JACK ZIPES INTEVIEW

KB) What or who, brought you into the fantasy field? JZ) "Ever since I was eight-years-old I began writing stories and sitting on floors in libraries and reading myself into other realms. There was no major writer or book that brought me into the fantasy field. I think, like many people, I find our reality so disturbing, so unfulfilling, so corrupt, and so barbaric that I began conceiving alternatives to our social condition. All good literature provides hope, but the best of fantasy literature provides extraordinary hope, and I guess that is what I am after -extraordinary hope." KB) You are considered an authority on fairy tales; do you take the title willingly? JZ) "I dislike the term "authority". So I don't take the term willingly. I think I am very knowledgeable about fairy tales. I think I have a deep interest in fairy tales and I may even be obsessed by them. I feel driven to uncover tales that few people know and to share this knowledge and pleasure with other readers. I do a lot of storytelling with young people and try to animate them to become storytellers of their own lives. So, perhaps animator would be a better term to describe what I do - or mediator." KB) How do you think fairy tales reflect the society in which they were created? JZ) I definitely believe (and can demonstrate and have demonstrated) that fairy tales reflect the conditions, ideas, tastes, and values of the societies in which they were created. Due to their symbolism, it is quite often very difficult to see how remarkably they comment on reality. One has to do a lot of scholarly detective work to draw parallels and to interpret their social significance. This is what makes studying fairy tales so challenging and fascinating. Once you begin to grasp the metaphors, the tales become enlightening. KB) Within the last half century televised mythology has been supplanting the written and oral tradition of story-telling. Do you think this shows a society in decline or one in metamorphosis? JZ) I think that the written word and the spoken word will never die out, nor will storytelling, for even on television, people are telling live stories. There is obviously a danger that technology will foster more and more alienation and destroy communities. It has already happened. On the other hand, television and the internet have created new forms of communication. Perhaps the question should be rephrased. Perhaps we should ask whether we would be better off if more and more people controlled the mass media instead of corporate conglommerates. Without sounding corny, I think if technology served the people, instead of people serving technolgy, we would not have to worry about social decadence and decline. (Incidentally, fairy tales measure to what extend we are losing the struggle against alienation and exploitation.) KB) Over the past half century, fairy tales have slowly been sanitised and even censored by "family values" zealots. If you look at fairy tales past, someone usually dies or gets baked in an oven or turned into butter or meets their end in some horrible way. What do you think of today's "politically correct" stories like Care Bears or that purple dinosaur?

JZ) Personally there is something perverse about Care Bears and the inane Barney. They are so sweet and clean and antiseptic that I want to throw up. On the other hand, I find a show like Mr. Rogers very compelling because he is gentle and kind and has a subtle sense of humor. So, for the very young, ages 1 - 6 or so, I do think we should take care about what stories we tell without overprotecting the children or censoring material. The sanitization process and political correctness can be very dangerous because they lead to censorship, police states, radical fundamentalism, etc. I have raised my own daughter on all sorts of stories without censorship, with curse words and violent scenes, where appropriate in the plot. Depending on the relationship a child has to the storyteller, and depending on the context, I think it is important that the child be able to listen to any story imaginable. In fact, the children imagine stories more gruesome and more violent than we can imagine. So it all boils down to honesty -- how honest is the story or storyteller. Fairy tales, the best of fairy tales, are very honest, never mince words, and challenge everyone's imagination. They should never be sanitized. KB) Reading Joseph Campbell's "The Power Of Myth", I was struck by the similarities in the creation myths throughout vastly differing cultures and ages. Despite our differences, it seems we're all asking the same questions: where do we come from; and how do we keep doing it. In your experience, do non-religious based stories share these similarities? That is (barring cultural and environment differences) are people from Reykjavik telling the same stories as those from Johannesburg? JZ) It is uncanny how similar tales -- let's focus on oral wonder tales or fairy tales -- are throughout the world. I am presently translating Sicilian fairy tales told in the 19th century, and they are remarkably similar to many French, German, and British tales that circulated about the same time, and the peasant women who told these marvelous tales would not have known of the French, German, and British versions. How has this come about? How did it come about? How does it still occur? Campbell would probably use Jung and the collective unconscious to explain their origin. However, I am very skeptical of Jung's theories, and Campbell's as well. I have recently been exploring Darwin, social Darwinism, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology, and I am gradually coming to the conclusion that there are basic instincts in the human species that are the same throughout the world. The instincts and dispositions have evolved genetically and are articulated through mental and public representations in response to a civilizing process. Given that the instincts and dispositions that evolve genetically are the same but altered by the environment, we are bound to feel the world and respond to the world in very similar ways and to record our responses in similar but different ways. So, on the island of Sicily, there will be peasant women telling the same tale with some different twists that women on some Hawaiian island are telling at the same time. This is my take on the subject, and I am trying to sort out these ideas in a book that I am working on. KB) Let's talk a bit about new fairy tales. Undeniably Vampires are a hot commodity. No longer, though, are they pitiable, doomed souls destined to live out eternity hiding their hideous faces from society; NO! today's Vampire is a hip, happenin' dude; a pop star to be envied and worshipped by young urban trendies. If Bram Stoker invented the "modern" vampire based on Victorian ideals of good (purity, holiness,

