7:52 a.m. - 2023-12-18
lookin' grimm
She loaned me the book a few days before her arrest.
I'd never asked about the conditions of her parole, but looking back it's hard to imagine one she hadn't violated. I hope I wasn't a bad influence? Not that I'd knowingly encourage anything like that, but we had a destructive, “fuck-the-world” chemistry together. A hellbent camaraderie that expressed itself predictably in the bedroom and through predictable-in-retrospect extremes in public. Alcohol might have played a factor.
We never discussed literature or art or cinema...anything “cultural” really. My only inkling of her aesthetic, in that regard, was the fact that she'd leave true-crime documentaries running on cable TV all night. She couldn't sleep w/out these lurid tales of gruesome victimhood running in the background, apparently. Which is why, when I dug the book out from the dusty debris of my bookshelf and cracked the spine, I was pleasantly surprised. Because Jack Zipes' translation of the first Brothers Grimm collection, Kinder und Haus-märchen (Children's and Household Tales) has proven a bit of a revelation.
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I realize now, for example, that I'd conflated the authors' “work” with their identity...that the moss-bearded rustics I'd imagined spinning hearthside tales and whittling bear figurines from Black Forest Alder were in fact middle-class academics. Philologists, to be precise. And that the whole project began as a loose attempt to define “Germanic” culture; even though a German nation had yet to exist. It was just a former region of the of the Prussian empire then, languishing under Napoleonic reign. But the Brothers held that there was a philological bond between the then-disparate dialects; a Gemeinschaft that was exemplified by the Naturpoesie of regional folk stories, and they began to collect and document these...as nascent ethno-folklorists, basically.(This makes total sense when I step back and consider the publishing date, 1812. The significance of myth was a hot topic w/German thinkers at the turn of the 19th century. Kant, Goethe, the romantic poets...familiar voices from my student days, all forwarded theories on the subject and introduced concepts that would gain cross-disciplinary traction in the years to follow. I'd just never realized Snow White and co. were involved.)
So when they published their first collection, the Brothers Grimm had more in common with say, Alan Lomax than they did with Hans Christian Andersen or Charles Perrault. This would change over the next 40 years, as Wilhelm, the younger brother, began to realize the commercial potential of the children's stories. Subsequent editions would shed the lengthy footnotes and academic introductions; and the line between editing and rewriting...between retelling and fabricating anew would erode w/each subsequent release. Thus did the coherently-narrated, morally sanitized, packaged-for-Disney versions of the stories as we know them come into being; as a bid to censure and sculpt these weird and chaotic voices of the past into a product w/marketable, bourgeois, appeal.
In fairness to Wilhelm though, the original tales do come across as a bit mad; bearing little resemblance to what we consider “traditional” story structure. Many unfold as string-of-consciousness adventures wherein our protagonist moves between milieus w/out destination or resolution. (How much of my frustration with these rambling fantasies has to do w/conditioned literary expectations, I wonder? And how much do I blame on the speed and “efficiency” of life as a modern adult, where one's imagination becomes less a state to get lost in than a tool to be harnessed and blinkered?) That said, my favorite tales gleaned to-date don't “go” anywhere...they just seem to happen, like a fever dream. Check out this bit of surreal poetry from the first paragraph of story #43, The Strange Feast:
“A blood sausage and a liver sausage had been friends for some time, and the blood sausage invited the liver sausage for a meal at her home. At dinnertime the liver sausage merrily set out for the blood sausage's house. But when she walked through the doorway, she saw all kinds of strange things. There were many steps, and on each of them she found something different. A broom and a shovel were fighting with each other, and there was a monkey with a big wound on his head, and more such things.”
I don't think Disney's adapted that one yet.
A lack of moral resolution in a preponderance of the tales also strikes those of us brought up on parables and allegories and such as queer. In tale #8, The Hand With a Knife, a bullied and neglected daughter is sent out daily to cut peat w/a blunt shovel. A local elf admires her, and every morning stretches his hand out from a rocky slope w/a magic knife that can cut through anything. She makes short work of the peat then, and returns the knife on her way home. Her mother becomes suspicious though, and sends her three abusive brothers to follow her out one day, whereupon they discover her secret. Seizing the knife, they return to the rocky slope and cut the expectant elf's hand off. Then, as-per the closing sentence, “The bloody arm drew back, and since the elf believed that his beloved had betrayed him, he was never seen after that”. Roll credits...1 Incidents of murder and incest and deceit are peppered throughout the collection, deeds that don't just go unpunished, but are oft-rewarded w/inexplicably “happy” endings.
