According to Zipes, fairy tales "serve a meaningful social function, not just for compensation but for revelation: the worlds projected by the best of our fairy tales reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society. He completed a PhD in comparative literature at Columbia University. Zipes taught at various institutions before heading German language studies at the University of Minnesota.
He has retranslation of the complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Search review text. Interesting theory using Richard Dawkins' "memes" to explain the 'stickiness' of fairy tales, but the book goes far beyond this in revealing more interesting depths to Zipes' ongoing discussion about fairy tales.
Zipes keeps chipping away at the importance of these traditional tales, but never falls into the trap of a Freudian, Jungian, post-structuralist,etc. Katherine Sas. Author 2 books 7 followers. I respect Zipes as a critic, and I appreciate that there is a usefulness to Marxist criticism, but this is where it falls short for me.
I'm not sure I understand fairy tales themselves any better than when I started the book. It's a great topic that I'm interested in, but the writing was dry and academic to the point of putting me to sleep each time I picked up this book. I can't believe I used to read this kind of stuff all the time in college. Parts of this - where he was discussing the history of the genre, or individual tales - were quite interesting.
Generally however there was just too much abstract academic waffle. This is a weighty tome in several ways—delving deeply into psychology, historical scholarship, and literary theory, it is also replete with a multitude of footnotes and a lengthy bibliography.
At times, impeded by a less-than-facile writing style, the narrative is bogged down with paragraph-long lists of titles that might better be relegated to notes or the bibliography. Some readers will undoubtedly find the jargon a bit off-putting. And there are signs of careless editing, such ascribing the work of Perrault and Mme.
On another occasion, he shifts the spelling of a character's name from Morrell to Morel — In a work so filled with minutiae, such oversights are bound to occur—of course, one wonders how many others went unheeded. The initial chapters review the history of what Zipes calls the literary fairy tales—which, in his definition, includes any tale that has been committed to the written page he goes back to Boccaccio and earlier , as opposed to a tale that is the original creation of a writer, as it is so often defined.
His conclusion is that it is impossible to find a pure "fairy" tale or pure "folk" tale, since all have been "contaminated" through "cross-cultural and intercultural exchange" producing a myriad of variants These cultural variants are what chiefly concern him in this study.
Much of this material he has covered elsewhere—as he himself points out. It is only in chapter 3 that he actually begins with the examination of specific tales and gets to the heart of the book as suggested by its title. His interest is in looking at modern-day variations of the best-known folktales to show how they have been adapted to twentieth- and twentieth-first-century lifestyles.
To my mind it is not suficient now to argue as I have done in the past that the classi- cal tales have been consciously and subconsciously reproduced largely in print by a cultural industry that favors patriarchal and reactionary notions of gender, ethnicity, behavior, and social class. There are other important elements or ingredients in the tales themselves as well as external factors that need more attention, for they might explain more fully how and why particular types are disseminated more than others.
What is it in the generic nature of the fairy tale that accounts for its cultural relevance and its attraction? Why do certain tales appear to spread almost like a virus, not only in the Western world but also in the entire world? Memetics and the Epidemiological Approach In The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Broth- ers Grimm ,1 I began trying to answer some of these questions by formulating more speciic questions about origins and by proposing a social biological and an epidemiological approach to understanding the relevance of fairy tales.
I asked: How did literary fairy tales originate? How did they spread? How was their great tradition formed? There are numerous theories about the origin of the fairy tale, but none have pro- vided conclusive proof about how the literary fairy tale was formed. This is because it is next to impossible to know because the literary fairy tale is similar to a special biological species that was cultivated slowly in an oral tradition and then suddenly lowered at one point in history with the help of the printing press and new social and technological forms of transmission.
It may seem strange to compare the genre of the fairy tale to a natu- ral form of species. Yet, there is a virtue to using a biological analogy to make sense of the great tradition of the literary fairy tale. In fact, the literary fairy tale has evolved from the stories of the oral tradition, piece by piece in a process of incremental adaptation, generation by generation in different cultures of people who cross-fertilized the oral tales with the literary tales and disseminated them.
