Bruno Bettelheim and the Fairy Tales

One of the most unforgettable things about the storyteller who spreads the marvelous tales which make up Rilke's Stories of God is that he believes his stories will better be understood by the children who hear them than by their elders who can only fear the dangers of straining the youngsters' minds with so much imaginative fantasy. The storyteller's favorite audience, though, is a certain cripple named Ewald, whose immobility has made him resemble things with which he fosters many intimacies, but whose familiarity with the art and grammar of silence has made him decidedly superior both to things and to changeable, talkative healthy people. It is Ewald's rare, quiet words and gentle, reverent feelings which the storyteller finds so appealing, in contrast to the crass incredulity of his other peers, who know so little about stories. On one particular day Ewald asks his friend, "Where did you get the story you told me last time?" Despondent, the storyteller has to recount how he found it in a book where the historians buried it some years ago after it had died a slow, painful death. It seems the story was inflicted with heavy words which became too difficult to speak, so that in the end it perished on one last pair of dry lips and was enshrouded with all honors in a book where others of its family lay. Before that, it had lived for four-or five-hundred years as a song, traveling freely from mouth to mouth, only pausing to sleep from time to time in some heart where it was warm and dark. After hearing all of this, Ewald asks, surprised, "But were people once so quiet that songs could sleep in their hearts?"¹

Rilke's point is well taken—even more so today than in 1899 when he first drafted his collection of stories. Oral folklore traditions in the past one hundred and fifty years have had to accommodate conditions which could only severely imperil their survival. As the highly industrialized societies race toward their apotheosis by means of increased professionalism, specialization, and the general institutionalization of knowledge, the art of storytelling is left behind, replaced by the newer arts of academic autopsy. Rilke's storyteller seems to have sensed that the printing press of itself was not enough to bring this about: it merely provided the most available graveyard for tales variously slaughtered by the forward rush of civilization. Like so many folk crafts whose means of production have been expropriated by technology, the folktale in most of its traditional genres has become a marketable commodity, ripped untimely from the socio-cultural setting in which it once flourished. And, to complete the process, what is left of the tales returns to contribute to the epidemic self-depreciation infecting the modern conscience. Children subjected to the biases of standardized schooling and mass modes of entertainment no longer want to be "told" stories that might depart from the "correct" versions printed in books or on film. And their educators, wary of offending the complex psychology of the child's development, learn to trust modernized editions of folktales, if indeed they tell them at all. The stories grow too heavy to be sung. They lose the right to roam about from mouth to mouth and be transformed each time they come to rest in a storyteller's heart.

The amazing thing in all of this is that so much of our traditional folklore maintains its natural enchantment over children and adults alike. The fairy tale is a case in point. However much we bowdlerize, mutilate, moralize, and otherwise bend it to our own ends, it still seems to move us with a power we have not yet learned to exorcise or imitate. That fact may well turn out to be more important that it at first seems. Like the hard-hearted King Shahryar, charmed for a thousand and one nights by the fantastic tales of the young Scheherazade, we may find in the end that our fairy tales contain much of the very wisdom necessary for our salvation.

It is precisely...