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Which brings me to an interesting, lateral-drift2, coincidence-on-topic. Shortly after I'd finished Zipes' intro to the Grimm translation, I found my mind awhirl w/implications and in need of more passive distraction, so I defaulted to the internet. YouTube suggested Salman Rushdie's recent acceptance speech for The Peace Prize of the German Book Trade...presumably because he addresses (in passing) the war in/on Gaza? Regardless of the keywords that had sought out my bespoke cyber-profile, I was grateful; for Rushdie's is a voice I respect on multiple fronts.As it is in much of his own writing, folklore is a theme in Rushdie's speech--coincidence enough considering the book I'd just set down, and one made stranger-still by his introduction to the topic. Because he starts out by acknowledging the influence of the Panchatantra on his recent work. This is India's own beloved collection of talking animal fables, passed on to children now as simple bedtime stories w/pedagogic moral conclusions, but the original Sanskrit texts aren't quite as tidy. Rushdie remarks on this, and his observations resonated w/something I'd just earmarked in the Grimm's introduction, wherein they write:
“Wherever the tales exist, they continue to live in such a way that nobody ponders whether they are good or bad, poetic or crude...they take pleasure in them without having any reason. This is exactly why the custom of storytelling is so marvelous, and it is just what this poetic art has in common with everything eternal...we don't want to praise the tales or even defend them against a contrary opinion: their mere existence suffices to defend them. That which has managed to provide so much pleasure time and again...carries its own necessity in itself and has certainly emanated from that eternal source that moistens all life, and even if it were a single drop that a folded leaf embraces, it will nevertheless glitter in the early dawn.”
While in Rushdie's speech3 he states the following:
“What I've always found fascinating and attractive about the Panchatantra stories is that many of them do not moralize. They do not preach goodness or virtue or modesty or honesty or restraint: cunning and strategy and amorality often overcome all opposition. The good guys do not always win. It's not even always clear who the good guys are. For this reason they seem, to the modern reader, uncannily contemporary. Because we, the modern readers, live in a world of amorality and treachery and shamelessness and cunning, in which bad guys everywhere have often won.”
The last two sentences begged so many questions that I had to hit pause, take a walk, and think about it.
~ ~ ~
At face value, Rushdie's meaning seems clear: as times have changed and the vices he lists have come to hold sway, stories describing a world bereft of moral certitude begin to make more sense. But this is objectively untrue; the cruelty and lust for power that underpin human history are a documented constant. There never was a peaceable Eden, nor golden age of grace to fall from. And while one could make a compelling case that our 'round the clock, tech-enabled exposure to a global litany of injustice has heightened collective awareness, you'd be missing a bigger point. Because if the cloth of history has spun-forth in brutal and predictable whole, then it's our perception that's been tailored to fit...and it's fashion that's changed with the times.Rushdie speaks to a loss of innocence. Appropriate given the theme's recurrence in fairy tales; but in light of his observations on the Panchatantra, and considering what I'd just read of the Brothers Grimm, it's a perspective that ignores a more-nuanced concern. For if the coarse fables of the ancients seem “uncannily contemporary” compared to the steady diet of happy endings we were fed as children, then it follows that this “lost innocence” must have been, at some point, “gained”.
Enter Wilhelm Grimm, seated at his desk, ink-stained fingers editing in earnest. An unassuming pin on the through-line of Western culture, and one whose impact I'd never paused to consider.
The European Age of Enlightenment began some 150 years before the Brothers were born, but that candle was still burning bright in what-would-soon be Germany...a steady wick dipped in 2,000 waxy years of culture-strata, a light that Wilhelm's education no-doubt reflected. A sensibility that the “modern reader” Rushdie speaks of takes for granted...one whose origin takes the Christian Bible (that oh-so-influential collection of fairy tales) and launders it through an unholy spin-cycle of ancient Greek philosophy as digested by Catholic apologists. Over time this would shape the better part of Western thought, and was spiritually epitomized, perhaps, by the Brothers' own devout Lutheranism. Hence the lust for order and insistence on purity, hence the demand for just resolution Wilhelm brought to the story-edits.
That the tales from the Panchatantra seem less-predictable in that regard doesn't surprise me. Though my experience w/the Hindu Vedas is limited to my Comparative Religion and Eastern Philosophy classes, I still own copies of the translated texts, and they still read, from a Western perspective, as a bit mad; rife w/moral ambiguity and oblique conclusions.
Quite akin to the Grimm’s original collection of Kinder und Haus-märchen, actually...
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1 These stories have been interpreted through multiple lenses, w/psycho-analytical takes cornering the market of popular opinion. But I am not so naïve to the sins of meine Vorfahren to ignore more-obvious meanings buried in plain sight. Our helpful “elf” may well have represented a Jew here, or a filthy Gypsy. Probably keen to fuck our dejected protagonist, and surely would have, had her brothers not intervened. So yeah...happy endings are relative, unfortunately.2 Do the youth still read Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
3 If you can make the time to listen, it's a terrific speech. His tone is dry and academic, and the first half may drag a bit, but the payoff is resounding. And he articulates what so many of us feel about censorship w/an authority no one would willfully boast. On that note we're adding his to our gallery of author portraits. After losing an eye, parts of his face and the ability to type, after life-shortening internal wounds and life-defining PTSD...all delivered at the hands of a deranged emissary of that all-powerful yet oh-so-insecure desert prophet; by a jihadic hitman who, had it not been for Rushdie's brave colleague on the podium (who was himself stabbed), surely would have beheaded him like he was a French schoolteacher or an American journalist or some other such existential threat to Islam...after all that he poses here for the camera.
