It is not often that a new book comes along that is both a breakthrough in scholarly terms and also a magnificent work of art.  Jack Zipes’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, illustrated by Natalie Frank, is both.  Since Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, published in 1976, we have worried about the uses of enchantment, and also taken for granted that the high-profile figures in fairy tales are female.  Who are the superstars?  Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and so on.  Never mind Jack, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel, and Prince Charming–the most memorable figures are girls and witches, stepmothers and princesses.  And these figures all live in a world where magic happens–and no one is ever shocked, startled, or surprise.  A high quotient of weirdness is part of what ensures that the stories never get old.  Because the conflicts in them are primal and do not yield easily to a solution or resolution (contempt vs. compassion; predator vs. prey; innocence vs. seduction), we get caught up in an endless repetition compulsion with these stories, always making them new even as we never get the core problem at the heart of the tale right.

What Jack Zipes has done is to foreground a tale that has not received much scholarly attention and yet has been right in plain sight.  Many of us grew up with Mickey Mouse as beleaguered apprentice in Fantasia but never thought to drill down deeper into the story.  And even dedicated readers of the Harry Potter books are unlikely to have connected “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” with Dumbledore and Harry, but presto! there it is. Zipes writes: “In short the structure of Rowling’s fairy tale resembles the folklore tale type ATU 325, which has the following plot functions: (1) a poor father apprentices his son to a magician/sorcerer to study magic for one or three years at a mysterious place/school.  (2) The son secretly flies home and indicates to his father/mother how he or she can recognize him, or the father and mother are helped by a mysterious stranger who advises them on how to recognize their son.  (3) Once liberated, the son, who has learned and gained just as much knowledge of magic as his master, can shape-shift . . . (4) The magician seeks revenge . . . (5) The magician imprisons the pupil . . . (6) The pupil uses his cunning and knowledge of magic to escape and the magician pursues him . . .  ”  I’ve left out a good deal, but there’s enough there to reveal the degree to which tropes from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” flash out for us repeatedly in the Harry Potter books.  Rowling’s series still seems more fantasy literature (with its multiple portals to Hogwarts and the magic world) than fairy tale, but it is astonishing how fantasy fiction creatively repurposes “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” along with a host of other intertexts, to be sure.

The great accomplishment of Zipes’s anthology is to draw attention to the importance of magic in fairy tales and to identify a subset of fairy tales that feature a father-son type relationship that goes wrong (a nice way to balance out all the stories about mothers and daughters).  And there is something wonderfully meta about a fairy tale in which the power struggle turns on magic and how to wield it and control it.

Zipes gathers together more than fifty variants of the tale type, from classical times up to the present, with what comes to feel like “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.”  He shows how the tale bifurcates, taking two different pathways, with “humiliated apprentices” who are defeated by magic and yield to authority and “rebellious apprentices” who learn how to control their powers and wield them skillfully and responsibly.  There is much to ponder in this book, and, the stories show a fascinating range and play of possibilities.

(SPOILER ALERT FOR GET OUT)

It’s rare to have a moment when two high-wattage cultural events collide to bring back a story–in this case Beauty and the Beast.  One of those blockbuster films, Disney’s live-action version of that story, “smashed records,” as they say in the business, with a record-breaking $170 million debut and $350 worldwide. Easily earning back its $160 million budget (an entire village was constructed in the English countryside for the opening scene, with 150 extras, 28 wagons, and hundreds of live animals, not to mention Emma Watson), it stuck closely to the script of the 1991 animated Beauty and the Beast, even as it piled on special effects and ornate excesses, all the while promoting the cute in the service of what Mel Brooks famously called “Moichandising” (see clip from Spaceballs below).

Then there was Jordan Peele’s Get Out, a Beauty and the Beast story that pulls out all the stops and gives us what horror movies do best, exaggerating and amplifying our cultural anxieties, and putting what Frank Bruni of the NYT called a “fantastical, grotesque spin” on things. Get Out (budget of $4.5 million) as a Beauty and the Beast story? Yes, it’s that and Bluebeard too. Only in this case, the monster is Rose (get it?), played by Allison Williams. As the social messaging of so many Beauty and the Beast story tells us, appearances are deceiving, and in this case they are beyond what we could imagine. Rose is the ferocious beast who lures an innocent into her childhood home, from which there appears to be no escape. She is also a Bluebeard figure, a monster straight out of our culture’s master horror-narrative, with its classic tropes: a secluded mansion with a dark place inhabited by a brooding homicidal maniac with secrets stored in a closet (in Get Out it’s Rose’s stash of photographs of victims pre-dating her relationship with Chris). And suddenly we see how Jordan Peele, unlike Disney, hit the refresh button and inflected the tale as old as time in new ways that speak to our own cultural anxieties about race and gender.

This morning CNBC had a brief segment on the box office numbers for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, and Joe Kernen pointed out that Disney had not even made the story up–gasp! Wasn’t the story invented in 1740? In a French novel? Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve did indeed write La Belle et la Bête, but it was hardly the “original.” In my new anthology, Beauty and the Beast: Tales about Animal Brides and Grooms from Around the World (Penguin 2017), I start with the Ancients, with stories like the one about Zeus and Europa, Cupid and Psyche, Hasan of Basra, and connect the narrative circuits of the tale with a global network of stories about Beauties and Beasts. There is no original, no pure, untainted right and true foundational story—just variants.

Still, not all adaptations are equal. There are the nostalgic ones, the ones that want to bring back earlier versions, just as the live-action Disney Beauty and the Beast aims to preserve, sanctify, and re-brand the story for a new generation. And then there are the adventurously inventive, creative adaptations that shock and startle us, rewiring our brains, and making us think more and think harder about the terms of the film. “Beauty and the Beast” is suddenly not just a tale as old as time, but a story that takes on new relevance as it resonates with fears and desire that beset us today.

Last night I gave a talk about my new anthology of Beauty and the Beast stories at the Harvard Bookstore.  It’s spring break week at Harvard, and I was expecting just a handful of true believers in fairy tales.  But Harvard Bookstore has its own faithfuls, and what a lively, attentive group it was.  Afterwards I browsed the tables and shelves and was reminded of what a powerful intellectual and social experience it is to roam around in that bookstore.  If you read this, stop by, browse, and buy at least one volume.  And if you live elsewhere, go to your local bookstore and do the same.

My purchase last night will make great reading for today’s Nor’easter.  It’s Edmund Gordon’s The Invention of Angela Carter (British cover below), and I can hardly wait to plunge into its pages today.  Here’s a link to the Guardian’s review

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/22/the-invention-of-angela-carter-a-biography-by-edmund-gordon-review

and also a link to a review by the always brilliant Joan Acoccela in The New Yorker.  And if you read that review, your next move will be to go buy the book.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/angela-carters-feminist-mythology

The English novelist Angela Carter is best known for her 1979 book “The Bloody Chamber,” which is a kind of updating of the classic European fairy tales. This does not mean that Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood chews gum or rides a motorcycle but that the strange things in those tales—the werewolves and snow maidens, the cobwebbed caves and liquefying mirrors—are made to live again by means of a prose informed by psychoanalysis and cinema and Symbolist poetry. In Carter’s version of “Beauty and the Beast,” retitled “The Tiger’s Bride,” the beast doesn’t change into a beauty. The beauty is changed into a beast, a beautiful one, by means of one of the more memorable sex acts in twentieth-century fiction. At the end of the tale, the heroine is ushered, naked, into the beast’s chamber. He paces back and forth:

I squatted on the wet straw and stretched out my hand. I was now within the field of force of his golden eyes. He growled at the back of his throat, lowered his head, sank on to his forepaws, snarled, showed me his red gullet, his yellow teeth. I never moved. He snuffed the air, as if to smell my fear; he could not.

 

Slowly, slowly he began to drag his heavy, gleaming weight across the floor towards me.

A tremendous throbbing, as of the engine that makes the earth turn, filled the little room; he had begun to purr. . . .

He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. “He will lick the skin off me!”

And 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 shiny hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.

Below is what I wrote for Signature about the Beauty and the Beast story:

The Primal and Mythical Allure of Beauty and the Beast

http://www.signature-reads.com/2017/03/the-primal-and-mythical-allure-of-beauty-and-the-beast/

Fairy tales are like riddles wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, and that’s what accounts in part for our fierce repetition compulsion when it comes to stories like Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, or The Frog King. It is always something of a challenge to figure out what makes a fairy tale tick and whir with cultural energy and why each one tends to carry some kind of emotional charge.

Disney’s release of a live-action “Beauty and the Beast” reminds us that fairy tales are not just for the nursery, but also for the older crowd. The “tale as old as time,” as Mrs. Potts sings in the animated “Beauty and the Beast,” has become so familiar to us that the odd couple at its core has been normalized. Yet the many other versions in circulation the world over remind us of just how startling it is to pair humans with animals in courtship rituals that end with “happily ever after” – or not. The tale’s narrative circuits are connected to a global network of storytelling in which young women encounter frogs, condors, muskrats, and snakes, while young men find themselves romantically linked with monkeys, dogs, swans, and toads. Is this what we mean when we refer to fairy-tale romances, and if it is, do why do we long for such a thing?

The anthropologists tell us that animals are good to think with, and in many ways we can imagine that stories about animal brides and animal grooms enabled our ancestors to address complicated issues turning not just on courtship but also on sexuality – in all its beastliness and tenderness. After all, sex stands at the point of intersection between the human and the animal kingdom, and the symbolic always helps us navigate the real. Some have speculated that Beauty and the Beast tales once served some kind of totemic purpose, helping humans to organize and understand their own social worlds. They also surely represented alterity in all its monstrous and terrifying incarnations, challenging humans to find some way of coexisting with lions, tigers, and bears, oh my, along with all the bugbears that haunt our imagination.