If we consider that tales are mentally and physically conceived by human beings as material products of culture, then it is possible to analyze how special forms of telling originated as species or what literary critics call genres. As a result, we can trace a historical evolution of many of these tales by examining how bits and pieces of a story accumulated in different cultures and then eventually gelled to form a genre. We cannot say with historical precision when the literary fairy tale began its evolution, but we can trace motifs and elements of the literary fairy tale to numerous types of storytelling and stories of antiquity that contributed to the for- mation of a particular branch of telling and writing tales.
I likened the evolutionary process of the speciic form of the oral wonder tale and the literary fairy tale to a process of contamination and contagion—the motifs and plots of stories spread like viruses that eventually formed a clearly identiiable genre, species, or virus that we generally call the fairy tale. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our own planet.
There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary planet. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense can be called imita- tion.
If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lec- tures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. We copy and change all the time, and we are disposed to copying memes that want to be copied.
A meme must be capable of being copied in a faithful way; it must be shaped or formed in such a way that many copies can be made; and it must be able to survive a long time so that many copies will be disseminated.
In time some memes form a memeplex, which is a group of memes that facilitates replication and can be likened to a genre. According to Blackmore, memes coevolve with genes, often inluencing them, or are inluenced by them. The dynamics will depend on the environment. At a June convention of biologists, zoologists, geneticists, psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, and social scientists in Cam- bridge, England, the status of the meme was critically debated by the participants.
Indeed, a good example of a meme is a fairy tale, but not just any fairy tale, an individ- ual fairy tale and its discursive tradition that includes oral and literary tales and other cultural forms of transmission such as radio, ilm, video, and the Internet.
Even this scholarly discussion is memetic, that is, it is bound up with the trans- mission of memes that only survive if they are relevant or made relevant and stabilized through cultural institutions. But it is perhaps too easy to accept memetics, a catchy theory, which is becoming more and more popular, when there is no conclusive scienti- ic evidence that proves how memes are either biologically absorbed or transmitted to our brains and retained so that we become disposed to replicate them.
Nevertheless, the concept of the meme, which needs to be qualiied, is, I believe, a valid term and starting point for considering the evolution and relevance of the fairy tale as a genre, and I shall use the term meme here in a broad sense to indicate a public representation or cultural replicator.
He begins with the premise that Members of a human group are bound with one another by multiple lows of information. Mentally represented information is transmitted from individuals to individuals through public productions.
Public representations such as speech, ges- tures, writing, or pictures are a special type of public productions, the function of which is to communicate a content. Public representations play a major role in the information transmission. A fairy tale as meme wants to be understood in a particular relevant way, otherwise it will not stick in the recipient who is intended to replicate it. The aim is to explain in cognitively realistic terms what these expectations of relevance amount to, and how they might contribute to an empirically plausible account of comprehension.
What I want to insist on at this point is that a meme must be made relevant to stick, and as a fairy tale it has been made relevant in an evolutionary process. With regard to the evolution of the literary fairy tale, we can consider its generator as the oral folk tale, in all its generic forms, as a meme that carries vital information for adaptation to the environment.
In the pro- cess of gathering information in the brain, storing it, making it relevant, and then sharing it, humans tended and still tend to privilege certain data and to use them in speciic circumstances. Recently, two European scholars have presented very useful explanations of how memes, when competing with other memes, are processed to become effective replica- tors.
This last stage is followed again by stage 1, thus closing the replication loop. At the same time, the meme has its own criteria of self-justiication, self- reinforcement, intolerance, and proselytism without which it would not be it for replication.
Both the stages and criteria can, I believe, be applied to how a particular fairy tale is processed and replicated by an individual or groups of individuals when they hear, read, or see a fairy tale.
In addition, there are other sociocognitive mechanisms to be considered. Castelfranchi and Heylighen provide qualiications about the opera- tions of memes that reveal how much more complex a meme is. Impart- ing knowledge through language and artifacts is an eficient and relevant mode that contributes to the formation and continuity of groups and societies and their speciic cultural rites, norms, and customs.
We tend to shape and form information as a public representation in special ways that can be categorized socially and aesthetically, and as the human species has evolved, we have cultivated speciic art forms linguistically, cognitively, and physically to express and communicate our beliefs and also our wonder about reality and the supernatural.
In her book What Is Art For? Dissanayake states: Making special implies intent or deliberateness. In most art of the past, it would seem, the special realm to be contrasted with the everyday was a magical or supernatural world, not—as today in the advanced West—a purely aesthetic realm.
In both the functional and nonfunctional art an alternative reality is recognized and entered; the making special acknowledges, reveals, and embodies this reality. If a form of telling became highly special and relevant, it was remembered and passed on. If the contents were crucial for adapting to the environment, they too were disseminated time and again in forms that were recalled and trans- formed.
Imitation and transmission are, indeed, key for understanding the evolution of a speciic form of oral folk tale that was picked up by a print culture in Europe and gave rise to the institutionalization of the literary fairy tale. Sperber has carefully explicated how the transmission of a meme or public representation, which can be equated with a particular tale, occurs.
According to his theory, there is a language faculty or module22 in the brain that enables humans to acquire language and other inputs, to copy and process them, and then to reproduce them in communica- tion with other humans who share and can decipher their linguistic codes and cultural meaning.
How can such an alterna- tion secure the stability of the contents transmitted? Two main types of processes have been invoked: imitation and communication. Imitation decomposes into a process of imitation of observation and a process of public of re-production of the behavior or of the artifact observed.
Communication decomposes into a process of public expression of a mental representation and a process of mental interpretation of the public representation. Between these two processes, there must be a third environmental process whereby the action of the communicator impinges on the sensory organs of the inter- preter. Ideally, imitation secures the reproduction of public productions behaviors of artifacts while communication secures the reproduction of mental representations.
Imitation and communication may overlap or interlock when the imitator acquires a mental representation similar to that which guided the behavior imitated, or when the interpreter repro- duces the public representation interpreted. Whatever the brain acquires through a stimulus is remembered, interpreted, adopted, and reproduced to contribute to the formation of a community and culture. It will also not become part of a cultural tradition or canon unless it is vital to the survival of a community and the preservation of its values and beliefs.
As Sperber and Hirschfeld argue: [T]he contents of cultural representations and practices must remain sta- ble enough throughout a community for its members to see themselves as performing the same ritual, sharing the same belief, eating the same dish, and understanding the same proverb in the same way.
We are not denying, of course—in fact we are insisting—that culture is in constant lux and that its stability is often exaggerated. Still, without some degree of stability, nothing cultural would be discernible in human thought and behavior.
In fact, a wide variety of representations, practices, and artifacts exhibit a suficient degree of stability at the population scale to be recognizably cultural. Its condition is relative and determined cultur- ally and biologically in a historical evolutionary process that reveals how we value things through mental and public representation.
Sperber suggests that we can understand how memes are produced and trans- mitted if we view the modular organization of the brain as constituted by a variety of domain- or task-speciic cognitive mechanisms called modules. Acquired modules have an innate basis and have derived biological functions and direct cultural functions. With cognitive adaptations and modules articulated in this manner rather than equated, the massive modularity thesis should become much more plausible and acceptable.
The innate learning module helps us classify and comprehend the tale, but if the tale acquires a cer- tain cultural signiicance through repetition or special attraction, it may generate an acquired module that recognizes certain formal conditions that an input has to meet. But as the tale acquired cultural signiicance and was repeatedly told, printed, and reproduced in other artistic forms, the brain was stimulated through a particular innate module or even through two or three innate modules working together to recognize the memetic quality of the tale through an acquired module.
Oral tales, as I have already stated, are thousands of years old and it is impossible to date and explain how they were generated, but they must have become vital for adapting to the environment and changes in the environment as soon as humans began to communicate through lan- guage. Whether there was such a cultural artifact as an oral wonder tale or fairy tale as we know it today in an oral form cannot be determined, although we do know through all kinds of archaeological evidence such as cave paintings, pottery, tombs, parchments, manuscripts, and scrolls that tales with fantastic creatures, magical transformation, and wondrous events were told and disseminated in tribes, groups, com- munities, and societies.
