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ePilogue The Politics of Wonder Wonder has no opposite; it springs already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear. It names the marvel, the prodigy, the surprise as well as the responses they excite, of fascination and inquiry; it conveys the active motion towards experience and the passive stance of enrapturement. marina Warner “Dom, did you think about your third wish?’ “No” “Take your time” fiona, the fairy, and dom in La fée / The Fairy 2011 You probably know this tale, but it’s worth retelling. One winter, when the snow was deep, a poor boy had to go outside with his sled to gather wood. After he had finally collected enough wood and had piled it on his sled, he was so frozen he decided not to go home right away. He thought he would instead make a fire to warm himself up a bit. So he began scraping the snow away, and as he cleared the ground he discovered a small golden key. Where there’s a key, he knew, there must also be a lock. So he dug farther into the ground and found a little iron casket. If only the key will fit! he thought. There must be precious things in the casket. He searched and searched, but could not find a keyhole. Then, finally, he noticed one, but it was so small he could barely see it. He tried the key, and fortunately it fit. So he began turning it in the keyhole. 190 ▪ Epilogue And now we must wait until he unlocks the casket completely and lifts the cover. That’s when we’ll learn what wonderful things he found. This is my own amalgamation of two English-language translations, Maria Tatar’s and Jack Zipes’s, of “The Golden Key” in the Brothers Grimm collection. I like retelling this tale and have done so in class as well as at scholarly meetings because it does, in a minor key, what Angela Carter associated with fairy tales in general: to quote her again, while providing “the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world,” these tales “positively parade [their] lack of verisimilitude,” and they exhibit, perhaps even instigate, “heroic optimism.” I also enjoy retelling it because it helps to reflect on the poetics of wonder. What I mean here by wonder, as I extrapolate it from reading “The Golden Key,” should resonate with the texts and ideas I discussed in earlier chapters of this book. If you are familiar with the tale in German or in another language, please keep in mind the words as you know them, especially what translates as “wonderful things,” because to what extent this resonance carries across to the so-called equivalents of the English-language “wonder” in German, Dutch, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish (wunder, wonder, meraviglia or incanto or prodigio, merveille, maravilha, asombro or maravilla), or for that matter Hawaiian (kamaha‘o) and other non-European languages, varies and matters.1 Something I noticed in three recent translations of “The Golden Key” into English is that the final sentences of the tale do not only enact the movement from storyworld to the scene of storytelling but also shift from the past tense to the present and future. For Zipes, “So, he began turning it, and now we must wait until he unlocks the casket completely and lifts the cover. That’s when we’ll learn what wonderful things he found” (Zipes 1987, 289). In Maria Tatar’s wording , the final sentences read: “Now, he’s started turning it, and we’ll just have to wait until he finishes unlocking the casket and lifts the lid. Then we’ll know what kinds of wonderful things can be found in it” (Tatar 2010, 251). And in Matthew Price’s rendition, “And now we’ll just have to wait until he has unlocked it all the way and raised the lid. Then we’ll discover what wonderful things are tucked away inside” (Price 2011, 290). This metanarrative shift in space and time—bridging action in the storyworld with the storytelling situation— is what makes retelling the tale worth it for me. This shift marks, without naming it, the transformative process that inhabits the tale, a transformation that seeks to bring about wonder as its effect and affect on listeners and readers. Wonder throughout...

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