Our version of “Beauty and the Beast” derives from Mme de Beaumont’s 1756 story, published in a magazine with designs on the young, teaching them about character and good manners. In that French tale, Beauty not only outshines everyone in looks, she is also “good,” “kind,” “sweet,” and “sincere,” amassing a set of attributes that would be impossible for anyone, let alone most little girls, to replicate. Why does the classically attractive and instinctively generous Beauty settle by marrying a Beast who is grotesquely ugly and desperately needy? In Mme de Beaumont’s tale, Beauty discovers that she feels something more than friendship for the Beast and that she cannot live without him. Three “peaceful” months at the castle, full of “good plain talk,” along with the discovery that Beast is “kind” and has “good qualities,” arouse Beauty’s compassion, so much so that she can agree to marry him when he stops eating and nearly dies of starvation.

What is the social messaging in that story (which we have made our own through picture books and through the Disney film) and how does it differ from what we find in the long ago and far away of the fairy-tale universe? To begin with, we are drawn to Mme de Beaumont’s version of Beauty and the Beast precisely because it enshrines empathy as the greatest of virtues and as the pathway to true love – even if in the most hypocritical sort of way. Who knew that hotness is not at all a factor and that charity, generosity, and pity reign supreme when it comes to romantic alliances? We live in what has been called an age of empathy, with dozens of books on why empathy matters, on the neuroscience of empathy, on the empathy gap, and so on. And so it is no surprise that we instinctively recoil from stories like the Filipino Chonguita, in which an act of defiance or outrage – hurling an animal against the wall – disenchants the animal groom or animal bride. There we are in the arena of brute force and passion rather than compassion.

Yet stories like those, along with the Latin American The Condor and the Shepherdess (with its abducted heroine who has to put up with a dinner of carrion) or the Ghanaian Girl and the Hyena-Man (which ends with a clever ruse used to escape an arranged marriage), remind us that the most satisfying narratives are those that shock and startle us. Counterintuitive finales get us talking about the terms of the story – the cultural contradictions that are so artfully encapsulated in fairy tales and give them their staying power. That’s the self-reflexive genius of the fairy tale and of the mythic imagination, to give us stories about the power of talk (those long dinner conversations between Beauty and the Beast light the spark) and to leave us with something to talk about. In African cultures, a popular genre is the dilemma tale, a story that recounts an extreme situation and ends with a question. For example, a boy is given the choice of executing his cruel biological father or his kind adoptive father – and now you must decide which of the two he should slay. Fairy tales make us wonder and try to find solutions as we wander through their storied precincts.

Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” like the many other versions, gave us a vivid, visual grammar for thinking about abstractions: cruelty and compassion, surfaces and essences, hostility and hospitality, predators and victims. Like all fairy tales, it gives us the primal and the mythical, getting us talking in ways that headlines do their cultural work today. And they also lead us to keep hitting the refresh button, as we try to get the story right, even as we know that Beauty and the Beast will always be at odds with each other in an endless struggle to resolve their differences.

From NPR:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/14/515193632/author-philip-pullman-announces-a-follow-up-trilogy-to-his-dark-materials

And from The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/17/first-instalment-of-new-philip-pullman-trilogy-the-book-of-dust-out-in-october

Shortly after the publication of The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman gave a reading at the Harvard Coop.  My children dragged me to the event–it was only a few months after volume one of His Dark Materials had appeared–and there he was, seated on a kid’s chair, surrounded by a dozen children, ages 6-12.  For close to 90 minutes, he talked about stories and what it was like to write them, while answering questions from the band of true believers and diehard fans.  It quickly dawned on me that Pullman’s magic derived in part from how seriously he took his readers, talking to them without a touch of condescension.  I felt not a touch of embarrassment about being an adult intruder on the enchanted circle, because he treated my question, asked only because there was one awkward pause near the end, with the same respect that he showed for the children.  Many years later, I was not at all surprised when I read the following

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book. In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness… The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They’re embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do. We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it.

And it also explained why he led the charge against age-banding for books:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2074620/Philip-Pullman-leads-author-revolt-against-age-banding-for-childrens-books.html

Mr Pullman told The Daily Telegraph: “I don’t mind anybody having an opinion about my books. I don’t mind a bookseller deciding they are for this age group or that, or a teacher giving one of my books to a child because they think it is appropriate.

“But I don’t want to see the book itself declaring officially, as if with my approval, that it is for readers of 11 and upwards or whatever. I write books for whoever is interested. When I write a book I don’t have an age group in mind.

“I have had letters from children of seven who say they have read all the way through His Dark Materials and they have an astonishing knowledge of it. But not every child is the same. A child of nine might be tentative and unsure about reading, and to give them a book that says 9+ will reinforce their sense of failure. The book should be suited to the individual child.”

As someone who still tries to read at a 25 year-old-level, I applaud his effort.

Who else but Neil Gaiman could become an accomplice of the gods, using the sorcery of words to make their stories new?  The author turns Norse myths into addictive reading for young and old, with high-wattage retellings that preserve the monumental grandeur of the Nordic universe but also turn it into world that is up close and personal, full of antic wit and dark intrigue. 

That’s what I wrote after previewing the book last fall, and the pantheon of Nordic gods finally feels familiar to me, after many attempts to try to understand their dark universe.  For more on the volume and on Neil Gaiman and his appreciative fans, read Sarah Lyall’s piece in the New York Times on February 13.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/disneys-beauty-and-the-beast-ticket-presales-rival-superhero-films-2017-02-02

“Beauty and the Beast” is simply the next puzzle piece in Disney’s broad-picture plan to reviving its old IP as live-action films. The studio has already ushered six live-action remakes into theaters, including two films from “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Jungle Book.” Disney has had success so far, with only two of the six films not having earned more than $500 million world-wide.

And here’s to the many other Beauty and the Beast stories from around the world

Below the link to Perri Klass’s NYT op-ed on “Banned Books Your Child Should Read,” with its shrewd concluding advice to parents:

When your children read books that have been challenged or banned, you have a double opportunity as a parent; you can discuss the books themselves, and the information they provide, and you can also talk about why people might find them troubling. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/…/the-banned-books-your-child-should-read.html

This week I have been preparing a talk about Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929, a book that was among the first to be banned by the Nazis.  The impulse to write about the novel came from an invitation to an academic conference on Remarque, and it was intensified by Donald Trump’s declaration that Remarque’s book was his favorite novel.  When had he read it? I wondered.  In high school, no doubt, as many in that generation had.  My interest in Remarque’s novel is now driven in part by the question of how it came to be enshrined as  required reading in US schools.  (I’m hoping to track sales figures for the last 80 years in this country.)  All Quiet on the Western Front was high on the list of books banned by the Nazis, and it was among the first to be thrown on the flames created by throwing a match on gas-soaked logs in Berlin on May 10, 1933.

For a list of the American Library Associations’s list of the top 100 banned/challenged books in the first decade of this century, click the link below:

http://www.ala.org/bbooks/top-100-bannedchallenged-books-2000-2009

That Mark Twain translated Heinrich Hoffmann’s Der Struwelpeter, a famous German children’s book published in 1845, always comes as a surprise to me.  It should not be a surprise at all that this born storyteller made things up for his daughters, and now we can get a glimpse of what he made up in “The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine.”

One night nearly 140 years ago, Samuel Clemens told his young daughters Clara and Susie a bedtime story about a poor boy who eats a magic flower that gives him the ability to talk to animals.

Storytelling was a nightly ritual in the Clemens home. But something about this particular tale must have stuck with Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, because he decided to jot down some notes about it.

The story might have ended there, lost to history. But decades later, the scholar John Bird was searching the Twain archives at the University of California, Berkeley, when he came across the notes for the story, which Twain titled “Oleomargarine.” Mr. Bird was astonished to find a richly imagined fable, in Twain’s inimitable voice. He and other scholars believe it may be the only written remnant of a children’s fairy tale from Twain, though he told his daughters stories constantly.

Today’s New York Times gives us the best possible valediction for the best possible President.  There are so many dense golden nuggets of wisdom in both the article about Obama’s reading and the transcript of the interview with him that it’s something of a challenge to choose.  All the things I’ve believed about the radiantly mysterious power of stories to promote curiosity, build bridges, foster empathy, and offer escapes into opportunity are stated here in ways that remind us of just how fortunate we were to have eight years of a President who was thoughtful, compassionate, judicious, and deeply intellectual.

In today’s polarized environment, where the internet has let people increasingly retreat to their own silos (talking only to like-minded folks, who amplify their certainties and biases), the president sees novels and other art (like the musical “Hamilton”) as providing a kind of bridge that might span usual divides and “a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day.”

He points out, for instance, that the fiction of Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri speak “to a very particular contemporary immigration experience,” but at the same time tell stories about “longing for this better place but also feeling displaced” — a theme central to much of American literature, and not unlike books by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow that are “steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you’re giving up.”

Mr. Obama says he is hoping to eventually use his presidential center website “to widen the audience for good books” — something he’s already done with regular lists of book recommendations — and then encourage a public “conversation about books.”

“At a time,” he says, “when so much of our politics is trying to manage this clash of cultures brought about by globalization and technology and migration, the role of stories to unify — as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize — is more important than ever.”