she decides to go herself, but the youngest says: “No, I will get the water; I am strong enough to carry it.” She takes the jug and walks out of the city to the fountain where she finds a manservant,127 who says to her: “My dear, would you like to go with me to my cave, so can give you something pretty?” “First I must take the jug of water to my mother and then I will come back right away.” She does so and the servant takes her through a cave into a marvelous underground palace. Everything is made of gold and silver; a table is set with fancy food. At night she is taken to a bed, its covers embroidered with pearls. When all the lights have been taken away, someone lies down beside her. This goes on for a while, and then she feels like seeing her mother. She says so to the servant.128 He gives her gold as a gift for her mother, but he tells her that she must be back soon and may not reveal anything to anyone about where she is living. She observes all his orders carefully. Her mother and her sisters want to go back with her, but she does not allow it. She returns a couple of times more and her sisters grow more envious of her good fortune.129 From a witch130 they finally learn everything, and on their sister’s next visit they reveal the secret to her, that at night the most handsome young man in the world lies at her side, but if she wishes to be perfectly happy she must follow their advice.131 When she lies in bed at night and the servant brings in her nightly drink, she must ask him to get her a napkin, and in his absence she must empty the cup. In this way she will stay awake, and as soon as her husband falls asleep, she must open the magic box (catenaccio, padlock), and then she will become the happiest woman in the world.132 She doesn’t recognize their deceit and does everything as she

310 a p p e n d i x

is told. She lights a candle and sees a most handsome young man, as radiant as a rose, sleeping beside her. She opens the magic box. Then and there, several tiny women come out of it. On their heads they are carrying the finest yarn, but when one drops a skein, the careless girl cries out: “Dear lady, pick up the yarn!” At her shout, the young man wakes up, becomes angry, and asks his servant to lead her out of the palace wearing the old rags in which she had arrived. She goes home, but her sisters send her away. She wanders through the world.133 Finally she arrives at a royal palace, where she rests on a bundle of straw and is looked after by one of the queen’s maids. She brings a wonderful baby boy into the world. At night, when everything is asleep, a young man walks into the room and says: “Oh, my dear son, you should be washed in a golden basin and swaddled in diapers interlaced with gold. If only no rooster would ever crow again!” At the crowing of the rooster he disappears. The maid relates this to the queen, who by way of punishment orders that all the roosters be killed. The following night the young man arrives. The queen recognizes him as her son and embraces him. The curse, which had been cast upon him, is thus lifted.134 Because of this curse, he had to wander away from his paternal house until his mother embraced him and no rooster crowed anymore. II. 10 The Friend 135 A man has a tiresome friend, who is always hard on his heels, sits at his table, and can’t be got rid of politely. When he hears that his friend is traveling across the country, he says: “May God be praised that we are free from that nuisance for a day. We can cook something good for ourselves.”136 He goes out and buys a nice eel and a bottle of wine, and in the meantime his wife is to bake a cake.137 When everything is ready, they sit at the table, but as soon as they have sat down, they hear the friend knocking at the door. “Hurry up,” says the man, “first hide all the things on the table, then you can let him in. When he sees that the castle is empty, he will take off.” She quickly puts the eel in a cupboard, the bottle under the bed, and the cake under the blanket; the man himself crawls under the table and peeks through a hole in the rug.138 But the friend sees everything through the keyhole. When he comes in, he looks quite shocked and dismayed. The wife asks what the reason is. “Oh,” he says, “while I was standing outside waiting for the door to be opened, a serpent passed between my feet, and it was so ferocious! It was as big as the eel that you put in the cupboard. I was terrified and picked up a stone, the same size as the bottle under the bed, and hit the beast on

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

311

the head with it, giving it a wound no smaller than the cake you folks have under the blanket. And while the serpent was dying, I watched and listened, like my friend there under the table.139 I don’t have a drop of blood left in my body, and I’m terrified.” At these words, the man can’t restrain himself any longer; he sticks his head out from behind the rug and expresses his anger in a torrent of reproaches about such impudence, and the friend, blushing, finally takes off.140

third day I. 1 Cannetella141 For a long time a king would like to have a daughter but has no success; finally his wish is fulfilled, and he gives her the name Cannetella.142 When she has grown up, he asks her what kind of husband she would like. She doesn’t want one. However, the king doesn’t give up. Then she says: “He should be a man unlike anyone else in the world.” The king stands by the window, paying attention to the people who pass by and when he singles someone out, he always calls his daughter, so she can take a look at him. But she never likes the one he has selected.143 For the same purpose he throws a party, but with no result. Finally Cannetella says: “If I must take a husband, he must have a head and teeth of gold.” The king then announces that whoever fulfills his daughter’s desire will marry her and acquire the kingdom.” The king has an enemy, a wild man by the name of Scioravante;144 as soon as he hears about this, he has a sorcerer turn his head and his teeth into gold, shows up before the king’s window, and gains Cannetella. He carries her away on his horse and at night takes her to a stable. “This is your home,” he says. “During my absence, which will last six years, you are not allowed to see anybody and must live on the bread left over from the horses.”145 She laments her fate, whereby she has exchanged the royal palace for a stable, her fine blankets for straw, tasty morsels for horses’ bread. One day, she looks through a hole and sees a beautiful garden full of delicious fruits. She develops a great desire for them. “Who can betray me?” she thinks, and walks into the garden and finally satisfies her great hunger. But when her husband comes back, one of his horses betrays her and tells him that she has eaten grapes. The wild man becomes enraged, takes a knife, and is about to kill her, but she begs him on her knees to have mercy on her; only her hunger led her astray. Eventually, he spares her life for this time. “I am leaving again for six years,” he says. “Don’t do anything wrong, otherwise it’s

312 a p p e n d i x

over for you; I know everything you do.” Cannetella bewails loudly her sad fate, which she sees as a punishment from the heavens. She cries so much that two streams flow from her eyes, and she becomes very emaciated. After some years her father’s chamberlain happens to pass by, and she calls him to come up; he doesn’t recognize her but nonetheless takes her home to her father.146 The father kisses her a thousand times, gives her something to eat, and asks her about her fate.147 She tells him what has befallen her: “It is more,” she says, “than one can possibly think. Dear father, I won’t move from your feet and would rather be your maid than a queen somewhere else.” In the meantime, the wild man returns to his home, and the horses tell him about Cannetella’s flight. Enraged, he rushes after her. An old woman lives across from the king’s palace; he gives her a hundred ducats to let him into her house so he can watch for the king’s daughter. He catches sight of Cannetella while she is combing her hair. As if her heart knew her imminent danger, she runs to her father and asks him to lock her up behind six iron doors;148 otherwise she is lost. He grants her wish, and the man goes back to the old woman and says: “Go to the royal palace to sell something, and secretly put this sheet of paper in the bed of the king’s daughter.”149 She agrees to do it for a hundred ducats, and as soon as she puts the paper in the bed, everyone in the palace falls deeply asleep. Only Cannetella stays awake. Scioravante breaks down all six doors, and she screams, but no one hears. When he is in the bedroom, he picks Cannetella up, along with the bed, to take her away; fortunately, the magic sheet falls out.150 Immediately people wake up, rush to the ogre, free the king’s daughter, and give him the punishment he deserves. III. 2 The Girl without Hands 151 A king has a beautiful sister named Penta and tells her that he wants to marry her.152 She is scared and says: “How can such a word come out of your mouth!”153 But he doesn’t take no for an answer and keeps repeating his forbidden desire.154 “You are beautiful from head to toe,” he says, “but I am especially in love with your beautiful hands.” “Wait a moment,” she says, goes to her room, and, under the pretext of accomplishing something secret, she has a servant cut off her hands, which she sends him on a plate covered with a silk cloth. When he sees this, the king becomes enraged; he has her pushed into a tarred box and thrown into the sea. Some sailors catch the box, and their leader, Masiello, takes her home to his wife, Nuccia, who is charged with taking care of her.155 Out of jealousy, however, Nuccia

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

313

throws her back into the sea. The waves toss the box here and there until a king aboard his ship notices it and fishes it out. He is stunned by the girl’s beauty, takes her with him and hands her over to his wife. She carries out every task with her feet: sews, combs the queen’s hair. Soon afterwards the queen feels that her death is approaching and says to the king: “If you want me to die in peace, promise me that you will marry Penta.” The king fulfills her wish; after the wedding night he has to leave Penta and go on a journey. In due time she gives birth to a beautiful baby boy, and the council sends a messenger with this communication to the king. On his way he runs into Nuccia and explains that he is taking a letter to the king to inform him of the birth of his son;156 the king has as his queen a beautiful girl without hands whom he found in a box in the sea. Nuccia realizes that the girl is the same Penta that she threw back into the sea. She gets the messenger drunk, takes the letter from him, and leaves a false communication stating that the queen has given birth to a dog, and sticks it, sealed, in the messenger’s satchel.157 The king receives the false letter but considers this misfortune a divine decree and responds that the queen should be taken care of. On his way back, the messenger stops at Nuccia’s house again; while he is asleep, she again takes the letter away from him and replaces it with a false one stating that the queen, along with the baby, should be burned to death without delay. The council thinks the king has lost his mind by condemning to death a wife who is like a pearl and an heir who is like a gem, and lets them escape. Penta arrives in a land whose king is a good sorcerer; she recounts to him her sad fate; then he tells her: “My daughter, you have found in me a father and a mother.” He gives her and her child shelter in his palace and proclaims that whoever comes to him and narrates his misfortune will be given a golden crown and scepter. Hereupon, unfortunate people from every corner of the world hasten to his kingdom. In the meantime, Penta’s husband returns home and hears about the unfortunate event; he sees the false letter, and it appears that the evil Nuccia is responsible. He has her arrested, and after she has been burned to death, he sails off in search of Penta.158 On the sea, he encounters another king, Penta’s brother, who is traveling to the sorcerer to tell him about his suffering. Both kings reach him by ship; the sorcerer welcomes them and seats them under his canopy. Each of them recounts his misfortune, and he realizes that one is Penta’s brother and the other her husband.159 He calls for the child and tells him: “Go and kiss your father’s hand.” The king feels such joy in seeing the boy that he puts a golden chain around his neck. “Now kiss your uncle’s hand also!” Then they ask: “To whom does he belong?”160 Penta, who has been

314 a p p e n d i x

standing behind the door, jumps out with great joy; the sorcerer says: “Here I have given you the mother and child as the promised crown and scepter,” and Penta too receives something; he makes new hands grow on her, more beautiful than the previous ones.161 III. 3 The Face 162 A king would like to know his daughter’s future and convenes all the astrologers; they inform him that she will face a danger because of a bone. As a result, the king locks her up with twelve young women in a tower and sternly orders that only meat without bones be given her. One day, when Renza (for this is her name) looks out of her barred window, she sees Cecio, a king’s son, passing by, and they are soon calling out to each other with the sweetest words. He proposes that she flee with him to his kingdom, where she will become his wife. Renza is wondering how she can possibly escape when a dog, which is assigned to the custody of the tower, runs into her room with a big bone in its mouth and lies under her bed. She takes the bone, chases the dog out, and finds the bone hard enough to gouge out a hole in the wall, through which she runs away with her beloved. At night they reach a place called Face (View? Viso) where there is a beautiful palace, in which they rest.163 Their luck doesn’t last long; Cecio receives a letter from his mother: if he wants to find her still alive, he must go to her without delay. He tells Renza: “Wait here for five or six days, then I will come back and pick you up.” He leaves, but Renza takes a horse, which she finds grazing in a meadow, mounts it, and gallops after him. On the way she encounters a hermit’s boy; she gives him her dress trimmed with gold, takes his sack and his rope and girds herself with it, resumes her journey, and soon catches up with Cecio. They greet each other, and he asks: “Dear Father, where are you coming from and where are you going?” Renza answers with a song:164 “Where I come from, oppressed by pain, A young woman waits and wails: Oh beautiful face,165 Alas, who has taken you away from me?”

Cecio truly takes her for a boy and says: “Your presence is so dear to me that I ask you never to leave my side.” Together they reach the queen, who called her son only to give him a wife who had been chosen for him. Cecio asks his mother to consider the boy his brother and treat him as such. He is to sing for him and eat at the same table with him and his bride.166 Only when she is in a solitary garden can Renza complain about her harsh des-

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

315

tiny and great pain, and about the unfaithfulness of Cecio, who has forgotten her. She has to go back to the house, but eats nothing and drinks not a drop of water. Cecio asks: “Is there something wrong?” “I am not feeling well,” she answers. It is now bedtime. At Cecio’s command, a sofa must be prepared for the boy in the wedding bedroom. Renza must repeat the words that are a dagger piercing her heart. “Oh,” says the bride, “what a sad song this is!”167 and she accuses Cecio of not caring about her. Then he kisses her, but as soon as Renza hears the sound of the kiss, her heart breaks and she dies. Cecio calls the boy: “Keep going with the song; it gives me a great pleasure.”168 When no answer follows, he quietly arises and takes the boy’s arm, but the boy stays still; so he puts his hand on his face and feels that it is cold. He calls for lights, and when he looks at the dead boy, he sees that it is Renza, recognizing her by a mole between her breasts. In consequence, he stabs himself in the heart. When the bride, paralyzed by the shock, comes to her senses, she calls the queen to show her this tragedy. Soon Renza’s father arrives as well and sees the sad fulfillment of the prediction.169 III. 4 Sapia Liccarda 170 A rich merchant has three daughters: Bella, Cenzolla, and Sapia Liccarda. One day, before leaving, he locks their windows and gives each of them a ring with a stone that is stained as soon as the person wearing it commits something shameful. He has just walked out of the gate when they open the windows and show themselves at the door.171 On the other side of the street, from the royal palace, the king’s three sons flirt with the girls and soon become more intimate. The two older ones, Ceccariello and Grazullo, quickly win Bella and Cenzolla over, and at night they sneak into the house. But the youngest girl, Liccarda, is prudent and doesn’t let the third son, whose name is Tore, beguile her. Like a snake, she slips into her room, and in vain he tries to open the door. Bella and Cenzolla become pregnant and join Tore in beguiling Liccarda as well.172 They tell her: “Have mercy on our condition; we have such a craving for a piece of bread, like the one the king eats; you can get it for us.”173 Liccarda makes a ragged dress, walks into the royal palace, and begs for a piece of bread, Tore keeps an eye on her and tries to grab her, but she turns her back on him and skillfully kicks him away.174 Since his trick hasn’t worked out, after a couple of days the sisters come up with a new craving, this time for the pears in the king’s garden. Liccarda again dresses up as a beggar; the king is already there, and his mouth waters as soon as he sees the beautiful girl; he himself climbs up the tree and gets the

316 a p p e n d i x

pears for her, but when he wants to get down, she whips the ladder away, and the king would have spent the night in the tree if a gardener hadn’t passed by and helped him down.175 Bella and Cenzolla bear two beautiful baby boys; they tell Piccarda: “Please take them to their fathers.” She takes this task on too and places the two princes in their beds, but puts a large stone on Tore’s bed. When they see the two babies, Ceccarillo and Grazullo rejoice, while Tore strikes the stone and hurts himself. In the meantime, the merchant returns, and by taking a look at his two oldest daughters’ stained rings, he realizes what crime they have committed and wants to kill them.176 But the two princes show up and propose to them, so he is satisfied and arrange the wedding for that evening. Liccarda makes a beautiful image out of sugar paste, puts it in a basket, and covers it up with cloths. When it is time to sleep, she has the basket brought into the room, places the statue under the linen sheets, and hides behind the bed curtain. Tore walks in, and thinking it is Liccarda, he scornfully cries out: “I don’t like you anymore; I detest you. What can a cricket do against an elephant!”177 He takes his dagger and stabs the statue. Not content, he wants to suck her blood too; he takes the dagger out and brings it to his tongue. When he finds its taste sweet and flavorful and thinks he has murdered such a sweet girl, he regrets his fury and in desperation raises his hand to kill himself with the same dagger. Then Liccarda comes out, takes his hand, and says that everything she did was only to test his faithfulness.178 III. 5 The Beetle, the Mouse, and the Cricket 179 Nardiello is a good-for-nothing. His father gives him a hundred ducats, with which he must go to Salerno and do some buying.180 On the way, by a rocky spring he runs into a fairy who has a beetle that is playing the loveliest melody on a zither.181 He gives her his hundred ducats, puts the little creature in a box, and runs home to show the treasure to his father. His father thinks there are diamonds in the box; when he sees the beetle, he scolds Nardiello but again gives him a hundred ducats. In the same place he finds another fairy with a mouse that dances very prettily. He buys it with the money and brings it home. He is scolded again and again receives a hundred ducats. He gives them to a third fairy for a cricket whose song is so sweet and lovely that everyone falls asleep. This time, however, he is beaten by his father and flees, but takes the three creatures with him. He ends up in a land where the king’s daughter has not laughed in seven years because she is melancholy;182 the father, having tried all possible means in vain, proclaims that whoever

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

317

can make her laugh will become her husband. Nardiello comes forward, is allowed in, and takes his three creatures, which play, dance, and sing in such a charming and amusing way that the king’s daughter finally bursts out laughing. The king resents having to give his daughter up to such an ordinary man and thus establishes the requirement that if he doesn’t consummate the marriage within three days, he will be thrown to the lions. But he wickedly orders that the man be given a sleeping potion each of the three evenings. Nardiello falls asleep all three evenings and is thrown into the lion pit. Here he opens the three boxes and says: “Dear creatures, since the time has arrived that I must die, I am setting you free. Go wherever you want!” But the creatures perform so many fascinating and amusing acts that the lions stand as still as statues, and the mouse says: “Cheer up, dear master, since you have freed us we want to serve you more; you have always loved us and cared for us. We have magic powers and we want to save you from danger.”183 The mouse then makes a hole so large that Nardiello can slip through it; then the creatures take him to a shack and ask what he wishes for. Nardiello answers: “If the king has married his daughter to another man, I want him also to be unable to consummate the marriage.”184 That’s nothing, the creatures say. The king has indeed married his daughter to a powerful man.185 The creatures hurry to the nuptial room; at night, as soon as the newlyweds lie down, the groom falls asleep. The beetle hears him snoring, gets on the bed, and makes him soil himself.186 The bride makes such a racket that he has to get out of bed. The doctors attribute the incident to the wedding banquet. The following night the valets suggest that he wrap himself in sheets. He falls asleep safely; the beetle, finding the entrance blocked,187 calls the mouse, which chews the sheets to pieces so that the beetle can accomplish his task again. Once more the bride has to get out of bed. The third night he decides to stay awake and follows the recommendation to put a wooden case (? tappo di ligno) around the threatened part; he lies there without moving and without sleeping.188 The beetle says: “At this point our art has come to an end.” But the cricket begins to sing so lovely that the bride does fall asleep. Since the barricade is so tough, the mouse comes up with something else. It stirs its tail in a pot of mustard, sneaks up to the sleeping man on the bed and smears his nose with it. He jumps up to sneeze; the wooden case shoots off because of the movement and hits the bride so hard that she can only think that her husband wants to kill her.189 At her shrieks, the king arrives in a rush and the suspicious groom is kicked out of the land. “This is the result of our bad behavior toward poor Nardiello!” says the king. The beetle then replies: “Console yourself; he is still alive and thanks to his good qualities

318 a p p e n d i x

deserves to be your son-in-law.” The three creatures bring him in; the king hugs him and gives him his daughter.190 III. 6 The Maidservant 191 A poor farmer has seven daughters, and a rich farmer has seven sons.192 One day, the poor man pays a visit to the rich one, whose son is sick. The rich man asks him how many children he has; he feels ashamed of his numerous daughters and says: “Seven, four sons and three daughters.” “Ask one of your sons to come here,” says the other, “so he can keep the sick one company.” The poor man doesn’t know how to get out of this situation. He goes home and asks his daughters one after the other: who would like to cut her hair and wear men’s clothes? The six oldest daughters cut him off with impudent words, but the youngest answers: “Father, for the love I have for you, I will transform myself not only into a man, but even into a beast.” 193 Her hair is cut and men’s clothes are made for her, and she goes to the sick young man and serves him with care. When he looks at this great beauty, he guesses her gender and falls deeply in love with her. He shares his thought with his mother.194 She says: “We must find that out soon!” and asks the girl to go to the stable and ride a wild colt. She obeys and behaves in a manly way. The son doesn’t want to give up his opinion, so his mother devises a second test. She must take a shotgun and open fire. The girl shoots like a man. The son clings to his doubt and, when his mother sees him so stubborn, she proposes that he go swim with the alleged girl. But she suspects this plan, and asks to be called home.195 So the rich man thus goes to the poor one; everything comes out, and not only this one, but also the other six couples marry one another.196 III. 7 Corvetto 197 Corvetto is one of the king’s servants and is his favorite but for this reason is hated by the courtiers.198 They try to set a trap for him, but he keeps his eyes and ears open; moreover, he is endowed with magic powers. An enemy of the king, a wild man, lives in a desolate forest on a mountain; he has a horse, the finest horse in the world, which also has the gift of human language.199 The courtiers succeed in persuading the king to order Corvetto to bring this horse to him. Corvetto sneaks into the wild man’s stable, saddles the horse, and rides it away. It shouts: “Come quickly! Corvetto is taking me away!” and the wild man rushes after him with lions, bears, and wolves, but Cor-

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

319

vetto is faster and joyfully rides the horse home. Now his enemies incite the king to demand the wild man’s precious jewelry as well. Corvetto rides up and at night, and when the man has lain down with his wife, he gently pulls off his jewelry. The man flares up and shouts: “Wife, wife, what are you doing?” “Nothing,” she answers, “I am lying still.” He reaches down with his hand and catches Corvetto’s face. “The gremlin! The gremlin!” he screams, “servants, quick, bring some light!”200 But Corvetto, who has already thrown the jewels out the window, makes a bold leap and leaves with his booty. It is still not enough, the third time he must even get the wild man’s palace for the king. Corvetto goes over and finds the wife alone; she has recently given birth, and her husband has gone out to invite their relatives. Corvetto offers to help her with the preparation of the party. She is very happy about it and asks him to chop two pieces of wood. He takes the ax and hits her on the head with it, and she falls to the ground. He then rushes to the front door and digs a deep hole, which he covers with green branches. He stands behind the door, and when he sees the wild man arrive, he shouts: “Long live the king!”201 The wild man, angered by his insolence, hurries to catch him, but falls into the hole. Corvetto then locks the door and takes the key to the king, who rewards him by giving him his daughter as a wife. III. 8 The Simpleton 202 A rich man has a son who is, however, dumb and naïve. He gives him a good handful of ducats and tells him he should depart and do some business.203 On the way, the simpleton finds a man whose name is Fast-as-Lightning (Furgolo) because he can run like lightning, and to prove it he catches up with a deer in a couple of strides. He takes him on, and after four miles he runs into another man, by the name of Hare’s-Ear (aurecchia a lleparo), who only needs to keep an ear on the ground to be able to hear everything that is taking place in the world.204 Afterwards a third one: Hit-the-Target (Ceca deritto), who from a great distance can shoot an arrow and hit a pea on a stone. He finds a fourth one, Wind-Player, who can blow every wind from his mouth; finally a fifth one, Strong-Back (Forte-schiena), who is so strong that he can carry a mountain on his shoulders as if it were a feather. As evidence, he carries so many pieces of rock and tree roots that a thousand carts couldn’t take them away. The simpleton takes them all on and arrives in a kingdom where the king’s daughter can run as fast as the wind. The king has proclaimed: whoever overtakes her in a race will have her as his wife; but if he is defeated, he will give up his head. The simpleton comes forward,

320 a p p e n d i x

but insists that another run on his behalf.205 “As far as I am concerned, whoever wants to come can come,” says the king’s daughter. Fast-as-Lightning takes the simpleton’s place, runs like a flash of lightning, and is the winner. Given that a second race must take place, the king’s daughter gives Fast-asLightning an enchanted ring that makes whoever wears it weak in the legs and unable to walk, let alone run.206 In the meantime, Hare’s-Ear hears the private conversation that she is having with her father about all this. On the following day, when the race is about to start and Fast-as-Lightning can’t take a step, Hit-the-Target, informed by Hare’s-Ear, takes his crossbow, shoots the stone on the ring worn by Fast-as-Lightning and to which the magic was tied, and splits it. As a result, Fast-as-Lightning regains his strength, reaches the king’s daughter with four leaps, and reaches the finishing line before her. The king resents the fact that his daughter must go to the simpleton and wants to buy him out with gold. The simpleton asks only for what one of his companions can carry on his shoulders; this is granted, and Strong-Back hauls away all the treasures of the kingdom. The king regrets this; he sends out armed people after them to bring it back to him, but Hare’s-Ear has heard everything, and when they approach, Wind-Player blows such a powerful north wind against them that they fly scattered into the air.207 The simpleton happily arrives home with his wealth.208 III. 9 Rosella209 The Great Turk has leprosy, and the doctors suggest that he take a bath in the blood of a great prince. He dispatches an army, and it succeeds in capturing a king’s son. However, the doctors, who have doubts about the results and are afraid of being punished, postpone the treatment with the excuse that the youth’s blood is not yet pure but troubled by his sadness and grief. So he is treated well and led to the Turk’s daughter, Rosella, in a beautiful garden, where they fall in love with each other.210 Spring arrives, when blood is usually very fresh, and the girl, who has received magic powers from her mother and knows what awaits her beloved, says: “Take this fine sword and hurry to the shore, where you will find a ship in which, thanks to this magic sword, you will be welcomed with great honor, as if you were the emperor himself.” She writes a spell and places it in her mother’s pocket, and as a result the mother falls into a deep sleep. Then she takes a bag full of precious stones, hurries to her beloved, and they sail away. In the meantime the Great Turk happens to go to the garden, and seeing that both of them are missing, he raises a tremendous alarm; his wife, however, doesn’t wake up, and nothing can wake her up until the spell is found and removed.211 Since

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

321

she immediately understands everything, she runs to the sea and throws in the branch of a tree, which turns into a ship on which she sits and goes after the fugitives. Although she is invisible, Rosella spots her. Rosella gives her lover a chain with an iron blade and shows him in which direction to throw it.212 Eventually he grabs the old woman’s hands and cuts them off.213 She screams out loud and casts a curse on Rosella that the king’s son, as soon as he steps ashore, will forget her. She goes back home with her bleeding stumps, narrates what happened to her, and gives up her life, which she has maintained for so long by virtue of her art; the Great Turk too dies of despair.214 Meanwhile, the two arrive home; he tells Rosella to wait on the ship, so that he can return to her ceremoniously and take her to his father’s palace. She waits three days, but he doesn’t come because the curse has taken effect and he has totally forgotten her. Rosella lands and rents a house in front of the king’s palace. The courtiers soon notice the new beauty and try to win her favor. She leads them on for a while; finally she tells one of them that if he brings a thousand ducats and a splendid dress, he can spend one night with her. When he arrives, she is already lying in bed, and she tells him that he must first lock the door because she forgot to. But as soon as he closes it, it opens up again, and he can do nothing else all night but close the door, so that at dawn he leaves ashamed. The second night another man comes with the same gift, and she tells him that before lying down he should put out the light. But the more he blows on it the more it flares up, and he is in the same situation as the previous one and is left out of breath. The third one has no better luck; she tells him that he should first comb her hair, but the more he works on it the more it gets tangled, and so he combs in vain until the day breaks. The three men recount to one another how they have been fooled, and finally they inform the king. He asks for Rosella and reproaches her for what she has done. She says: “One in your court has done the greatest injustice to me”215 and recounts how she saved him from the Great Turk, who is her father, and freed him from captivity and joyfully took him home. The king has her seated with great honor and asks: “Who is he?” She takes a ring off her finger: “The person to whom this ring will jump is the betrayer!” The ring slips onto the finger of the king’s son, and thanks to the power of this ring he regains his memory. He runs to his beloved Rosella and takes her in his arms.216 She is baptized and married to him. III. 10 The Three Fairies 217 A widow named Caradonia, a wicked and jealous woman, has an extremely ugly daughter, named Grannizia. She marries a widower, Antonio, who has

322 a p p e n d i x

also a daughter from his first marriage; named Cecella, she is a model of beauty and goodness. Yet she is mistreated by her stepmother, has to do all the basest chores: sweep, feed the pigs, take care of the donkey. Good fortune rules that one day, while she is carrying the garbage along the old walls, her basket falls down. While she tries to see how she can get it back, she spots an imp down there.218 She says to him: “Give me back the basket that slipped from me.” He answers: “Come and get it.” She crawls down between roots and stones, and at the bottom she finds three fairies, one more beautiful than the other; their hair is like spun gold. They take the girl by the hand and lead her to a magnificent palace. There they sit down, put their heads in her lap and have her comb their hair.219 She does this with care and skill. They ask: “What do you find on this head?” “Neither dirt nor vermin, only pearls and garnets,” she answers courteously.220 Then they take her around and show her the treasures and wealth of this magical palace. Finally they go to a room where all kinds of the finest garments are hanging. They tell her she should choose one. The humble Cecella takes the most modest thing there, a checkered underskirt. Then they ask her which door she wants to go through when she leaves. Again she answers humbly: “Through the stable door.” They dress her in a fine dress and lead her to the golden door and say: “Go, and when you are below the door, look up.” She does as they say, and as soon as she raises her head, a golden star falls on her forehead. With this adornment she hurries home and tells her stepmother everything that has happened to her. She sends her daughter Grannizia down there. She has to comb the fairies’ hair, and when asked what she finds on their heads, she answers rudely: “Such big vermin.” When she is shown the fine things and asked to take something, she snatches the best one with both hands. When asked through which door she would like to leave, through the golden one or the garden door, she answers: “Through the best possible one.” They tell Grannizia to look up when she is under the door, and when she does so, a mark of shame (no testiculo d’aseno) falls on her forehead and stays there.221 When she gets home, her mother fumes with rage, tears off Cecella’s beautiful clothes, and has her perform the basest tasks, which she fulfills with great patience. It happens that a noble gentleman named Cuosemo sees this jewel in the mud,222 falls passionately in love, and asks the stepmother for Cecella’s hand. She tells him to come back at night, and, instead of the real wife, gives him a false one, Grannizia. Cuosemo is alarmed by the transformation, but he takes his wife home, and without having touched her he takes her back the following day.223 Caradonia is not there; she is gone to the woods to get some twigs. When he calls after her, a little cat close to the ashes says: “Meow, meow, the young woman is in the barrel.” Cuosemo goes to the barrel and hears some-

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

323

thing moving and knocking inside it; then he takes an ax and breaks it open, and inside finds the beautiful Cecella. Beside himself with joy he takes her in his arms as his proper spouse: “Sweetheart, how did you end up in this barrel?” She tells him about all the abuses that her evil stepmother inflicts on her. Cuosemo takes Grannizia, pushes her into the barrel, closes it up, puts Cecella on a horse, and rides away with her.224 Caradonia comes back home with a huge bundle of twigs, lights a fire, places a big kettle on it, and when the water boils she pours it into the barrel. When she thinks Cecella is now dead, she opens it, and finds her own daughter, whom she has killed. Full of despair, she runs to the well and throws herself in.

fourth day IV. 1 The Rooster’s Stone 225 Minecaniello, a poor man, has nothing left apart from a short-legged rooster; hunger forces him to sell this as well. He takes it to the market, where two men strike a bargain with him and ask him to take the rooster to their house. They are sorcerers, and he hears one say to the other: “The rooster has a stone in its head, and if we take it out and set it in a ring, we can wish for whatever we desire and it will happen.” Minecaniello hurries home with the rooster; he himself takes the stone out of its head and has it set in a ring, and to try out its capacity he wishes to be a handsome young eighteen-yearold and to have the most splendid palace in the world.226 His wishes are fulfilled immediately, and the king doesn’t hesitate to give him his daughter as a wife.227 In the meantime the two sorcerers find out Minecaniello’s good fortune and try to trick him. They make a doll that plays music and dances; they entice Minecaniello’s daughter to wish for the rare object. All they ask is to take a close look at her father’s ring, so that they can have a similar one made for themselves. As soon as he comes home, she wheedles the ring out of him, just to play with it a bit. When the sorcerers have it in their hands, they run away, and the first thing that they do is to destroy Minecaniello’s good fortune; he becomes old again and his palace disappears; as a consequence, the king chases him away in disgrace.228 He curses his daughter’s foolishness and goes off, full of despair, into distant parts of the world. In his wandering, he arrives at the kingdom of the mice. He is seen as a spy for cats and is taken to the mouse king, to whom he presents a bacon rind and recounts his sad fate. Two experienced mice are summoned; they tell him to cheer up, for they have heard the two sorcerers talking about the ring; one is wearing it on his finger and never takes it off. They depart with Mine-

324 a p p e n d i x

caniello. At night, the mice sneak into the sorcerer’s bedroom; one of them gnaws on the finger with the ring; he thinks it is too tight, takes it off, and puts it on the nightstand next to him. The other mouse quickly puts it in its mouth, runs away, and takes it to Minecaniello, who transforms the two sorcerers into donkeys, himself into a young man again, and wishes for his past good fortune.229 Now the king welcomes him cordially.230 IV. 2 The Two Brothers 231 A dying father gives his two sons good instructions.232 Marcuccio takes them to heart and leads an industrious and virtuous life, but despite his education he is poor and unlucky. Parmiero squanders what he has and rejects his brother’s advice. Saddened, Marcuccio climbs a high mountain so as to throw himself off the precipice; there a beautiful woman appears with a laurel crown on her golden hair, consoles him, and tells him he must go to a certain kingdom, where the king’s daughter is deathly sick, and he should feed her a fresh egg so that she will immediately regain her health.233 He does what she says; he is rewarded by the king and becomes his first counselor. Parmiero’s fate leads him to this land as well, but he is so hungry, weak, and poor that he decides to hang himself in a hut outside the city. But the rock to which he fastened the rope breaks off, and an old hidden treasure comes to light.234 He resumes a lavish life, but is suspected of a crime and taken to the judge.235 Marcuccio is the highest judge and recognizes him; a chance discovery reveals his innocence.236 Marcuccio welcomes him into his house and shares with him the fruits of his good fortune. IV. 3 The Three Kings 237 A king has three beautiful daughters; another has three sons, who want to marry them, but the father doesn’t want to give them his daughters because the three suitors have turned into animals by magic.238 The first, a falcon, calls all the birds of the sky at once and asks them to destroy everything green, not to spare even one leaf. The second, a stag, calls the quadrupeds, which must ravage all the fields. Finally, the third, a dolphin, uses sea monsters to stir up such a storm that no ship is left intact. In this devastation, the king decides to give up his daughters. At their departure, the queen hands a ring to each of them, so as to make them recognizable, and says that, if anyone visits them with one of these rings, he will be someone of their blood. The falcon takes his wife to his marvelous castle on a mountain; the stag leads his wife into a forest, where a house with the most beautiful gar-

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

325

den awaits her; finally the dolphin carries his wife on his back through the sea to a rock where his castle is.239 Meanwhile the queen bears a beautiful baby boy who, when he is fifteen years old and hears his mother’s constant complaint about her three married daughters, decides to look for them. She gives him a ring exactly like the one his sisters received so that they will be able to recognize him. He takes off and reaches the falcon’s castle on the mountain, and while he is observing its beauty, his sister notices him and calls him in. She recognizes him by his tale, which the ring confirms. When the falcon gets home, she hides her brother. At first he doesn’t want to hear about a brother-in-law,240 but then he becomes more lenient, and when the brother appears in front of him, he treats him in the best possible way, and after fifteen days when he takes his leave, the falcon even gives him one of his feathers, saying: “Keep it carefully; when you need me, throw it on the ground and say: ‘Come, come!’ I won’t delay.” The young man goes on traveling and finds his other sisters, the one living with the stag and the youngest with the dolphin on the island. At his departure, one gives him a hair and the other a scale, with similar words. Continuing his journey, he arrives at a forest, where a tall tower stands on an island in a lake. At one of the windows he sees a beautiful young woman at the feet of a wild dragon, which is asleep. She calls him; he wishes to free her from the hands of the monster. He thinks about how to do it; then he recalls his brothers-in-law’s gifts. He quickly throws the feather, the hair, and the scale onto the ground and cries out: “Come! Come!” Immediately the falcon, the stag, and the dolphin appear and ask what he needs. “Only that you free that young lady from the claws of the dragon.” The falcon calls up griffins, which fly in, grab the young lady, and carry her over the lake to the young man. In the meantime the dragon wakes up, sees what has happened, gets up, and wants to tear the young man apart, but the stag calls up lions, tigers, bears, and panthers, which charge at the dragon and defeat him. To do something too, the dolphin makes such a storm arise over the lake that the tower is shaken to its foundations and collapses.241 Afterwards, the falcon, the stag, and the dolphin regain their human forms and turn into handsome young men, for the curse was dissolved as soon as they freed a princess from her affliction.242 The four couples hasten joyfully to the parents’ house.243 IV. 4 The Seven Bacon Rinds 244 An old witch brings home seven bacon rinds that she has panhandled and gives them to her daughter to cook;245 the daughter, however, while the old woman is away to get some vegetables, can’t resist her craving and eats the

326 a p p e n d i x

rinds, one after the other. Afraid of being punished, she cuts up the sole of an old shoe into seven pieces and throws these strips in the pot. The old woman gets home, and soon the dish is ready; she starts eating but can’t chew the rinds. The daughter denies doing anything, but this doesn’t help her; the old woman grabs the broomstick and beats her. A merchant passing by is sorry for the girl, takes her as his wife, and escorts her to his comfortable house.246 On Monday, he gets up early and gives her twenty rolls of flax.247 She is to spin it in twenty days, which is when he returns from his journey.248 He will give her a beautiful gift. Once he has taken off, however, all she can think about is frying pancakes and eggs, sleeping, and loafing around. Meanwhile, the time of her husband’s return approaches, and she thinks: “You must do something”; she takes a long pole and makes wild preparations for spinning.249 By chance, some sorceresses pass by and can’t help but laugh, and they kindheartedly grant the lazy girl that all the flax in the house be immediately spun, woven, and bleached.250 She goes to bed as soon as her husband arrives and pretends to be exhausted and sick because of the hard work;251 but while her husband goes to the doctor, she cracks nuts open and throws the shells out of the window. The doctor explains the sickness as the result of an idle life, but the husband doesn’t believe him, and she tells him that she has been cured by his mere gaze.252 IV. 5 The Dragon 253 A cruel king travels with his wife to a remote castle. In the meantime, a sorceress takes possession of his throne. He asks a prophetic wooden statue about his kingdom, and it answers him: he will recover his kingdom when the sorceress loses her eyes.254 But since she knows how to defend herself against this adversity, the king becomes enraged at women, and violates and then kills all those who fall into his clutches. Such a destiny even befalls Porziella, a young woman whose beauty has no match in the world. He has already drawn his dagger when a bird drops something onto his arm, making his blade fall from his hand.255 This bird was a fairy, whom Porziella once had saved from a looming danger.256 The king, disconcerted by this event, does not kill her but locks her up in a cell, giving her nothing to eat or drink. But the bird arrives, reassures her with human words, and brings her food and even grapes for her thirst through an opening in a corner of the floor, which is connected to the kitchen.257 Meanwhile, Porziella gives birth to a beautiful baby boy, whom she names Miuccio. When he grows up, the bird suggests that she should break some of the floorboards so that the

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

327

opening will be large enough for Miuccio, and then, with ropes that the bird has brought with it, his mother can lower Miuccio down into the kitchen as soon as the cook is not around. He is not supposed to reveal where he comes from but must say that he is lost and seeks a master. When the king sees him and likes him because he is so handsome, he hires him as his page and loves him, without suspecting who he really is; the queen, however, hates him because the king holds him in such esteem, and tries to ruin him.258 She tells the king that Miuccio has bragged that he is able to build three castles in the air. So he orders him to carry this out on pain of death. Miuccio doesn’t know what to do, and wails; the bird arrives and helps out: he makes three castles out of cardboard, and three griffins come and carry them in the air; as a result, the king, who has come with the entire court to see it, loves him even more. But the queen’s envy grows; she concocts something new and makes the king believe that Miuccio has volunteered to blind the sorceress and take back the lost kingdom. The king demands this also. The bird has advice for this difficult problem too; it gathers a large group of birds and asks who dares to attack a sorceress’s face. A swallow, which has made its nest on the royal palace and hates the sorceress, presents itself.259 It darts forth, and when the sorceress lies down on a couch, it lands on her head and lets filth fall on her eyes, which blinds her.260 In desperation the witch runs to a cave and pounds her head against the wall. The king regains possession of his entire realm. For the third time, the queen comes up with something against Miuccio. Not far from the castle lives a fierce dragon, which was born at the same time as the queen and whose life is tied to hers and therefore can’t continue to live after her death.261 Only one thing can save her: if her temples, her breastbone, her nostrils, and her dimples are smeared with the dragon’s blood, she can have her life back.262 Now she tells the king that Miuccio, his favorite, brags that he can kill the dragon, and although it is her brother it is also her enemy, and she’d rather keep her husband than a hundred brothers. The king, who loathes the dragon but doesn’t know how to free himself from it, calls Miuccio and orders him to fulfill the task; otherwise he will lose his head.263 The bird doesn’t abandon him and gives him an herb: “Take this to the dragon’s cave and throw it in; soon it will fall deeply asleep, and then chop its head off.”264 Miuccio takes a sharp knife with him too, and when the beast is asleep, he tears it apart. With each cut he makes, the queen feels her own life weakening; she calls the king and tells him that she feels that Miuccio is killing the dragon; dying, she asks him to smear her with her brother’s blood before burying her.265 When Miuccio arrives and announces that he has completed the

328 a p p e n d i x

task, the king orders him to go back and get the dragon’s blood. On the way the bird comes up to him and asks what he plans to do. Miuccio explains. Then the bird says: “The dragon’s blood will be your ruin!” and tells him that the king doesn’t know that Miuccio is of his own blood, and that his mother lives in a prison. But the king, who has followed Miuccio, hears everything. Porziella is freed and becomes his wife; the bird turns into a beautiful young woman, whom Miuccio marries.266 IV. 6 The Three Crowns 267 A king wishes for children, and when he expresses this wish aloud in a garden one day, a voice responds from a bush: “King, which do you want, a daughter or a son?”268 The king discusses the matter with his counselors; he finally chooses a daughter and gives his answer to the bush.269 After nine months his wife gives birth to a baby girl.270 She is locked up in a sturdy castle and carefully watched. When she has grown up, she is promised to a king.271 She has to be taken to her husband and for this reason leaves her home for the first time. As soon as she steps out, the wind seizes her and carries her to a forest, and to the front of an ogress’s house. There she finds an old woman who tells her: “Oh, you unlucky girl; it’s all over for you when the ogress comes home and sees you! One thing I can tell you: go inside the house and clean and tidy everything up and then hide.” When she comes home, the ogress rejoices at the wonderful order and tidiness, which are unusual, calls the old woman, and praises everything to the skies. She leaves again, and the old woman says to Marchetta (this is the name of the king’s daughter): “Now prepare something good, but you can trust her only when she swears by the three crowns that she is not going to do anything to you; only then can you let yourself be seen.”272 Marchetta kills a goose and prepares an excellent dish. The ogress comes and asks: “Who cooked this?” “I did,” says the old woman, “and think nothing of it.” She eats and finds it so delicious that she swears by many things that she will look with great favor on the person who cooked it. Marchetta hears this from her hiding place but doesn’t move. Finally the ogress says: “I swear by my three crowns that out of love I will do everything for him.” Then Marchetta jumps out and shows herself. The ogress stays true to her word: “I will treat you like my daughter. I turn over to you the keys to every room. You may open all of them, except the last one. If you serve me well, I promise you by my three crowns that I will take care of you generously.”273 But as soon as the ogress leaves, Marchetta is so tortured by curiosity that she opens the forbidden

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

329

room. Three girls, all dressed in gold, are sitting on three chairs and seem to be asleep.274 Their mother has enchanted them, because a great misfortune awaited them unless a princess arrived and awoke them.275 Because her feet make a noise as she walks in, they wake up and want something to eat. Marchetta cooks three eggs apiece in the ashes. They step out of the door to catch some fresh air; meanwhile the ogress comes back and is so angry with Marchetta that she slaps her. She takes offense and quits her service to her and wishes to go into the wide world. She persists in her decision, despite the ogress’s kind words to her. At her departure, she gives her a ring that she must wear with the stone inside of her hand and pay no attention to it until in a moment of great danger she hears the echo call her name (Orca).276 She also gives her male clothes.277 In this outfit she meets a king who is hunting. Taking her for a beautiful lad, he hires her as his page. The queen, however, falls madly in love with him and makes advances to him.278 Marchetta keeps her distance, and out of revenge she is accused of pursuing the queen with inappropriate love. On her way to death she cries out: “Who will save me from the gallows?” The echo then calls the ogress (“chi mme libera de sta forca?” “Orca”). Then Marchetta remembers the ring and looks at the stone, and at once a mighty voice resounds three times in the air: “Let her go, she is a girl!” The king has the deceitful queen thrown into the sea and Marchetta becomes his wife.279 IV. 7 The Two Cakes 280 Two sisters, Luceta and Troccola, have two daughters, Marziella and Puccia. Marziella is beautiful and good, Puccia is ugly and wicked, and so are their mothers. One day Luceta tells Marziella: “Go to the fountain and get me a bucket of water,” and for that she gives her a small cake.281 While she is eating it by the fountain, an old woman comes by and asks for a piece.282 “Here,” says Marziella, “have some. I wish it were sprinkled with sugar.” “May the heavens bless your good heart,” says the old woman, and grants her that every time she breathes, roses and jasmines will come out of her mouth; when she combs her hair, pearls and garnets will fall from her head; finally, wherever she puts her foot down, lilies and violets will sprout.283 The girl thanks her, and as soon as she gets home, everything the old woman has said comes to fruition. When Troccola learns about this great fortune, she wants the same to happen to her daughter. She sends her too with a cake to the fountain. The old woman shows up again and asks for a piece. “It’s hardly my job to give you cake,” Puccia answers scornfully and in a

330 a p p e n d i x

few bites wolfs it all down. The angry old woman curses her: “When you breathe, may foam come out of your mouth as if you were a mule; when you comb your hair, may vermin fall from your head; and wherever you go, may stinking flowers pop up.” As soon as Puccia gets home, the curse takes effect, and so resentment against Marziella grows even more in the mother’s and the daughter’s hearts. Meanwhile Ciommo, Marziella’s brother, enters into the king’s service, and when one day the conversation is about women’s beauty, he extols above all others his extraordinary sister, even more so because of the white woman’s gifts.284 The king demands to see her; if she is as described, he will marry her. Ciommo informs his mother that she must come with her daughter quickly. Luceta is sick, so she asks her sister to take her place and accompany Marziella; the sister is very eager and brings Puccia along. They take off on a boat, but in the middle of the sea, while the sailors are asleep, the mischievous Troccola throws her innocent niece into the water. A beautiful siren quickly appears, takes Marziella in her arms, and carries her away.285 Troccola brings Puccia to the king for his wife, but when he tests her and vermin instead of pearls fall from her hair and stinking weeds instead of lilies sprout under her feet, he throws mother and daughter out and has Ciommo tend geese as punishment. He takes them to the beach where they look for food, and while in a shepherd’s hut he laments his fate; in the evening he takes the geese back. It comes to pass that Marziella emerges from the waters and feeds the geese with royal paste and gives them rose water.286 When in the evening the geese were confined in a small garden under the king’s window, they began to sing: “Quack, quack, quack, beautiful are the sun and the moon, but even more beautiful is the one who feeds us.”287 The king becomes aware of this, calls Ciommo, and asks what the geese grazed. “Nothing but fresh grass.” The king sends a faithful servant to observe; he sees Marziella arrive, and reports everything to the king. The following day, the king himself goes there, hides, catches sight of Marziella coming out of the waves and feeding the geese; then she goes down again and combs her hair, from which pearls and garnets fall. The king calls Ciommo from his straw hut and asks if he knows that beautiful girl. He hastens there, embraces and kisses her as his sister. Marziella recounts Troccola’s and her daughter’s betrayal. With great joy, the king invites her to follow him, but she can’t yet, because the siren restrains her by a golden chain fastened to her foot and drags her down if she lingers too long in the air.288 The following day the king frees her from the chain with his own hands; then she is led to the royal palace and is married to him.289

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

331

IV. 8 The Seven Doves 290 A woman gives birth to a baby boy every year until she has seven. She becomes pregnant again; her seven sons threaten her: “If you don’t give birth to a girl, we will get up and leave.” When the time draws near, they tell her: “We will go to the hilltop across from here; if you have a boy, put an inkstand and a feather by the window, but if it’s a girl, put a spindle (? cocchiara) and a distaff.”291 Fortunately, it is a girl, but the silly wet nurse, who is supposed to put out the sign, takes the wrong one, and the seven sons believe it’s a boy. They take off and end up in a thick forest of a wild man’s house.292 Since a woman once gouged his eyes out while he was asleep, he is so angry with the whole female gender that he devours every woman he can catch.293 Tired and hungry, they ask him for a piece of bread; he promises them food if they wish to serve him; they only need to make sure that one of them always waits on him.294 They choose to stay with him. Meanwhile, their sister grows up and when she hears that her brothers went far away because of her,295 she makes up her mind and looks for them. Like a pilgrim, she wanders from place to place until she arrives at the forest where her brothers are, and they welcome her with great joy.296 They give her a small room where the wild man can’t smell her,297 and urge her to give some of her food to a cat that lives in the house. Cianna, this is the girl’s name, is very careful and becomes good friends with the cat.298 It happens that one day the brothers have to go hunting for their master, and they ask her to cook a bowl of peas. In it she finds a hazelnut and eats it alone, without sharing it with the cat. Out of malice, the cat jumps on the stove and dampens it until the fire goes out.299 Cianna doesn’t know what to do; she runs out of her room and ends up in the wild man’s quarters, where she looks for fire. He immediately notices a girl’s voice and yells: “Welcome! Just wait a second, I’ve found what you need.”300 Then he reaches for a whetstone, smears it with oil, and begins to sharpen his fangs. Cianna hurries back to her room and barricades herself, as well as she can, with benches, bedsteads, and stones and whatever else is available. Since he can’t get in, the ogre blusters and tries to break down the door, but in the meantime the seven brothers come home and see the disaster.301 “We know nothing about this, maybe this damned woman crept in while we were hunting! But let’s go, I will take you to a place where we can catch her right away.”302 They take him by the hand and lead him to a pit and throw him in. Then they cover it with earth. Now they let her sister out of her room and tell her she should be careful not to pick any stalk grown on the wild man’s grave; otherwise the seven of them will turn into

332 a p p e n d i x

doves. They want to spend the winter in the house and then go back home. One day, while they are away collecting wood, a wanderer passes by, sees a monkey sitting on a spruce tree, and teases it; it throws a fir cone at him and makes a dreadful gash on his face.303 The wounded man screams so miserably that Cianna hears him, and out of pity runs to grab some rosemary, which grows on the wild man’s grave, and makes a plaster with it, adding salt and chewed-up bread, which she applies to his wound. She waits for her brothers to have dinner; they fly in as seven doves, reproach her for forgetting their warning, and say: “It would have been better if your hand had been cut off than that you had plucked that rosemary; now we must keep flying, and there is no hope for us, unless you find the mother of Time.”304 Cianna begs her brothers to forgive her and says that she will travel through the whole world until she finds the old woman. She also asks them to stay in the house, and sets off. She reaches the sea and sees a whale, which asks: “Beautiful girl, what are you looking for?”305 “I am looking for the house of the mother of Time.” “Keep walking along the seashore, and when you reach the first river, look up and you will find someone who will show you the way.306 But do me a favor too; when you arrive at the old woman’s, ask her what I should do so as not to bump into the rocks and end on a sandbank.” When she reaches the stream, she walks up and arrives at a beautiful country, where she finds a mouse, which tells her: “If you want to go to the mother of Time, you still have to travel a lot, but don’t get discouraged and keep walking toward that mountain. But when you get there, ask the old woman how we can free ourselves from the tyranny of cats.” She exerts herself and keeps going, and when she sits on a stone, exhausted, she sees a multitude of ants dragging a stock of corn. Cianna asks them the same question. “Keep going,” they say, “if you’re looking for the mother of Time. But do us a favor and asks her how ants can prolong their lifespan.” Cianna resumes her walking and finds a tall, ancient tree, which speaks to her: “Come under my shade and rest a little.”307 The girl excuses herself: “I’m looking for the mother of Time.” “You are not far from your destination,” says the tree; “on top of that mountain you will find a house, that’s where she sits; but ask her how I can regain my lost honor.”308 Cianna finally reaches the foot of the mountain, and there she finds an old man lying worn out on a heap of hay. She recognizes him as the old traveler whose wound she had healed.309 He says: “I bring to Time the interest earned from the earth; he is a tyrant who snatches everything away and demands a tribute from everything, primarily from people of my age. Since I received a good deed from your hands, I will reward you and inform you about everything.310 On the

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

333

peak of the mountain you will find a wrecked house; only the coat of arms over the door is undamaged: a snake biting its own tail, a deer, a raven, and a phoenix. Sitting inside you will see an old woman with a beard that reaches the ground and hair on her head that covers her heels.311 She sits on a clock and, since her eyebrows are so thick that they cover her eyes, she won’t be able to see you when you arrive.312 As soon as you walk in, you must take the weights away from the clock, then call the old woman and tell her what you want from her. She will call her son (lo tiempo) so that he can eat you;313 but since the weights will be missing from the clock, he won’t be able to come, and she will be forced to do what you wish. Do not believe her until she swears by the wings of her son, but do everything she says.” After speaking these words, the old man dissolves into dust, and Cianna buries him.314 Then she climbs the mountain, but waits until the old woman’s son leaves the house. He appears as an old man with a long beard and an old cloak, and has big wings; he moves so quickly that she soon loses sight of him. Scared, she steps into the house and immediately takes the weights away from the clock. Everything happens as the pilgrim told her. The old woman finally swears by her son’s wings to fulfill her desires; so Cianna hands over the weights of the clock and soon her son (lo tiempo) shows up and answers the questions she has submitted.315 The tree can’t be dear to men as long as it has a treasure under its roots. The mouse won’t be safe with the cat unless it ties a bell to the cat’s leg, so that the mouse can hear it when it gets close. The ant can live a hundred years if it doesn’t fly, because when the ant is about to die it grows wings. The whale will travel untroubled if it becomes good friends with the water mouse, because the whale can use it as a guide. Finally, the doves will regain their human forms if they sit on the pillar of wealth. Cianna walks down the mountain, and then the seven doves arrive. They have followed her, and tired of so much flying they settle on the horns of a dead ox lying there, and soon they recover their human forms, because the horn as cornucopia was the pillar of wealth.316 They travel back together and take the answer to the tree. A great treasure is dug out from under its roots, and the eight siblings divide it up and take it with them. When they lie down in a thicket, exhausted by the journey, some thieves arrive, tie up their hands and feet, and make off with their treasure. They would have died of hunger had the mouse not shown up, and when it hears the answer to its question, out of gratitude it gnaws their cords to pieces. The ant shows up as well, hears the reply, and shows them the cave where the thieves have stored the treasure. They recover all their possessions, set off, and reach the sea, where the whale is waiting and welcomes the good

334 a p p e n d i x

advice. In the meantime the thieves, who have been looking for them, show up with weapons, but the whale saves them, for it takes the eight of them on its back and guides them through the sea to their homeland, which they reach happily and with their treasure.317 IV. 9 The Crow 318 King Milluccio loves hunting more than anything else. In a forest one day he finds a freshly killed crow on a piece of marble, and when he sees the red blood flowing down the snow-white stone, he sighs and cries out: “If I only had a wife white as this stone, red as this blood, and with hair black as the feathers of this crow!”319 His brother Jennariello finds him buried in these thoughts, motionless as a statue. At last he draws out of him what he desires, and he promises to wander through the whole world until he finds such a woman for him.320 He departs; in a big city he buys a beautiful falcon and a magnificent horse for his brother, and keeps seeking the unknown beauty.321 He first refuses to speak to a beggar but later tells him the reason for his journey.322 The beggar says: “I will show you the daughter of a magician. She is the one you are looking for.”323 He then knocks on the door of a house; Liviella shows up and offers a piece of bread to the poor man. Jennariello is immediately convinced that she is the right one. He gives a generous gift to the beggar, gets hold of a box full of all sorts of fine items, and walks up and down in front of Liviella’s house, loudly boasting of his goods, until she comes and takes a look at those fine things.324 “This is nothing,” he says, “I have some real treasures on my ship. Come and see them.” Curious, as soon as her father goes out, she hurries with her nursemaid to the ship.325 While she is looking at all those things, Jennariello raises the anchor and sails off. She is terrified when she discovers the ruse, but when he reveals everything to her and describes the handsomeness of the king, she is soon content. During the journey, all of a sudden the waves rise up and clouds gather in the sky.326 Jennariello climbs up the crow’s nest, hoping to spot land where he can set anchor; then he notices a couple of doves, one male and one female, passing by. The male dove wails: “Coo! Coo!” “What’s the matter?” asks the female dove. “Oh, the poor king’s son bought a falcon, but as soon as it sits on his brother’s hand, it will peck his eyes out. But if he doesn’t bring him the creature or if he warns him about it, he will turn to stone.” Once again the male dove wails: “Coo! Coo!” “What’s the matter?” asks the female. “The poor king’s son bought a horse for his brother. The first time he sits on it, he will jump off and breaks his neck. But if he doesn’t take it to him or if he warns him about it, he will turn to stone.” Finally, for

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

335

the third time the male dove wails: “Coo! Coo!” and says, “He is taking a beautiful woman to his brother, but the first night they lie together, a wild dragon will come in and devour them. But if he doesn’t take her or if he alerts him about it, he will turn to stone.” Soon the sea calms down and the wind abates. Jennariello becomes very sad because of what he heard. Milluccio sees the ship from afar. He stands by the shore and rejoices at his brother’s return.327 “What is this falcon?” asks Milluccio. “I bought it as a gift for you.” “The biggest treasure wouldn’t have given me a greater joy,” says the king, and wants to take it on his arm. But Jennariello grabs a large knife and slits the bird’s neck. Milluccio is astounded but doesn’t want to ruin the joy and asks about the horse.328 Jennariello gives the same answer; the king wants to mount it, but in the blink of an eye Jennariello cuts off the horse’s legs. Once again Milluccio restrains himself out of joy for the young bride his brother has brought him from his journey. The wedding is celebrated with great pomp; as soon as the two lie down in bed and fall asleep, Jennariello creeps behind the bed, and when the dragon arrives he fights it with his knife, but one wrong thrust hits one of the bed posts. The king then wakes up and the dragon disappears. But when he sees the knife in his brother’s hand and the post split in the middle, Milluccio cries out for help and firmly believes that his brother intended to kill him. The following day he calls for a trial, which condemns him to death.329 Now Jennariello reveals everything to Milluccio, but as soon as he speaks of the falcon, his feet turn to stone; when he speaks of the horse, half of his body does so; when he speaks of Liviella, he becomes totally petrified. In vain the king weeps for his error. In the meantime, the queen gives birth to two beautiful boys. One day, while she is away and the king is with the two little ones in the hall before the statue of his faithful brother, an elderly man with long hair and a beard walks in and tells him he can bring his brother back to life if he daubs him with his children’s blood. He resolves to do it, and the petrified image comes back to life.330 The king has the two innocent victims laid in a coffin; then the queen comes back, and devastated at this sight wants to throw herself out of the window, but her father, the magician, floats toward the window on a cloud, brings the children back to life, and makes everyone happy.331 IV. 10 Pride Punished 332 A king had a daughter as haughty as she was beautiful, and no suitor was good enough for her. Among the suitors there was even a king, who for a long time offered her his sincere love, but to no avail. All his words were thrown to the wind. So he leaves.333 He lets his beard grow and makes him-

336 a p p e n d i x

self unrecognizable, then goes back and serves as a gardener.334 One day, under the window of Cintiella—this is her name—he spreads out a stunning golden dress. She wants to have it; in exchange, the gardener asks to be allowed to sleep in her antechamber one night, which she grants. The next day he spreads out an equally marvelous petticoat. She acquires this as well, and in exchange he sleeps one night in her antechamber. The third day, he spreads out a wonderful jacket that goes well with the other items, but he doesn’t want to give it to her until she allows him to spend one night in her bedchamber, to which she finally agrees.335 She has him sit in a chair, and with charcoal she draws a line on the floor, which he may not cross.336 Then she lies down on her bed and falls asleep, but he doesn’t respect the ban.337 When later she becomes pregnant, she has no choice but to run away with him. He takes her to a stable next to his palace, where she leads a sad, pitiful life.338 The maids who bake the bread tell her she should help them and then fill a pot with food, which she puts into a bag.339 The king arrives but is unrecognizable to her because he is wearing his royal clothes, and says: “Who is this creature? She has ‘swindler’ written on her face. Search her bag, and you will see.” The king disguises himself again and finds Cintiella deeply distressed because of the abuse she has just endured, for the pot of food has been snatched from her bag.340 The time of her delivery drawing near, she tries to get hold of some baby clothes, but the king, in his royal appearance, pulls them out from under her apron, and accused of being a thief, she has to return to the stable. He disguises himself and rushes to console her, so that sadness should not overwhelm her.341 He tells her that the queen has promised her son to a foreign lady and wishes to have a dress of gold and brocade made for her. Since she has the same figure, the measures will be taken on her. Cintiella shows up in this kind of dress before the king, who as a gardener suddenly approaches her, consoles and kisses her.342 She only thinks that the heavens are sending her this to inflict a just humiliation on her because of her past pride.343 But the king’s mother calls for the girl and has sympathy for her condition. She is laid in a royal bed and gives birth to two beautiful baby boys. The king arrives, embraces and kisses her, and reveals to her that he was the gardener.344

fifth day V. 1 The Goose 345 Two sisters live in the harshest poverty and support themselves with spinning. One day they go to the market to offer their yarn for sale, and with the