As many of the tales became irrelevant and anachronistic, they were forgotten. Bits and pieces, what we may call motifs, characters, topoi, plots, and images, were carried on and retold during the rise of early European civilization in Latin and vernacular languages and in many cases written down mainly by male scribes, many of them religious.
Gradually, as tales were used to serve speciic func- tions in court entertainment, homes, and taverns, on public squares, ields, and work places, and during rituals such as birth, marriage, death, harvest, initiation, and so on, they were distinguished by the minds of the members of a community and given special attention. Engendered as cultural artifacts they formed generic traits that made them appropri- ate for certain occasions. The cultural requirements were never so strict to prevent the tales from mixing with one another, becoming mixed, or borrowing from one another.
There was never a pure oral wonder tale, myth, legend, or fable. But as humans became more discerning and their brains developed the cognitive capacity to recognize, reine, and retain speciic narratives that spoke to the conditions in their environ- ment about survival, they began to group, categorize, and shape diverse stories artistically to make better and more eficient use of them.
All of this occurred long before print culture came to dominate artistic pro- duction in Europe. Numerous scholars have set their studies of oral and literary tales in a sociohistorical context to arrive at deinitions, categories, and types of the fairy tale. The focal points of these studies and their conclusions vary a great deal, and some even contradict one another; yet, they all historicize the conception of the fairy tale as a literary genre.
Though it might be more prudent to use the term public representation to talk about the classical fairy tales, I shall continue to use the term meme in the broadest possible sense to denote a particular fairy tale that has been canonized in the Western world and become so memorable that it appears to be transmitted natu- rally by our minds to communicate information that alerts us to pay attention to a speciic given situation on which our lives may depend.
As we shall see, the symbolic order established by literary fairy tales is not static, but it is certainly marked continually by recognizable recurring motifs, topoi, and conventions and has been framed by male hegemonic concerns. Within the borders of the oral and written frame there is a dialogue concerning gender-oriented ritu- als, social initiations, or the appropriate manner of behavior in speciic situations.
It communicates information. It selects that which has become relevant in a commu- nity to inform members of that community what has become crucial for adaptation to the environment in the most effective manner possible that might be entertaining and instructive. The fairy tale acts through language to depict all kinds of issues and debates that concern socialization and civilization. Once a fairy tale has gelled or been artistically conceived so that it is ostentative, it seeks to perpetuate itself indiscriminately.
Like the selish gene, a fairy tale as meme is concerned with its own per- petuation and will adapt to changes and conlicts in the environment. Conditioned by fairy tales, we insist that the fairy tale act out these conlicts through conventionalized language and codes that stimulate a play with ideas.
We act as though fairy tales have always been with us. But this is not the case. There was a point in time when literary fairy tales were not expected and used in the manner that we expect and use them. These we may call speech genres.
Bakhtin makes a distinction between primary simple and secondary speech genres complex. During the process of their formation, they absorb and digest various primary simple genres that have taken form in unmediated speech communion.
These pri- mary genres are altered and assume a special character when they enter into complex ones. Yet, this is the value of a secondary genre like the literary fairy tale: it preserves elements of the primary speech genre and enters into a dialogue with it as it transforms itself into something new and more complex.
As Bakhtin states: [T]his question of the concept of the speech addressee how the speaker or writer senses and imagines him is of immense signiicance in literary history. Each epoch, each literary trend and literary-artistic style, each literary genre within an epoch or trend, is typiied by its own special concepts of the addressee of the literary work, a special sense and under- standing of its reader, listener, public, or people.
A historical study of changes in these concepts would be an interesting and important task. But in order to develop it productively, the statement of the problem itself would have to be theoretically clear. Each of these authors used a frame tale in which storytellers shared their tales with listeners, who were also tellers, and all their tales were intended for a community of readers and tellers.
In addressing a particu- lar speech community, writers seek to use, explore, and validate their own speech acts as they assume a conceptual and aesthetic whole. Therefore, we must ask, if we want to understand the beginnings of this literary genre, what constituted the fairy tale as a secondary speech genre?
What must our focus be if we are to understand the historical origins and development of the literary fairy tale? Such genres exist above all in the great and multifari- ous sphere of everyday oral communication, including the most familiar and most intimate.
As a pri- mary genre, the oral folk tale circulated hundreds, if not thousands, of years before it came to be registered in script and was formed and shaped according to semantic and syntagic rules and audience expectations.
When authors began writing the tales, however, the narratives did not become fully generic and memetic as a literary genre because a liter- ary genre is also an institution. To be fully developed a genre has to be instituted in a society; that is, it must be accepted and used by different groups as a speciic mode of entertainment, communication, and social- ization. It must also have effective modes of publicity, dissemination, and reception that will enable the genre to take root in society.
Tzvetan Todorov Like Bakhtin, Todorov believes that a genre begins as a speech act and undergoes various transformations before becoming institutional- ized. A new genre is always the transformation of one or many older genres: by inversion, by deplacement, by combination.
There has never been a literature without genres. It is a system in the process of continual transformation, and the question of the ori- gins can never leave historically the terrain of the genres themselves. He maintains that a discourse is made up of enunciated sentences or enunciated words, and like Bakhtin, he argues that its meaning depends on the context of enunciation. In other words, a discourse is always by necessity a speech act un acte de parole constituting a text.
If one designates genres as classes of texts, this designation occurs in a meta- discourse about genres in history that has, as its aim, the establishment of properties, traits, and laws of the text. In other words, genres are nothing but the codiication of discursive properties. These properties reveal the semantic aspect of the text meaning , the syntactic aspect of the text relation of the parts to one another , the pragmatic aspect of the text the relation among users , and the verbal aspect all that concerns the materiality of the signs.
It is through their institutionalization that the genres communicate with the society in which they are currently developing. Just like any other institution the genres give testimony about the constitutive traits of the society to which they belong.
This is why the existence of certain genres in a society, their absence in another, reveals a great deal about this ideology and permits us to establish it with more or less great certainty. However, there was no dis- tinct and distinguishable genre in literature called the fairy tale until the seventeenth century, irst in Italy and more importantly in France, because there was no textual community to cultivate and institutionalize it and because the vernacular languages had not yet fully developed into literary languages.
Without the appropriate conditions of reception and transmission in large groups of textual or literate communities, the fairy tale could not have established itself as a genre. Within these communi- ties, the oral performance, recitation, and communication continued to play a major role. According to Brian Stock, a textual community is a microsociety orga- nized around the common understanding of a script. As he explains: [T]he rise of a more literate society in the eleventh century automati- cally increased the number of authors, readers, and copiers of texts everywhere in Europe, and, as a consequence, the number of persons engaged in the study of texts for the purpose of changing the behav- ior of the individual or group.
This, in nuce, was the rationale behind much reformist and some orthodox religious agitation, to say nothing of communal associations and guilds. These textual communities were not entirely composed of literates.
The minimal requirement was just one literate, the interpres, who understood a set of texts and was able to pass his message verbally to others. The manner in which the individuals behaved toward each other and the manner in which the group looked upon those it considered to be outsiders were derived from the attitudes formed during the period of initiation and education. The unlettered and semilettered members thereby conceptualized a link between textuality, as the script for enactment of behavioral norms, and rationality, as the alleged rea- sonableness of those norms.
It is with the rise of textual communities, court entertainment, schools, reading societies, academies, literary associations and institu- tions, and salons and the interaction with oral traditions of storytelling that the formation of the fairy tale as genre took place. And this forma- tion made the tale linguistically malleable, accessible, and purposeful as a memetic linguistic formation that carried relevant information about the survival of the species, in particular, the survival of individuals, and representatives of different social classes who are bent on improv- ing their status and condition in society.
The form and information constitute its psychological appeal and explain why the brain gradually recognized basic fairy tale types through a cognitive module. As memes cultural replicators or public representations particular fairy tales were endowed with and recognized as having great value in communities and societies. Their memetic value resides in their potential to assist human beings to become more alert to particular signs, to improve their situa- tions, and to adapt more successfully in a changing environment.
Moreover, they will only be effective if they can mutate and blend in altered and adapted forms that respond to environmental transformations.
Selection favours memes that exploit their cultural environment to their own advan- tage. This cultural environment consists of other memes which are also being selected.
The meme pool therefore comes to have attributes of an evolutionarily stable set, which new memes ind it hard to invade. This leads to a troubling problem. Again, to quote Dawkins: However speculative my development of the theory of memes may be, there is one serious point which I would like to emphasize once again. This is that when we look at the evolution of cultural traits and at their survival value, we must be clear whose survival we are talking about. Biologists, as we have seen, are accustomed to looking for advantages at the gene level or the individual group, or the species level according to taste.
What we have not previously considered is that a cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply because it is advanta- geous to itself.
Fairy tales provide us with hope that some relevant transformation is possible. Jean-Michel Adam and Ute Heidmann One way we do our choosing, despite the selishness of genes and memes, is through cooperation. Put another way, even a gene recog- nizes the importance of cooperation for its own sake.
A gene cannot reproduce itself and proliferate without the assistance of other genes. Neither can a meme, and the fairy tale cannot be understood as genre if we do not take into account the manner in which it interacts with and depends on other genres. As soon as there is a text—that is, the recognition of the fact that a series of enunciations form a complete communication—there is an effect of generictity, that is, an inscription of this series of enunciations into a particular practice of discourse.
The genericity is a socio-cognitive necessity that relates each text to the inter-discourse of a social formation. A text does not in itself belong to a genre, but it is placed in relation to one or many genres at the point of production as well as at the point of reception-interpretation. It is best deined by its relationship to other genres as it keeps mutating.
Each text develops its own dynamic by activating centrifugal and cen- tripetal forces, a dynamic that is important to analyze in itself before comparing it to another text that has its own dynamic. Through a com- parative and textual discourse analysis, we mean the comparison of the respective dynamic of the textual and trans-textual forces of two or more texts. This type of comparison differs from the use of comparison in the studies of folklore and literature in that it does not approach the texts through their static characteristics the occurrence of motifs, genetic traits, intertextual traces, etc.
If we draw and build upon their ideas, we can see that to analyze a literary fairy tale and the genre of the fairy tale entails: 1 determining the text and its place in a sociocognitive discursive formation; 2 comparing it with other fairy-tales texts of its period; 3 comparing it with texts of other generic formations; 4 understanding the linguistic elements that constitute its proper forces and constitute its dynamic force within the genre of the fairy tale; 5 analyzing its transformation beyond its original publication, that is, to study its reception in different sociohistorical con- texts as well as new texts that are produced and interrogate the original text; 6 recognizing the mediation of oral and literary tales that interact with one another to bring about mutations.
In general, the approach of Adam and Heidmann is an explicit critique of how folklorists have tended to approach literature or tales that have become literary: According to our discursive concept of text, the meaning of written tales is generated by this complex interaction of textual forces such as thematic-semantic coniguration, textual composition and micro- linguistic texture, with text-transcending forces such as genericity, inter- texutality, paratextuality and cotextuality.
Folklore studies put the main focus on the examination of motifs and themes, i. We argue that the complex meaning of a written tale is produced by the speciic linguistic, textual and discursive articulation of the chosen motifs and themes, while folklore studies often assume that the meaning of a tale is simply inherent in a universal grammar of motifs and symbols. Certain fairy-tale texts have become formative and deinitive, and they insert themselves into our cognitive processes, enabling us to establish and distinguish patterns of behavior and to relect upon ethics, gender, morality, and power.
As the fairy-tale genre formed itself and was formed by myriad tellers and writers, they and their publishers, listeners, readers brought their tales in relation to other fairy tales and genres, and they made some of them special, or took a special interest in tales that we have made canonical.
They copied them and changed them, and as they took hold of these tales, the tales took hold of them. The tales have evolved in response to changes in the environment, its own linguistic properties and potential, and the particular social institutions of diverse cultural groups through- out the world. To a certain extent, it is impossible nowadays to speak about the fairy tale, especially a canonical tale, narrowly as a printed text, for it has transcended both the oral and literary in iconic forma- tions that depend on the technology of the radio, cinema, advertising, Internet, and so on.
Canonical fairy tales are complex memes that are a result of the conlicting forces of cultural production. They are special and relevant because we cultivate them as special and relevant in our speech and in our writings and images. Very few folklorists and critics have examined fairy tales from an evolutionary psychological perspective, despite the fact that fairy tales deal opulently with evolution of the human species under particular cultural conditions that often engender crises.
All of these situations incite similar questions: What must an individual do to adapt to a new and unexpected situation? Does a person become heroic through a special kind of adaptation?
How will the heroine or hero survive? What does a person have to do to maintain power so that she or he can survive? How must one protect oneself in a dog-eat-dog world? Are there alternative ways of living and reproducing the species that do not involve the transgression of other bodies? In some respects I believe that we have been attracted to fairy tales because they are survival stories with hope.
They alert us to dangerous situations, instruct us, guide us, give us counsel, and reveal what might happen if we take advantage of helpful instruments or agents, or what might happen if we do not. They communicate the need to be oppor- tunistic, to exploit opportunities, to be selish so we can survive.
They have arisen out of a need to adapt to unusual situations, and many of these situations are similar the world over so that many of the same types of tales have arisen and been disseminated and transformed so that new generations will learn to adjust to similar situations in chang- ing environments.
All tales want to stay alive in us, and they compete for our attention. We choose a particular metaphorical tale to be more precise and effective in what we want to express. Yet, each tale in its mutated form must articulate why it is still necessary and relevant in a changed environment and whether its impact is positive or negative.
It is a tale about predators and how to deal with them. In my book The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, I demonstrated that the origin of the literary fairy tale can be traced to male fantasies about women and sexuality and to conlicting versions with regard to the responsibility for the violation in the tale. In particular, I showed how Charles Perrault and the Grimm Broth- ers transformed an oral folk tale about the social initiation of a young woman into a narrative about rape in which the heroine is obliged to bear the responsibility for sexual violation.
Such a radical literary transformation is highly signiicant because the male-cultivated liter- ary versions became dominant in both the oral and literary traditions of nations such as Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States, nations that exercise cultural hegemony in the West.
Indeed, the Per- rault and Grimm versions became so crucial in the socialization process of these countries that they generated a literary discourse about sexual roles and behavior, a discourse whose fascinating antagonistic perspec- tives shed light on different phases of social and cultural change.
In discussing this development, however, I did not examine how it might be a linguistic and memetic form related to evolutionary theories about instincts, adaptation, and survival. Therefore, I should like once more to summarize my arguments about the sociopsychological implications of the changes made by Perrault and the Grimm Brothers and conclude by considering how the tale has evolved up to the present and why it is still so popular.
None of these motifs, it must be borne in mind, are particular to the times of Perrault and the Grimms, or to our very own times of rabid violence and violation. The tally of Red Riding Hood tales is quite impressive. Thanks to his exhaustive study of tales and motifs in the ancient world, however, we now have a much more comprehensive grasp of the memetic and epi- demiological formation of canonical fairy tales.
If we accept the latter premise, then we can accept the hypothesis of widespread diffusion of folktale, with deviant and misrecollected ver- sions by forgetful or inaccurate storytellers easily corrected by those with better memories.
What we should guard against is the idea that tales will be reinvented in more or less identical form by different societies as they proceed through progressive stages of civilization, a fantasy of nine- teenth-century proto-anthropology, or that because a large number of popular tales use a inite number of motifs, then oral storytellers simply shufle the motifs around to make new tales. There are indeed instances where two convergent tales can become confused, or where one tale seems to borrow from another, but on the whole[,] hybrids, common as they are, still remain marginal in the process of diffusion of tales.
The more examples of any given international tale-type we study, the more clearly we can see the integrity and logic of the tale. They gradually had to be congealed in a stable form to become canonical, so to speak, and though one cannot precisely detect each step in the formation of a classical literary tale, the more information we gather about the spread of the motifs the more light we will shed on why and how a tale becomes memetic.
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