Books for the Post-Revolutionary Reader

Books for the Post-Revolutionary Reader I take my text from Maria Tatar's book. The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales: For many adults, reading through an unexpurgated edition of the Grimms' collection of tales can be an eye-opening experience. Even those who know that Snow White's stepmother arranges the murder of her stepdaughter , that doves peck out the eyes of Cinderella' s stepsisters, that Briar Rose's suitors bleed to death on the hedge surrounding her castle, or that a mad rage drives Rumpelstiltskin to tear himself in two will find themselves hardly prepared for the graphic descriptions of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest that fill the pages of these bedtime stories for children. (3) But that was then, and this is now. Long before Walt Disney gelded the Grimms, we'd found ways to discount them. After all, the brothers had been born into a Europe seething like a cauldron in the genocidal aftermath of the French Revolution. Besides, they were Germans and perhaps worse: philologists. Just as well there were no child psychologists then to gauge the Grimms' effect on their first little listeners. From our distance we can even take the lofty view that the Europeans would doubtless have been at each other's throats through much of subsequent history even if the Grimms hadn't been so . . . grim. Moreover, from early childhood the young have a perennial taste for the gothic. Inside every child is a BeIa Lugosi struggling successfully to get out. Today only a handful of children deeply immured within the middle class hear traditional tales at their parents' knees. From pre-school on, the American young learn their murder, mutilation, and infanticide from the television and the rented video, if not in their own homes, then in another. The television screen becomes itself an agent of infanticide. I've already said more about early childhood than I know. When my books and I meet young people, the die has been cast. They are either quivering on the brink of puberty or are in its abyss or are scrambling out the other side. By then they've memorized movies I have never seen. Nightmare on Elm Street, New Jack City, all the Friday the 13th' s, Tiexas chain saws, poltergeists , endless slasher films, along with the commercialized mayhem of Saturday morning cartoons. By the time they are 41 eighteen, the statisticians tell us, they've watched twenty-two thousand hours . Before books of my sort reach this audience, heads have rolled. Blood flows freely on television and so does language that could get any faculty member but the coach fired. Journalism is far more outspoken now too, though the young have very little taste for non-fiction television. Teachers who have asked their students to watch a documentary on some topic relevant to school work have learned how annoyed are the young at this interruption of their regular programming. They do, however, like Oprah Winfrey who adds gynecology to the gothic. But you could fire a missile through any high school without knocking down a viewer of Ted Koppel, let alone MacNeil and Lehrer. Still, any third-grader in front of the set when a program called 20/20 aired last month met three women bringing suit against their father for incest. If you didn't know what incest is, in graphically descriptive terms you learned. The only common cultural experience of modern children is film. In our schools we would not now have a national curriculum of shared readings even if our students could read them. The trend howling out of our universities is in quite the opposite direction. Every turn in history's road strengthens the hold of the camera upon children. In defense of television, Eric Sevareid once said that in many American homes, television is the only coherent voice ever heard. The flickering image is bigger than we are and will grow beyond our imaginings as the literacy level of schools and colleges continues its decline. Why even belabor the point? Because writers and their co-conspirators, librarians and teachers, are being sent mixed messages. Hardly a week passes in my life without a...