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

337

money earned they buy a goose, but it becomes so dear to them that they take it to bed with them.346 Instead of soiling itself, the good creature deposits nothing but pieces of gold in the bed, and soon the poor sisters grow rich.347 Two women who live nearby notice their prosperity;348 they make a hole in the wall and see the goose standing on a bed sheet and letting pure pieces of gold fall on the bed.349 One of them walks over and asks if she could borrow the goose for a couple of hours; she just bought some goslings and would like them to get used to the house. They kindly grant her request.350 Together the women spread out a cloth and encourage the goose, which fills it with filth instead of gold; same thing happens a second time, and they can’t stand it anymore because of the stench. Flying into a rage, they wring the goose’s neck and throw it out of the window. As chance would have it, the king’s son is riding by on his way to go hunting, and pressed by a natural necessity he dismounts and uses the freshly killed goose, which is lying in a corner close to him, for his convenience.351 But the goose is not dead and gets such a firm hold on him with its teeth that he screams in pain. Since no one is able to remove it, he announces that whoever frees him from this agony will have half of his kingdom, and that if the person is a woman he will marry her. The youngest sister alone succeeds, because she needs only to call the goose and it lets go and runs to her.352 She becomes queen and her sister is well taken care of.353 V. 2 The Months 354 There are two brothers: Cianne is rich but wicked, Lise is poor but good. Lise decides to go out into the world.355 In the evening, he arrives at an inn, where twelve youths are sitting together by the fire and warming themselves up. When they see that his clothes are ragged and he is shivering because of the cold, they invite him to join them. One asks: “How do you like this time of year?” Lise answers: “Every month does its duty,” and praises their variety. “But you will admit that March is a nasty month,” and he criticizes the dampness, the frost, and so on and so forth. Lise, on the contrary, praises it as the time in which new life takes form.356 The youth is pleased with this because he was the month of March itself, and he gives him a nice little hat (cascatella) with which he can fulfill all his desires.357 Lise thanks him, puts it on his head, and wishes for a litter on which he can be taken home; on the way, he wishes for a delicious meal, and arrives home in grand style.358 His brother Cianne, as soon as he sees such abundance, wants to have the same luck. He drives to the inn where the twelve months are gathered. The month of March poses him the same question, but Cianne curses it and receives a

338 a p p e n d i x

club as a gift, to which he is supposed to say: “Give me a hundred!”359 Cianne hurries home, thinking that it could only mean a hundred coins, and declares: “Give me a hundred!” But he receives blows. Because of his screaming, Lise rushes to him, puts the club to rest, and calms his brother down.360 V. 3 Pintosmauto (? Enamel painted)361 Betta, the daughter of a merchant, doesn’t want to get married. One day when her father travels to the market, she requests sugar, seasoning, aromatic water, and similar things, as well as pearls, rubies, garnets, two sapphires, some spun gold, and finally a dough tray and a silver knife. When she has everything there, she gets started; she blends it all together, and with the dough she builds a most handsome young man; his hair is spun gold, his eyes sapphires; his teeth pearls; his lips rubies. Finally, he also receives life.362 With great joy she takes him to her father and says, “This should be my husband.”363 A marvelous party is thrown; a queen attends and takes Pintosmauto, as he is called, away to her kingdom.364 Betta sets out to look for him; she arrives at the hut of an enchantress, who feels sorry for her condition, because she is pregnant, and gives her three phrases.365 When necessary, she should recite one of them, and she will find help. Betta finally reaches the palace where Pintosmauto is.366 She says the first phrase (tricche varlacche, ca la casa chiove!). A wonderful coach, which drives itself and is studded with precious stones, suddenly appears. The queen would like it, but Betta will give it only if she is allowed to spend one night in the king’s bedroom. The queen accepts, but gives Pintosmauto a sleeping potion. As a result, Betta expresses her suffering in vain. For the second phrase (anola, tranola, pizze fontanola!), she receives a birdcage with a bird made of precious stones, which sings like a nightingale. She gives it away for a second night, but again the king has been given a sleeping potion and hears nothing. But the following morning he goes into the garden, and there an old man, whose house is adjacent to his room, tells him everything he heard the night before.367 With the third phrase (tafaro e tamurro, pizze ngongola e cemine!), Betta receives splendid clothes made of gold and silk. She sacrifices them for the third night. Pintosmauto doesn’t take a sleeping potion, stays awake, and hears clearly what Betta says.368 Everything comes back to him, like a forgotten dream. He jumps up, embraces the unlucky Betta, then creeps up to the sleeping queen, takes back the three valuable things and all her precious stones, and hurries away with Betta, who gives birth to a beautiful baby boy.369

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

339

V. 4 The Golden Trunk 370 A poor gardener buys a piglet for each of his three daughters. The two older ones take their animals to a good pasture, but they don’t let the youngest daughter go there. She thus takes her piglet to a forest, where she finds a fountain and a tree with golden leaves. She brings one leaf back to her father, who turns it into a lot of money, and little by little she brings him all the other leaves.371 In consequence, the tree stands totally bare, but when she notices that the bark too is made of gold, she gets an ax and hacks the tree down. Under the tree she finds some stairs, goes down them, and arrives at a magnificent palace.372 A table has been set. Parmetella—this is the girl’s name—takes a seat. While she is eating, a handsome young man walks up to her and says: “You shall become my wife and the most joyful woman in the world.”373 She is seated in a carriage made of gemstones and four golden horses lift her up.374 At night, he says to her: “When you lie in bed, put out the lights.” But as soon as she closes her eyes, he lies next to her, and departs at the crack of dawn.375 The second night, she stays awake and lights a candle and sees the astonishing beauty of the young man. At that point he wakes up and laments her ruinous curiosity, because of which he will be cursed for seven more years, and disappears from her sight.376 She goes away, and in a cave she finds an enchantress.377 This merciful woman gives her a spindle, seven figs, a pot of honey, and a pair of iron shoes and says: “Walk and never stop, until these shoes are worn out. Then you will find seven women, sitting on high and spinning, with the thread hanging down and wound around the bone of some dead person. Quietly creep up close, take the thread off the bone and attach it to the spindle, which you must smear with honey and stick the figs onto it. When they pull it up and taste its sweetness, they will want to see who did that. They will make all sorts of promises, but don’t trust them and don’t come out until they swear by Thunder and Lightning (pe Truone e Lampe) that they will not eat you.” Everything takes place as announced. As soon as Parmetella reveals herself, the women say: “Traitor, it is your fault that our brother must be a slave for seven years.” After giving their word, they explain how she can save herself from their mother. “Hide behind this kneading trough. When she comes, grab her breasts from behind, which she has thrown her shoulders like satchels, and pull them and don’t let them go until she swears by Thunder and Lightning (this is her son’s name) that she will do you no harm.” The girl does as suggested, but for that very reason the old woman torments her. She mixes up twelve different kinds of vegetables and says: “You wretched

340 a p p e n d i x

girl, sort these out for me, otherwise you’ll pay dearly!” Parmetella is unable to do it and starts to wail. Then Thunder and Lightning (the handsome young man) arrives and tells her to throw all the vegetables on the ground; then he gets a huge number of ants to separate them.378 The old woman is angry when she finds the job done. She gives her twelve quilts, which she must fill with feathers.379 Thunder and Lightning comes to help. He says that she needs to cry out loud: “The king of the birds is dead!” As soon as she does this, clouds of birds, covering the sky, arrive. They flap their wings and enough feathers fall to fill all the quilts. The old woman plots something new: “Run to my sister. She wishes to send me some music. I want to get Thunder and Lighting married and to give a royal party for him.” Through someone else, however, she tells her sister that she should kill Parmetella and cook her. They will eat her together. But Thunder and Lightning meets her on the way and gives her a loaf of bread, a bundle of hay, and a stone, and tells her: “In that house you will find a dog, to which you will throw the bread; then a horse, to which you will give the hay.380 Finally you will arrive at a door that always slams. You will steady it with this stone. The ogress will be sitting upstairs with her child in her arms. She has heated up an oven to roast you. She will tell you: ‘Hold my little girl and wait. I will go upstairs and get the music,’ but be aware that she will only be sharpening her fangs to tear you apart. With no mercy, throw the baby into the oven; she is the offspring of an ogress. Take the music that lies behind the door and hurry out before she comes back. But I tell you, do not open the box that contains the music.” Everything happens as predicted. The problem is that Parmetella is too curious, and on her way back she opens the box. At once the music flies out and makes the hell of a noise. As soon as the ogress hears it, she comes running down, and when she can’t find the girl, she shouts out of the window: “Kill the traitor!” But the door answers: “Why should I hurt her if she brought me rest?” The horse: “Why should I kill her if she gave me hay?” The dog: “I let that poor girl go, she gave me bread!” In tears, Parmetella runs here and there after the tunes. Thunder and Lightning meets her again and rebukes her for her curiosity; then he calls the tunes back and locks them in the box. When she gets home, the old woman complains about her sister, who has acted against her will. In the meantime, the bride arrives and has every possible bad quality.381 A big party is prepared. Parmetella is seated on the edge of a pit, because the old woman hopes that she will fall into it.382 Thunder and Lighting asks her to give him a kiss; she refuses.383 The bride says: “Why do you refuse to kiss such a beautiful young man; for two chestnuts I let a shepherd smother me with kisses.” After the

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

341

dinner, while going to bed, she says again: “For two chestnuts, I let a herdsman who tended sows kiss me.” Thunder and Lightning can’t contain himself any longer: he kills her with a knife and then embraces Parmetella and says: “You are my wife and the flower of all women.”384 They lie down; in the morning the old woman comes and, as soon as she sees her son in Parmetella’s arms and learns the entire course of events, she runs to her sister to consult with her. But out of sorrow for the loss of her baby the sister has burned herself up as well, and the old woman has no option but to slam her head against the wall.385 V. 5 Sun, Moon, and Talia 386 At the birth of a king’s daughter, wise men announce to him that she will be in great danger because of a tiny piece of flax.387 Therefore, he forbids spinning, but when she grows up and sees a woman walking by who is spinning, Talia rushes down, takes the distaff in her hand, and begins to spin.388 But soon she gets a tiny piece of flax stuck under her fingernail and at once falls down as if dead.389 The king has her sit on a marvelous chair, and along with his court he abandons that desolate house.390 After some time, it so happens that another king is hunting in that region;391 a falcon flies through one of the windows, and the king knocks at the locked portal, but no one comes to open it. He finally climbs up a ladder and is greatly surprised to find no living being inside. He walks into the room where Talia is sitting in all her beauty.392 He thinks she is asleep and calls to her, but she doesn’t hear; so he lifts her up, brings her to a bed, tarries by her, and then climbs down.393 After nine months, still enchanted in her sleep, with the assistance of two fairies Talia gives birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The fairies place them at her breasts, and when once one of the two mistakenly sucks at their mother’s finger, the baby pulls out the piece of flax. Talia immediately wakes up as though from sleep and greatly rejoices at the sight of the babies; invisible hands bring food to them.394 At that time the king remembers his adventure, looks for the house, and finds Talia with two wonderful children.395 He reveals himself, comforts her, and leaves her with the promise that he will come back soon and gives the children the names of Sun and Moon.396 In the meantime, the queen becomes suspicious, and using promises and threats she gets one of the king’s servants to tell her everything.397 She sends him to Talia in the name of the king, and he takes the children away.398 Then she delivers them to the cook, who is told to kill them and prepare a dish with them. But since they are so beautiful, he doesn’t kill

342 a p p e n d i x

them and slaughters two young goats in their stead. While the king is eating his meal, she says repeatedly: “A great dish, you are eating what is yours!” Since she reiterates these words, the king reluctantly leaves.399 She summons Talia as well, claiming that the king is waiting for her. As soon as she arrives, she has a big large oven heated and condemns her to death.400 Talia only asks that she be allowed to take off her clothes. At every piece of clothing that she removes, she sends out a loud cry. After taking off even her underskirt and crying out for the last time, the king appears. He has his wicked wife thrown into the oven along with the dishonest servant, rewards the cook who has cared for his children, and marries Talia. V. 6 Sapia 401 The son of a king is so pigheaded that he learns nothing, not even the alphabet. A noblewoman has a beautiful and intelligent daughter by the name of Sapia, who has to attend to the blockhead’s learning. She starts her teaching so skillfully that in the end he becomes the most intelligent man in the entire kingdom.402 But he can’t forget the beatings that he received during his lessons and decides to take revenge. He goes to his father and says that he would like to marry Sapia out of gratitude, and requests separate chambers for him and his wife. He keeps her there in harsh conditions and gives her bad food, to the point that she barely survives. She says: “Have you forgotten what I did for you, and now you treat me like a slave?” He answers: “That’s why I married you, to repay you for how you treated me when you were my teacher.” Later she gives birth to three children, and through her mother’s clever stratagems he fully accepts her as his wife and regards her with favor.403 V. 7 The Five Sons 404 A man has five sons. Since he can’t feed them, he tells them: “Go out into the world and learn some craft. You must be back in a year.”405 They all return at the appointed time. When they sit down to dinner, they hear a bird sing. The youngest runs out to listen to it. When he goes back in, their father asks each of them about their crafts. The oldest has learned the art of stealing and has become a master thief;406 the second shipbuilding; the third archery; the fourth knows the herbs that bring a dead person back to life. Finally, the fifth understands the language of birds. “Well,” says the father, “what did the bird outside say?” “He said that an ogre took away a king’s daughter and left her on the peak of a cliff. Whoever brings her back will re-

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

343

ceive her as wife.” “We are really in luck!” the brothers cry out. The second brother builds a ship, on which they sail to the cliff.407 The ogre is asleep with his head resting on the girl’s womb. They signal her to be quiet and to say nothing. Then they place a large stone under the sleeping ogre and take the girl away.408 They leave with her, but the ogre wakes up and follows them in a cloud.409 The third brother, the shooter, takes his bow and shoots an arrow through the ogre’s eye. Terrified, the young woman drops dead, but the fourth brother saves her by looking for an herb, which he puts it in her mouth, and she comes back to life. The king rejoices greatly but doesn’t know which of the five brothers should receive the young woman, because each of them deserves her equally. Finally, the father requests her for himself, for he was the one who had his sons learn a craft, and the king gives her to him.410 V. 8 Nennillo and Nennella 411 A man has two children, Nennillo and Nennella, from his first wife. He loves them very much, but their stepmother is an evil woman who doesn’t give the children enough to eat and torments them so much that the unhappy father, as a result of her oppression, finally takes them out into the forest, gives them a piece of bread, and abandons them with these words: “If you want to come home, just follow the path of ashes that I have scattered.”412 The children find their way easily and arrive at home late. Their stepmother screams and raves, and their father leads them back into the forest and tells them that if they want to come home, they should follow the path of bran that he has scattered. But the bran is blown away, and they get lost and wander in the forest for a couple of days and eat acorns and chestnuts.413 Then God saves them.414 A king is hunting in the forest. As soon as hear the dogs barking, Nennillo flees into a hollow tree, but Nennella runs away and arrives at the sea, where a fisherman and his wife welcome the poor child.415 The dogs run to the tree and bark; the king finds the handsome boy and takes him with him. When he grows up, he becomes an expert cutler. In the meantime, Nennella has to flee from pirates with the couple who care for her, and in the middle of the sea their little boat capsizes.416 A magical fish swallows Nennella. In its belly, she finds a tidy dwelling.417 It swims with her to a rocky shore, where at that very moment Nennillo is sharpening a knife. Nennella sees him through the fish’s throat and calls to him: “Oh brother, brother! The knives are sharpened, the table is set, but without you I must spend my life in a fish!”418 He pays no attention, but the king sees the fish and hears the repeated appeal: “Oh, brother, brother!” The fish gets

344 a p p e n d i x

closer, lays its head on the shore, and Nennella appears on dry land in all her beauty. The king proclaims that the person who lost two children, Nennillo and Nennella, in the forest should present himself at the royal palace.419 Their father arrives and recognizes them with joy;420 their stepmother is summoned and asked what the right punishment would be for a person who exposed those two beautiful children to a deadly danger. She answers: “[That person should be] locked up in a barrel and rolled down a mountain.” This self-imposed verdict is carried out and the king provides for the two siblings.421 V. 9 The Three Citrons 422 A king has a son who is the apple of his eye but who, to his father’s chagrin, doesn’t want to hear about marriage.423 One day, sitting at the table, he cuts his finger, and two drops of blood fall in the milk that he has in front of him.424 And while he contemplates the beautiful mixture of red and white, the thought comes to his mind that he must find a woman who is white as the milk and red as the two drops of blood. He heads out and travels through the world;425 he finally reaches an island and finds an old woman there, to whom he recounts his fate.426 She tells him to depart so that he may attain his happiness.427 A second elderly woman tells him the same; he meets a third one who is sitting on a wheel, with all kinds of food beside her.428 She gives him three citrons and a beautiful knife, and tells him to return to his kingdom, and he will find a fountain in a forest, and she explains what he must do with the three citrons and how everything will come to pass.429 He does indeed find a fountain, takes out the knife, and cuts one of the citrons.430 At once, the most beautiful woman emerges and says: “Give me something to drink.”431 Overwhelmed by her appearance, however, he pays no attention, and she disappears. The same thing happens with the second citron. Finally, with the third citron he quickly offers her some water and holds in his arms a girl of marvelous beauty, who is as white as milk, as red as blood.432 He then says: “I will go home and look for clothes and come back for you in splendor. In the meantime, climb up this tree, which forms a summerhouse within its enclosure.” Meanwhile, an ugly maidservant is sent to fetch water from the fountain.433 She sees the fairy reflected in the surface of the stream; she believes it is her own image, and amazed by her beauty she breaks the jug to pieces and goes home.434 Her mistress gives her a new jug, but things go the way they did the first time. She gets sternly reprimanded and receives a goatskin that she must fill up.

the grimms’ adaptations of basile

345

Since she believes once again that she is looking at her own great beauty, she takes a pin from her hair and pricks the leather container so that the water spurts out from a hundred holes. The fairy then bursts out laughing. “Ah, you are the one,” says the maidservant, “who misled me. But what are you doing here, beautiful girl?” The fairy tells her everything. The black maid says: “Come, I’ll comb and arrange your hair before your husband returns.” The fairy accepts the offer and comes down the tree, but the wicked woman sticks a pin into her breast.435 “Dove! Dove!,” cries the fairy, who turns into a dove and flies away. The king’s son soon arrives to pick up his bride. He is beside himself when he finds the black maidservant. But she succeeds in making him believe that she is the right woman, and he takes her with him.436 Great preparations are made for the wedding party. In the kitchen, there is slaughtering and cleaning. A beautiful dove lands at the kitchen window and says: “Cook in the kitchen, what is the king doing with the black bride?”437 The cook ignores the bird, but when the dove returns a second and a third time and asks the same question, the cook goes and tells the bride. She understands well and tells him to kill the dove and cook it. The cook seizes it, douses it with hot water and then plucks it, and throws the water with some of the feathers onto a tree.438 After three days, a citron tree sprouts and grows. From a window, the king sees the tree and asks how it got there, and the cook tells him the entire course of events. The king orders that the tree be cared for, and that any harm inflicted on the tree will be punishable by law. After a few days, three fine citrons appear, identical to those he had received from the old woman. He has them plucked from the tree and takes them to his chamber; he has a large container of water brought in, and since he also has his knife, handy, he does what he did by the fountain in the woods. From the third citron the right bride appears, receives water, stays with him, and tells him everything. The black woman is burned, and her ashes are scattered to the wind. V. 10 Conclusion to the introduction 439 It is now Zoza’s turn to tell a story. She begins with her own fate, speaks of her natural melancholy, the event that led to her laughter, but even more to her tears; the old woman’s curse; her pilgrimage to the tomb and her treacherous sleep. The black woman flies into a rage and wants her to be silenced, but the king’s son dismisses her and lets Zoza continue. Then she tells about the black woman’s betrayal, and since the woman says nothing and is found guilty, he orders that she be buried alive.440 Finally, he marries Zoza.

Notes

dancing backward: an introduction 1. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 74. 2. Brothers Grimm, “Einleitung,” in Irische Elfenmärchen, trans. Brothers Grimm (Leipzig: Friedrich Fleischer, 1826), lxxxiii. Cf. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, 172, n. 34. 3. I study this literature in Satan’s Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 54–95. 4. Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 3, trans. James Steven Stallybrass (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1882–88), 1051. Stallybrass consulted the fourth edition of Grimm’s immense work. I use “German” instead of “Teutonic” because the original title is Deutsche Mythologie. 5. Hans Christian Andersen, Fairy Tales, trans. Tiina Nunnally (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 207–12: 210. 6. On the appearance of demons, see my In the Company of Demons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 53. 7. Novalis, The Universal Brouillon, fragment 234, in Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, ed. Jochen Schulte-Sasse and others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 230. 8. Donald Haase, “Introduction,” in The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, edited by Donald Haase (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 8–23: 10. 9. Giuseppe Gatto, La fiaba di tradizione orale (Milan: LED, 2006), 20. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 10. Nicole Belmont, Poétique du conte: Essai sur le conte de tradition orale (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 33. 11. Ibid., 34. 12. Günter Arnold, “Herders Projekt einer Märchensammlung,” Jahrbuch für Volkskunde und Kulturgeschichte 27 (1984), 99–106: 103–04. 13. Ibid., 101. 14. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, “The Publishing History of Grimms’ Tales,” in The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 78–101: 79. Bottigheimer stresses that the Grimms’ collection was not an instant classic. 15. Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), Kindle edition, location 243.

348

notes to pages 4–12

16. Rudolf Schenda, “Semiliterate and Semi-Oral Processes,” trans. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies (2007/1), 127–40: 131. 17. Gatto, La fiaba di tradizione orale, 164. 18. Jack Goody, Myth, Ritual and the Oral (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Kindle edition, location 3334. 19. Jens E. Sennewald, Das Buch, das wir sind (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), 52–53. 20. Ibid., 121. 21. Alan Dundes, Folklore Matters (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 44. 22. Ibid., 45. 23. James W. Heising, “Bruno Bettelheim and the Fairy Tale,” Children’s Literature 6 (1977): 94. I find this citation in Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), Kindle edition, location 194. 24. Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell, 286. 25. Patrick Colm Hogan, The Culture of Conformism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 59. 26. Ibid., 70. 27. Ikuko Itoh, Mizuo Shinonome, Jun-ichi Satoh, Princess Tutu, vol. 1 (ADV Manga, 2005), 3. 28. Hogan, The Culture of Conformism, 87 and 88. 29. “La vida secreta de las plantas,” Espacio en blanco, RNE Radio nacional de España, July 1, 2012. 30. Maria Tatar, “Reading the Grimms’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales: Origins and Cultural Effects of the Collection,” in The Annotated Brothers Grimm, ed. Maria Tatar (New York: Norton, 2004), xxvii–xlvii: xxxiii. 31. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 10 and 262–63. 32. Ibid., 10. 33. Ibid., 273. 34. Jeff D. Leach, “Dirtying Up Our Diet,” New York Times, June 20, 2012. 35. Louise Murphy, The True Story of Hansel and Gretel: A Novel of War and Survival (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 5. 36. See Luciano Morbiato, “Saggio introduttivo,” in Contastorie: Antologia di testi narrativi popolari veneti (Padua: CLEUP, 2009), 13–50: 15. 37. Giovan Battista della Porta, L’arte del ricordare, in Ars Reminiscendi, ed. Raffaele Sirri (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1996), chap. 11, 78. In the Renaissance, favola could certainly mean fairy tale, but writers also spoke of the favole dei poeti in the sense of an imaginary or even mythic tale. On this subject, see: Claudio Marazzini, Le fiabe (Rome: Carocci, 2005), 93–94. 38. Guillermo del Toro, “The Power of Myth,” in Pan’s Labyrinth, disc 2 (New Line Home Video, 2007). 39. Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell, location 2194. 40. Simon Dentith, Parody (New York: Routledge, 2000), Kindle edition, location 261. 41. Dentith, Parody, location 733. 42. Maria Tatar, “Introduction,” in The Fairies Return or New Tales for Old, compiled by Peter Davies (1934; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1–36: 6. 43. Marazzini, Le fiabe, 26. 44. Frank Gado, “Robert Coover,” in First Person: Conversations on Writers and Writing (New York: Union College Press, 1973), 142–59: 152. 45. Michael Taussig, Beauty and the Beast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), Kindle edition, location 690. 46. Jan de Vries, “Theories Concerning ‘Nature Myths,’ ” in Sacred Narratives, edited by Alan Dundes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 30–40: 31. 47. Adalbert Kuhn, Die Herabkunft des Feuers und des Göttertranks, ed. Ernst Kuhn (Güther-

notes to pages 12–25

349

sloh: Verlag von C. Bertelsmann, 1886), 19. On Kuhn’s approach to mythology, see Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 64–65 and 238–39. See also ibid., 47–137. 48. On Müller’s view of myth as a disease of language, see ibid., 66–68. 49. Marazzini, Le fiabe, 12–13. 50. Angelo de Gubernatis, Storia delle novelline popolari (Milan: Hoepli, 1883), 13. 51. Ibid., 20. 52. Laurence Coupe, Myth (New York: Routledge, 2009), 195. 53. On Bettelheim and myth, see Robert A. Segal, Myth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 99–100. 54. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in The Tolkien Reader (Ballantine Books, 1966), 33–90: 45–46. 55. Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 73. 56. Dundes, Folklore Matters, 119 (cited in Gatto, La fiaba di tradizione popolare, 99–100. 57. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd ed., trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), chap. 2, 21. 58. On the limits of Aarne and Thompson’s approach, see Nicole Belmont, Mythe, conte et enfance (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), 219. 59. Goody, Myth, Ritual and the Oral, location 97. 60. Neil Philip, “Introduction,” in The Cinderella Story (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 1–8: 4. 61. Michael Buckley, The Sisters Grimm, Book 1: The Fairy-Tale Detectives (New York: Amulet Books, 2007), 66. On the evolution of children’s literature, see Stefano Calabrese, Letteratura per l’infanzia (Milan: Bruno Mondandori, 2013). 62. Ibid., 67–68. 63. Michael Buckley, The Sisters Grimm, Book 2: The Unusual Suspects (New York: Amulet Books, 2007), 2. 64. Bill Willingham, Fables: Storybook Love (New York: DC Comics, 2004), 35. 65. Bill Willingham, Fables: The Dark Ages (New York: DC Comics, 2009), 92. 66. Goody, Myth, Ritual and the Oral, location 1632. 67. Jack Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition (New York: Norton, 2001), 684. 68. Giambattista Basile, “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” in The Tale of Tales, trans. Nancy Canepa (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 413–17: 413. 69. Suzanne Magnanini, “Postulated Routes from Naples to Paris: The Printer Antonio Bulifon and Giambattista Basile’s Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-Century France,” Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 21/1 (2007), 78–92. See also Ruth B. Bottigheimer’s remarks in Fairy Tales Framed: Early Forewords, Afterwords, and Critical Words, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 130. 70. Charles Perrault, “Sleeping Beauty,” in Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 688–95: 693. 71. Andrew Weeks, “Between God and Gibson: German Mystical and Romantic Sources of ‘The Passion of the Christ,’” The German Quarterly 78/4 (Fall 2005), 421–440: 425.

chapter one: a never ending and never told tale 1. See Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962), 95–99. Ariès summarizes this central point as follows: “At the end of the seventeenth century, while the story was becoming a new form of serious written literature, the oral recitation of stories was being abandoned by the very people for whom the fashion of the written story was intended” (96).

350

notes to pages 25–29

2. I refer to the symposium “New Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives on the Fairy Tale,” which Nancy Canepa, the most important scholar of Italian fairy tales in the United States, organized at Dartmouth College on May 28–31, 2009. For a detailed survey of the Italian tradition of fairy tales, see Nancy Canepa, “Italy,” in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, ed. Jack Zipes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 252–65. 3. Robert Coover, Briar Rose (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 25 and 84. 4. On the role of fairy tales in commercials, see Madeleine Barnoud, “Les bonnes fées de la réclame,” in Il était une fois . . . Les contes de fées, ed. Olivier Piffault (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 278–81. Barnoud holds that commercials do not preserve the “corpus” of tales that had remained “intact” until the first half of the twentieth century (280). 5. Gatto, La fiaba di tradizione orale, 20. 6. On the concept of ‘memes,’ which are units of cultural transmission, see Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale, location 658. 7. See Cristina Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 50; Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 10. 8. Kathrin Pöge-Alder, Märchenforschung: Theorien, Methoden, Interpretationen (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, 2007), 64–65. 9. Jack Goody, The Interface between the Written and the Oral (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 80. 10. Pöge-Alder, Märchenforschung, 64. Cf. Goody, Myth, Ritual and the Oral, location 977. 11. Ibid., 977–986. 12. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Routledge, 2002), Kindle edition, location 2896. See also Goody, “Heroic Societies and the Epic,” in The Interface between the Written and the Oral, 96–109. 13. Ong, Orality and Literacy, location 239. 14. On The Tale of Tales, see Nancy Canepa, From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile’s “Lo cunto de li cunti” and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999). On the origins of Basile’s book, see pp. 16–19. 15. Heinz Rölleke, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Eine Einführung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004), 14. 16. See Michele Rak, Logica della fiaba (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005), esp. pp. 8–9 and 13. Cf. Pöge-Alder, Märchenforschung, 162. On Basile and popular culture, see Suzanne Magnanini, Fairy-Tale Science: Monstrous Generation in the Tales of Straparola and Basile (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 30. 17. Schenda, “Semiliterate and Semi-Oral Processes,” 130. 18. I borrow from Ruth Bottigheimer’s introductory comments to Schenda’s “Semiliterate and Semi-Oral Processes” (127). 19. Ong, Orality and Literacy, location 405–414. 20. Ong, Orality and Literacy, location 288. 21. Nancy Canepa, “Basile, Giambattista,” in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, ed. Donald Haase (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), vol. 1, 99–101: 99. 22. Ibid., 100. 23. Belmont, Poétique du conte, 56. 24. Nancy L. Canepa, “Quanto ’nc’è da ccà a lo luoco dove aggio da ire?”: Giambattista Basile’s Quest for the Literary Fairy Tale,” in Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France, ed. Nancy L. Canepa (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 37–80: 39–40. 25. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1990), 201. 26. Cf. Ong, Orality and Literacy, location 2718–2727

notes to pages 29–33

351

27. Jack Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (New York: Routledge, 2006), 18. 28. On Straparola and the birth of European fairy tale, see Maria Tatar, “Reading The Grimms’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales,” in The Annotated Brothers Grimm, ed. Maria Tatar (New York: Norton, 2004), xxvii–xlvii: xxxvi. 29. Jack Zipes, “Introduction,” in Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), xi–xxxii: xv. 30. Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertexuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 5. 31. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 202. 32. Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick, 15. 33. Harries, Twice upon a Time, 23. 34. See Max Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, trans. Jon Erickson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 57–68. 35. Heather Maring, “Oral Theory,” in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, vol. 2, 708–17: 712. 36. Belmont, Poétique du conte, 21. 37. On Boccaccio’s Decameron in The Tale of Tales, see Nancy Canepa, “Introduction,” in Basile, The Tale of Tales, 1–31: 12–13. 38. Benedetto Croce, Saggi sulla letteratura italiana del Seicento (Bari: Laterza, 1911), 52. 39. Philipp Otto Runge, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “Von dem Machandelboom”—“Von dem Fischer un Syner Fru,” ed. Heinz Rölleke (Trier: WVT, 2008). See especially Rölleke’s introduction (7–10). 40. Walter Burkert, Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 69. 41. Burkert, Creation of the Sacred, 72. 42. Italo Calvino, “Introduzione,” in Favole italiane, vol. 1 (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), xxix and xlviii. 43. Renato Aprile, “Introduzione,” in Indice delle fiabe popolari italiane di magia, vol. 1 (Florence: Olschki, 2000), ix. 44. For the visual renditions of this myth in the Renaissance, see Joscelyn Godwin, The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance (Boston: Weiser Books, 2005), 68–71; Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 194–96. 45. See Julia Haig Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and The Golden Ass (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 53–59. 46. Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and The Golden Ass, 57. 47. Fabii Planciadis Fulgentii, Mitologiarum libri tres, in Opera, ed. Rudolph Helm (Leipzig: Teubner, 1898), book 3, chap. 6, 66–70: 69. 48. Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and The Golden Ass, 112–18. 49. Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium, 2 vols, ed. Vincenzo Romano (Bari: Laterza, 1951), book 5, chap. 22, 260. 50. Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium, 261. See Ugo De Maria, La favola di Amore e Psiche nella letteratura e nell’arte italiana (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1899), 99–100. 51. Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 90. 52. Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 106. See Virginia Swain, “Cupid and Psyche,” in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, vol. 1, 246–47; Larry DeVries, “Literary Beauties and Folk Beasts,” in Betsy Hearne, Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 155–88: 183–88.

352

notes to pages 33–45

53. Neumann, Amor and Psyche, 59. 54. See Nicoletta Morra, “Il racconto popolare in Basile e la fiaba di corte di Perrault,” in La fiaba barocca: Studi su Basile e Perrault, ed. Anna Maria Pedullà (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1999), 7–21; Maria Vittoria Botta, “Le tre fate in G. Basile e in C. Perrault: Analisi della fiaba,” in ibid., 23–35; Davide Pisano, “Per un’enciclopedia fantastica: Lo serpe di G.B. Basile,” in ibid., 37–67. 55. On “The Old Woman Who Was Skinned,” see Nancy Canepa, “‘Entertainment for the Little Ones’? Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti and the Childhood of the Literary Fairy Tale,” Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 17/1 (2003), 37–54: 49–51. 56. Jacob Grimm, “Vorrede,” in Der Pentamerone, oder Das Märchen aller Märchen von Giambattista Basile, 2 vols., trans. Felix Liebrecht (Breslau: Verlag bei Josef Mar und Komp, 1846), xi. 57. “Plus Belle que Fée,” in Les contes des contes par mademoiselle de*** (Paris: Simon Bernard, 1698), 1–95. On this author, see Harold Neemann, “Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force,” in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, vol. 2, 552–53. On Basile’s possible influence on this French volume, see Ruth Bottigheimer, “Charlotte Rose de la Force, ‘Notice Concerning the Following Story’ in The Tales of the Tales (1698),” in Fairy Tales Framed, 195–96. 58. Neil Philip, “Creativity and Tradition in the Fairy Tale,” in A Companion to the Fairy Tale, ed. Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2003), 39–55: 42. 59. Lüthi, The European Folktale, 62. 60. Ernst Bloch, Traces, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 5–6. 61. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 201. 62. “The Twelve Brothers,” in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, trans. Jack Zipes (New York: Bantam Books, 2003), 35–39: 38. 63. Giovambattista Basile, Sacri sospiri, in Il Basile spirituale, ed. Salvatore Ussia (Vercelli: Edizioni Mercurio, 1996), 115–51, madrigal 24: “Ove trovar posso io / il perduto Amor mio? / Chi di voi, donne, ha scorto . . .” (123). 64. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, vol. 1, ed. J. Arthur Hanson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), book 5, 292. 65. Vincenzo Cartari, Le vere e nove imagini de gli dei degli antichi (Padua: Pietro Paolo Tozzi, 1615), 75 and 296. 66. Cf. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 216 and 242. 67. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 405. 68. Ibid., 406. 69. Ibid., 408. 70. Ibid., 409. 71. Ibid., 410. 72. Compare W. F. H. Nicolaisen, “Time and Place,” in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, vol. 3, 973–76. 73. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 6, 329. 74. Jan-Ojvind Swahn, The Tale of Cupid and Psyche (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1955), 374: “Apuleius has tried to unite two motifs, partly, the husband in the guise of a snake . . . partly, the husband as a god . . . The snake-motif is probably the primary one.” But Georgios Megas has later questioned this conclusion. Georgios A. Megas, Das Märchen von Amor und Psyche in der griechischen Volksüberlieferung (Athens: Academy of Athens Publications, 1971), 197–98. 75. Max Lüthi, Once upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales, trans. Lee Chadeayne and Paul Gottwald (1970; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976), 137. 76. Lucrezia Marinella, Amore innamorato et impazzato (Venice: Giovambattista Combi, 1618), cantos 4 and 5.

notes to pages 45–54

353

77. Tommaso Campanella, Le poesie (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), 111. On the influence of the Italian view of Cupid on the English Renaissance, see Jane Kingsley-Smith, Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 78. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 6, 349. 79. Ibid., book 6, 353. 80. Ibid., book 6, 327. 81. Ibid., book 6, 328–29. 82. Ibid., book 5, 237. 83. Ibid., book 5, 243. 84. See Nancy Canepa, “Ogres and Fools: On the Cultural Margins of the Seicento,” in Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination, ed. Keala Jewell (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 222–46. 85. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 6, 351. 86. Cf. Stith Thompson, “Ogres and Witches,” in The Folktake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 35–40. Thompson’s analysis of numerous tales in which they appear seem to infer that the ontological boundaries between these two kinds of creatures are rather ambiguous. 87. Giambattista Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, ed. Michele Rak (Milan: Garzanti, 1998), 336–53: 346. 88. Megas, Das Märchen von Amor und Psyche in der griechischen Volksüberlieferung, 105. 89. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 6, 326–27. On the figure of the ogre in Western culture, see: Tommaso Braccini, Indagine sull’orco (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013). 90. Thompson, The Folktale, 148. Thompson analyzes the motif of the “bridge to another world,” which is “well known as an independent tale” and is reported in tales especially from India and Northern Europe. 91. Cited in Edward Sell, The Faith of Islam (Kessinger Publisher, 2004), chap. 4, 260. 92. Albericus Casinensis, Visio Alberici, ed. Paul Gerhard Schmidt, Sitzungs. der wissenschaflt. Gesellschaft und der Johann Wolfgang Goethe- Universität Frankfurt am Main, XXXV. 4 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997), 160–207: 168. Cf. Corrado Gizzi, Il ponte del capello: Elementi della tradizione islamica e della visione di Alberico nella poesia di Dante (Pescara: Ianieri, Fondazione PescarAbruzzo, 2008). 93. Albericus, Visio Alberici, 182. 94. The same bridge returns in Saint Francis’s Little Flowers, a collection of charming devotional narratives about the Italian saint. See Little Flowers of Saint Francis, trans. Robert Hopke and Paul A. Schwartz (Boston: New Seeds, 2006), chap. 21, 85–88. Chapter 21 of this abridged but lively translation of the Little Flowers corresponds to chapter 26 of the original Italian version. Benedetto Croce first proposed this possible allusion, as Michele Rak point outs (Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 942). 95. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 6, 340–41. 96. Ibid, book 6, 344–45. 97. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 201. 98. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 6, 340–41. 99. See Ruth B. Bottigheimer, “Fertility Control and the Birth of the Modern European FairyTale Heroine,” in Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches, edited by Donald Haase (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 37–51. 100. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 6, 329, 333, 335, 341. 101. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 408–9. 102. Cited in Michele Rak’s edition of Lo cunto de li cunti, 30. Basile writes under a pseudonym: Gian’ Alessio Abbattutis, “A lo rre de li viente,” in Giulio Cesare Cortese, La Vaiasseide (Naples: Novello de Bonis, 1666), 3–9: 7.

354

notes to pages 54–66

103. Ovid, Metamorphoses, books 9–15, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), book 11, v. 44, 123. On Ovid’s depiction of the Orpheus myth, see Charles Segal, Orpheus; The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 54–72. 104. I quote from: Apollodoro, Biblioteca, ed. Marina Cavalli (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), book 1, chap. 3, 8–9. See W. K. C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 25–68. 105. See Giovambattista Marino, “Orfeo, che canta & suona nel bosco di Sinibaldo Scorza,” in La galeria, ed. Marzio Pieri and Alessandra Ruffino (Trent, Italy: La Finestra, 2005), vv. 9–10 and 12, 47. 106. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 409. 107. Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 934. 108. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 409; Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 932 and 934. 109. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 6, 349. 110. Ibid., book 6, 333. 111. Ibid., book 4, 251 and 247. 112. See Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 228–33. 113. Cartari, Le vere e nove imagini de gli dei degli antichi, 151. 114. Ibid., 143. 115. Ibid., 141. On emblematic visual expression in Basile, see Canepa, “Quanto ‘nc’è da ccà a lo luoco dove aggio da ire?”: Giambattista Basile’s Quest for the Literary Fairy Tale,” 69–70. 116. Andrea Alciato, Diverse imprese (Lyon: Mathias Bonhomme, 1551), 11. 117. Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 382. 118. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 6, 353. 119. Ibid., book 6, 355. 120. Basile may also allude to the Italian saying “reggere il moccolo” (literally, to hold the candle), which describes the embarrassing situation of someone who is forced to witness a couple’s romantic encounter. As far as I know, this ironic reference has never been mentioned before. 121. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 410. 122. Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 938. 123. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 225. 124. Strozzi Cigogna, Il palagio de gl’incanti et delle gran meraviglie de gli Spiriti et di tutta la natura loro (Vicenza, 1605). 125. Armando Maggi, In the Company of Demons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) 103. Cf. Cigogna, Magiae omnifariae (Cologne: Conradi Butgenij, 1606), 1.4.4, 487. The word “fantasme” is only in the Palagio (353), and not in Magiae (488). 126. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 411. 127. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 5, 295; book 6, 339; book 6, 349; Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 936 and 938. 128. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 62–68. 129. Cf. Graham Anderson, Fairytale in the Ancient World (New York: Routledge, 2000), 62. 130. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 6, 355. 131. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 200. 132. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 4, 251; book 5, 253. 133. Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 926. 134. Grimm, “Vorrede,” in Der Pentamerone, oder Das Märchen aller Märchen von Giambattista Basile, xi. 135. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 405. 136. Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 710 (“testimonnie de la ‘gnoranzia”) Cf. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 318 (“testimonials of ignorance”).

notes to pages 66–72

355

137. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 2. 138. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 412. 139. Ibid., 444. 140. Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, 38.

chapter two: orpheus, the king of the birds 1. Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998), 153. 2. Ibid., 191. 3. Umberto Eco, “On Some Functions of Literature,” in On Literature, trans. Martin McLaughlin (New York: Harcourt, 2004), 1–15: 8 and 11. 4. Laura Gonzenbach, Sicilianische Märchen (Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1870), 93–103. 5. The German title is “Der König Stiglitz” (King Goldfinch). The original Sicilian cardiddu is placed in a footnote (93). 6. For a detailed reconstruction of Gonzenbach’s life and collection, see Luisa Rubini, Fiabe e mercanti in Sicilia—La raccolta Gonzenbach (Florence: Olschki, 1998); Luisa Rubini, “Introduzione,” in Laura Gonzenbach, Fiabe siciliane, ed. Luisa Rubini (Rome: Donzelli, 1999), xv–xxix. 7. Rubini, “Introduzione,” in Gonzenbach, Fiabe siciliane, xvii. 8. Ibid., xvii–xix. 9. Ibid., xx–xxi. 10. Jack Zipes, “Laura Gonzenbach’s Buried Treasure,” in Laura Gonzenbach, Beautiful Angiola: The Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairytales, trans. Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 2003), xi– xxvii: xii. Zipes first published his translation in two books, chose a different title, and modified the original order of the tales both in the German version and the more recent Italian translation. The tale “Zafarana” appears in the second volume: Laura Gonzenbach, The Robber with a Witch’s Head, trans. Jack Zipes (New York: Routledge, 2004), 142–48. Zipes’s two-part translation was reissued by Routledge as a single volume, titled Beautiful Angiola, in 2005. For my abridged versions of the Sicilian tales I have consulted Zipes’s translation. 11. Zipes, “Laura Gonzenbach’s Buried Treasure,” xii. 12. Jennifer Fox, “The Creator Gods: Romantic Nationalism and the Engenderment of Women in Folklore,” in Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, ed. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, and M. Jane Young (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 29–40: 30. 13. Debora Kodish, “Absent Gender, Silent Encounter,” in Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, 41–50: 43. 14. Rubini, “Introduzione,” in Gonzenbach, Fiabe siciliane, xx. 15. Rudolf Schenda, “La donna e il lavoro nelle fiabe siciliane raccolte da Laura Gonzenbach e Giuseppe Pitrè,” in Folklore e letteratura popolare: Italia-Germania-Francia, trans. Maria Chiara Figliozzi and Ingeborg Walter (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1986), 279–87: 282. 16. See Schenda, “La donna e il lavoro nelle fiabe siciliane,” 287. On Laura Gonzenbach, see also Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale, Kindle edition, location 2841–3001. 17. Cf. Rubini, “Introduzione,” in Gonzenbach, Fiabe siciliane, xxvi. 18. Gonzenbach, Sicilianische Märchen: “Ach, weh mir!” (93). 19. Gonzenbach, Sicilianische Märchen, 94. The text uses the German word Hexe (witch), but a footnote explains that the original Sicilian term used by the oral narrator was mamma draja (literally mother-dragon), which is closer to “ogress” than to “witch.” 20. Gonzenbach, Sicilianische Märchen, 101: “noch dazu in diesem Zustand.”

356

notes to pages 76–94

21. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 6, 355. 22. Schenda, “La donna e il lavoro nelle fiabe siciliane,” 281. In Schenda’s view, the impossible tasks in this tale show a cultural view of physical work as an “unbearable burden” that only magic can alleviate. 23. I quote from the following translation in modern English: “Sir Orfeo,” in Medieval English Verse, ed. Brian Stone (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986), 213–29: 222. For a brief analysis of this text in the evolution of the Orpheus myth, see Davide Susanetti, Favole antiche. Mito Greco e tradizione letteraria europea (Rome: Carocci, 2005), 109. 24. Here and elsewhere I quote from The New Jerusalem Bible, Standard Edition (New York: Doubleday, 1998). 25. Gonzenbach, Sicilianische Märchen, 101. 26. Ibid., 103.

c h a p t e r t h r e e : m e l a n c h o ly i s t h e b e s t s t o ry t e l l e r 1. The rare modern exceptions to this rule have a satirical undertone. See, for instance, Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal (1978), which narrates a love affair backward, and Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along (1981). Both works aim at debunking basic, clichéd ideas and representations about love and self-discovery. 2. Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 33 and 41. 3. Gonzenbach, The Robber with a Witch’s Head, 47–57; Gonzenbach, Sicilianische Märchen, 73– 84; Gonzenbach, Fiabe siciliane, 64–73. 4. Gonzenbach, Sicilianische Märchen, 74. 5. Ibid., 76: “Ich beschwöre dich bei dem Namen Gottes.” 6. The translation in The Robber with a Witch’s Head, 50, has “date tree” instead of “fig tree” (Feigenbaum in Sicilianische Märchen, 77; fico in Fiabe siciliane, 67). 7. To more accurately render the German Riesin (Sicilianische Märchen, 77), I use “giantess” here rather than “ogress” or orca, the words used in the English and Italian versions. Gonzenbach uses the masculine form Riese (plural Riesen) to define the huge men hitting the anvil with clubs. When speaking of these monstrous men, the Italian and English versions have “giants” (giganti). Cf. Jacob and Wilhelm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 8, 952–53. 8. “Erhob sich” (arose) evokes the image of the girl coming out of the box itself (Sicilianische Märchen, 80). 9. Zipes’s English translation is incomplete. The reference to the bird dropping salt is missing, and consequently the prince’s angry reaction and the cook’s confusion is inexplicable (The Robber with a Witch’s Head, 56). The Italian interpretation replaces salt with drops of blood (Fiabe siciliane, 72). See Gonzenbach, Sicilianische Märchen, 83. 10. Gonzenbach, Sicilianische Märchen, 84: “Die Sklavin ward verblendet.” 11. Clemens Brentano, “Das Märchen von Rosenblättchen,” in Italienische Märchen (1810–20; Modautal-Neunkirchen: Anrich, 1980), 99–114:108–9. 12. Brüder Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen: Die handschriftliche Urfassung von 1810, ed. Heinz Rölleke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2007), N. 34, “Marienkind,” 58–60. 13. See my Satan’s Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 137–79. 14. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 36–37. 15. Ibid., 37. 16. Ibid., 38. 17. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications, 2006), 117.

notes to pages 95–114

357

18. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 41. 19. See Fabienne Feller-Geissdörfer, Giambattista Basile und die italienische Märchentradition (München: Martin Meidenbauer, 2006). 20. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 439. 21. Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, “Le tre cetra,” 994. The prince is “nsammorato” and “nsateco.” 22. See Theo Meder, “Fuga magica,” in Ton Dekker, Jurjen van der Kooi, and Theo Meder, Dizionario delle fiabe e delle favole, trans. Fernando Tempesti (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2003), 202–8: 206–7. 23. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, 196. 24. Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, “The Story of the Grail (Perceval),” trans. William W. Kibler (New York: Penguin, 1991), 432. 25. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 439. 26. Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 1008. My translation. 27. Gonzenbach, Sicilianische Märchen, 84. 28. Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 1016. 29. Ibid., 1018. 30. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 445. 31. See Michelangelo Picone, “La cornice novellistica dal ‘Decameron’ al ‘Pentamerone,’” in Giovan Battista Basile e l’invenzione della fiaba, ed. Michelangelo Picone and Alfred Messerli (Ravenna: Longo, 2004), 105–20: 120. Picone connects the final reference to ‘honey’ to Giulio Cesare Cortese’s novel Li travagliuse ammure de Ciullo e de Perna (The Troubled Love Story of Ciullo and Perna) and, in particular, to Cortese’s dedicatory letter to Basile, in which Cortese presents Boccaccio as a bear (106). 32. I quote from: Seneca, Lettere morali a Lucilio, 2 vols., edited by Fernando Solinas (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), book 11, letter 84, 566–70. 33. Compare Ezekiel 3.1–3.

chapter four: what we leave behind 1. On the lack of flashbacks in fairy tales, see Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 56. 2. Ibid., 141. 3. Ibid., 65. 4. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 83–109: 94. 5. Michele Rak, Da Cenerentola a Cappuccetto Rosso: Breve storia illustrata della fiaba barocca (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2007), 16–17 and 49. 6. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 101. 7. Kermode speaks of “our deep need for intelligible Ends. We project ourselves . . . past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle.” Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8. 8. Max Lüthi, Once upon a Time, 142. 9. Cf. Basile, The Tale of Tales, “The Dove,” 184–94. 10. Vincenzo Cartari, Le imagini de gli dei degli antichi, ed. Ginetta Auzzas, Federica Martignano, Manlio Pastore Stocchi, Paola Rigo (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1996), “Venere,” 469. 11. See Feller-Geissdörfer Giambattista Basile und die italienische Märchentradition, 135–54. 12. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 53. 13. Ovid, Fasti, trans. James George Frazer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), book 4, vv. 140–45, 199. 14. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 108–14: 112.

358

notes to pages 116–128

15. Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 12. 16. Ibid., 614–31. 17. Ibid., 622. 18. Ibid., 198–217. 19. Ibid., 14. 20. Basile, The Tale of Tales, third tale of the first day, 62. 21. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 55. 22. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 4, 249. 23. Italo Calvino, “La mappa delle metafore,” in Sulla fiaba (Milan: Mondadori, 2011), 135– 50: 140. 24. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 56. 25. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 1, vv. 553–55, 41. 26. Ibid., book 1, v. 552, 41. 27. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 57. 28. Ibid., 58. 29. Ibid., 60.

c h a p t e r f i v e : t h e fa i ry, t h e m y r t l e , and the myrtle-maiden 1. Clemens Brentano’s Italienische Märchen, 1805–1810/20, was published posthumously in 1846–47. On Brentano’s fairy tales, see Susanne Mittag, Clemens Brentano: “Eine Autobiographie in der Form” (Heidelberg: Carl Winter–Universitätsverlag, 1978), 135–46; John Fetzer, Clemens Brentano (Boston: Twaine, 1981), 106–30; Helene M. Kastinger Riley, Clemens Brentano (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985), 108–25; Hartwig Schultz, Clemens Brentano (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), 90–126. For a brief introduction to Brentano’s view of fairy tales, see Elizabeth Wanning Harries, “Brentano, Clemens,” in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, vol. 1, 137–38; Mary Beth Stein, “Brentano, Clemens,” in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, 62. 2. Jacob Grimm, “Vorrede,” in Der Pentamerone, oder Das Märchen aller Märchen von Giambattista Basile, vi. 3. On Liebrecht’s translation and his contacts with Jacob Grimm, see Rudolf Schenda, “Giovanni Battista Basile in Germania,” in Folklore e letteratura popolare: Italia-Germania-Francia, 57– 64: 62–63; Manfred Grätz, “The Reception of Basile’s Pentamerone in Germany,” Romanic Review 99/3–4 (2008), 227–38: 235–36. 4. Grimm, “Vorrede,” in Der Pentamerone, xi. 5. Heinz Rölleke, “Der Tod in den Märchen der Brüder Grimm,” in Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Quellen und Studien (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004), 251–59: 255. 6. Grimm, “Vorrede,” in Der Pentamerone, v and vii–viii. 7. Ibid., ix. 8. C. M. Wieland, “Pervonte, Oder die Wünsche,” in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 18 (Leipzig: Georg Joachim Göschen, 1796), part 1, 77 and 79. 9. Grätz, “The Reception of Basile’s Pentamerone in Germany,” 229. 10. Grimm, “Vorrede,” in Der Pentamerone, viii. 11. Ibid., ix. 12. See Nancy Canepa’s explanation in Basile, The Tale of Tales, 126. 13. Basile, “The Crucible,” in The Tale of Tales, 126–39: 127. 14. Ibid., 136. 15. “Die Heidelbeerstrauch,” in Kinder- und Hausmärchen: Gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm, vol. 3 (1822 edition), 282–84.

notes to pages 129–140

359

16. Der Pentamerone, vol. 1, 28. 17. “Der Jungfernstein,” in Deutsche Sagen, ed. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (Berlin: in der Nicolaischen Buchhandlung, 1816), chap. 228, 308–9. 18. Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, “Tanzliedchen im Grünen,” in Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte Deutsche Lieder, vol. 3, ed. Heinz Rölleke (Stuttgart: Reklam, 2006), 290. On this important collection, see Kastinger Riley, Clemens Brentano, 29–32. 19. Arnim and Brentano, “Kommentar,” in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, vol. 3, 448. 20. Grimm, “Vorrede,” in Der Pentamerone, vii. 21. Bottigheimer, Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 52. 22. Ibid., 53–54. Cf. Lutz Röhrich, “Das Bild der Frau im Märchen und im Volkslied,” in Das selbstverständliche Wunder, ed. Wilhelm Solms and Charlotte Oberfeld (Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1986), 83–108; Heinz Rölleke, “Die Frau in den Märchen der Brüder Grimm,” in Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Quellen und Studien, 184–95. 23. Clemens Brentano, “Das Märchen von dem Myrtenfräulein,” in Italienische Märchen (Mannheim: Albatros Verlag, 2001), 26–38: 30. 24. See Lawrence O. Frye, Poetic Wreaths: Art, Death and Narration in the Märchen of Clemens Brentano (Heidelberg: Carl Winter–Universitätsverlag, 1989), 13–27. 25. Clemens Brentano, Rheinmärchen, in Werke, ed. Friedhelm Kemp (München: Carl Hanser, 1965), vol. 3, 9–294. 26. In Fairy Tales of the Rhine, Brentano includes a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche tale in which Cupid is a fisherman turned into a beaver by a grumpy miller, who demands that his customers pay him not with money but by telling him a new German word. Brentano, Rheinmärchen, 246. 27. Fetzer, Clemens Brentano, 106–7. 28. Ibid., 107. See Hans-Joachim Lope, “‘Der Reiz des Fremden’: Exotismus der Ferne und Exotismus der Nähe in den europäischen Literaturen,” in Europäische Romantik III: Restauration und Revolution, ed. Norbert Altenhofer und Alfred Estermann (Wiesbaden: AULA-Verlag, 1985), 619–48: 630–32. 29. Fetzer gives a good summary of The Fairy Tales of the Rhine (Clemens Brentano, 107–11). 30. For an overview of these ‘minor’ tales, see Fetzer, Clemens Brentano, 116–19. 31. Frye, Poetic Wreaths, 19. 32. Ibid., 2. 33. Mittag, Clemens Brentano, 29. 34. Ibid., 136. 35. Ibid., 47. 36. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 52. 37. Brentano, “Das Märchen von dem Myrtenfräulein,” 26. 38. Frye, Poetic Wreaths, 4. 39. Brentano, “Das Märchen von Fanferlieschen Schönefußchen,” in Italienische Märchen, 97– 150:125. 40. Ibid., 125–26. 41. Ibid., 126. 42. Brentano, “Das Märchen von Rosenblättchen,” in Italienische Märchen, 47–57: 51. 43. Brentano, “Das Märchen von Fanferlieschen Schönefußchen,” 148. 44. Ibid., 143. 45. “The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs,” in The Complete Fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, 109–16; “The Blue Light,” in ibid., 418–21. 46. Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 54. 47. Brentano, “Das Märchen von dem Myrtenfräulein,” 28. 48. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 53.

360

notes to pages 140–150

49. Brentano, “Das Märchen von dem Myrtenfräulein,” 28. 50. Ibid.,29. 51. Ibid., 30. 52. Ibid., 31, 30, 32. 53. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 57. 54. Ibid., 58. I slightly modify Canepa’s translation. 55. Brentano, “Das Märchen von dem Myrtenfräulein,” 36. 56. Clemens Brentano, “Erzählung aus der Französischen Revolution,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 19, ed. Gerhard Kluge (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1987), 359–81: 360. 57. Brentano, “Chronica des fahrenden Schülers (I. Fassung),” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Kluge, vol. 19, 87–177: 89. 58. Brentano, “Die mehreren Wehrmüller und ungarischen Nationalgesichter,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Kluge, vol. 19, 253–311: 282. 59. Clemens Brentano, Anna Katharina Emmerick–Biographie, in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 28.1, ed. Jürg Mathes (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1981), 539. 60. Ibid., 541. 61. Ibid., 542. 62. I quote from Clemens Brentano, Werke, vol. 1, ed. Wolfgang Frühwald, Bernhard Gajek, and Friedhelm Kemp (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1968), 1129. Frye mentions this vision in Poetic Wreaths, 9. 63. Brentano, “Das Märchen von dem Myrtenfräulein,” 36. 64. Ibid., 37. 65. Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), book 4, v. 32, 279. 66. Brentano, “Das Märchen von dem Myrtenfräulein,” 37. 67. Ibid., 38.

chapter six: how to undo

t h e ta l e o f ta l e s

1. Clemens Brentano, “Die ersten Tagebuchaufzeichnungen,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes vol. 28.1, 150. 2. On the multiple connotations of the term “writer” (Schreiber and Schriftsteller) in Brentano, see Wolfgang Frühwald, Das Spätwerk Clemens Brentanos (1815–1842) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1977), 262–64. Frühwald explains that Brentano’s concept of writer includes chronicler and Prophet. For Brentano, Anna Katharina was a “real source, a real connection to the dream world” (263). 3. Kastinger Riley, Clemens Brentano, 53. On Brentano’s relationship with Anna Katharina, see 50–59. 4. See Harry Tucker Jr., “Clemens Brentano: The Imagery of Despair and Salvation,” Modern Language Quarterly, 14/3 (September 1953), 284–97. 5. Frühwald, Das Spätwerk Clemens Brentanos, 258–59, 266–70. 6. Brentano, “Die ersten Tagebuchaufzeichnungen,” 15, 16, 64, 67, 68. 7. On these two versions, see Schultz, Clemens Brentano, 108–9; Frye, Poetic Wreaths, 67. On the challenges of translating the names of Brentano’s characters into English, see David Blamires, Telling Tales: The Impact of Germany on English Children’s Books 1780–1918 (Cambridge, UK: OpenBook Publishers, 2009), 268–74. I borrow the translation “Dear-my-Soul” (Liebseelchen) from Fairy Tales from Brentano, trans. Kate Freiligrath Kroeker (London: T. Fisher Unwin 1885). This is a selection of four of Brentano’s ‘Italian’ fairy tales. It includes the first, but not the second, rewriting of Basile’s frame tale. 8. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 37.

notes to pages 150–164

361

9. Clemens Brentano, “Das Märchen von Schnürlieschen,” in Italienische Märchen, in Werke, vol. 3 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965), 600–14: 601 and 613. 10. Ibid., 297 and 601. 11. I quote from Fairy Tales from Brentano, 10. 12. Ibid., 15. 13. Brentano, “Gockel und Hinkel,” in Italienische Märchen, 484–565: 552. On this tale, see, for instance, Stefan Willer, “‘Des Hahnen Ahn’: Verwandlung und Verwandtschaft bei Clemens Brentano,” in Gabe, Tausch, Verwandlung, ed. Ulrike Landfester and Ralf Simon (Würzug: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), 207–26; Ulrike Landfester, “Kreuzungen, Körperbild und Textproduktion in Clemens Brentanos Das bittere Leiden unseres Herrn Jesu Christi (1834) und Gockel, Hinkel und Gackeleia (1838),” in Gabe, Tausch, Verwandlung, 227–50. 14. Brentano, “Das Märchen von Schnürlieschen,” in Italienische Märchen, 602. 15. Ibid., 605. 16. Ibid., 606. 17. Ibid., 607. 18. Brentano, “Die ersten Tagebuchaufzeichnungen,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.1, 127. 19. “Lesarten und Erläuterungen,” in Clemens Brentano, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.2, 16–17. 20. Weeks, “Between God and Gibson: German Mystical and Romantic Sources of ‘The Passion of the Christ,’” 427. 21. Brentano, “Die ersten Tagebuchaufzeichnungen,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.1,126–27. 22. Ibid., 124. 23. “Lesarten und Erläuterungen,” in Brentano, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.2, 161. 24. I borrow this quotation from Friedrich Schlegel’s writings from Andrea Polaschegg, “‘Totale Verschiedenheit.’ Zur physikalischen Ethnographie der Vergangenheit in der Romantik,” in Kultur-Schreiben als Romantisches Project, ed. David E. Wellbery (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012), 257–73: 260. See Lope, “‘Der Reiz des Fremden’: Exotismus der Ferne und Exotismus der Nähe in den europäischen Literaturen,” in Europäische Romantik III: Restauration und Revolution. In particular, Lope stresses that the Orient represents a recurrent theme in the vast Romantic literature on the ‘exotic’ (621). 25. Cf. Polaschegg, “‘Totale Verschiedenheit.’ Zur physikalischen Ethnographie der Vergangenheit in der Romantik,” 264. 26. Brentano, “Die ersten Tagebuchaufzeichnungen,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.1, 50. 27. Ibid., 76. 28. Ibid., 172. 29. Ibid., 65. 30. Ibid., 92. 31. Ibid., 124–25. 32. Ibid., 125–26. 33. I find this brief biographical information about Luise Hensel in “Lesarten und Erläuterungen,” in Clemens Brentano, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.2, 89. 34. See, for instance, the vision she had during the night of December 6–7, where she sees the entire holy family. Brentano, “Die ersten Tagebuchaufzeichnungen,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.1, 68. 35. Ibid., 45. 36. Ibid., 30.

362

notes to pages 165–173

37. Brentano, “Kindheit und erste Jugendzeit,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.1, 296. 38. Brentano, “Die ersten Tagebuchaufzeichnungen,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.1, 64. See also page 53. 39. Cf. “Lesarten und Erläuterungen,” in Brentano, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.2, 126. For an English translation, see Life of Anne Catherine Emmerich, in Anne Catherine Emmerich, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1983), 14. 40. See my Introduction to Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi: Selected Revelations (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2000), 5–53. 41. Brentano, “Die ersten Tagebuchaufzeichnungen,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.1, 88–89. 42. According to the commentators of Brentano’s journal, the two battles concerned Luise’s conversion and the state investigation about the disappearance of Anna Katharina’s stigmata, although the chronology is problematic. The wounds on the mystic’s body healed on December 28, 1818, and Luise converted to Catholicism on December 7, 1818. Cf. “Lesarten und Erläuterungen,” in Brentano, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.2, 18 and 144. 43. This is the first vision in which Brentano appears as the Pilgrim. “Lesarten und Erläuterungen,” in Clemens Brentano, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.2, 141. 44. Brentano, “Die ersten Tagebuchaufzeichnungen,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Mathes, vol. 28.1, 81–82.

chapter seven: where are the ogresses of yesteryear? 1. Heinz Rölleke, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm Eine Einführung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004), 14. 2. Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (Berlin: Keimer, 1822), 276–371. 3. Rölleke, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Eine Einführung, 14–15. 4. See Pierre Péju, “Fidélité et creation chez les frères Grimm,” in Il était une fois . . . les contes de fées, 121–29: 128. 5. Calvino, “Le fiabe del focolare di Jacob e Wilhelm Grimm,” in Sulla fiaba, 95–106: 95. 6. Calvino, “La mappa delle metafore,” in Sulla fiaba, 135–50: 145. 7. Calvino, “Quickness,” in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Kindle edition, location 493. On Calvino and the Grimms, see Giorgio Cusatelli, “Il modello dei Grimm,” in Inchiesta sulle fate: Italo Calvino e la fiaba, ed. Delia Frigessi (Bergamo: Lubrina Editore, 1988),103–8. Calvino expresses his skepticism toward the alleged pristine purity of dialect in more than one essay. For a clear synthesis of his view, see Calvino, “L’antilingua,” in Una pietra sopra (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), 150–55. 8. Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822 edition), 277. 9. I quote from Maria Tatar’s translation of the Grimms’ preface to the first edition of their collection: Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), “Appendix C,” 258. 10. Bottigheimer, Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys, 15. See also Shawn C. Jarvis, “German Tales,” in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, vol. 2, 404–13. 11. Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 33. 12. Ibid., 32. 13. Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822 edition), 278. 14. Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 31. 15. Carol Lisa Tully, Creating a National Identity (Stuttgart: Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1997), 136; Jack Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick, 81–82.

notes to pages 173–184

363

16. Zipes, The Brothers Grimm, 31. 17. See Reinhold Steig, Clemens Brentano und die Brüder Grimm (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1914), 185–93; Rölleke, “Clemens Brentano and die Brüder Grimm im Spiegel ihrer Märchen,” in Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Quellen und Studien, 57–66: 61. 18. Clemens Brentano, Briefe, ed. Friedrich Seebass (Nürnberg: Carl, 1951), vol. 2, 86–88: 88. Brentano wrote this letter in January 1813. See Fabian Lampart, “The Turn to History and the Volk: Brentano, Arnim, and the Grimm Brothers,” in The Literature of German Romanticism, ed. Dennis F. Mahoney (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 171–90: 177–78. 19. Wilhelm Grimm mentioned this to his brother Jacob in a letter. See Rölleke, Clemens Brentano and die Brüder Grimm im Spiegel ihrer Märchen,” in Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Quellen und Studien, 60. 20. Ibid., 60–61. 21. Steig, Clemens Brentano und die Brüder Grimm, 187. On von Arnim’s view of Brentano’s tales, see Riley, Clemens Brentano, 111. 22. See André Jolles, Einfache Formen, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1958), 223–24. 23. Steig, Clemens Brentano und die Brüder Grimm, 188. 24. Cf. G. Ronald Murphy, S.J., The Owl, The Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Murphy contends that Wilhelm Grimm tried “to revive the religious feelings in fragmented ancient pagan stories in such a way that they would elicit a religious reaction” (7). See also Heinz Rölleke, “Das Bild Gottes in den Märchen der Brüder Grimm,” in Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Quellen und Studien, 184–95; Wilhelm Solms, Die Moral von Grimms Märchen (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1999), 175–92. 25. Louis Vax, “Les genres de la littérature orale,” in Formes du récit dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle: Grimm–Brentano–La Motte Fouqué (Paris: Editions du temps, 2001), 184–222: 205. 26. Rölleke, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Eine Einführung, 42. 27. John M. Ellis, One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 82 and 85. 28. Zipes, The Brothers Grimm, 112. See also Linda Dégh, “What Did the Grimm Brothers Give to and Take from the Folk?” in The Brothers Grimm and Folktale, ed. James M. Glathery (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 61–90. 29. Tully, Creating a National Identity, 137 and 149. 30. Ibid., 151. 31. Donald Haase, “Response and Responsibility in Reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales,” in The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, ed. Donald Haase (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 230– 49: 235. 32. On the unstable nature of ogres in Lo cunto de li cunti, see Canepa, “Ogres and Fools: On the Cultural Margins of the Seicento,” in Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination, 222–46. 33. Charles Perrault, “La belle au bois dormant,” in Perrault, Fénelon, Mailly, Préchac, Choisy and others, Contes merveilleux, ed. Tony Gheeraert (Paris: Champion, 2005), 185–97: 193. 34. “Das Zauberkästchen,” in Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822 edition), 314–15. 35. As an allusion to Psyche’s four trials, Basile writes that the girl endures “a thousand torments” (The Tale of Tales, 201). 36. An ogress had cast the curse (The Tale of Tales, 202). 37. Ibid., 315. 38. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 202. 39. “Der goldene Baumstamm,” in Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3, 359–62. For my notes to this story, see the version in the Appendix. 40. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 14/1 (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1955), 1019. 41. Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale, location 1647.

364

notes to pages 184–191

42. http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Dornröschen_(1812)#Seite_225 43. “Dornröschen,” in Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 1 (1857 edition), 257–60: 257. The 1810 and 1812 versions of the tale are in Die ursprünglichen Märchen der Brüder Grimm, ed. Kurt Derungs (Bern: Edition Amalia, 1999), 35–36 and 99–100. Heinz Rölleke has published the complete 1810 manuscript: Brüder Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen Die handschriftliche Urfassung von 1810 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2007). For “Dornröschen,” read pages 35–36. See also the entry “Dornröschen,” in Hans-Jörg Uther, Handbuch zu den “Kinder- und Hausmärchen” der Brüder Grimm (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 117–22. 44. Basile, The Tale of Tales, 411; Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 940; Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm. Dritter Band, “Der goldene Baumstamm,” 362. 45. Charles Perrault, Preface, to Grisélidis, in Perrault et al., Contes merveilleux, 105. 46. Arturo Graf, Ecce homo: Aforismi e parabole, in Favole, Apologhi e Bestiari: Moralità poetiche e narrative nella letteratura italiana, ed. Gino Ruozzo (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007), 428. 47. Ibid., 429. 48. Perrault, “Preface” to Grisélidis,105–6.

c h a p t e r e i g h t : b e au t y, z u l i m a , a n d a l i n e 1. Betsy Hearne, Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 12–13. 2. Novalis, The Universal Brouillon, fragment 234, in Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, ed. Jochen Schulte-Sasse and others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 230–31. See William Bernard McCarty, “Novalis,” in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, vol. 2, 689–91. On the character of Zulima in Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Jacobi’s Nessir und Zulima, see James R. Hodkinson, “Moving Beyond the Binary? Christian-Islamic Encounters and Gender in the Thought and Literature of German Romanticism,” in Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture, ed. James R. Hodkinson and Jeffrey Morrison (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 108–27: 114–20. 3. Jonas Maatsch, “Naturgeschichte der Philosopheme”: Frühromantische Wissenordnung im Kontest (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2008), 9. On the pseudonym ‘Novalis’ and its link to the poet’s family history, see Hans-Joachim Hahn, “Novalis,” in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760– 1850, ed. Christopher John Murray (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 818–19: 818. 4. Maatsch, “Naturgeschichte der Philosopheme,” 10; Manfred Frank, “‘Philosophy as ‘Infinite Approximation.’ Thoughts Arising out of the ‘Constellation’ of Early German Romanticism,” in German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Espen Hammer (New York: Routledge, 2007), 291– 308: 300. 5. Maatsch, “Naturgeschichte der Philosopheme,” 15; Frank, “Philosophy as ‘Infinite Approximation,’” 299. 6. Frank, “Philosophy as ‘Infinite Approximation,’” 303. 7. Maatsch, “Naturgeschichte der Philosopheme,” 165. 8. Ibid., 212–13. 9. Andreas Michel and Assenka Oksiloff, “Introductory Essay,” in Theory as Practice, 157–79: 175; Maatsch, “Naturgeschichte der Philosopheme,” 156. 10. Novalis, The Universal Brouillon, in Theory as Practice, 239. See Detlef Kremer, Prosa der Romantik (Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 1996), 52–57. 11. See Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Friedrich Schlegels Rede über die Mythologie,” in Mythos und Moderne, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 52–82. On Novalis’s definition of poet as magician, see Novalis, Logological Fragments II, in Philo-

notes to pages 191–199

365

sophical Writings, trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), fragment 43, 79. 12. Kremer, Prosa der Romantik, 53. 13. Novalis, “General Draft,” in Philosophical Writings, 124. 14. Novalis, Logological Fragments I, in Philosophical Writings, fragment 66, 60. 15. Novalis, Studies in the Visual Arts, in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), fragment 481, 237. 16. Johann Georg Jacobi, Nessir und Zulima, in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4 (Zürich: Drell, Fussli und Compagnie, 1819), 3–86: 16. 17. Ibid., 14. 18. Ibid., 35. 19. Ibid., 48. 20. Ibid., 65. Cf. Novalis, Miscellaneous Remarks, in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, fragment 73, 212. 21. Jacobi, Nessir und Zulima, 81. 22. Ibid., 85. 23. La reine de Golconde, in Oeuvres du Chevalier de Boufflers (Genève, 1782), 10. 24. Ibid., 15. 25. Ibid., 17. 26. Ibid., 19. 27. Ibid., 22. 28. Ibid., 28. 29. Novalis, Logological Fragments I, in Philosophical Writings, fragment 66, 60. On Novalis’s view of the relationship between magic and imagination, see “General Draft,” in Philosophical Writings, 135. 30. Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), translated by Palmer Hilty as Henry von Ofterdingen (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1992), part 1, chap. 4, 58. While citing this edition, I have retained the German form of Heinrich’s name and made further modifications to the translation. 31. Ibid., 59. 32. Ibid., 60. 33. Ibid., 61. 34. Ursula Ritzenhoff, Erläuterungen und Dokumente. Novalis. Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988), 44. 35. Novalis, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, trans. Ralph Manheim as The Novices of Sais (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2005), 37. 36. Ibid., 33 and 35. 37. Novalis, Henry [Heinrich] von Ofterdingen, part 1, chap. 9, 123. Wieland, Dschinnistan oder auserlesene Feen- und Geister- Märchen, vol. 3 (Winterthur, 1810). 38. Ritzenhoff, Erläuterungen und Dokumente: Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 75 and 88. 39. Novalis, Henry [Heinrich] von Ofterdingen, part 1, chap. 9, 125. 40. As Manfred Grätz explains, Wieland knew Basile through a French translation in Bibliothèque universelle des romans (“The Reception of Basile’s Pentamerone in Germany,” 228). I have consulted the following edition of Wieland’s poem: C. M. Wieland, “Pervonte oder die Wünsche,” in Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 18 (Leipzig: Georg Joachim Göschen, 1796), 79–158. 41. Christoph Martin Wieland, “Der Herausgeber an die Leser,” in Dschinnistan oder auserlesene Feen- und Geister- Märchen, vol. 3 (Winterthur, 1810), viii. 42. Christoph Martin Wieland, “Adis und Dahy,” in Dschinnistan oder auserlesene Feen- und Geister-Märchen, vol. 1 (Winterthur, 1810), 66. 43. Ibid., 81. 44. Ibid., 85.

366

notes to pages 199–205

45. Ibid., 87. 46. Ibid., 109. 47. Ibid., 125. 48. See Ruth B. Bottigheimer, “Cupid and Psyche vs. Beauty and the Beast: The Milesian and the Modern,” Merveilles et contes 3 (1989): 4–14. 49. See Hearne, Beauty and the Beast, 6–7. For a general introduction, see Virginia E. Swain, “Beauty and the Beast,” in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, vol. 1,104–8. As far as film adaptations are concerned, see Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown Story of Fairy-Tale Films (New York: Routledge, 2011), Kindle edition, location 6819–7124. 50. Hearne, Beauty and the Beast, 26. On the influence of Madame de Beaumont’s tale on oral transmission, see Swahn, The Tale of Cupid and Psyche, 298–312. 51. See Maria Tatar’s introduction to her translation of the tale in The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, ed. Maria Tatar (W. W. Norton: New York: 2002), 58–60. 52. Barbara G. Walker, “Ugly and the Beast,” in Feminist Fairy Tales (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 47–54: 54. 53. Angela Carter, “The Tiger’s Bride,” in The Bloody Chamber (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 51–67: 52 and 53. 54. Ibid., 66. 55. Ibid., 67. 56. Robin McKinley, Beauty (New York: HarperCollins, 1978), 68, 105. 57. Francesca Lia Block, “Beauty,” in The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold (New York: HaperCollins, 2001), 169–98: 178. 58. Zipes, The Enchanted Screen, location 6856. 59. Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, “Beauty and the Beast,” in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 805–15: 810. Cf. Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, “The Story of Beauty and the Beast,” in Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales, trans. Jack Zipes (Maidstone, UK: Crescent Moon, 2009), 151–229. Madame de Villeneuve mentions an “immense library” and “a salon filled with different kinds of instruments,” but they are only two of the numerous amazing surprises awaiting the girl in the enchanted palace (171). 60. See Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blond (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 273–318. 61. Leprince de Beaumont, “Beauty and the Beast,” in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 808. 62. Ibid., 810. 63. Madame de Villeneuve, “La Belle et la Bête,” in Si les fées m’étaient contées . . . , ed. Francis Lacassin (Paris: Omnibus, 2003), 767–815. 64. Tanith Lee, “Beauty,” in Red as Blood (New York: Daw Books, 1983), 149–86. In writing her interpretation of Beauty and the Beast, Lee has Leprince de Beaumont’s version in mind. Lee’s Beauty is called Estár, which is also the name of a “distant planet, meaning the same as the Greek word psyche” (149). On Lee’s tale, see Jessica Tiffin, Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tales (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 158. 65. De Villeneuve, “The Story of Beauty and the Beast,” in Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment, 198. In Si les fées m’étaient contées . . . , the fracture from the original tale starts on page 812. 66. See Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales, 72–81. Bacchilega underscores the importance of placing this tale within its broader folkloric context, since the transformation of a beast into rational being is a recurrent motif of fertility rituals, which reveals “the family’s centrality in this narrative” (74). 67. De Villeneuve, “The Story of Beauty and the Beast,” 200. 68. Ibid., 203. 69. Ibid., 206. 70. Ibid., 207.

notes to pages 205–215

367

71. Beauty has her first dream at the beginning of her stay in the Beast’s palace. De Villeneuve, “La Belle et la Bête,” in Si les fées m’étaient contées . . . , 783–84. Cf. “La belle et la bête,” in Le cabinet des fées, ou collection choisie des contes des fées et autres contes merveilleux, vol. 26, in Nouveau cabinet des fées, vol. 12 (Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1978), 68–69. 72. De Villeneuve, “The Story of Beauty and the Beast,” 210 and 211. 73. Ibid., 215. 74. Ibid., 198. Cf. “La belle et la bête,” in Le cabinet des fées, 137. The English translation erroneously speaks of the “prince’s father.” 75. De Villeneuve, “The Story of Beauty and the Beast,” 226–27 (translation modified). 76. Ibid., 209. 77. De Villeneuve, “The Story of Beauty and the Beast,” 227. 78. Cf. de Villeneuve, “La Belle et la Bête,” in Si les fées m’étaient contées . . . , 813. 79. Ibid., 814. 80. Hearne, Beauty and the Beast: “As superintendent editor of eleven variously colored fairy tale collections (1889–1910), Lang employed . . . a bevy of ladies to prepare the texts. In the case of “Beauty and the Beast,” Minnie Wright was responsible for the drastic reduction of Madame de Villeneuve’s long tale.” (49–50). 81. Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book (London: Longmans, Green, and co., 1889), 100–19: 119. On Lang, see Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 220–22. 82. Félix Martí-Ibáñez, “Tell Me a Story,” in Ariel: Essays on the Arts and the History and Philosophy of Medicine (New York: MD Publications/ Inc., 1962), 34–35: 35. A renowned Spanish physician, Martí-Ibáñez also worked in the United States and was particularly interested in the history of medicine.

chapter nine: “you will never awaken” 1. See Brian Evenson, Understanding Robert Coover (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 246–53. 2. Robert Coover, The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) (Providence: Burning Deck, 2002), 12–13. 3. See Jack Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth—Myth as Fairy Tale (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994), 157–61. 4. Coover, The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell), 13. 5. On the importance of Sleeping Beauty’s attractiveness, see “Dornröschen,” in Uther, Handbuch zu den “Kinder- und Hausmärchen” der Brüder Grimm, 118. 6. See, for example, “One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes,” in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, trans. Jack Zipes, 461–67. 7. “Brier Rose,” in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, 186–89: 189. 8. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 47. 9. Warner, Phantasmagoria, 50. See Donald Haase, “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship,” in Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches, 1–36. In the conclusions to his essay, Haase stresses the centrality of close readings for further research (30). 10. Coover, The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell), 14. 11. Ibid., 15. 12. Ibid., 16. 13. Günther Kunert, “Dornröschen,” in Tagträume in Berlin und andernorts (München: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974), 49–50. I quote from the following translation: Spells of Enchantments, ed. Jack Zipes (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 701.

368

notes to pages 215–220

14. Kunert, “Memory,” in; Tagträume in Berlin und andernorts, 24. 15. Greg Costikyan, “And Still She Sleeps,” in Black Heart, Ivory Bones, ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (New York: Avon Books, 2000), 64–89: 68. 16. Ibid., 89. 17. Patricia C. Wrede, “Stronger Than Time,” in Black Thorn, White Rose, ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (New York: Avon Books, 1995), 31–57: 51–53. 18. Ronald Keller, “The Princess and the Penis,” in Naughty Fairy Tales from A To Z, edited by Alison Tyler (New York: Plume Book, 2003), 119–22: 119. 19. Thomas Alden Bass, “An Encounter with Robert Coover,” Antioch Review 40/3 (1982), 287– 302: 300. 20. See Paul Maltby, Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 3–23; C. Barry Chabot, “The Problem of the Postmodern,” New Literary History, 20/1 (Autumn 1988), 1–20. 21. Cf. Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales, 19–24. 22. Donald Barthelme, Snow White (New York: Scribner Paper Fiction, 1996), 88. In The Postmodern Fairytale (New York: Palgrave, 2007), Kevin Paul Smith reproduces a different section of Barthelme’s questionnaire for the reader while analyzing the first of “eight elements of intertextual use of fairytales.” The first element is “authorized,” which is the “explicit reference to a fairytale in the title” (9–10 and 13). In an interview, Barthelme stated that his Snow White “could have been better, [because its] prose is far too worked, wrought, banged upon, too many jokes.” I quote from Donald Barthelme, “Interview with J. D. O’Hara, 1981,” in Not-knowing, ed. Kim Herzinger (New York: Random House, 1997), 288. 23. John Barth, “Postmodernism Revisited,” in Further Fridays (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 113–26:123–24. 24. Ibid., 124. 25. Tiffin, Marvelous Geometry, 4. 26. Bran Nicol, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Kindle edition, location 543. 27. Ibid., location 1866–75. 28. Ibid., location 1951. 29. Robert Coover, “The Magic Poker,” in Pricksongs and Descants (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 20–45: 20. 30. On this tale, see Nicol, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction, location 1951–78. 31. For the centrality of the grotesque in Coover’s narrative, see Kathryn Hume, “Robert Coover: The Metaphysics of Bondage,” Modern Language Review 98/4 (2003), 827–41. 32. Robert Coover, Pinocchio in Venice (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 32. 33. Ibid., 32–33. 34. Ibid., 253. 35. Ibid., 191. 36. Ibid., 312. 37. Ibid., 281. 38. Ibid., 66. 39. Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio, trans. Nancy Canepa (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 2002), chap. 36, 207. 40. Coover, Pinocchio in Venice, 274. 41. Coover has recently published a sequel: The Brunist Day of Wrath (Dzanc Books, 2014). Coover’s novel came out while my book was already in production. 42. On the birth of the name “Brunists,” see Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 263. 43. Ibid., 21.

notes to pages 221–228

369

44. Ibid., 23. 45. Ibid., 24. 46. Ibid., 251. 47. Ibid., 305. 48. Ibid., 386. 49. Robert Coover, Gerald’s Party (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 82–83. On this novel, see Marek Wilczynski, “Playing Monsters”: The Games of Memory and Language in Robert Coover’s “Gerald’s Party,” Modern Language Studies 18/4 (Autumn 1988), 3–32. 50. On the concept of speed in Gerald’s Party, see Kathryn Hume, “Narrative Speed in Contemporary Fiction,” Narrative 13/2 (2005), 105–24, esp. 106. On parody in postmodern rewritings of fairy tales, see Cathy Lynn Preston, “Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender: Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale,” in Fairy Tales and Feminism, 197–212. See Jackson I. Cope, Robert Coover’s Fictions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 124. 51. Coover, Gerald’s Party, 11. 52. Ibid., 88. 53. Ibid., 169. 54. Ibid., 77. 55. Ibid., 78. 56. Ibid., 34. 57. Ibid., 187. 58. Robert Coover, “The Marker,” in Pricksongs and Descants, 88–92: 88–89. 59. Ibid., 89. 60. Ibid., 90. 61. Robert Coover, Stepmother (San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2004), 45. 62. Coover, Stepmother, 23. 63. Ibid., 8. Cf. Preston, “Disrupting the Boundaries of Genre and Gender: Postmodernism and the Fairy Tale,” in Fairy Tales and Feminism, 210: “In postmodernity the ‘stuff ’ of fairy tales exists as fragments . . . it is a free-floating cultural data.” 64. Coover, Stepmother, 25. 65. Ibid., 1. 66. Warner, From the Beast to the Blond, 223. 67. Coover, Gerald’s Party, 44. 68. Ibid., 45. 69. Cf. Christy Williams, “Who’s Wicked Now? The Stepmother as Fairy-Tale Heroine,” Marvels and Tales 24/2 (2010), 255–271. 70. On Coover’s Briar Rose, see Sunje Redies, “Return with New Complexities: Robert Coover’s Briar Rose,” Marvels and Tales 18/1 (2004), 9–27. On Basile, see page 21. See also Stephen Benson, “The Late Fairy Tales of Robert Coover, in Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale, ed. Stephen Benson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), 120–43. Sheldon Cashdan, in his psychological analysis of fairy tales, The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales (New York: Basic Books, 1999), briefly discusses Coover’s Briar Rose (253–55). 71. Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales, 24. 72. John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in The Friday Book (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984), 62–76. Barth explains that by exhaustion he means “the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities” (64). 73. Coover, Briar Rose, 1. 74. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976; New York: Vintage, 2010), 5. 75. Cameron Dokey, Beauty Sleep (New York: Simon Pulse, 2006), 142–43. 76. Coover, Briar Rose, 1–2.

370

notes to pages 228–234

77. Donald Finkel has his prince ask a similar question in his poem “The Sleeping Kingdom”: “But bending my mouth to that perfect mouth I wondered / from what it was I had meant to save this kingdom.” The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales, ed. Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson (Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 2003), 19–20: 20. 78. In 1998, Coover revisits the image of the lost hero in search of meaningful signs in a hostile landscape in Ghost Town (New York: Grove Press, 1998), the story of a nameless rider traveling through the Wild West. Like the prince in search of Sleeping Beauty, the mysterious traveler passes through a land of “dead things” and nonetheless feels compelled, like the prince, to continue his journey (3). A similar opening is detectable in Coover’s The Adventures of Lucky Pierre. Director’s Cut (New York: Grove Press, 2002), which focuses on a disillusioned porn star. In the first chapter, the novel presents the hero walking at night through the dark and snowy streets of a “solitary city” (1). 79. Frank Gado, “Robert Coover,” in First Person: Conversations on Writers and Writing (New York: Union College Press, 1973), 142–59: 142. 80. Gado, “Robert Coover,” in First Person, 142–43. 81. I quote from: Jolles, Einfache Formen, 93. 82. Ibid., 94. 83. Gado, “Robert Coover,” in First Person, 143. 84. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1970; New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 47. Cf. Barth, “The Spanish Connection,” in Further Fridays, 35–48: 46. 85. Coover, “Seven Exemplary Fictions,” in Pricksongs and Descants, 78. On Coover’s view of Cervantes, see Larry McCaffery, The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), 27–28; Cope, Robert Coover’s Fictions, 11–12. 86. Gado, “Robert Coover,” in First Person, 152. 87. Ibid., 153. 88. Calvino, “Cibernetica e fantasmi,” in Una pietra sopra, 201–21: 218. See Mimma Bresciani Califano, Uno spazio senza miti (Florence: Le Lettere, 1993), esp. 90–102. 89. Calvino, “Cibernetica e fantasmi,” 217. 90. Coover, Briar Rose, 2. 91. Ibid., 3. 92. Ibid., 5. 93. Anne Sexton, “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty),” in Transformations (New York: Mariner Book, 2001), 107–12: 112. 94. Sexton, “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty),” 107. 95. Coover, Briar Rose, 6. 96. Cashdan, The Witch Must Die, 27. 97. Coover, Briar Rose, 17 and 12. 98. Ibid., 17. 99. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book 4, 235–37. 100. On the past tense in fairy tales, see Rudolf Freudenberg, “Erzähltechnik und ‘Märchenton’,” in Das selbstverständliche Wunder, 121–41: 125–27. 101. James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 158. 102. Basile, “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” in The Tale of Tales, 413–17. 103. Ibid., 414. 104. Coover, Briar Rose, 18. 105. Ibid., 18–19. 106. Basile, “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” 414. 107. Coover, Briar Rose, 19. 108. Basile, “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” 416. 109. Coover, Briar Rose, 19.

notes to pages 234–239

371

110. Charles Perrault, “Sleeping Beauty,” in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 688–95: 694. For the meaning of this French sauce in Perrault’s tale, see Louis Marin, “Robert Sauce,” in Food for Thought, trans. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 133–47. 111. Coover, Briar Rose, 20. 112. Ibid., 197. 113. Ibid., 198. 114. Gado, “Robert Coover,” in First Person, 152. See Andrew Teverson, “Migrant Fictions: Salman Rushdie and the Fairy Tale,” in Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale, 47–73. In Chimera (1972; New York: Mariner Books, 2001), which is also an astute rewriting of The Arabian Nights, John Barth has a genie appear to the pensive Scheherazade, who wants to stop the king’s serial killing but doesn’t know how. The genie comes from the future; he is a contemporary American writer who ends up supplying Scheherazade “from the future with these stories from the past” (9). 115. Robert Coover, “Grandmother’s Nose,” in A Child Again (San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2005), 185–93: 191. 116. “The Juniper Tree,” in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, trans. Jack Zipes, 171–79: 173. 117. Coover, Briar Rose, 22–23. 118. Ibid., 23. 119. Ibid., 22 and 23. 120. Ibid., 22; Perrault, “Sleeping Beauty,” in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 693: “she was of the race of ogres.” 121. Basile, “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” in The Tale of Tales, 416. 122. Coover, Briar Rose, 24. 123. Ibid., 23 and 24. 124. Ibid., 24 and 25. Coover had already presented a similar sadomasochistic scenario in Spanking the Maid (1982). 125. Ibid., 34 and 35. 126. Ibid., 16. 127. Ibid., 35. 128. Robert Coover, “The End of the Book,” New York Times, June 21, 1992. Coover returns to this topic in his later article “Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer,” New York Times, August 29, 1993. 129. John Barth has expressed a negative view of “intermedia arts.” See his comments in Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in The Friday Book, 65. 130. Eco, “On Some Functions of Literature,” in On Literature, 15. 131. Coover, Briar Rose, 70. 132. In his novel Noir (New York: The Overlook Press, 2011), Coover enlightens this fundamental aspect of the classic fairy tale via a cunning rewriting of the classic detective story centered on a mysterious lady with a black veil who contacts a jaded detective to find her husband’s killer. 133. Coover, Briar Rose, 41 and 51. 134. Ibid., 40. 135. “The Frog King,” in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, 2–5. In the Grimms’ version, the frog doesn’t turn into a prince thanks to a kiss. The girl throws the frog against a wall. In Tatar’s words, “Anglo-American versions have replaced the act of violence with a kiss.” Maria Tatar, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, 10. 136. Coover, Briar Rose, 41. 137. Ibid., 54–55. 138. Ibid., 55. 139. Ibid., 65. 140. Ibid., 60.

372

notes to pages 239–246

141. Ibid., 64. 142. Ibid., 65. 143. Gado, “Robert Coover,” in First Person, 153–54 and 156. 144. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 11. 145. Ibid., 52. 146. Ibid., 54 and 55. 147. Gado, “Robert Coover,” in First Person, 157. 148. Among the many examples not cited in this chapter, see Justin Miller’s dream in Coover, The Origin of the Brunists, 393–94; and the following books by Coover: Pinocchio in Venice, 45; Ghost Town, 66–67; The Adventures of Lucky Pierre. Director’s Cut, 23; Noir, 77, 176. 149. Karl Jaspers, “Myth and Religion,” in Karl Jaspers and Rudolf Bultmann, Myth and Christianity (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005), 21–62: 28. 150. Ibid., 31. 151. Ibid., 35. 152. Ibid., 51. 153. Jaspers, “The Issues Clarified,” in Karl Jaspers and Rudolf Bultmann, Myth and Christianity, 75–108: 88 and 85. 154. Coover, Briar Rose, 68. 155. Coover, “Sir John Paper Returns to Honah-Lee,” in A Child Again, 7–31: 16. 156. Cf. Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 237; Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses, trans. Francis Celoria (New York: Routledge, 1992), 66–67. 157. Coover, Briar Rose, 68. 158. Ibid., 70. 159. Ibid., 69 and 80. 160. Ibid., 69 and 70. 161. Ibid., 70. 162. Robert Coover, “A Passionate Remembrance,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 14/3 (1994), 9–10: 9. 163. Coover, Briar Rose, 78. 164. Ibid., 79. 165. Ibid., 2. 166. Ibid., 79. 167. Ibid., 86. 168. Ibid., 3. 169. Ibid., 84. 170. Josef Reding, “Mädchen, pfeif auf den Prinzen!,” in Mädchen, pfeif auf den Prinzen: Märchengedichte von Günther Grass bis Sarah Kirsch (Köln: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1983), 88. 171. See, for instance, Borges’s short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (New York: Vintage, 2012), Kindle edition, location 2169. 172. John Barth, “Author’s Note,” in Lost in the Fun House (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), ix–xi: ix. 173. John Barth, “Night-Sea Journey,” in Lost in the Fun House, 3–12: 4. 174. Ibid., 5. 175. Ibid., 3. 176. Ibid., 6. 177. Ibid., 8. 178. Ibid., 12. 179. Calvino, “La tradizione popolare nelle fiabe,” in Sulla fiaba, 117–134: 131.

notes to pages 246–252

373

180. Ibid., 134. 181. Italo Calvino, “Lightness,” in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988; New York: Vintage eBooks), Kindle edition, location 141–50. 182. Calvino, “Lightness,” in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, location 159. 183. Italo Calvino, “Ovid and Universal Contiguity,” in Why Read the Classics? (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999; New York: Vintage eBooks), Kindle edition, location 643.

chapter ten: “disney world has become a kind of reverse lourdes” 1. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 43. 2. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 13. 3. Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, 44. 4. Adam Nagourney and Brooks Barnes, “In New Exhibit, Disney Lends Its Star Power to Reagan, and Vice Versa,” New York Times, July 12, 2012. 5. Louis Marin, Utopics, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (New York: Humanity Books, 1984), 240. 6. Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth—Myth as Fairy Tale, 95. 7. Ibid., 92 and 94. 8. Marin, Utopics, 240–41. 9. Audio interview with Don Swaim, April 16th, 1985 (Elkin suffered from multiple sclerosis). http://www.wiredforbooks.org/stanleyelkin/ 10. On Stanley Elkin, see Thomas Pughe, Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth (Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1994), 127–66; Pughe, “The Conception of a Freak: Stanley Elkin’s Cruel Poetics,” Revue française d’études américaines 64 (May 1995), 227–37; Thomas LeClair, “The Obsessional Fiction of Stanley Elkin,” Contemporary Literature, 16/2 (Spring 1975), 146–62; Marc Chénetier, “Charting Contemporary American Fiction: A View from Abroad,” New Literary History 16/3 (Spring 1985), 653–69; C. Barry Chabot, “The Problem of the Postmodern,” New Literary History 20/1 (Autumn 1988), 1–20; Michael J. Shapiro, “Terminations: Stanley Elkin’s ‘Magic Kingdom’ and the Politics of Death,” International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique 12/2 (April 1991), 149–63. Shapiro holds that, after Foucault, “we can treat Disneyland as a kind of ‘heteropia,’ that is a place that is “outside of all places” (150); Peter J. Bailey, Reading Stanley Elkin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 167–88. Bailey gives an insightful analysis of Elkin’s The Living End; David C. Dougherty, Stanley Elkin (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 83–99; David C. Dougherty, “‘Because Everything Has a Perfectly Reasonable Explanation.’ Our Ticket to Elkin’s Magic Kingdom,” in The Magic Kingdom by Stanley Elkin: A Casebook, edited by David C. Dougherty with Robert Morace, Kellie Wells, Skip Willman (Norman, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005), 1–37; Marc Chénetier, Sgraffites, Encres & Sanguines (Paris: Presse de l’Ecole normale superieure, 1994), 153–73. In a 1976 interview, Elkin stated that death is a central aspect of his fiction because it is the most important “personal” experience: Phyllis Bernt and Joseph Bernt, “Stanley Elkin on Fiction: An Interview,” Prairie Schooner, 50/1 (Spring 1976), 14–25: 15. 11. Pughe, Comic Sense, 140. 12. Stanley Elkin, The Magic Kingdom (Norman, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000), 42–43. 13. Ibid., 78. 14. Ibid., 55–56. 15. Ibid., 48. 16. Ibid., 58.

374

notes to pages 253–262

17. Ibid., 182. On the “religious” nature of Disney World, see Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 12. 18. Shapiro, “Terminations,” 156–57. For an analysis of the Snow White tale, see N. J. Girardot, “Initiation and Meaning in the Tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Journal of American Folklore 90 ( July–September 1977), 274–300. 19. Elkin, The Magic Kingdom, 218. 20. Ibid., 33. 21. “Snow White,” in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, 196–204: 199. 22. Elkin, The Magic Kingdom, 105. 23. Ibid., 269–70. 24. Ibid., 285, 287. 25. Ibid., 284. 26. Ibid., 286. 27. Ibid., 316–17. 28. Cf. Scott Sanders and Stanley Elkin, “An Interview with Stanley Elkin,” Contemporary Literature 16/2 (Spring 1975), 131–45. 29. Basile, The Tale of Tales, “Introduction,” 37. 30. Elkin, The Living End (New York: Dutton, 1979), 23. 31. Ibid., 23–24. 32. Ibid., 124–26. 33. Ibid., 129. 34. Bailey, Reading Stanley Elkin: “The Living End comes to be seen as an allegory of life that ends in apocalypse because all life ends in dispersion and dissolution” (183).

c h a p t e r e l e v e n : “a b e n i g n fa i r y t a l e out of the brothers grimm” 1. Lynne Cox, Grayson (New York: Harvest, 2008), 1. 2. Ibid., 2–3. 3. Ibid., 75. 4. Ibid., 33 and 97–98. 5. Ibid., 147. 6. Tomas Tranströmer, Memories Look at Me (New York: New Directions, 2011), 3. 7. Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal (New York: Grove Press, 2011), Kindle edition, location 124. 8. Ibid., location 118. 9. Ibid., location 146. 10. Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), 240. 11. Sven Birkerts, The Art of Time In Memoir (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2008), 3. 12. Evgenia Peretz, “James Frey’s Morning After,” Vanity Fair, June 2008. 13. Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights (New York: NYRB, 2001), 3. 14. Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow’s Story: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 300. 15. Janet Maslin, “The Shock of Losing a Spouse,” New York Times, February 13, 2011. 16. David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 81. 17. Ibid., 22. 18. Ibid., 21. 19. Ibid., 27. 20. Ibid., 22. 21. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Vintage International, 2007), Kindle edition, location 26.

notes to pages 263–271

375

22. Ibid., location 60. 23. Ibid., locations 219 and 228. 24. Ibid., location 336. 25. Ibid., location 801. 26. Ibid., location 1622. 27. Ibid., location 225. 28. Ibid., location 234. 29. Ibid., location 1627. 30. Ibid., location 261. Cf. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981), 6. 31. Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, locations 855, 1203, 1636, 2185. 32. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 5. Ariès merely mentions “the Chanson de Roland, the stories of the Round Table, and the poem about Tristan” as the literary sources he will use to study how the Middle Ages identified the ‘warning’ of death’s arrival. 33. La Mort d’Artus, in Le Saint Graal-La Mort d’Artus, ed. Jacques Boulenger (Paris: Plon, 1923), 188. 34. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 7. 35. Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, location 2059. 36. Ibid., location 1594. 37. Ibid., location 1604. 38. Ibid., location 1613. 39. Ibid., location 1981. 40. Ibid., location 2369. 41. Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 12. 42. Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, location 2379. 43. Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Vintage International, 2012), 166–67. 44. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play (New York: Vintage International, 2007), Kindle edition, location 22. 45. Ibid., location 31. 46. Ibid., location 197. 47. Ibid., location 301. 48. In Didion’s words, the expression “blue nights” indicates “a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilight turns long and blue.” Didion, Blue Nights, 3. Didion uses this expression to signify the time, during and after her daughter’s hospitalization and death, when “I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise . . . the dying of brightness” (4). 49. Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play, location 768. 50. Oates, A Widow’s Story, 81. 51. Ibid., 368. 52. Ibid., 200. 53. Ibid., 207. See also page 353. 54. Ibid., 55. 55. Ibid., 413. 56. Darin Strauss, Half a Life: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2011), 56. 57. Ibid., 7. 58. Ibid., 131, 133. 59. Ibid., 157. 60. Ibid., 169. 61. Ibid., 170. 62. Ibid., 173.

376

notes to pages 271–287

63. Ibid., 186. 64. Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Life (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 10. 65. Ibid., 94. 66. Laura M. Flynn, Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008), 3. 67. Flynn, Swallow the Ocean, 6. 68. Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace (New York: Free Press, 2011), 31. 69. Ibid., 149. 70. I quote from Audrey Niffenegger’s blurb on the back cover of Mira Bartók’s The Memory Palace. 71. Bartók, The Memory Palace, “Homeless,” n.p. 72. Bartók, The Memory Palace, 3. 73. Ibid., 65. 74. Ibid., 33. 75. Ibid., 165. 76. Ibid., 121. 77. Ibid., 196. 78. Ibid., 198. 79. Ibid., 284. 80. Ibid., 298. 81. Robert Nisbet Bain, “The Frog-Tsarevna,” in Russian Fairy Tales from the Skazki of Polevoi (London: Bullen, 1901), 118–26: 119. 82. Ibid., 123. 83. Alyse Myers, Who Do You Think You Are? (New York: Touchstone, 2009), 2–3. 84. Ibid., 235. 85. Michael Greenberg, Hurry Down Sunshine (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), 3–4. 86. Greenberg, Hurry Down Sunshine, 18 and 19. 87. Ibid., 18. 88. Ibid., 20. 89. Ibid., 20 and 24.

chapter twelve: “everything beautiful is gone” 1. Lucy Alibar, “A Note from the Author,” in Juicy and Delicious (New York: Diversion Books, 2012), Kindle edition, location 41. 2. “The Making of Beasts of the Southern Wild,” in the DVD of Beasts of the Southern Wild, directed by Behn Zeitlin (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2012). 3. Novalis, The Universal Brouillon, fragment 234, in Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, 230–31. 4. Alibar, Juicy and Delicious, location 132. 5. Ibid., location 390. 6. A. O. Scott, “Beasts of the Southern Wild Shares Something With Lincoln,” New York Times, December 26, 2012. 7. Jolles, Einfache Formen, 241. For a succinct analysis of this issue and reference to Jolles, see Solms, Die Moral von Grimms Märchen, 10–12.

appendix: the grimms’ adaptations of basile 1. Kinder- und Hausmärchen: Gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm, vol. 3 (1822 edition), 280–81. From now on, the title will be quoted as Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822).

notes to pages 287–290

377

2. This is a rare case in which the Grimms keep Basile’s metaphorical expression in order to avoid a crude description of the old woman’s obscene act. 3. Basile does not use the term “witch” (Hexe), but only “old woman” (vecchia). Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti, 12; Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 280. From now on we shorten the Italian title (Lo cunto and The Tale). 4. The black bat is obviously a metaphor for the black slave. In Basile, it is the prince who “like a bat was always flying around that black night of a slave” (The Tale, 39). 5. The Grimms fail to mention that in Basile the female storytellers are extremely ugly and crippled; the Grimms beautify them by calling them “young.” Basile writes a parody of the attractive young ladies in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Basile speaks of “ten women,” whose names are, for example, “hunchback Popa,” “snout-faced Ciullia,” and “cross-eyed Paola” (The Tale, 41–42). 6. The storytellers’ introductory remarks to each tale are deleted from the Grimms’ summaries, along with the four long poems at the end of each of the five days. 7. “Vom wilden Manne,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 281–82. 8. Literally, “washes his head without soap,” an Italian idiom. 9. “Bricklebrit” is a magical expression that the Grimms use in tale 36 of their collection (“The Wishing Table, the Gold Donkey, and the Club in the Sack,” in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, 138; Kinder- und Hausmärchen, ed. Heinz Rölleke, vol. 1, 200). In Basile, the forbidden words are much more graphic and vulgar: “Arre, cacaure” (Lo cunto, 36). The Grimms recreate a magical rhyme and cadence but remove the verb “to shit” (Basile, The Tale, 45: “Giddy up, shit gold!”). This is an explicit case of significant editorial intervention on the Grimms’ part, considering that in other tales they keep the original, untranslatable expression in parentheses. 10. The use of the diminutive (Tüchlein) is also in Basile’s version (tovagliuolo). 11. In this second case, the diminutive (Knüttelchen) is added by the Grimms. Basile only says “club” (mazza). 12. “Die Heidelbeerstrauch,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 282–84. The Italian title is “La mortella” (The Myrtle). In his rewriting of this tale (“The Fairy Tale of the Myrtle-maiden”), Clemens Brentano is faithful to the original title. A possible explanation of the Grimms’ incorrect translation may be the common confusion between the Italian words mirtillo (blueberry) and mirto (myrtle). Blueberry is also present in the Grimms’ German Legends and in Brentano’s The Youth’s Magic Horn. 13. The Grimms remove Basile’s repeated allusions to the mysterious lady’s soft genitals. The Tale, 53. 14. The summary passes from present to past tense. 15. In Basile, each harlot takes a branch of the plant. 16. From this point on, the summary switches tense again. 17. In Basile it is the prince who is eager to know “everything” in detail (The Tale, 59). According to this summary, on the contrary, the fairy seems to be anxious to complain about the seven women’s abuse. 18. “Pervonto,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822). 284–86. 19. Basile speaks of three “young men” (tre guagnune) and not three young women. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 76. The ending in “e” (guagnune) may have misled the Grimms. It is also true, however, that the image of three magical ladies is more ‘poetic’ and thus makes more sense in the Grimms’ view of the fairy tale. However, a few sentences later Basile specifies that they were “sons” ( figli) of a fairy, thus dispelling all possible doubts about the gender of these magical creatures. 20. The Grimms rewrite this humorous scene. Basile says: “He arrived home almost immediately, with so many little kids in tow taunting and shrieking at him that if his mother hadn’t been quick to close the door behind him they would have killed him with blows of citrons and broccoli” (The Tale, 63). 21. Basile speaks of a barrel, and not of a boat (Lo cunto, 82: “la votte”). Again, we encounter a sort of beautification of the original text.

378

notes to pages 29o–295

22. The Grimms transcribe the original text in parentheses, and instead of “I will tell you” they write “I will serve you.” 23. “Vardiello,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822). 286–88. 24. Note the shift from the present to the past tense in this summary. 25. The Grimms summarize in one sentence a rather lengthy but amusing description of how Vardiello ends up killing the hen. The hen dies when the young man, angry because the bird is not following his orders, “threw his cap, and after the cap he threw a rolling pin, which hit her squarely and caused her to stretch out her legs for the last time and croak” (Basile, The Tale, 71). 26. The summary switches to the present tense. 27. The summary omits that a second cat was running after the first cat with the hen. 28. Basile speaks of omore malenconeco (melancholic humor). The Grimms’ summary opts for ‘imagination,’ ‘delusion’ (Einbildung). Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 100. 29. “Der Floh,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822). 288–89. 30. The summary makes no mention of the princess’s long monologue in which she complains about her father’s unjust decision. The girl’s name is also removed. Her name is Porziella. Her speech opens as follows: “Just what kind of bad service have I performed in this house with you to be delivered into the hands of this bogeyman?” (The Tale, 78). The king tries to convince his daughter that her marriage to the ogre is God’s will. 31. “Aschenkätzchen,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 282–84. 32. In Basile, it is the girl who wishes that the governess were her mother, because she shows the girl so much affection. The girl interrupts her teacher’s speech and asks her what she needs to do in order to get rid of her stepmother. By manipulating the dialogue between the governess and the girl, the Grimms try to make the girl more passive than she actually is. Lo cunto, 124. 33. Basile reveals that the widower is a prince at the beginning of the tale. At first the prince thinks that his daughter is joking when she asks him to marry her governess. 34. Basile has the girl express a much harsher warning to her father: “If you forget, may you be unable to go forward or backward. Keep in mind what I say.” The Tale, 85. The Grimms tone down the Italian Cinderella’s forceful character. 35. Basile uses the word fata (fairy). Zauberin is the Grimms’ translation. In “Rapunzel” (1857), a Zauberin owns the garden surrounded by a high wall. This character can cast spells and detect the signs of secret occurrences, but she is not a fairy. Same meaning of the term Zauberin is in the tales “Die Sechs Diener” and “Die Krystallkugel.” 36. “Der Kaufmann,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822). 292–94. 37. Basile speaks of a cana (bitch). Cf. Lo cunto, 142. 38. This summary edits out a heated discussion between son and father in which the son defends his actions by saying that the king’s son provoked him, and his father responds to his overconfident son that the king may decide to execute him because of his disrespectful behavior. 39. One of the most moving and autobiographical passages of The Tale of Tales is absent from this summary. In leaving Naples, where he lives with his father and brother, Cienzo is overwhelmed by melancholy and delivers a passionate monologue that opens as follows: “Here I go, my beautiful Naples, I’m leaving you! Who knows if I’ll ever be able to see you again” (Basile, The Tale, 92). This omission can be easily justified because Cienzo’s long monologue is irrelevant from the plot standpoint, even though it also gives this character a psychological depth that is foreign to the Grimms’ concept of fairy tale, which is supposed to represent abstract, two-dimensional figures. 40. According to Basile, these three people look like papute (fantastical creatures that scare children, a sort of bogeyman). These creatures cry: “My beautiful treasure, now I’m going to lose you” (Basile, The Tale, 94). They tell the young man that that treasure is meant for him alone. 41. In Basile, the tower’s owner hears Cienzo because he is taking a piss in the ruined house. 42. The fairy is not asleep in Basile’s tale (cf. Lo cunto, 146). The Grimms’ summary presents

notes to pages 295–298

379

her as a sort of Sleeping Beauty rescued by her Prince Charming, which is not what happens in the Italian tale. A band of delinquents are about to rape her when Cienzo shows up and saves her (Basile, The Tale of Tales, 94–95). 43. The dragon has seven heads in Basile (Lo cunto, 148). 44. The dragon had rubbed his neck with some herb growing nearby and “stuck its head back on” (Basile, The Tale of Tales, 95). The Grimms emphasize the magic nature of this herb by turning it into a “dragon herb” (Drachenkraut) even though Basile does not say that this herb had magic qualities because it was somehow connected to the dragon. 45. Basile stresses that both brothers find the fairy very attractive and this is why they go to her house. It is her great beauty (“since he liked the looks of her very much”) that draws them to her and not her magic powers, which she uses once they are in her house. Cf. Basile, The Tale, 99. 46. The role of the wife is here limited to the recognition of the brother’s innocence, whereas in the Italian tale she comes across as a much more defiant woman, who first gets angry at her husband for showing interest in another woman, and then expresses her resentment toward his brother, whom she sees as her husband, because he refuses to comply with his marital duties. 47. “Das Ziegengesicht,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822). 294–95. 48. Basile speaks of twelve “daughters” (Basile, Lo cunto, 166). 49. In Basile’s tale, the lizard threatens to kill the farmer on the spot if he doesn’t comply with its request (Basile, Lo cunto, 168). 50. Basile emphasizes the farmer’s melancholy through a long monologue in which he expresses his deep sorrow, whereas his wife has the optimistic belief that maybe something good will come of this transaction. (Basile, Lo cunto, 168–70). 51. Basile does not use the word “fairy” at this point of the tale. 52. Basile does not mention that the girl, whose name is Renzolla, is “beautiful.” When he arrives at the palace, the lizard appears to him in the form of a young lady and welcomes him. After a rich meal, the king goes to bed and Renzolla is one of the young people who serve him: “Renzolla herself pulled the socks off his feet and the heart from his breast, and in such a charming manner that the king felt love’s poison” (Basile, The Tale, 103–4). 53. At this point, Basile uses the word “sorceress” (maga) and not “fairy” (Basile, Lo cunto, 172). This fluctuation (lizard-fairy-sorceress) is common in Basile’s tales, which creates a problem for the Grimms’ much clearer distinction among the diverse nonhuman characters (ogres, witches, fairies, angels, etc.). 54. The “small room” is in fact the kitchen (Basile, Lo cunto, 174). 55. The girl goes back to the fairy because, after some months, the king asks about the two dogs. The old man is the janitor. Basile, Lo cunto, 176. 56. “Die verzauberte hirschkuh,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822). 295–97. 57. Basile calls the girl damigella (lady-in-waiting). Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 184. 58. The prince wants to go hunting with his friend and needs to melt lead to make bullets. The prince leaves the room because he has forgotten something. The queen walks in and throws a “red-hot bullet mold” at Canneloro (Basile, The Tale, 111). 59. In the Italian version, Canneloro wears a hat to cover the wound (Basile, Lo cunto, 186). The Grimms introduce a more poetic, but incorrect, touch. In the Italian, Canneloro asks his friend, and not the king, permission to leave. What is missing from the summary is Canneloro’s passionate declaration of eternal love for his friend, who is “my heart” (“che sì lo core mio”). Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 186. 60. In Basile, the prince is devastated when he hears that his friend is leaving and in tears asks him for a sign of his love. 61. Basile speaks of a “myrtle” not “blueberry.” Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 188. 62. In Basile, this kingdom has a name: “Longapergola” (Lo cunto, 188). 63. Basile writes quarche mese (some months) and not “four months.” Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 188.

380

notes to pages 298–301

64. The word “magician” (Zauberer) is not in Basile, who keeps using the term “ogre.” Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 190; Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 297. 65. The second sentence of the princess’s speech is not in Basile (Lo cunto, 192). 66. Basile writes that many other people were in the pit along with Canneloro. 67. Again, in Basile’s tale Canneloro wears a hat to cover the scar. 68. “Die geschundene Alte,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 298–99. In a footnote, the Grimms note that in the 1788 edition of Basile’s book the title is “La vecchia scoperta” (The Uncovered Old Woman”). 69. This is one of the Grimms’ least successful summaries probably due to the story’s crudeness and lack of magical or poetic elements. The initial part of the summary is problematic. In Basile, the two elderly women live in rooms beneath the king’s window to avoid the sun, even though, as this summary states, their home is in the gardens in front of the king’s residence. Moreover, the summary is unclear about the meaning of the women’s actions. In Basile, they claim that the lightest thing fallen from above (a flower or a discarded letter, for instance) has inflicted serious pain to their shoulders, heads, etc. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 200. 70. Basile writes that both women, and not just one of them, want to titillate the king. The German summary introduces a difference between the two old women as if to emphasize that one is better than the other and thus deserves the final reward, as it usually happens in fairy tales where one sister is more compassionate than the other. 71. The summary omits that the women spend those eight days sucking their fingers in order to make them as smooth as possible. 72. At the end of each of the first four “days” Basile inserts a long poem that serves as intermission between one set of ten tales and the next. All poems have a satirical tone and deal with frequents topics of baroque culture, such as the corruption and the transiency of the world. For instance, the first is titled “The Crucible” and describes a device that reveals men’s “stains” (The Tale, 126–38: 127). The Grimms ignore these poems altogether. 73. “Petrosinelle,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 299–300. 74. In the Italian tale the evil woman is an “ogress” (orca) and not a “witch” (Hexe) as in the Grimms’ summary. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 284. 75. Petrosinella is seven years old in the original tale. The Grimms change the age of other characters in their summaries of Basile’s book. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 286. 76. Basile writes that every time the girl ran into the ogress on the street the ogress told her to remind her mother of her promise. Tired of hearing this, the mother gives in and instructs her daughter to say “Take her” next time she sees the ogress. Basile, The Tale, 148. 77. Basile says “during several days” ( pe chiù iuorne) and not just a few days (“ein paar”). Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 286. The girl gives the ogress a sleeping potion. 78. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 286. Basile reports the ogress’s words as indirect speech, which the Grimms turn into a direct one, which is more incisive, also considering that it concerns the description of a spell. The Grimms thus bring the magic element to the forefront. 79. “Die grüne Wiese,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 300–302. 80. Often the heroines’ names are omitted from these summaries. The use of the character’s name is not consistent. 81. Basile says that the prince is “enchanted” (fatato). Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 298. 82. Basile makes it clear that the prince is naked because he is ready to “enjoy” the girl. 83. Before leaving, Nella “colored her face, disguised herself.” The summary mentions that at the end, the prince recognizes her only when she washes her face, but omits the reason that has made her unrecognizable. Cf. Basile, The Tale, 154. 84. In the Italian version, the ogress does not wish to devour the girl. She is willing to give her some bread but doesn’t want to welcome the girl into their house. The Grimms create an unfair opposition between the decent male monster and the bestial female one, which is not in the original

notes to pages 301–304

381

tale. During their conversation at the dinner table, the ogress is very surprised that no one can help the young traveler. It is the ogre who lets the girl in because he wants to eat her. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 302–4. 85. “Viola,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 302–4. 86. The Neapolitan sentence is inserted in the German version. The problem is that its real meaning is “Good morning, son of the king, I know more than you.” Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 310. I have transcribed the Neapolitan words as they appear in the Grimms’ summary. The free translation could just be due to a misunderstanding, but it could also be an attempt to turn the tale into a love story, whereas in Basile the girl not only rejects the prince, she also states that she is intellectually superior to him. The Grimms may have added the Italian words in parentheses to make the reader aware of the difference between the original meaning and their adaptation. 87. Viola cuts off both her aunt’s ears (Basile, Lo cunto, 314). Viola’s violent reaction is not fully understandable in this summary, whereas Basile makes it clear that the aunt essentially sells the girl to the prince who wishes to kiss her. 88. This sentence reflects the Grimms’ wish to recreate a scene close to their sensibility. Basile doesn’t define the sisters as “evil” and the owner of the garden is more specifically an ogre and not a monster (Ungethüm). In Basile, the sisters are tired of Viola’s disrespectful behavior toward the prince. Finally, in this German sentence the cunning and brutal Viola is suddenly reduced to a child (“little one”). The result is a vignette very distant from Basile’s text. Cf. Lo cunto, 314; Kinderund Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 302. 89. The Grimms use “wild man” (wilde Mann) as synonym for “monster” in this summary. See the figure of the “wild man” in their famous tale “Iron Hans” in which a wild man is found in a forest at the bottom of a pool: “His body was as brown as rusty iron, and his hair hung over his face down to his knees.” The wild man is dragged to the royal castle where “everyone was amazed by it.” At the end of the tale, the wild man reveals his real identity. He was a king who, because of an evil spell, had been turned into a wild man. The ending coincides with his retrieving his noble, civilized form. Cf. “Iron Hans,” in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, 482–88: 483. 90. Basile portrays the ogre as a goodhearted and sensitive person. This summary edits out the key fact that, as soon as he realizes his mistake, the ogre himself calls the girl’s real father and informs him of his daughter’s great fortune. The ogre leads the tale to its happy ending. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 320. 91. “Gagliuso,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 304–5. In a footnote to her English translation of Basile’s book, Nancy Canepa gives a succinct analysis of this famous tale, from Straparola to Perrault. Basile, The Tale, 163. 92. As usual, the summaries remove all references to real geographical locations. The tale takes place in Naples. Basile mentions specific points of the Neapolitan coast where the cat picks up the fish for the king. 93. The Grimms try to improve Basile’s text. In Basile, Gagliuso only keeps asking the cat to keep an eye on his rags because he is afraid that someone may steal them. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 328. The Grimms stress the poor man’s inability to behave properly while eating with the king. 94. “Die Schlange,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 305–8. 95. Basile describes the princess as a brave and moral girl who accepts her destiny to respect her father’s decision. When her parents, who at the arrival of the beast hide terrified, shout at her that she should run away, the princess firmly responds that she will not avoid her fate. In this summary, she comes across as a mute pawn in the confrontation between the king and the serpent. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 342. Also eliminated is the fact that the snake kisses the girl passionately before turning into a handsome man. 96. Basile writes that the two have some sexual intimacy. Basile doesn’t say that the princess falls for him. 97. Basile has the prince scream at the king and queen “renegade dogs” before flying away.

382

notes to pages 305–307

In a like manner, the princess openly accuses her parents of having destroyed her happiness. Cf. Basile, The Tale, 172. 98. The fox’s direct speech is not in Basile. The animal does not impose its decision in the Italian version. In Basile, the third-person narrator reports that the animal only asks the girl if she would enjoy its company. The princess accepts the fox’s offer, but the girl’s direct speech is omitted in this summary. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 344. 99. Basile speaks of an “ogress” (orca) and not a sorceress (Zauberin). The curse is supposed to last seven, and not six, years. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 346; Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 307. In an important article, Heinz Rölleke explains the meaning of numbers in the Grimms’ tales. In particular, the number 6 concerns “the time limit of weeks, months, and years,” even though the numbers 3 and 7 are the most frequent ones (Rölleke, “Zeiten und Zahlen in Grimms Märchen,” in Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm. Quellen und Studien, 269–77: 274). 100. Basile doesn’t specify what part of the prince’s body was wounded. 101. Note that this is one of the Grimms’ most extensive adaptations of Basile’s tales. “The Snake” has all the ingredients of a Grimm tale, such as the quest through the woods, speaking animals, a cursed prince who first turns into a serpent and then into a dove, one of the Grimms’ most cherished animals. The Grimms synthesize the dialogues and make them into sharp verbal exchanges. The Grimms emphasize the fox’s ‘magical’ identity by having it pronounce a concise and forceful sentence absent in Basile. In like manner, the final exchange between the princess and the king has the poetic cadence present in many of the Grimms’ own tales. 102. “Die Bärin,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822). 308–10. 103. The summary omits that the queen threatens the king with a curse if he doesn’t fulfill her wish. The daughter’s name is “Preziosa” (Precious). Basile, Lo cunto, 358. 104. The king notices his daughter’s beauty after having inspected a huge number of women who had come to his kingdom from every corner of the world in the hope of marrying him. 105. In Basile, the prince takes the she-bear with him because it “crouched close to the ground and wag[ged] its tale like a puppy” (Basile, The Tale, 181). The prince is not enthralled by the shebear’s mysterious charm, as this summary seems to imply. The prince simply finds this animal very tame and pleasant. In Basile, the girl acts seductively. 106. In Basile the she-bear scatters flowers on the bed. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 368. 107. Again the Grimms reduce a dialogue (in this case between the queen and her son) to one short incisive sentence that acquires a symbolic power, since after the queen’s brief order the shebear turns into a beautiful girl. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 368. 108. The finale of this summary is a clear and romantic image, even though Basile’s tale doesn’t end here. The girl declares her love for the prince and the queen asks her to tell her story. Concluding that the girl has behaved very morally, the queen consents to their marriage. 109. “Die Taube,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 310–12. 110. Basile specifies that the forest was located “eight miles outside of Naples” (Basile, The Tale, 184). 111. Basile always uses the word “ogress” (orca) and never “witch.” Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 374. 112. Compare the same statement in Basile: “Come out, come out, horns, or mommy will break them off on the terrace, and then have a baby boy!” (The Tale, 186). 113. In Basile, the ogress is much more terrifying than a “wild beast.” He gives a detailed description of a truly monstrous creature that vaguely resembles a harpy of classical mythology. 114. In Basile the ogress says that she will eat him up if he doesn’t do as she orders. 115. The ogress pays a visit to other ogresses in the forest. 116. Basile’s ogress asks the prince to “clean out a cistern that contained a thousand barrels of water because she wanted to fill it up again” (Basile, The Tale, 190). 117. In Basile, the girl states exactly the opposite: “The conjunction of the stars that had kept my art sequestered is past,” and so now she can run away (Basile, The Tale, 190).

notes to pages 307–311

383

118. The girl builds the tunnel that takes them out of the ogress’s house. 119. Basile says that the queen “kisses with her lips” and not that she kisses him on the lips. Cf. Basile, The Tale, 191; Basile, Lo cunto, 386. 120. The girl steals the clothes of a servant working at an inn. 121. Before dismissing the girl whom he had just married, the prince explains the situation to his mother who agrees that he should keep his word. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 390. 122. The story doesn’t end here. Before leaving, the old woman’s ghost curses the prince a second time: “May the beans that you threw away always appear before you, and may the proverb ‘He who sows beans sprouts horns’ come true” (Basile, The Tale, 194). The girl, whom Basile now calls “fairy” ( fata), reassures the prince that the curse will never come true (Basile, Lo cunto, 392). The tale ends with the two lovers celebrating their love in bed. 123. “Die Küchenmagd,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 312–13. The Italian title is “The Little Slave Girl” (La schiavottella). Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 398. 124. Basile openly writes that the girl is pregnant (The Tale, 196). 125. In Basile the curse is supposed to take place after seven years. 126. “Das Zauberkästchen,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 314–15. The Italian title is “Il catenaccio” (The Padlock). The Grimms opt for a much more ‘poetic’ title. 127. In Basile the servant is a “handsome slave” who wishes to give the girl “nice things.” A sexual subtext is detectable. The Tale, 200. 128. This part of the tale from the girl’s descent into the underground palace to her sleeping in bed next to someone is translated almost verbatim from the Italian text. 129. Basile says that she goes back to her mother’s “three or four times” and not a couple of times, as the Grimms write. The Tale, 200. 130. Basile speaks of an ogress, not a witch. 131. They tell her that she is given a sleeping potion every night before the mysterious young man lies next to her. 132. The Grimms keep the original Italian term with its German translation in parentheses. 133. As an allusion to Psyche’s four trials, Basile writes that the girl endures “a thousand torments” (The Tale, 201). 134. An ogress cast the curse. The Tale, 202. 135. “Der Gevatter,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 315–16. Tale 42 in the final edition of the Grimms’ collection has the same title (“Der Herr Gevatter;” “The Godfather”). 136. In Basile, the man says: “Oh, may the Sun in Leo be praised” (Basile, The Tale, 204). He doesn’t mention God. The man says “we” because he is married and his wife is also given a name in Basile. The tone of the Italian tale is more humorous because the main character is very stingy even though he is extremely rich, and his friend shows an incredible ability to gobble down everything the couple has prepared for lunch or dinner. 137. The wife prepares a pizza in Basile. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 424. 138. The man sees through a hole in the tablecloth that hangs down from the table to the floor. 139. In Basile, the scene is more morbid. It is the dying snake that looks at its killer, and the animal’s gaze resembles that of the friend who is hiding under the table. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 426. 140. This is a rare tale almost entirely dominated by a series of long monologues, which the summary can skip entirely without affecting the plot. “The long flow of reproaches” in reality synthesizes two pages of reproaches, curses, and insults directed at the disrespectful visitor. 141. “Cannetella,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 317–19. 142. The summary doesn’t explain the name Cannetella. The king chooses this name to thank the Greek “goddess Syrinx” (Basile, The Tale, 217), that is the nymph desired by the god Pan. She turns into a reed (canna in Italian) to escape the lustful god. Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.690–712. The king had made a vow to Syrinx. This explicitly un-Christian opening is cut out from this German summary.

384

notes to pages 311–314

143. Basile reports in detail the king’s failed attempts to arrange his daughter’s marriage. 144. In Basile, the king’s enemy is not a “wild man.” Scioravante (or Fioravante) is a capable sorcerer who conjures up some demons who turn his head and his teeth into gold. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 466. The Grimms probably transform this character into a ‘wild man’ to make the tale more coherent. When he marries the princess, Scioravante takes her to a stable, which could be an appropriate dwelling for a wild man. At the end of the tale, Basile defines this character as ‘ogre,’ who is somehow close to the image of a wild man. 145. Her husband will be away for seven, and not six, years. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 468. 146. The person who runs into the poor girl is the king’s “sewer cleaner” and not the king’s chamberlain. He puts her into an empty barrel. Basile, The Tale, 220. 147. Her father doesn’t recognize her at first. He only realizes that she must be his daughter because of a wart on her right arm. 148. She asks for seven, and not six, doors. 149. The ‘wild man,’ who in Basile’s tale is a magician, asks the old woman to repeat some magic words: “May everyone fall asleep, and only Cannetella stay awake!” (Basile, The Tale, 222). 150. Basile doesn’t define the sheet of paper as “magic.” 151. “Das Mädchen ohne Hände,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 319–21. 152. The king and his sister have two long dialogues. At first, the king tells her that he wishes to marry her because it is inappropriate to lose something of great value and she is “of the same breath” that he is (The Tale, 224). Again, the summary cuts out a woman’s strong reaction to a man’s abusive behavior. 153. The summary identifies the most significant sentence from the lady’s long and passionate speech. Basile, Lo cunto, 480. 154. The modest Penta tells her brother that, after studying her face in a mirror, she has found nothing that can justify her brother’s passion because she is an ordinary woman. 155. Basile explains that the sailor takes Penta home because she is extremely beautiful and thus his wife’s reaction is justified. Basile, Lo cunto, 482. 156. The summary cuts out a reference to a terrible storm that lands the messenger on the same shore where the sailor and his wife live. Basile, Lo cunto, 484. 157. Nuccia is illiterate in Basile and has a student read the letter for her and then forge a new document. Basile, Lo cunto, 486. 158. Basile’s macabre baroque taste stages a horrific scene. Nuccia is “covered in wax. And when she was thoroughly waxed and tallowed he placed her on a huge pile of dry wood and set her on fire, and as soon as he saw that the fire, with its bright red tongue of flames, had devoured the wretched woman, he hoisted his sails.” (Basile, The Tale, 230). 159. The summary doesn’t explain that Penta’s brother expresses his deepest sorrow and regrets having treated his sister so cruelly. This is his ‘misfortune.’ Basile, Lo cunto, 492. 160. The Grimms distort the tale’s finale to create a more powerful narrative effect. This brief question is not in the Italian text, which simply states that the boy’s uncle asks the sorcerer if the child is his, the sorcerer’s, son. Basile, Lo cunto, 494. 161. In the Italian tale, the sorcerer says that he will give Penta’s husband not only the golden crown and scepter, but also his kingdom. The sorcerer wishes to ‘adopt’ the entire family. 162. “Das Gesicht,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 321–23. 163. The Grimms find the name ‘Face’ inappropriate and hypothesize that maybe Basile means ‘view’ (Aussicht), which would make more sense, also because viso and vista sound similar. But the correct translation is indeed “Face.” 164. Basile only says: “And Renza answered.” “With a song” (Lied) is added in this summary. The emphasis on the Volk’s natural and simple poetry according to the Grimms is obvious. Cf. Basile, The Tale, 236. 165. The Grimms add a footnote in which they stress that Renza’s song alludes to the place

notes to pages 314–317

385

called “Face” where she was supposed to wait. Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 322. In Basile, Renza says “Oh white face” and not “Oh beautiful face.” 166. Basile only writes that Renza from time to time repeats the verses that the prince likes so much. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 508. 167. The bride uses the word “music,” not “song,” but it is in this passage that Basile calls Renza’s verses canzona (song) and writes that Cecio asks her to repeat those verses. In Basile, the bride’s long reaction to Renza’s words doesn’t have the poetic tone of the Grimms’ concise sentence. The bride vents her anger in a very vulgar tone (cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 512). Her first words are: “You have broken my ass with this white face!” (Basile, The Tale, 239). 168. Cecio’s first-person statement is not in Basile, who only writes that Cecio wanted to hear those “words” (parole). Basile, Lo cunto, 512. 169. Basile writes that the queen “had the two of them thrown into a ditch.” Renza’s father arrives when they are about to be buried. The dismissive sentence and bleak baroque ending is cut out. Basile, The Tale, 240. 170. “Sapia Liccarda,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 323–24. 171. The difference between the two older sisters and Sapia Liccarda is clearly stated from the outset. Sapia Liccarda is very angry with her sisters because of their unbecoming behavior. The door remains locked in Basile and the princes will enter through the window. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 524. 172. Sapia Liccarda sternly scolds her sisters, and the prince convinces them to help him seduce their younger sister. Basile emphasizes the prince’s responsibility. 173. The sisters present their request as a response to Sapia Liccarda’s harsh disapproval. They make her believe that they agree with her reprimands, and she offers her help because she feels sorry. Basile, Lo cunto, 526. 174. In Basile, the girl is much more combative. She goes to the palace with a flax comb and when the prince tries to catch her, she turns around and he catches the comb that scratches his hands badly. The girl doesn’t kick the prince. 175. The prince Tore, and not the king, is the victim of the girl’s clever trick (Basile, Lo cunto, 528). 176. In Basile, the furious father doesn’t mention murder. He feels like beating and torturing his immoral daughters. 177. The prince’s speech in the Italian version is as usual much longer and makes no allusion to the prince’s previous affection for the girl. The prince only vents his anger due to his repeated humiliations. The comparison between the elephant and the grasshopper is a quotation from Basile. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 530. 178. The story ends with the two lovers sleeping together. The prince now understands that postponing the sex with the girl has made the experience much more pleasurable, and also comes to appreciate her morality. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 532. 179. “Der Käfer, die Maus und die Grille,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 325–27. 180. Usually references to specific geographic locations are removed from these summaries. Nardiello must go to Salerno to buy many steer. Basile, Lo cunto, 538. 181. The beetle (or cockroach) plays a guitar in Basile. 182. In this case, the summary fails to mention that Nardiello travels to Lombardy. The more vague term “land” evokes the ‘universal’ fairy-tale motif of the princess who can’t laugh. 183. The mouse says that they are “charmed” (fatati). Basile, Lo cunto, 544. 184. In Basile, Nardiello states that he doesn’t want the marriage to be consummated, with no direct reference to the husband being unable to fulfill his marital duty. 185. The Grimms don’t mention that this “powerful man” is from Germany. He is ridiculed in the second part of the tale. 186. The beetle enters the German man’s anus and makes him defecate.

386

notes to pages 317–320

187. The entrance is the man’s anus. 188. The bride asks for a wooden stopper (tappo) to stick up his behind as a radical precaution. The Grimms are not sure about their interpretation of this obscene detail. Basile, Lo cunto, 548. 189. This is not what the Italian tale says. The bride is almost killed by the blow but the king expels the German man because he has soiled his nuptial bed for the third time. Basile, Lo cunto, 550. 190. The Italian tale has an additional final part. The magic animals turn Nardiello into a handsome young man, who finally reconciles with his estranged father. Basile, Lo cunto, 552. 191. “Die Dienstmagd,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 327–28. The German title is very distant from the original Italian “La serva d’aglie,” which literally means “The Garlic Forest.” Nancy Canepa correctly translates it as “The Garlic Patch” (Basile, The Tale, 255). The Grimms may have misunderstood the term serva, which is the Neapolitan version of the Italian selva (forest), because in Italian the word serva exists but it means “servant.” The recent Italian version of Basile’s book (Il racconto dei racconti, trans. Ruggero Guarini [Milan: Adelphi, 2010], 341) keeps the word selva (forest) in the title but mentions in a footnote that in his seminal Italian version Benedetto Croce, like the Grimms before him, had opted for a new title: “Belluccia.” Croce and the Grimms choose the main character’s first name as title. 192. Basile adds that this man has only “a garlic forest” to sustain his family. Basile, Lo cunto, 556. 193. As usual, the Grimms synthesize and rewrite the female figure. In Basile, the girl’s words betray a much livelier and spunkier character: “If disguising myself as a man is not enough to serve you, I’ll become an animal. I’ll shrink down to nothing to make you happy!” (The Tale, 256). 194. In Basile, the young man becomes very melancholy, and his health deteriorates significantly. His mother asks him if something has caused the worsening of his health. At this point he reveals to her his doubts about the girl’s real gender. Basile, Lo cunto, 560. The Grimms often remove allusions to melancholy, which affects several of Basile’s characters. 195. She asks a servant to rush to the beach and tell her that her father is about to die. 196. This finale is far too vague and incorrect. In Basile, after the debacle at the beach, the son goes back to his mother who suggests that he go to the girl’s house right away. By looking at how she walks down the stairs, he should be able to understand if she is really a woman. The girl has the time to change clothes but forgets to take off her earrings. The son proposes to her and together they go back to the rich man who rejoices at his son’s full recovery and thus offers to the poor man to marry his other six sons to his six daughters. Contrary to what the Grimms’ summary states, it is the poor man who goes to the rich man’s house and not vice versa. Basile, Lo cunto, 564–66. 197. “Corvetto,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 328–29. 198. Basile speaks at length about the courtiers’ corruption, a leitmotif of baroque literature. The king lives in Scotland. Basile, Lo cunto, 572. 199. The wild man is a savage ogre in Basile. The ogre is angry with the king because he persecuted him. 200. The Grimms correctly translate the word monaciello as Kobold (gremlin), the genius of the house according to classical culture and Neapolitan folklore. Basile, Lo cunto, 576. 201. The sentence, as usual, is much longer and more colorful in Basile: “May you be my witnesses: watch that piece of shit, and long live the king of Wide River!” (Basile, The Tale, 266). 202. “Der Dummling,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 329–30. 203. The father wants his son to go to Cairo via Venice. Basile, Lo cunto, 584–86. 204. The young man asks Hare’s-Ear what he can hear at that moment, and he reports that the simpleton’s father is rejoicing at his son’s departure. The young man is deeply saddened by this information. Basile, Lo cunto, 586. 205. He pretends to feel sick. Basile, Lo cunto, 590. 206. The princess casts a spell on the ring. Basile, Lo cunto, 592.

notes to pages 320–324

387

207. It is not a north wind in Basile, but its devastation is like the one caused by a strong north wind (Lo cunto, 594). 208. Basile adds that the simpleton shares his wealth with his companions. 209. “Rosella,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 330–32.7. 210. Basile explains that the Turk himself puts his daughter in the garden to make the prince believe that he intends to marry him to his daughter (Lo cunto, 600). 211. The Turk has her maids undress her, and the magic sheet falls out of his wife’s skirt (Basile, Lo cunto, 602). 212. This is a confusing rendition of what the girl says. She gives the prince a blade and tells him that when he hears the sound of chains hooking up to their boat, he must throw the blade blindly. (Basile, Lo cunto, 602). 213. The prince simply chops them off. He has no chain to hold the woman’s hands. 214. Basile says the Turk and his wife go to hell because she learned her art from “her master,” the devil. He doesn’t say she had survived for a long time thanks to her magic powers. Whereas Basile explicitly connects the old woman’s skills to the devil, the Grimms present her not as a witch but as one of their evil female characters whose wicked nature is somehow linked to magic. Thanks to magic, these characters in the Grimms’ tale can defy time. Portraying Muslims as followers of the devil was common in early modern Italy. See, for example, Torquato Tasso’s depiction of the Arab soldiers in his epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (1581), which recounts the final days of the first Crusade. 215. The girl first says that her actions were a form of revenge (Basile, Lo cunto, 610). The Grimms’ concise sentence is not in Basile’s text. 216. The prince apologizes to the girl, who tells him that one shouldn’t beg pardon “for those mistakes not generated by will” (Basile, The Tale, 278). This is why she can forgive him. These strong and sensible words emphasize a different ending. In the Grimms’ version, the girl becomes the passive object of the prince’s manipulation (embrace, baptism, wedding). 217. “Die drei Feen,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 333–35. 218. In Basile, the girl sees an ogre, not an imp. Basile, Lo cunto, 618. 219. At this point Basile calls the fairies “sorceresses” (maghe). Basile, Lo cunto, 620. 220. The original text has the girl mention “little nits, tiny lice, and pearls and garnets” (Basile, The Tale, 282). The fairies/sorceresses do have lice, but the girl responds kindly. 221. When they remove an unbecoming expression or modify the text significantly, the Grimms at times introduce the original Neapolitan words in parentheses. The disrespectful girl gets a donkey’s testicle stuck on her forehead. Basile, Lo cunto, 622. 222. This metaphor is Basile’s; the Grimms translated it literally. 223. What has been left out is the long, amusing description of Cuosemo’s repulsion when his lips have to touch his ugly wife’s mouth, and also the embarrassing night in bed together. To avoid any contact, he moves so far away from her that he falls off the bed and ends up on the chamber pot, thus spilling its smelly content. Basile, Lo cunto, 626–28. 224. Cuosemo tells Grannizia that she must wait for him there while he has a spell against the evil eye created for her. Basile, Lo cunto, 630. 225. “Der Hahnenstein,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 335–36. 226. Basile gives a detailed description of his rejuvenation, including his blood, flesh, eyes, hair, legs, and even teeth. Basile, Lo cunto, 666. 227. Becoming the king’s relative is part of Minecaniello’s wish. 228. His transformation takes place in front of the king. Basile describes a reverse process of metamorphosis according to the baroque penchant for morbid details. Basile, Lo cunto, 668. 229. The hero goes back to the king by riding one of the two donkeys and loading the other with food for the friendly mice. Basile, Lo cunto, 672. 230. The two donkeys are thrown off a mountain.

388

notes to pages 324–326

231. “Die zwei Brüder,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 336–37. 232. This summary is sloppy and too vague, and limits itself to listing a sequence of motifs usually present in this kind of edifying tale. The first sentence synthesizes the father’s three-page speech on how to conduct a moral and safe life. The father’s discourse is also a succinct manual of manners, a genre popular in baroque culture, which emphasizes the mistrust of others (“Do not be too much of a chitchat . . . ; Think and then act. . . . ; Flee from disputes . . .” The Tale, 306–7). 233. By reading this sentence, one may think that a fairy appears to the despondent man. In Basile, she is Lady Virtue. She is dressed in green, a detail missing from the summary, and the high mountain is her home. Virtue tells the man that the heavens sent him there, reminds him that virtue is the best remedy for poverty, and persuades him not to kill himself. Lady Virtue also gives him some powder that he will have to sprinkle on an egg to save the princess’s life. Basile, Lo cunto, 684–86. 234. The rafter on which he fastens the rope is rotten, and it cracks. He falls on the stones he piled up and then kicked aside when trying to hang himself. A precious coin falls from the broken rafter. Basile, Lo cunto, 686. 235. Parmiero simply goes to a tavern to celebrate his lucky discovery. But a few days earlier some thieves had robbed the tavern and hidden the loot in the rafter that broke down when Parmiero tried to take his life. The innkeeper recognizes his money and reports Parmiero to the authorities. Basile, Lo cunto, 690. 236. “A chance” is the fact that the real thieves are arrested because when they returned to the place where they had hidden their treasure, they couldn’t find it and accused each other of betraying their pact. 237. “Die drei Könige,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 337–39. Cf. Basile, “The Three Animal Kings,” The Tale, 314. 238. Basile says that a fairy had cursed them. Lo cunto, 700. 239. In Basile, the three realms clearly correspond to the three areas of the world. The first castle is on top of a mountain that is higher than the clouds; the second is in the darkest recesses of a forest; the third is on the sea. Basile, Lo cunto, 702. 240. The girl only mentions the possibility that a relative, not her brother, may wish to pay her a visit. Basile, Lo cunto, 704. 241. Basile only says that the dolphin makes the sea rise very high. 242. The three kings explain that they had been turned into animals because their mother had been rude to a fairy. Basile, Lo cunto, 710. 243. The four couples’ trip to the royal family is much more complicated in Basile. They travel in a carriage pulled by six lions. 244. “Die sieben Speckschwarten,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 339–40. 245. Basile says that the mother is a “miserable old woman,” not a witch. Like her daughter, the old woman is deceitful and manipulative. She tells some women that she wants to cook some rich dish for her sickly daughter. Basile, The Tale, 321. 246. In Basile, the old mother tells the merchant she is punishing her daughter because the girl works too hard and this may endanger her health. The merchant chooses to marry her because he believes that this hard-working girl will be a perfect wife. Basile, Lo cunto, 720. 247. This summary distorts Basile’s story. The merchant wakes up, goes to the market, buys the flax, goes back home and tells his wife she is now free to work as hard as she likes. When he comes back, he will have a pair of sleeves made for her out of the spun flax. The German summary describes a test imposed on the hapless heroine, whereas Basile emphasizes the humorous consequences of the old woman’s lie about her daughter’s alleged wish to work very hard. 248. Basile speaks of vinte decine, which was the equivalent of four rolls. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 728. But for the meaning of the German word Kaute, see Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 5, 363.

notes to pages 326–328

389

249. This vague sentence fails to synthesize a detailed, and amusing, scene: “And so she took a very long pole and wound twenty rolls of the flax onto it . . . and after sticking an Indian gourd with a large hairpin and tying the pole to the parapet of the terrace, she began to lower this abbot of all the spindles from the terrace” (Basile, The Tale, 323). 250. The kind ladies are fairies in Basile (Lo cunto, 724). The girl comes up with a complicated and unsuccessful system to spin flax, which the fairies find extremely amusing, but the summary doesn’t try to explain what is so comical. 251. The wife has scattered nuts in the bed, and by tossing and turning she makes a noise as if her bones were rattling. Basile, Lo cunto, 724. 252. The story ends with the husband telling his deceptive wife that she must stop working. The husband would like to call another doctor but she tells him that the doctor has cured her just by looking at her. The summary is unclear and hasty. Cf. Basile, Lo cunto, 726. 253. “Der Drache,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 340–42. The considerable length of this detailed adaptation is due to its closeness to the Grimms’ view of fairy tale. 254. The king “prays” to the statue in Basile (Lo cunto, 730). The sorceress must lose her sight, not necessarily her eyes. 255. Basile stresses that the king has already raped Porziella (Lo cunto, 732). The birds drops “some sort of root” (The Tale, 327). 256. The fairy was asleep, and a satyr was about to rape her, but Porziella woke her up. 257. The bird steals a knife from the king, takes it to the girl, and tells her to dig a hole in the wall so that the bird can deliver food. 258. Miuccio soon becomes the most virtuous man in the court, and this is also why the king loves him (Lo cunto, 734). 259. The bird also offers a reward: the bird that blinds the evil woman will receive protection against hawks. 260. At this point of the story, the woman is a “fairy.” Basile (Lo cunto, 738) writes that the swallow “shits” into her eyes; it doesn’t let its “filth” pour down the woman’s face, as this summary says. 261. The queen and the dragon were born from the same womb. Her father knew how to save her because he had consulted his astrologers. Basile, Lo cunto, 740. 262. In Basile, the queen’s wrists, and not her dimples, need to be smeared with the dragon’s blood. 263. The king’s threat only comes at the end of a long argument in which the young man vents his anger at the king. Initially the king has very kind and flattering words for Miuccio and promises him a great reward if he helps him out again. By simplifying the Italian text, the German adaptation ‘purifies’ the narrative and lingers on the bare motifs (three tasks, etc.), which Basile’s characters are often very reluctant to act out (Lo cunto, 742). 264. Note the Grimms’ use of the direct speech to highlight the final magical event in the story. 265. The king expresses his great love for his wife and tells her that he will add his own blood to the dragon’s. Basile, Lo cunto, 744. 266. This telegraphic sequence of events replicates the Grimms’ narrative style. In Basile, before marrying her, the king begs the young woman to forgive him. The bird becomes a young lady because of the great love it has for Miuccio. Finally, the two couples celebrate their love while the queen’s corpse is thrown into a grave. Basile, Lo cunto, 746–48. 267. “Die drei Kronen,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 342–44. 268. The voice’s statement is incomplete. In Basile, the voice presents a riddle: does the king want a daughter who will run away from him, or a son who will kill him? (Lo cunto, 754). The Grimms turn this defiant statement into a meek request that aims to satisfy the king’s desire. By editing the voice’s mysterious statement, the Grimms give the tale an entire different meaning. In the Italian version, the ominous voice reveals that the tale will be somehow coherent but in an ob-

390

notes to pages 328–331

scure and sinister way. In the Grimms’ retelling, no unclear mystery lurks behind the beginning of the tale. The Grimms’ view of a fairy tale is based on the assumption that things cannot help but follow a natural, just, and good order. 269. In the Neapolitan version a long paragraph is dedicated to this debate. What is more important, life or honor, considering also that honor usually does not reside among women? The debate is based on the premise that women are unreliable and inferior to men. 270. Basile literally says that after nine months the king had a baby girl. Lo cunto, 756. 271. Having removed the ominous clause from the mysterious voice’s statement (a daughter “who will flee you”), the Grimms give a new meaning to the king’s act of locking his daughter up. The king wants to preserve her for marriage. Marriage becomes the focal point of the new tale. 272. The German adaptations are not consistent as far as the characters’ first names are concerned. Frequently all names are removed; in other cases, even when the names have a metaphorical meaning, they are edited out. Mentioning Marchetta’s name in parentheses is unusual. This is how Basile at times introduces his characters, including Marchetta. 273. The ogress promises that she will marry the girl to a wealthy man. Lo cunto, 760. 274. The chairs are “imperial.” The Tale, 340. 275. The three girls were “the fairy’s daughters.” Basile doesn’t explain who the fairy in question is, but given that his fantastic characters (ogres, ogresses, fairies) have an unstable identity (in a tale the same character may be called both fairy and ogress), we assume that the girls’ mother is the ogress herself, whom Basile now defines as a “fairy.” Lo cunto, 762. 276. The Italian name “Orca” (ogress) is added because of the word play at the end of the tale. 277. In Basile the girl asks the ogress for male clothes. 278. The summary keeps the gender confusion (her/him). 279. The king asks Marchetta to tell the truth. The girl recounts her entire life in detail, and her speech has a powerful dramatic effect. The king remembers a conversation he had with Marchetta’s father and realizes that the girl is telling the truth. Lo cunto, 768. 280. “Die zwei Kuchen,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 344–46. 281. In the original, the girl asks for the cookie (or, rather, a small pizza), which she wants to eat while drinking some water at the fountain. Lo cunto, 772. 282. In Basile, the girl is about to eat the cookie when the old woman arrives. The girl gives her the whole cookie. Lo cunto, 774. 283. The old woman doesn’t bless the girl’s heart; she wishes the heavens to “reward” the girl for her goodness. 284. Basile speaks of a “fairy.” For the “white woman” (weisse Frau) in German folklore, see Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 3, trans. James Steven Stallybrass (London: George Bell & Sons: 1883), chapter 32, 962. She is a “divine or semi-divine” creature who appears “in warm sunlight to poor shepherds.” In Basile’s tale, Ciommo soon becomes a shepherd. 285. On sirens and mermaids in German folklore, see Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, chap. 7, 433–34. 286. According to Michele Rak, this paste is a kind of Neapolitan bread made especially at Christmas time. Lo cunto, 786. Basile writes that the geese became so fat thanks to Marziella’s food that they looked like castrati. Lo cunto, 778. 287. The summary passes from present to past tense in this sentence. 288. In Basile, Marziella defines her oppressor as “the sorceress” (la maga). Lo cunto, 782. 289. The king saws off the chain. The ending of the Italian tale includes the punishment of the two evil women. The mother is stuck in a barrel and set on fire; her daughter is exiled from the kingdom. Lo cunto, 784. 290. “Die sieben Tauben,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 347–51. This very extensive adaptation often reproduces complete sentences of the Italian text, generally stripped of their poetic metaphors, which are however a fundamental aspect of Basile’s storytelling.

notes to pages 331–334

391

291. “Cocchiara” is a serving spoon, as we find in Canepa’s correct translation (The Tale, 351). Basile creates a consonance (“cocchiara e conocchia,” Lo cunto 790), which in the Grimms’ version becomes an allusion to the ‘female’ act of storytelling (spindle and distaff ). 292. The wild man is an ogre in Basile. The brothers walk for three years. 293. This, for example, is a good translation of the original Italian sentence. 294. In Basile, the ogre says that the brothers’ only task is to lead him like a puppy. 295. Basile writes “because of the midwife’s forgetfulness” and not “because of her” (The Tale, 351). 296. Basile says that the girl dresses up as a wayfarer. 297. In Basile, the brothers tell her that in that room the ogre won’t “see” her, not that he won’t “smell” her. Lo cunto, 792. 298. The Grimms introduce the girl’s name in the same point as the Neapolitan tale. As usual, the poetic metaphors, which Basile uses to enrich his storytelling and his style, are missing. 299. Basile writes that the cat “pees” on the fire. 300. The ogre says: “You have found what you need.” 301. The Grimms’ ‘wild man’ become an ‘ogre’ (Menschenfresser) in the literal sense of ‘cannibal,’ as the Grimms point out in their German dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 6, 2045–46). 302. We are not told that it is the oldest, and wisest, brother who speaks to the ogre. Lo cunto, 794. 303. In Basile, a bogeyman (gatto maimone) sits on the tree. The bogeyman throws a “fruit” that is growing on the tree and makes a large lump (vruognolo) on the man’s face, not a slash. 304. The doves stress that now they will be the easy prey of innumerable stronger birds, and draw up a long list (half a page) of dangerous birds. This is why their sister asks them to stay home. Lo cunto, 796. 305. In Italian, the whale says: “Beautiful girl, what are you doing?” 306. In Basile, the girl has to walk upstream (tira capo ad auto) and not look up (aufschauen). 307. The tree is an oak tree. 308. Basile specifies that the oak has lost its “honor” because it is now used to feed pigs. Basile says that the poor condition of the old tree is a symbol of the corruption that dominates his contemporary society. Lo cunto, 800. 309. In Basile, it is the old man who recognizes the girl. 310. In the German adaptation, the traveler’s monologue begins earlier than in Basile. In Lo cunto the first two sentences are an indirect speech. 311. Basile gives a powerful description of the ruins of ancient civilizations scattered inside the old house of Time. An important detail missing in the Grimms’ version is that the old woman has a hunchback that reaches the sky. In other words, the mother of Time has power over the heavens and the earth since her beard touches the ground. Lo cunto, 802. 312. The clock is attached to the wall. 313. Basile doesn’t mention “the time” (lo tiempo) at this point. 314. Basile uses a powerful metaphor: the man decomposes like a corpse taken from a tomb and exposed to air. 315. In Basile, the girl kisses the old woman’s hand and is rewarded because of her kindness. The mother of Time tells her that she must hide when her son shows up because he doesn’t respect anyone. He even eats his own children. Lo cunto, 804. 316. Basile doesn’t mention the “cornucopia.” He writes that the seven doves understood that the horns were “symbol of the goat” and thus were the columns of wealth. The Tale, 357. 317. Their homeland is Naples. However, since the whale is afraid of “getting beached,” one of the brothers suggests that she travel to the “Salt Rock,” which was an actual location marked on some contemporary maps. The Tale, 360. 318. “Der Rabe,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 352–54.

392

notes to pages 334–337

319. In Italian, the king says “white and red as this stone.” Lo cunto, 816. 320. Basile offers a long description of the king’s melancholy obsession. He writes that the king saw that image in front of him wherever he went. The image of the stone was like a stone in his heart. As we find in other summaries, the Grimms don’t mention the word “melancholy.” 321. The brother travels to Venice and then to Cairo. 322. The beggar worries about him because he looks anxious. 323. The beggar insists that he look at her closely. Lo cunto, 820. 324. He also dresses up as a “vendor of notions.” The Tale, 364. 325. The girl goes with a friend (a commare). Lo cunto, 822. 326. In the original, the storm is described in dramatic detail. 327. The king also sees that his brother has the girl he desires. 328. The king thinks that his brother is mad. Lo cunto, 826. 329. The king’s wife pleads on his brother’s behalf but to no avail. Lo cunto, 828. 330. The king accepts the challenge, saying he can always have new babies with his wife. The king is very happy when his brother comes back to life. Lo cunto, 830. 331. The queen utters a long and moving monologue before attempting suicide. Her father, the magician, reveals to her that he is behind the ordeals of the king and his brother. He wanted to take revenge against the king’s brother, who had taken his daughter away from him. He had led the king to execute his brother and then kill his own children. But now the magician feels like restoring the order he had disrupted. In Basile, the magician appears on a cloud as a powerful divine figure. Lo cunto, 832. 332. “Der bestrafte Hochmuth,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 354–56. 333. Note the shift from past to present tense. 334. The king promises himself that he will take revenge on the proud girl. Lo cunto, 840. 335. He says he is willing to sleep on the floor. Lo cunto, 842. 336. She warns him that if he disobeys he will have to give up his ass (“lo culo ’nce lasse!”). 337. Basile writes that even though she had rejected many kings, she was now sleeping with a gardener. Their affair went on for a while before she realized that she was pregnant. Lo cunto, 844. 338. The king doesn’t tell the girl that the palace belongs to him. He pretends to be a worker there. The king reveals his scheme to his mother the queen. 339. This sentence is unclear. The king asks his maids to call the girl and have her work with them. Then, disguised as a gardener, he suggests that the girl should steal some food to help the poor maids. 340. Disguised as gardener, the king tells the girl that she shouldn’t feel bad because she had no choice but to act as she did. 341. Again, Basile uses the word “melancholy” (malanconia) and not “sadness.” Lo cunto, 846. 342. Cintiella isn’t wearing a gorgeous dress. She has stolen some expensive cloth. Lo cunto, 848. 343. Basile writes that Cintiella goes into labor because of her shame and anger. 344. Before hugging and kissing her, the king verbally abuses her again. His mother steps in and asks him to stop his cruel game. 345. “Die Gans,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 356. This short tale is a clear example of the stark contrast between Basile’s and the Grimms’ literary style. The straightforward moral message of the tale is certainly close to the Grimms’ view of a fairy tale. However, they feel obliged to obscure the explicitly vulgar, and extremely funny, details. 346. Basile writes that the heavens had inspired the sisters to buy the goose as a reward for their goodness. Lo cunto, 888. 347. Basile uses the more expressive verb cacare (to shit) in multiple grammatical forms (cacata, cacatoria, etc.). 348. Lo cunto mentions “some,” and not just two, neighbors. Lo cunto, 890. 349. Basile doesn’t mention gold coins but only “money” and “coins.” Lo cunto, 888 and 890.

notes to pages 337–338

393

350. The sisters give the goose to the woman in part because they don’t want to raise any suspicion. 351. In Lo cunto, the prince simply “passes by” and doesn’t “ride by,” so he doesn’t dismount. This opaque sentence is much clearer in Basile. The prince defecates in an alley and uses the goose to wipe his behind. Lo cunto, 892. 352. Basile comments that the goose doesn’t mind switching a prince’s ass with a peasant’s mouth. Lo cunto, 894. 353. The prince exiles the evil neighbors and marries the older sister to a wealthy man. 354. “Die Monate,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 357. 355. Basile writes that Cianne wouldn’t even leave the latrine to help his brother. In despair, Lise leaves. Lo cunto, 898. 356. In a typically baroque style, Basile has Lise deliver a long monologue on man’s ignorance vis-à-vis God’s unfathomable plans. Man complains about the cold months of the year because he would like to dominate nature and even compel God to satisfy his base desires. 357. Basile speaks of a cascetella, which is a small box. Lo cunto, 902. The Grimms’ summary uses the word “Hütchen.” The passage from present to past tense is in the German text only. 358. The Grimms misunderstand what Lise does with the youth’s gift. He uses the small box as pillow. He puts it at the head of his bed, not on his own head. This is why the Grimms had to replace “box” with “hat.” 359. The two brothers’ speeches represent two opposite, but coexisting, themes of baroque culture. Cianne laments the painful instability of the human condition. Man is exposed to nature’s inscrutable decisions without being able to defend himself. Basile’s tale has thus a philosophical subtlety that is missing from the German summary, which reduces the two characters to the clichéd opposition between good and evil. Lo cunto, 904. 360. The tale doesn’t end here. Lise tells his brother that he should be content with what God has given him, and that he is willing to share his wealth with him. Cianne asks to be forgiven, and from that day on he only says positive things about everything. Lo cunto, 906. 361. “Pintosmauto?” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 358–59. Unsure about the meaning of the title, the Grimms leave the Neapolitan expression and offer a likely translation in parentheses. 362. The summary doesn’t explain how the youth came alive. Basile writes that Betta suddenly remembers that “another statue had come alive due to the prayers of a certain king of Cyprus” (The Tale, 400). After alluding to the myth of Pygmalion, Basile has Betta pray to a pagan goddess, Venus, who gives life to the statue. Lo cunto, 912. 363. Betta’s speech is much longer in Basile. She tells her father that since he wants her to have a husband, she has decided to make one to her liking. 364. The young man, who was born so recently, was unfamiliar with the world’s malice, Basile writes. 365. In Basile, the lady is just “an old woman,” not an enchantress (weise Frau). Lo cunto, 914. 366. Betta first finds shelter in the royal stable, and then, thanks to some ladies-in-waiting, moves to a small room at a higher level, which allows her to see Pintosmauto. 367. Lo cunto says that the king walks to a garden outside the city walls to get a few figs. He doesn’t go to “the” garden, as we read in this summary, as if it were in his palace. The Grimms also try to solve a problem. Basile writes that the old man had a room next to Betta’s and had heard everything she said the night before. But since the girl had slept in the king’s bedroom, he couldn’t have heard her words. This is why the Grimms give the poor man a house next to the king’s room. Lo cunto, 918. 368. The king spits out the drink when he pretends that he needs to pee. The summary says nothing about the content of Betta’s complaint. She reminds the king that she had made him with her own hands. Lo cunto, 920.

394

notes to pages 338–342

369. Betta has the baby in a hotel before getting home. When the queen wakes up and sees what happened, she “tore herself to shreds” (The Tale, 403). 370. “Der goldene Baumstamm,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 359–62. 371. Her father asks her where she found the golden leaf, but she tells him: “Take it, father, and don’t ask anymore, otherwise you will ruin your good fortune!” Lo cunto, 926. 372. Parmetella is extremely curious, Basile remarks. 373. The young man is a slave. 374. Basile writes that she is so scared that she gets diarrhea. But she is given some monkeys as servants and they dress her up so beautifully that she looks like a queen. Lo cunto, 928. 375. The slave turns into a handsome young man when he lies with the girl, but in the morning he becomes dark-skinned again. 376. The young man demands that she leave immediately. 377. In Basile, she runs into a fairy when she comes out of the cave where her lover dwells. She does not encounter the lady in a cave while walking away. Lo cunto, 930. 378. Basile specifies that his seven-year curse had ended. The young man tells her: “Traitor, why are you crying?” Lo cunto, 932. 379. In the Neapolitan tale, the old woman gives her empty pillowcases. Lo cunto, 934. 380. The young man says “In my aunt’s house,” thus stressing that he too is an ogre. 381. Basile describes the woman as a horrible, ridiculous monster. 382. Basile describes an ominous setting similar to a gathering of witches: “She had the table set near a well, where she placed her seven daughters, each with a torch in her hand. She gave Parmetella, however, two torches, and had her sit on the edge of the well” (The Tale, 411). 383. He says: “If you care about me, give me a kiss.” 384. He buries his wife in the basement. Lo cunto, 938. 385. The old woman knocks her head on the wall repeatedly until her brains spurt out. The young man asks his sisters to make peace with Parmetella, and they all live happily ever after. Lo cunto, 940. 386. “Sonne, Mond und Talia,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 362–64. 387. “A great lord” (no gran signore), and not a king, is the girl’s father. Lo cunto, 944; The Tale, 413. 388. He forbids spinning “in his house,” not in his kingdom. Talia calls the woman up; she doesn’t go down. 389. She falls down dead, not “as if dead.” The old woman rushes down as soon as she sees the girl collapse. 390. Basile doesn’t mention “his court.” The father, whom Basile doesn’t define as “king,” leaves alone. Lo cunto, 946. 391. Not “another” king, but only “a” king, since he is the first king in this tale. 392. “In all her beauty” is not in this passage. Basile mentions Talia’s beauty later, when he narrates how the king violates her because of her beauty. The Grimms move up the allusion to the girl’s beauty to create a magic atmosphere and dilute the crude tone of Basile’s tale. 393. Dazzled by her beauty, the king rapes the girl and then returns to his kingdom where he forgets about her. 394. This is not what Basile says. Talia simply wonders who is feeding her family. 395. The king leaves with the excuse that he wishes to go hunting. 396. The king doesn’t “console” Talia. He tells her what happened. 397. She becomes suspicious because her husband is late, and when he returns he keeps mentioning Talia and the two children even when he is asleep. Lo cunto, 948. 398. She has the servant (the king’s secretary) tell Talia that the king wishes to see the children. 399. The king is annoyed and reminds his wife that she hasn’t given him any children. 400. The summary edits out a powerful exchange between the queen and Talia, who defends

notes to pages 342–343

395

herself by explaining that the king had taken advantage of her while she was asleep. Talia will be burned at the stake. Lo cunto, 950. 401. “Sapia,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 364. 402. Basile doesn’t say that the prince becomes the smartest child in the realm, only that his intellectual abilities increase significantly. Also, the first thing Sapia tries to teach him is how to cross himself, but she fails, which is why she slaps him. This is one of Basile’s very rare allusions to the Christian faith. Lo cunto, 958. 403. This vague sentence unsuccessfully summarizes the entire second part of the tale, which the Grimms may have deleted because of moral concerns. The prince visits Sapia periodically in the hope of finding her dejected and humiliated, but she maintains her proud stance. When the king dies, the prince inherits the kingdom and decides to visit the vast regions of his realm. Sapia’s mother had a tunnel built under Sapia’s room so that the young woman could sneak out before her mean husband’s departure. Sapia finds a house in front of the palace where the prince will rest at the end of his trip. Wearing elegant clothes, Sapia shows herself at the window and the prince falls for her. They sleep together and she becomes pregnant. The prince gives her a jewel as a token of his affection. She returns to her modest room and gives birth to a baby boy. When the prince leaves for a second trip, Sapia’s mother suggests that she repeat the same scheme, and this time the prince gives her a tiara. She gives birth to a second boy. The third time he meets her and makes love to her he gives her a golden chain. This time she has a baby girl. Sapia’s mother gives her a sleeping potion and makes people believe that Sapia is dead. The prince decides to marry a noblewoman but Sapia appears wearing his precious gifts and holding their three babies and asks him not to take the kingdom away from their children. Dumbfounded, the prince acknowledges Sapia’s wisdom and accepts her as his rightful wife. 404. “Die fünf Söhne,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 364–65. 405. The five sons were “good for nothing” and ate too much, Basile adds. Lo cunto, 982. 406. The father is concerned about the possible grim future awaiting his first son. Lo cunto, 984. 407. They travel to Sardinia, where they offer to save the king’s daughter. Lo cunto, 986. 408. The Grimms add the following footnote: “The oldest one, the thief, has to do this because otherwise he doesn’t have a chance to use his craft. But this is not specified.” 409. The ogre doesn’t travel in a cloud; he turns into a dark cloud. Later the princess says that she knows that the ogre is hidden in the dark cloud. Lo cunto, 986 and 988. 410. The father doesn’t explicitly ask for the girl. After hearing from all the brothers, the king turns to the father and asks him what he did in his daughter’s rescue. The father says he did a lot because he was the one who suggested that his sons learn a craft. Lo cunto, 990. 411. “Nennillo und Nennella,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 366–67. 412. The stepmother is very ugly and complains about everything. Unlike the tale of “Hansel and Gretel,” “Nennillo and Nennella” doesn’t focus on the family’s poverty. The new wife is spoiled and doesn’t want to waste time with her stepchildren. This is why she is mean to them. The father takes them to the forest to appease his wife’s ego. Lo cunto, 970. 413. A donkey eats the scattered bran, thus erasing the trace. Lo cunto, 972. 414. Basile writes that “the heavens always keep a protecting hand on innocents,” which is much less specific than “God saves them.” (The Tale, 429). 415. The fisherman is the leader of some pirates. He takes the girl to his wife because she had recently lost her own baby girl. 416. The real story is that the pirate and his wife have to flee because he is a wanted criminal. 417. In the fish’s belly, she finds a beautiful countryside, marvelous gardens, and an elegant house. Lo cunto, 974. 418. In a footnote the Grimms transcribe the original Neapolitan: “Frate, mio frate! / li cortielle so ammolate, / le tavole apparecchiate, / ed a mme la vita ncresce, / senza te drinto a sto pesce.” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 366.

396

notes to pages 344–345

419. Nennillo tells the king that he remembers, as in a dream, that he used to have a sister. But he doesn’t recall his father’s name. Lo cunto, 976. 420. The king scolds the father severely and calls him a “wimp” and a “good-for-nothing.” 421. The king marries them to two nobles. Lo cunto, 978. 422. “Die drei Zitronen,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822), 367–69. 423. The prince is a loner and uncivilized. So his story is also about a process of education triggered by a sudden bout of melancholy. Lo cunto, 994. 424. It’s ricotta cheese, not milk. Lo cunto, 996. 425. An entire page is dedicated to the father’s moving plea to his son and his son’s stern reply. 426. Again, Basile doesn’t set his tale entirely in an imaginary landscape. The young man travels to France, then on a Genovese ship reaches the Strait of Gibraltar, and from there gets to the “island of the ogresses” (Lo cunto, 998). 427. The skinny old woman warns him about her three sons, who will devour him if they catch him. 428. This is a very incomplete description of the mysterious woman. She gives sweets to some donkeys, which then jump around by a river and kick some swans. Lo cunto, 1000. 429. The woman tells him that he can go back to Italy. 430. He travels through the Columns of Hercules and lands at a port that is only a day away from his kingdom. He enters a forest and there sees the fountain. 431. This lady is as white as milk and as red as strawberries. Lo cunto, 1002. 432. The description of this girl’s beauty takes almost a page in Basile. She is as red as the prosciutto from the Abruzzi region, and Jupiter dropped gold onto her hair. Juno had squeezed the “tits” (zizze) on her breasts to nourish men’s desire. Lo cunto, 1002–4. 433. She is a dark-skinned slave, like the one who claims that she has filled the jar with her tears at the beginning of Lo cunto de li cunti. 434. Basile mocks the ugly slave by mimicking her ungrammatical Italian in which the verbs are all in the infinitive, as he has done with the other slave at the beginning of his book. 435. The slave sticks the pin into the fairy’s “memory,” that is, into her brain. Lo cunto, 1008. 436. She says that, because of a spell, she looks white one year and black the next. 437. The fairy says “with the Saracen,” and not “with the black bride.” Lo cunto, 1010. 438. The tree is in a pot on a terrace. 439. “Schluss der Einleitung,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen, vol. 3 (1822). 369. 440. The dark-skinned woman is buried alive with her head sticking out of the earth to make her death more painful. Recall that she is pregnant, so the fetus will die with her.

Index

Aarne, Antti, 14 Abram, David, 8–9 Alciato, Andrea, Emblemata, 57–58 Alden Bass, Thomas, 368n19 Alibar, Lucy, Juicy and Delicious, 278, 282 Andersen, Hans Christian, 1–2 Anderson, Graham, 354n129 Antoninus Liberalis, 241 Aprile, Renato, 351n43 Apuleius. See “Cupid and Psyche” Arabian Nights, The, 234, 371n114 Ariès, Philippe, 264, 349n1 Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando furioso, 27 Arnold, Günther, 347n12 Bacchilega, Cristina, 227, 350n7, 366n66, 368n21, 369n71 Bachelard, Gaston, 94 Bailey, Peter J., 373n10, 374n34 Barnoud, Madeleine, 350n4 Barth, John, 216, 217, 227, 371n129; Chimera, 371n114; Lost in the Fun House, 217, 245–46 Barthelme, Donald, 216–17 Bartók, Mira, The Memory Palace, 272–75 Basile, Giambattista: “The Crucible,” 127–28; “The Enchanted Doe,” 114; “The Golden Trunk,” 40–67, 74–76, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83– 84, 85–86; “The Myrtle,” 113–23, 128–34, 140; “The Old Woman Who Was Skinned,” 116; “The Padlock,” 35–40, 74, 177–80;

“Penta with the Chopped-Off Hands,” 61; “Peruonto,” 116; Sacri sospiri, 39; “The Snake,” 48; “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” 18– 20, 27–28, 232–33, 234–35, 238; The Tale of Tales (Lo cunto de li cunti), 10, 30–67, 88, 93–96, 104–7, 112, 113, 190–91, 276, 279, 286; “The Three Citrons,” 96–101; “The Three Fairies,” 116; view of ogres, 176 Baudrillard, Jean, 249, 374n17 Bateson, Mary Catherine, Composing a Life, 271 Beasts of the Southern Wild, 22, 278–86 “Beauty and the Beast,” 188; in Coover, 238; in de Villeneuve, 201–10; in Lang, 209; in Leprince de Beaumont, 200–210; in Novalis, 189, 191–92, 198 Belmont, Nicole, 3, 28, 30, 349n58 Benjamin, Walter, 28, 30, 111, 112 Benson, Stephen, 369n70 Bettelheim, Bruno, 2, 13, 227 Birkerts, Sven, 259 Blamires, David, 360n7 Bloch, Ernst, 36 Block, Francesca Lia, 201 Boccaccio: Decameron, 30–31; Genealogies of the Pagan Gods, 32–33 Bohrer, Karl Heinz, 364n11 Borges, Jorge Luis, Ficciones, 245 Bottigheimer, Ruth, 131, 347n14, 353n99, 366n48 Braccini, Tommaso, 353n89

398

index

Brentano, Clemens, 21, 173–74; and Basile, 29, 125–28, 149–50, 173–74; and Catholicism, 137, 138–39, 143–44, 148; Chronicle of the Traveling Student, 143; and Emmerick, 143–44, 148–49, 152, 155–70; “The Fairy Tale of Fanferlieschen Lovely-Little Feet,” 138–39; “The Fairy Tale of Gockel, Hinkel, and Gackeleia,” 132, 151; “The Fairy Tale of the Fairy Tales, or Dear-My-Soul,” 149– 52; “The Fairy Tale of the Laced-Up Girl,” 149–55; “The Fairy Tale of the Myrtle-Girl,” 132–47, 149, 150–51; The Fairy Tales of the Rhine, 132–33, 174; Italian Fairytales, 92, 112, 124, 125–28; The Numerous Wehmüllers, 143; Story From the French Revolution, 143. See also Youth’s Magic Horn, The Buckley, Michael, Sisters Grimm, 16–18 Bull, Malcolm, 351n44 Bultmann, Rudolph, 240 Burkert, Walter, 351n40 Burton Russell, Jeffrey, 352n66 cabinet des fées, Le, 198 Calderón de la Barca, 33 Calvino, Italo, 32, 118, 172, 213, 230; Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 246; Why Read the Classics?, 246 Campanella, Tommaso, 45 Canepa, Nancy, 127, 350n2, 350n21, 351n37, 352n55, 353n84, 363n32, 381n91 Cartari, Vincenzo, The Images of the Ancient Gods, 56–57, 113, 352n65 Carter, Angela, The Bloody Chamber, 200–201, 242 Cashdan, Sheldon, 369n70, 370n96 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quijote, 229 Chabot, C. Barry, 373n10 Chénetier, Marc, 373n10 Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, 99, 102 Cigogna, Strozzi, Magiae omnifariae, 61–62 Cocteau, Jean, 201 Collodi, Carlo, The Adventures of Pinocchio, 219 Colm Hogan, Patrick, 6 Coover, Robert, 11, 21; The Adventures of Lucky Pierre. Director’s Cut, 370n78, 372n148; and Basile, 232–33, 234–36, 238; Briar Rose, 26, 226–29, 230–33; A Child Again, 235, 241; “The End of the Book,” 237; Gerald’s Party, 222–25, 226, 233, 234; Ghost Town, 370n78, 372n148; The Grand Hotel (of Joseph Cor-

nell), 213–15, 222; and myths, 229–30, 240–41, 254; Noir, 371n132; The Origin of the Brunists, 220–22, 372n148; and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 234; “A Passionate Remembrance,” 242; Pinocchio in Venice, 218–19, 372n148; Pricksongs and Descants, 217, 229; Spanking the Maid, 371n124; Stepmother, 225–26 Cope, Jackson I., 369n50 Cortese, Giulio Cesare, 54 Costikyan, Greg, 215 Coupe, Laurence, 13 Cox, Lynne, Greyson, 257–58 Croce, Benedetto, 31 “Cupid and Psyche”: in Apuleius, 21, 31–32, 38, 39, 44–47, 49, 50–51, 52–53, 62–63, 231; in Basile, 28, 33–67, 118; and “Beauty and the Beast,” 188; in Brentano, 132–33, 146, 162–63, 165; in the Brothers Grimm, 180– 81, 183; in Novalis, 190; in Perrault, 187; in Sicilian Fairy Tales, 73–74, 76–77, 83, 85; in Western culture, 32–35 Dante, The Divine Comedy, 49 de Boufflers, Stanislas Jean, Aline, Queen of Golconde, 191–92, 194–96, 197 de Caumont La Force, Charlotte Rose, 34–35, 200, 203 Dégh, Linda, 363n28 de Gubernatis, Angelo, 12–13 della Porta, Giovan Battista, The Art of Remembering, 1, 10 del Toro, Guillermo, 10 Dentith, Simon, 10 de Pazzi, Maria Maddalena, 165–66 de Villeneuve, Gabrielle, “Beauty and the Beast,” 201–10 de Vries, Jan, 12 Devries, Larry, 351n52 Didion, Joan: Blue Nights, 267, 375n43; Where I Was From, 258–59; The Year of Magical Thinking, 262–67; The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play, 266–67 Disney, Walt, 203, 248–56; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 253, 254 Dokey, Cameron, 228 Dougherty, David C., 373n10 Douglas, Mary, 87 Dundes, Alan, 4–5 Durkheim, Emile, 240, 241

index Eco, Umberto, 69, 217, 237, 249 Elkin, Stanley, 21; The Living End, 255–56; The Magic Kingdom, 251–55 Ellis, John M., 363n27 Emmerick, Anna Katharina, 21, 137, 143–44, 148–49, 155–70; and the Orient, 156–57; and relics, 144, 149 Espacio en blanco (Radio nacional de España), 6–8 Euripides, Alcestis, 265 Evenson, Brian, 367n1 fairies, in Basile, 115–17 Feller-Geissdörfer, Fabienne, 357n19 Fetzer, John, 132 Finkel, Donald, 370n77 Flynn, Laura M., Swallow the Ocean, 271–72 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, 229 Fox, Jennifer, 70 Frances of Rome, Saint, 144 Francis of Assisi, Saint, Little Flowers, 353n94 Frank, Manfred, 364n4 Freudenberg, Rudolf, 370n100 Frey, James, A Million Little Pieces, 259–60, 261 “Frog Tsarevna, The,” 275 Frühwald, Wolfgang, 360n2, 360n5 Frye, Lawrence, 137, 359n24, 360n62 Fulgentius, Mythologies, 32–33 Gado, Frank, 370n79 Gatto, Giuseppe, 4, 350n5 Gibson, Mel, The Passion of the Christ, 21 Girardot, N. J., 374n18 Gizzi, Corrado, 353n92 Godwin, Joscelyn, 351n44 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, 192 Gonzenbach, Laura, 69; “The Beautiful Maiden with Seven Veils,” 88–92, 95–96, 98–105; “King Cardiddu,” 70–86; Sicilian Fairy Tales, 21, 69–70, 88, 112 Gonzenbach, Magdalena, 69 Goody, Jack, 4, 18, 27 Graf, Arturo, 187 Grätz, Manfred, 365n40 Greenberg, Michael, Hurry Down Sunshine, 277 Grimm, Jacob, 124–25, 130; German Mythology, 1, 229 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 21; and Basile,

399

29, 34, 125–31, 171–87; “The Blue Light,” 139; “Brier Rose,” 184, 214, 227; Children’s and Household Tales, 1, 3, 18–20, 31, 59, 184; “The Devil with Three Golden Hairs,” 139; Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, 1–2; “Faithful Ferdinand and Unfaithful Ferdinand,” 92; “The Frog King,” 238; German Dictionary, 388n248, 391n301; German Legends, 129–30; “The Godfather,” 383n135; “Iron Hans,” 381n89; “The Juniper Tree,” 235; “Rapunzel,” 378n35; “The Twelve Brothers,” 38; “The Virgin Mary’s Child,” 92; “The Wishing Table, the Golden Donkey, and the Club in the Sack,” 377n9 Guarini, Ruggero, 386n191 Guthrie, W. K. C., 354n104 Haase, Donald, 3, 176, 367n9 Haig Gaisser, Julia, 351n45 Hardwick, Elizabeth, Sleepless Nights, 260 Hartwig, Otto, 69 Hearne, Betsy, 364n1, 366n49 Heising, James, 5 Hensel, Luise, 163, 167 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 3 Hillman, James, 232 Hodkinson, James R., 364n2 Hölderlin, 68 Hume, Kathryn, 368n31, 369n50 Iles Johnston, Sarah, 372n156 Iliad, 87 Jacobi, Johann Georg, Nessir and Zulima, 191, 192–94 Jasper, Karl, 240–41 Jolles, André, 286, 363n22, 370n81 Keller, Ronald, 216 Kermode, Frank, 357n7 Kierkegaard, Søren, Sickness unto Death, 1–2 Kodish, Deborah, 355n13 Kremer, Detlef, 364n10, 365n12 Kuhn, Adalbert, 12 Kunert, Günther, 215 Lacassin, Francis, 202–3 Lampart, Fabian, 363n18 Landfester, Ulrike, 361n13

400

index

Lang, Andrew, The Blue Fairy Tale Book, 209 Leach, Jeff D., 348n34 LeClair, Thomas, 373n10 Lee, Tanith, 203 Leprince de Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie, “Beauty and the Beast,” 200–210 Liebrecht, Felix, 124, 130, 171 Lincoln, Bruce, 349n47 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 146, 246 Luther, Martin, 145 Lüthi, Max, 30, 36, 111, 146 Maatsch, Jonas, 364n3 Maggi, Armando, 362n40; In the Company of Demons, 61 Magnanini, Suzanne, 349n69, 350n16 Maltby, Paul, 368n20 Marazzini, Claudio, 11 Marin, Louis, 250, 371n110 Marinella, Lucrezia, 45 Maring, Heather, 30 Marino, Giovambattista, 354n105 Martí-Ibánez, Félix, 210 McCaffery, Larry, 370n85 McCarty, William Bernard, 364n2 McKinley, Robin, 201 Meder, Theo, 357n22 Megas, Georgios, 352n74, 353n88 Melancholy, 92–93, 100–102 Mittag, Susanne, 133 Morbiato, Luciano, 348n36 mort d’Artus, La, 264 Müller, Max, 12 Murphy, Louise, The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, 9 Murphy, Ronald, S.J., 363n24 Musaeus, Johann Karl August, 191 Myers, Alyse, Who Do You Think You Are?, 276 Nabokov, Vladimir, Speak, Memory, 258 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 355n137 Neumann, Erich, 33 Nicol, Bran, 368n26 Nisbet Bain, Robert, Russian Fairy Tales, 277 Norris, Kathleen, Dakota, 258 Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 191, 197; The Novices of Sais, 191, 197; Studies in the Visual Arts, 192; The Universal Brouillon, 2, 68, 87, 189–92, 196–97, 198, 210, 281

Oates, Joyce Carol, A Widow’s Story, 260–61, 268–69 Odyssey, 87 Once Upon a Time (ABC), 18 Ong, Walter, 27, 28 Orality, 29–30 Orpheus, 54, 78–80 Ovid: Fasti, 113; Metamorphoses, 11, 54, 119–20, 234, 246, 383n142 Parody, 10–11, 18 Perrault, Charles: Grisélidis, 187; Tales and Stories of the Past, 18, 25, 176–77, 234, 235 Petrarch: canzoniere, 176; Familiares, 107 Philip, Neil, 15, 35 Picone, Michelangelo, 357n31 Pinter, Harold, 356n1 Pitrè, Giuseppe, 117 Pöge-Alder, Kathrin, 350n8 Pogue Harrison, Robert, 375n41 Polaschegg, Andrea, 361n24 postmodernism, 216–18, 227 Preston, Cathy Lynn, 369n50 Princess Tutu (manga), 6 Propp, Vladimir, 14–15 Pughe, Thomas, 373n10 Rak, Michele, 350n16, 353n94, 353n102, 357n5, 390n286 Redies, Sunje, 369n70 Reding, Josef, 372n170 Rice, Anne, 216 Riley, Kastinger, 360n3 Ritzenhoff, Ursula, 365n34, 365n38 Röhrich, Lutz, 359n22 Rölleke, Heinz, 174, 358n5, 359n22, 362n1, 363n17, 363n24, 364n43, 382n99 Rubini, Luisa, 69, 70 Runge, Philipp Otto, 31 Rushdie, Salman, 14 Sarnelli, Pompeo, 29 Schenda, Rudolf, 28, 348n16, 355n15, 356n22, 358n3 Schiller, Friedrich, 189 Schlegel, Friedrich, 189, 361n24 Segal, Robert, 349n53 Sell, Edward, 353n91 Sendak, Maurice, Where the Wild Things Are, 5 Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 107

index Sennewald, Jens, 4 Sexton, Anne, Transformations, 230–31 Shapiro, Michael J., 373n10 Shields, David, 261 Sir Orfeo, 79 “Sleeping Beauty,” 18–20, 21, 112, 176–77, 213–16, 219–22, 232–45 Smith, Kevin Paul, 368n22 Solms, Wilhelm, 363n24 Sondheim, Stephen, 356n1 Steig, Reinhold, 363n17 Stewart, Susan, 351n30 Straparola, Giovan Francesco, 29 Strauss, David, Half a Life, 269–71 Susanetti, Davide, 356n23 Swain, Virginia E., 366n49 Swann, Jan-Ojvind, 352n74 Tasso, Torquato, 387n214 Tatar, Maria, 8, 11, 25, 173, 351n28 Taussig, Michael, 11 Teverson, Andrew, 371n114 Thompson, Stith, 14, 353n86 Thousand-and-One Nights, A, 191 Tiffin, Jessica, 217 Tolkien, J. R. R., 13, 18 Tranströmer, Tomas, 258 Tucker, Harry, Jr., 360n4 Tully, Carol Lisa, 362n15

401

Vax, Louis, 175 Vedas, 12 Viehmann, Dorothea, 4, 8, 9, 10 Visio Alberici, 49 von Arnim, Ludwig Achim, 173, 174–75. See also Youth’s Magic Horn, The von Franz, Marie-Louise, 13 Walker, Barbara, 200 Wanning Harries, Elizabeth, 350n7 Warner, Marina, 33, 214, 226, 366n60 Weeks, Andrew, 349n71, 361n20 Wieland, Christoph Christian, 125; “Adis and Dahy,” 198–200; Dschinnistan, 198 Wilczynski, Marek, 369n49 Willer, Stefan, 361n13 Williams, Christi, 369n69 Willingham, Bill, Fables, 16–18 Winterson, Jeanette, 259 Wrede, Patricia, 216 Yagoda, Ben, 259 Yolen, Jane, Briar Rose, 9 Youth’s Magic Horn, The, 130 Zeitlin, Benh, Beasts of the Southern Wild, 278 Zipes, Jack, 4, 5, 10, 29, 30, 67, 69, 173, 250, 350n6, 366n49, 367n3