jack zipes interview

8/3/2019 Jack Zipes Interview

1/5

JACK ZIPES INTEVIEW


2/5

KB) What or who, brought you into the antasy eld?

JZ) "Ever since I was eight-years-old I began writing stories and sitting on foors in

libraries and reading mysel into other realms. There was no major writer or book

that brought me into the antasy eld. I think, like many people, I nd our reality so

disturbing, so unullling, so corrupt, and so barbaric that I began conceiving al-

ternatives to our social condition. All good literature provides hope, but the best o

antasy literature provides extraordinary hope, and I guess that is what I am ater --extraordinary hope."

KB) You are considered an authority on airy 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 airy tales. I think I have a deep interest in airy tales and I may

even be obsessed by them. I eel driven to uncover tales that ew people know and

to share this knowledge and pleasure with other readers. I do a lot o storytelling

with young people and try to animate them to become storytellers o their own lives.So, perhaps animator would be a better term to describe what I do - or mediator."

KB) How do you think airy tales refect the society in which they were created?

JZ) I denitely believe (and can demonstrate and have demonstrated) that airy tales

refect the conditions, ideas, tastes, and values o the societies in which they were

created. Due to their symbolism, it is quite oten very dicult to see how remarkably

they comment on reality. One has to do a lot o scholarly detective work to draw par-

allels and to interpret their social signicance. This is what makes studying airy tales

so challenging and ascinating. Once you begin to grasp the metaphors, the talesbecome enlightening.

KB) Within the last hal century televised mythology has been supplanting the written

and oral tradition o 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, or even on television, people are telling live stories. There is obviously

a danger that technology will oster more and more alienation and destroy commu-

nities. It has already happened. On the other hand, television and the internet have

created new orms o communication. Perhaps the question should be rephrased.

Perhaps we should ask whether we would be better o i more and more people

controlled the mass media instead o corporate conglommerates. Without sounding

corny, I think i technology served the people, instead o people serving technolgy,

we would not have to worry about social decadence and decline. (Incidentally, airy

tales measure to what extend we are losing the struggle against alienation and ex-

ploitation.)

KB) Over the past hal century, airy tales have slowly been sanitised and even cen-sored by "amily values" zealots. I you look at airy 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 o today's "politically correct" stories like Care Bears or that

purple dinosaur?


3/5

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 nd a show like Mr. Rogers very compelling because he is gentle and kind

and has a subtle sense o humor. So, or 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 undamentalism,etc. I have raised my own daughter on all sorts o 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 act, 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 o airy

tales, are very honest, never mince words, and challenge everyone's imagination.

They should never be sanitized.

KB) Reading Joseph Campbell's "The Power O Myth", I was struck by the similarities

in the creation myths throughout vastly diering cultures and ages. Despite our di-

erences, it seems we're all asking the same questions: where do we come rom; and

how do we keep doing it. In your experience, do non-religious based stories share

these similarities? That is (barring cultural and environment dierences) are people

rom Reykjavik telling the same stories as those rom Johannesburg?

JZ) It is uncanny how similar tales -- let's ocus on oral wonder tales or airy tales

-- are throughout the world. I am presently translating Sicilian airy tales told in the

19th century, and they are remarkably similar to many French, German, and Britishtales that circulated about the same time, and the peasant women who told these

marvelous tales would not have known o 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. How-

ever, I am very skeptical o Jung's theories, and Campbell's as well. I have recently

been exploring Darwin, social Darwinism, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychol-

ogy, 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 disposi-

tions have evolved genetically and are articulated through mental and public repre-sentations in response to a civilizing process. Given that the instincts and disposi-

tions that evolve genetically are the same but altered by the environment, we are

bound to eel the world and respond to the world in very similar ways and to record

our responses in similar but dierent ways. So, on the island o Sicily, there will be

peasant women telling the same tale with some dierent 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 airy tales. Undeniably Vampires are a hot commodity.

No longer, though, are they pitiable, doomed souls destined to live out eternity hid-ing their hideous aces rom society; NO! today's Vampire is a hip, happenin' dude;

a pop star to be envied and worshipped by young urban trendies. I Bram Stoker

invented the "modern" vampire based on Victorian ideals o good (purity, holiness,


4/5

celibacy, virtue) and evil (lust, physical pleasure, power, eroticism) then was it inevi-

table that Anne Rice's "post-modern" vampires - while representing the same attrib-

utes - should be considered heroes?

JZ) Actually, vampires, draculas, and ghosts play a negligible role on airy tales.

Strictly speaking, they orm another type o genre -- ghost stories, horror stories,

etc. They appear more oten in legends than in airy tales. It is only in contemporary

times, with the rise o antasy, which nobody has ever dened satisactorily, to mymind, that you have writers mixing genres so that anything is possible in a antasy

work. Fantasy, o course, is a market denition. The vamp, witch, dracula, etc. have

all been redened by eminists and other subversive writers who want to question

what the good religious and proper people have condemned as evil. The relativity o

values is the central theme o many writers o antasy. You see that especially in the

writings o Angela Carter, who even promotes the Sadeian Woman. It is dicult to

denite what evil is today. Is evil banal in the orm o George Bush and thus much

more dangerous than the axis o evil incarnated by the clearly sadistic and brutal

Hussein? The traditional denitions and categories do not work in our postmodernworld, and this sets writers dangerously ree to concoct their worlds o good and

evil. I say dangerously because the writer has a huge responsibility and i he/she

has a large ollowing or readership, the infuence can be dangerous. However, what

is more dangerous is the power o the mass corporations that control the distribu-

tion and reception o news, stories, etc. The mass corporations are, to my mind, the

vamps o today.

KB) And speaking o new airy tales: how did you rst become aware o Neil

Gaiman?

JZ) How does any proessor become aware o the best writers??? Through their

undergraduate students. I have oten been inspired by my students' curiosity and

reading passions. Whenever I teach a course on airy tales and antasy literature, I

become engaged with my students, and we exchange ideas about dierent authors,

their works, etc. Well, it must have been about ten years or so ago when a student

tipped me o to Neil's graphic novels. Since then I have read many o Neil's works

with relish.

KB) What do you think sets him apart rom other writers o that genre?

JZ) It depends on what you mean by genre. Neil is obviously very versatile -- airy

tales, horror, gothic tales, science ction, utopian literature. So, it is his versatility

that strikes me and his willingness to experiment. Not all o his works are "success-

ul," but he is a serious artist with a subtle sense o humour.

KB) Neil's work is somewhat deeper in scope and darker in tone than the "horror-lite"

o Stephen King or Anne Rice. Are there any other writers you eel are looking be-

yond the "suburban goth" stereotype and drawing rom, 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 o all I read theory and olk tales. For instance, right now I am working on three


5/5

huge olk-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 de-

velop a new theory o the olk tale (oral tales). So, I am not conversant with the latest

developments in dark antasy, though there are some works I have read or pleasure.

KB) You've written many academic works on antasy and airy tales, do you ever eel

the urge to write a straight out, blockbuster work o "antasy/horror" ction?

JZ) I don't have an urge to write "blockbuster" antasy or horror. But I have written

several small pieces o ction under a pseudonym, and I preer to keep it that way.

I have also written some airy tales under my own name that have appeared in my

book Creative Storytelling, and I have just completed several airy 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 or translat-

ing. As you probably know, I have translated the Grimms, Perrault, Hesse, and a host

o other writers (German, French, Italian). I take great pleasure out o the creativework o translating, especially because it is an act o sharing stories that are not ac-

cessible to English-speaking readers. I love to discover unusual writers and translate

their works. In some cases, I have taken olk 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

dene or distinguish a "Fairy Tale"? Is a moral or allegory necessary or can they sim-

ply be stories? Is it as simple as Wittgenstein makes it out: "But the airy tale only

invents what is not the case: it does not talk nonsense."?

JZ) The ollowing is a passage rom 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 airy tale is or is not:

For the past three hundred years or more scholars and critics have sought to de-

ne and classiy the oral olk tale and the literary airy tale, as though they could be

clearly distinguished rom one another, and as though we could trace their origins to

some primeval source. This is an impossible task because there are very ew i any

records with the exception o paintings, drawings, etchings, inscriptions and other

cultural arteacts that reveal how tales were told and received thousands o years

ago. In act, even when written records came into existence, we have very little inor-

mation about storytelling among the majority o people, except or 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 olk tales and airy tales, and it was also at this time

that the Brothers Grimm, and many others to ollow, sought to establish national cul-

tural identities by uncovering the pure tales o their so-called people, the olk, and

their imagined nations.

From a contemporary perspective, the eorts o the Brothers Grimm and the nu-

merous eorts that they helped to inspire by Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen

jack zipes interview

Documents