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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
At the sand-logged, mildewy tail end of a beach vacation, four exhausted parents take two seven-year-olds to a rainy-day play, "The Fairy Tale Detective": the tales of the Three Bears and Hansel and Gretel and Red Riding Hood, retold as though in a film noir, complete with raincoated detectives and lynx-eyed blondes. Puzzled looks from the seven-year-olds: the kids, the startled parents realize, just don't know the fairy tales, don't know the material or the usual spirit in which they're told. At last, one parent whispers, "It's a parody, a kind of joke--you know, like the Mr. Peabody stories on the 'Bullwinkle' videos." Instant enlightenment crosses their features; oh, that familiar thing, and, almost visibly, the work of interpretation--O.K., what's being kidded here? Although "Beauty and the Beast" and, perhaps, "The Little Mermaid" are part of the children's cultural baggage--or, rather, among their cultural parachutes; we are their cultural baggage--the tales exist for them only in highly sweetened, song-filled forms. A thought crosses at least one parental mind as he shepherds the children toward the exit and the fried clams: Is it possible that we have actually come to the end of fairy tales as an available, rather than an archival, entertainment? Fairy tales, however many times they are transformed, depend in some part for their effect on an air of sincerity, of urgent seriousness. For the not merely wise but wised-up children of this new century, other tales and other, more skittish ways of telling seem to have usurped the old stories and styles. Which means that the fairy tale could be headed for the place where all our good used-up things go, America's Island of Misfit Toys, the college English department.
Like a fairy godmother, along comes an encyclopedic book about fairy tales, prepared by a literature professor, which will test whether we must entomb or can yet enliven the genre. "The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales" (Norton; $35), edited by Maria Tatar, a professor at Harvard, is the latest in Norton's long line of annotated classics, a form that Martin Gardner invented and perfected, forty years ago, with "The Annotated Alice" and "The Annotated Snark": a familiar text with lots of glosses, explanations, and reflections. Annotating a classic is hard, since it involves both discreetly explaining the obvious and modestly explaining the...
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