celibacy, virtue) and evil (lust, physical pleasure, power, eroticism) then was it inevitable that Anne Rice's "post-modern" vampires - while representing the same attributes - should be considered heroes? JZ) Actually, vampires, draculas, and ghosts play a negligible role on fairy tales. Strictly speaking, they form another type of genre -- ghost stories, horror stories, etc. They appear more often in legends than in fairy tales. It is only in contemporary times, with the rise of fantasy, which nobody has ever defined satisfactorily, to my mind, that you have writers mixing genres so that anything is possible in a fantasy work. Fantasy, of course, is a market definition. The vamp, witch, dracula, etc. have all been redefined by feminists and other subversive writers who want to question what the good religious and proper people have condemned as evil. The relativity of values is the central theme of many writers of fantasy. You see that especially in the writings of Angela Carter, who even promotes the Sadeian Woman. It is difficult to definite what evil is today. Is evil banal in the form of George Bush and thus much more dangerous than the axis of evil incarnated by the clearly sadistic and brutal Hussein? The traditional definitions and categories do not work in our postmodern world, and this sets writers dangerously free to concoct their worlds of good and evil. I say dangerously because the writer has a huge responsibility and if he/she has a large following or readership, the influence can be dangerous. However, what is more dangerous is the power of the mass corporations that control the distribution and reception of news, stories, etc. The mass corporations are, to my mind, the vamps of today. KB) And speaking of new fairy tales: how did you first become aware of Neil Gaiman? JZ) How does any professor become aware of the best writers??? Through their undergraduate students. I have often been inspired by my students' curiosity and reading passions. Whenever I teach a course on fairy tales and fantasy literature, I become engaged with my students, and we exchange ideas about different authors, their works, etc. Well, it must have been about ten years or so ago when a student tipped me off to Neil's graphic novels. Since then I have read many of Neil's works with relish. KB) What do you think sets him apart from other writers of that genre? JZ) It depends on what you mean by genre. Neil is obviously very versatile -- fairy tales, horror, gothic tales, science fiction, utopian literature. So, it is his versatility that strikes me and his willingness to experiment. Not all of his works are "successful," but he is a serious artist with a subtle sense of humour. KB) Neil's work is somewhat deeper in scope and darker in tone than the "horror-lite" of Stephen King or Anne Rice. Are there any other writers you feel are looking beyond the "suburban goth" stereotype and drawing from, and building on, historical precedents? JZ) To tell you the truth, I do not read in one particular genre. I read all over the place. Most of all I read theory and folk tales. For instance, right now I am working on three

huge folk-tale projects that are connected to Sicily. At the same time I am reading books on social Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, and bio-poetics to try to develop a new theory of the folk tale (oral tales). So, I am not conversant with the latest developments in dark fantasy, though there are some works I have read for pleasure. KB) You've written many academic works on fantasy and fairy tales, do you ever feel the urge to write a straight out, blockbuster work of "fantasy/horror" fiction? JZ) I don't have an urge to write "blockbuster" fantasy or horror. But I have written several small pieces of fiction under a pseudonym, and I prefer to keep it that way. I have also written some fairy tales under my own name that have appeared in my book Creative Storytelling, and I have just completed several fairy tales which I shall either publish under a pseudonym or my own name. Not sure yet. Right now I am so excited about two Sicilian writers whose works I am translating that I push my own creative work aside. As I write this, however, I must put in a good word for translating. As you probably know, I have translated the Grimms, Perrault, Hesse, and a host of other writers (German, French, Italian). I take great pleasure out of the creative work of translating, especially because it is an act of sharing stories that are not accessible to English-speaking readers. I love to discover unusual writers and translate their works. In some cases, I have taken folk tales and adapted them to create my own. I shall probably continue writing and translating along these lines, crossing lines, mixing up lines, trying to produce stories with new lines. KB) Perhaps we should have set the ground rules at the beginning: How does one define or distinguish a "Fairy Tale"? Is a moral or allegory necessary or can they simply be stories? Is it as simple as Wittgenstein makes it out: "But the fairy tale only invents what is not the case: it does not talk nonsense."? JZ) The following is a passage from my book The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (NY: Norton: 2002). It sums up my most recent position on what a fairy tale is or is not: For the past three hundred years or more scholars and critics have sought to define and classify the oral folk tale and the literary fairy tale, as though they could be clearly distinguished from one another, and as though we could trace their origins to some primeval source. This is an impossible task because there are very few if any records with the exception of paintings, drawings, etchings, inscriptions and other cultural artefacts that reveal how tales were told and received thousands of years ago. In fact, even when written records came into existence, we have very little information about storytelling among the majority of people, except for bits and pieces that highly educated writers gathered and presented in their works. It is really not until the late 18th century and the early 19th century that scholars began studying and paying close attention to folk tales and fairy tales, and it was also at this time that the Brothers Grimm, and many others to follow, sought to establish national cultural identities by uncovering the pure tales of their so-called people, the folk, and their imagined nations. From a contemporary perspective, the efforts of the Brothers Grimm and the numerous efforts that they helped to inspire by Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen