Terrors of Childhood in Grimms’ Fairy Tales (review)

This is a curious, slight but dense study, filled with revelations and contradictions that ultimately do not advance our understanding of the Grimms’ fairy tales. If anything, Kudszus’s book provides some interesting linguistic insights into the tales with a dose of psychoanalytic comments. Strangely, the thesis of this work is announced only in the final chapter: “The plots, behaviors, and aberrations that manifest in the only slightly concealed terrain of fairy-tale infamy obscure a terrifying underworld. The readings performed in this study strive for their intrinsic breaking points. There, it is imagined, they turn polysemous, unruly, endlessly wide. In such dynamics, close readings turn groundless, fall through layers of interpretation toward a space and time before words. In the boundary region between verbalization and preverbal experience, reading and hearing these narratives involve a process of learning between linguistic formulation and a world whose frights and promises escape one’s grasp” (132). In other words, the more we reveal about the Grimms’ tales, the less we know. One must then ask: why bother plunging into them in the meticulous manner in which Kudszus dissects the tales?

Kudszus hopes, I think, that we can catch glimmerings of the real terrors of childhood through his readings that penetrate the underbelly of selected Grimms tales. Though his book is not very large, it is ponderous and intended to make us ponder every word of each tale he analyzes. His book consists of a brief introduction, which is some kind of praise about the marvels of language, followed by nine short chapters containing his own translations of “The King of the Golden Mountain,” “The Glass Coffin,” “Faithful Johannes,” and “The Juniper Tree.” The original 1857 German texts are on matching pages. The concluding chapter allegedly ties together the linguistic strands of interpretation by untying them and wondering what we have experienced through the close readings.

In sum, this is a disappointing book. There is no doubt that Kudszus is a careful if not genial close reader who brings all of his expertise and knowledge to unravel the frightening aspects of the Grimms’ tales that few scholars, according to him, have explored. However, despite the occasional flashes of learned etymological, linguistic, and psychoanalytic comments that he weaves into his readings, they are more performative displays of his own talents than relevant interpretations for other readers. His language is so turgid that it is often difficult to understand what he means or intends to mean. He never justifies his choice of tales or explains why these tales are especially important in comparison to the other two hundred tales. He treats the texts as though they were fixed when we know that the Grimms’ texts, often based on oral variants, are unstable and unreliable, because they kept changing them, and we do not know their complete sources or manifold ways that they were received. Kudszus glides over the fact that the Grimms changed the texts and then makes assertions and suppositions that lack any foundation whatsoever.

One example of his approach will suffice to show how he imposes his own authoritative meanings and readings on a text, similar to the heavy-handed manner in which Bruno Bettelheim operated. Kudszus declares:

Receiving “The King of the Golden Mountain” from the firmly defined grounds of an adult linguistic universe misses as well as subjugates the text’s underlying drama and vitality. Although cast in negative terms, the little man speaks in a manner akin to experiential understandings of language in early childhood. Speaking multivalently, he at the same time enacts a communicative flexibility that reflects the experience of being a child in the process of learning and handling a language. Such speech precariously unfolds at the threshold between a world of many meanings, feelings, perceptions, and a more focused reality where much that does not fit a specific pursuit is shut out.

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First of all, Kudszus implies that he knows exactly what the underlying drama and vitality of the text is and what the language...