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2 Myths and Fairy Tales in King's Works In the 1989 interview with Tony Magistrale, King argued: liTo my mind, the stories that I write are nothing more than fairy tales for grown ups" (Magistrale, Decade, 4)' From a functional angle this statement seems to hold true. King has in Danse Macabre given the horror genre both personal and social functions. Magistrale summarizes these functions (Decade, 21-24), and Sharon A. Russell presents them in the form of a list (19-22): 1. Horror allows us to prove bravery, and we can test our courage without risking our lives. 2. Horror allows us to re-establish feelings of normality. 3. Horror confirms our positive feelings about the status quo. 4. Horror allows us to feel we are part of the larger whole: identifying with the group and working together for a good cause, we identify with the good. 5. Horror allows us to penetrate the mystery of death: horror, on the one hand, shows a way to cope with death and, on the other hand, even suggests what might happen beyond death. 6. Horror allows us to indulge our darkest collective and social fears, connecting our anxieties to a larger concern. 7. Horror allows us to return to childhood. 8. Horror allows us to transcend the world of darkness and negation. Significantly, the horror genre and myths and fairy tales have these functions in common. 108 Copyrighted Material Myths and Fairy Tales in King's Works Mircea Eliade in an essay "Myths and Fairy Tales" in his Myth and Reality, Jack Zipes in Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale, and in part Bruno Bettelheim in a psychoanalytic guise in The Uses of Enchantment (1975) elaborate the symbiotic connection between myth and fairy tale, tracing both back to initiation rites (see also Franz, 24-36). Eliade claims that although in the West the fairy tale has long since become a literature of diversion or of escape, it takes up and continues initiation on the level of imagination and dream (201-2). He goes on to point out that the fairy tale constitutes an "easy doublet for the initiation myth" (202), and initiation is one of the functions that King explores in his fiction. King's first point suggests that horror allows us to prove bravery without risking our lives (Magistrale, Decade, 22; Russell, 20). This is close to aIle Sjogren's notion that horror movies are modern rites of passage (14). Sjogren refers to Arnold van Gennep's Rites ofPassage , according to which, the rite of passage includes three parts: separation, transition, and incorporation (96). When breaking away from family ties, teenagers gather together in dark cinemas in order to confront their fears and prove their bravery. A successful experience both reinforces the feeling of togetherness and provides the Aristotelian catharsis (Aristotle, 10; DM, 13). Although the modern reader enjoys the fairy tale and the tale of horror as a private activity, the three parts of the rite of passage can also be distinguished in the reading process. Russell notes that King provides us with skills that allow us to cope with the evil we encounter in our lives. While identifying with those who are tested, we see what is crucial for our own survival. We learn that we must face our fears and believe in the power of good in our lives (22). The paradox that myth and the fairy tale are both fictitious yet true resembles that of horror fiction. Zipes points out that although we regard myths and fairy tales as lies, saying "oh, that's just myth/a fairy tale," these so-called lies often govern our lives (Fairy Tale, 4) or, rather, as Bettelheim puts it, tell the truth about our lives through allegory (6-7). Both in myth/fairy tale and the horror genre, "a pleasing allegorical feel" softens the occasional blows of harsh reality (DM, 5). Zipes could be referring to horror fiction rather than fairy tales when in Spells of Enchantment he states that both the oral and the literary forms of the fairy tale emanate from specific battles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces Copyrighted Material 110 Myths and Fairy Tales in King's Works that have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors, and therefore these tales are marks that leave traces of the human struggle for...

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