The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre by Jack Zipes (review)

A new book by Jack Zipes is both an occasion to review his career to date and an opportunity to marvel at his continued productivity. Zipes is, of course, the undisputed dean of fairy tale studies in the US; his works have shaped and inspired fairy tale scholars for almost forty years. In The Irresistible Fairy Tale, Zipes draws on and extends his prior work. He both celebrates the fairy tale as a subversive form and analyzes it as a nearly living creature, evolving from a dim past into the multifarious forms it takes today. While the celebration and the analysis sometimes conflict with one another, the book as a whole helps to focus us on the question, "Why do we still read these crazy stories?" while also introducing us to an ever richer, deeper, and perhaps crazier trove of tales.

Zipes outlines his goal in his preface: "I have sought . . . to widen my own sociopolitical approach to folk and fairy tales, and have explored new developments in evolutionary psychology, cultural anthropology, biology, memetics, cognitive philosophy, and linguistics . . . to demonstrate that the historical evolution of storytelling reflects struggles of human beings worldwide to adapt to their changing natural and social environments" (xi). Zipes's earlier sociopolitical approach focused on the way fairy tales were "grounded in history" and provided hope and release to the powerless (Spells xi). In this newer work, Zipes maintains that emphasis but combines it with what seems to be a far less politically charged focus on "fit"—on the process, that is, of evolutionary adaptation. This juxtaposition presents a potential contradiction, if not a conflict: evolution is a process by which random mutations "succeed" or "fail" to thrive in certain environments, while Zipes's earlier focus has emphasized the ways in which fairy tales criticize, rather than adapt to, prevailing social conditions. For Zipes, however, there is no conflict: "Fairy tales are informed by a human disposition to action," he writes, "to transform the world and make it more adaptable to human needs, while we also try to change and make ourselves fit for the world" (2). Here, "fit" is informed, purposive, directed by human will; elsewhere, however, the term becomes more elusive and almost seems a living organism of its own. He writes, for example, of how in the case of Straparola's collection, "the tales themselves sought to be memetically relevant" (17). It seems more than possible that their memetic relevance would (as perhaps in the case of Disney films, a genre Zipes decries) decrease their subversive capacity—that the adaptive fairy tale would tend to "fit" with prevailing socioeconomic conditions, rather than critique them. This potential conflict, however, goes unremarked as Zipes continues to emphasize the mutual "fit" of humans and tales.

In Why Fairy Tales Stick (2006), Zipes used the metaphor of the virus to analyze the fairy tale, which I found both useful and compelling: "the fairy tale as genre has become contagious and spreads like a meme in different strains. It is a strange viral gene because it contains positive and negative effects . . . it acts like a meme that undergoes multiple mutations in interaction with the environment" (94). Using epidemiological language, Zipes was able to analyze the way fairy tales spread and change without requiring value judgment—the mutations that survived were those that "fit" in a particular environment, but another environment might reward a different mutation. The analogy seemed to me both elegant and simple. Zipes further insists, in both Why Fairy Tales Stick and The Irresistible Fairy Tale, that both print and orality are components of fairy tale transmission, and that in fact trying to disentangle the two strains is neither possible nor necessary: the fairy tale "shaped and was shaped by the interaction of orality and print as well as other technological mediations and innovations, such as painting, photography, radio, and film" (Irresistible 21). This, too, strikes me as both...