Curious to hear again this favorite story and to read the full version of “Hansel and Gretel,” I tracked down an edition of Grimms’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales. In addition to reading of the redemptive reunion between the father and his children, of the jewels and precious stones, I learned that Straw did not experience a happy ending. Rushing upon his thin comrade as he lay stretched and hopeful across the brook, the hot-headed Coal paused fearfully when hearing the water below and burned Straw in half. Both plunged to death in the brook. Bean, having held back, burst his seam laughing and was later stitched back together. So, after all these years, why did I hold on so tenaciously to the moral of self-sacrifice? Had my grandmother altered the ending to soften its harshness? Did she field the inevitable questions of her grandchildren in ways that eased the hardness or uplifted the heroism? What would it have meant, after all, to imagine Straw’s sacrifice as no more than a prelude to a meaningless fall or mocking laughter? As my grandmother looked into my eyes, she might have seen a child’s need to believe in the possibility of such sacrifice; perhaps she knew that the story told only a partial truth, that it had forsaken goodness in the midst of evil, that death had erased Straw’s generous impulse. So much, after all, can occupy that imaginative space. What should we remember and who should we praise: selfish Coal, cautious and unsympathetic Bean, or self-sacrificing Straw?
All storytellers face the problem of just how much to tell and just how to tell it. How much should be left out or let in? How piercing should the teller paint the evils of the world? How much of the tale changes in what the listener can understand and what the storyteller knows can be told at any given time?
My curious journeying back to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s book made me wonder how they wrestled with such questions and whether they spoke of this tale-teller’s dilemma. Having listened to, recorded, and revised the hard-edged narratives, they must have considered, like any father sitting in the storyteller’s chair or on the bed’s edge, how they opened a world of fear and abandonment within the sanctuary of a family’s sleeping quarters. In reading their preface to the second volume of the tales’ first edition, we hear them express such a concern. “There are those,” they write, “who do not even want [their children] to hear bad things about the devil” and parents who “might not want to put the book into the hands of their children.” But, not surprisingly, they err on the side of the telling, concluding that they “do not know of a single healthy and powerful book used to educate the people (and that includes the Bible) in which such delicate matters do not actually appear to an even greater extent.” In the folk tales, they see a “document of our hearts.” If so, for both the storyteller and the listener, the document is of a kind that haunts as it heals. The stories that keep calling us back are also the ones that may keep us up at night.
In my years of learning about stories and how to read them, I remember once coming across the name of Bruno Bettelheim in relation to fairy tales, and so, in my library browsing, I sought out where this recollection might lead. Just as my grandmother sought to frame how to read Grimms’ tales, Bettelheim must also have offered some insight into the stories. How might he illuminate these tales of famine, estrangement, and loss in the intimate home of memory and desire? Sitting down with The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, published in 1976, the same time as my bedtime storytelling to my brother, I read of Bettelheim’s fascination with the harsh realities of Grimms’ fairy tales and their important role in educating children. The hard facts represented in literature and especially fairy tales, Bettelheim cajoled readers, stimulate and enrich children’s imaginations and consequently their developing minds and emotions. Seeing the world through a Freudian lens—and the psychoanalytical bogeymen of unconscious desires, “oedipal dilemmas,” and “sibling rivalries”—he emphasizes the significance of Grimms’ stories in the growth of identity and self-worth. To deal with inner tribulations and achieve self-understanding, children must engage in dream and fantasy: “[A child] can achieve this understanding, and with it the ability to cope, not through rational comprehension of the nature and content of his unconscious, but by becoming familiar with it through spinning out daydreams—ruminating, rearranging, and fantasizing about suitable story elements in response to unconscious pressures.” In this way, it seems, self-understanding is not possible without stories and storytelling. We often make use of the short time before sleep to narrate the day in the context of near and far off fears.
It is not a bad thing, then, for parents and teachers to encourage children to sleep with all that might lead to sleeplessness. In important ways, a listener’s unscripted fears and chaotic fantasies can be given shape through such troubling narratives as “Hansel and Gretel.” With this kind of tough love, Bettelheim rejects what he sees as the widespread cultural desire to pretend that the “dark side of man does not exist” and asserts that “only by struggling courageously against what seem like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence.” In the 1970s, The Uses of Enchantment must have seemed timely, an odd solace in the face of the era’s violence within and beyond the nation, of alienated sons and daughters, of disillusioned citizens attempting to “wring meaning” from so much that was falling apart. Having survived time in a German concentration camp and yet still able to articulate the prospect of courage, compassion, and hope, Bettelheim himself seemed the storyteller to meet a parent’s (and nation’s) needs. He promised the possibility of mastering the evil within by doing more than simply offering the stories; he provided a master narrative, a way to piece together all the fragments: the mother’s deception, the father’s abandonment, and the child’s exile or silence.
Still, caught up in these fantasies of psychoanalysis, I did wonder just how much to trust Bettelheim’s shaping of Grimms’ tales. Within the forest of his own enchanting logic, I began to lose what it meant to live with and in a tale, to sit beside the child, to taste the words as they drifted amid the smells of steaming tea and scones. I felt the imposition of meaning and a kind of forgetfulness, as if such stories do not shift and bend within the realities of an intimate storytelling. Is it not possible for the loving gesture, the timely sacrifice, to hold the weight of both suffering and hope and thus repair some painful gap or fracture in life? With her grandchildren upon her lap, my grandmother did not use her hands or words to choke meaning from a harsh world; she was no witch mixing evil with sweet breads. But, she did invite evil in, gradually, describing the outlines of wickedness and sorrow, letting our bodies lean against hers in the fear of the imagining. In this space, death did not go away; Straw and Coal still fell voiceless in the rushing stream. And, yet, having experienced a kind of exile from her home in leaving her family to come to the United States with her World War I husband, my grandmother must have known that the texture of a story’s truth emerged in more than the hard and ever-present reality of loss. With some nudging, she invited a simultaneous and complicated truth—that the meaning changed with Straw’s gesture, even when considered in light of the perhaps predictable rashness of Coal. In the legacy of this interpretation of the story, I find different questions. Is there an account of the tale where the bridge holds, where one can feel the heat scarring the back yet lie without breaking across the chasm? Or, perhaps, is the story of the falling just the beginning, a point where the listener takes up the emptiness without forsaking the need to cross the gap together?
I think of my son’s restless nights and our wrestling in the dark. I recall the days and weeks when I felt the fall and the splash, felt his fingers in my flesh and my too-hard gripping of his body. But, if the truth be told, there is more in the remembering: the echo of “hug” and a leaning of his body into mine, a laughter and lightness of spirit that sees Madeline floating and shapes a world through the happy endings of Pooh. Can I find a way to capture the whole story? Can I see that at different times Jacob and I exchange the putting of our bodies down, the stretching toward the other side? Can I write a new story out of the old ways of seeing, a tale that honors the fall but holds more than death and loss?
Perhaps these questions point to the truth that another reader of Bettelheim, Maria Tatar, so eloquently expresses in Off with Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood,