Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales

Chapter 4: The Instrumentalization of Fantasy: Fairy Tales, the Culture Industry and Mass media

The Instrumentalization of Fantasy Fairy Tales, the Culture Industry and Mass Media Every ruling class produces sensual present-day products of a better life. It produces needs in the masses which it cannot satisfy. To be sure, the palaces are not builtfor the masses. Howevel; the needs of the masses are measured by them. This is mostfully and freely articulated by fairy tales. -0skar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Offentlichkeit and E$ahrung Ever since the eighteenth century German bourgeois writers have shown a marked propensity to write and study folk and fairy tales. One might snidely assert that this is perhaps what has been wrong with German bourgeois thinking. However, such a snideremark would miss the real significance of this phenomenon. The discovery and serious study of folklore during the latter half of the eighteenth century tapped a rich vein of culture which is still being explored today and is vital for a concrete realization of humanistic utopian projects. It was Johann Gottfried Herder, who first kindled the interest in German folklore, and his ideas set fire to the imagination of other talented writers of this period such as Goethe, the poets and dramatists of the Sturm und Drang movement, and those progressive thinkers interested in waking the national consciousness of the German people. Once the romantics turned their attention to the folk and fairy tales by The Instrumentalization of Fantasy the end of the eighteenth century, Novalis was able to proclaim: "The genuine fairy tale must be at the same time a prophetic portrayal -ideal portrayal-absolutely necessary portrayal. The genuine fairy-tale writer is a seer of the future. (With time history must become a fairy tale-it becomes once again what it was at the beginning .)"' History as a fairy tale. It is easy to laugh about this as typical romantic escapism, but the utopian landscape etched by Novalis in his fairy tales was created in rebellion against the manner in which reason had already become instrumentalized to serve the arbitrary interests of authoritarian powers. The Enlightenment had become utilitarian and rationalized human production for economic exploitation and profit, thereby warping the people's sense of their own history . For Novalis, history was a reappropriation of nature and human resources through love and the imagination by individuals jointly striving and helping one another to reach their full potential in harmony . The fairy tale showed allegorically the way toward self-realization , or, in other words, the alternative path history could take if human beings actually took charge of their destiny. Novalis was already fighting a losing battle with his fairy tales and radical theories. But, as I mentioned before, that did not stop the great German bourgeois minds from writing and using folk and fairy tales to criticize the dehumanizing forces of rationalism and capitalism up to the present. Undoubtedly the love of the fantastic in their metaphorical works can be interpreted as retreat and privatism, but this love also signifies an active utilization of the imagination to oppose social manipulation and arbitrary domination. The telling of a folk or fairy tale is accomplished by an autonomous exercise of the imagination that endows the creator with a sense of his or her own power and challenges the self-destructive dictates of reason. Equally important is the creator's direct connection with an audience, social experience and nature. As Walter Benjamin has emphasized, "a great story teller will always be rooted in the peoplew2since he or she has the practical task of communicating wisdom as a use value to the people, and such mediation can effectively bring audiences closer to nature and endow them with a sense of possibilities for self-realization . Benjamin particularly praised the folk tale as the highest form of narrative: Breaking the Magic Spell The folk tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story.The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of folk tales. Wherever good counsel was at a premium , the folk tale had it, and where the need was the greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was the need created by the myth. The folk tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth placed upon its chest. . ..The wisest thing-so the folk tale taught mankind in...