Word: hanseler
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This defense of the fairy tale provides the hard, glistening surface of Bettelheim's book; the very title The Uses of Enchantment suggests utility over literary delight, therapy before amusement. Deep within the volume are less convincing "proofs" of this attitude. The legends of Snow White, of Hansel and Gretel, of Goldilocks are parsed for every psychological nuance. Here the reader leaves the nursery for what Vladimir Nabokov calls "the fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying...
Freudian Simples. In Hansel and Gretel the gingerbread house stands for "oral greediness." An analysis of Snow White descends to pure jargon: "The queen, who is fixated to a primitive narcissism and arrested in the oral incorporative stage, is a person who cannot positively relate ..." The doctor's narrow Freudian couch allows no room to turn around. Versions that do not accord with orthodox analysis are jettisoned; Disney's version of Snow White, for example, is psychologically useless to the child because each dwarf has a separate name and a distinctive personality. This "seriously interferes with the unconscious...
Such dogma tends to remind the reader of a remark attributed to the father of analysis: that while a cigar was a phallus it was also a cigar. The humor of Sneezy, Dopey and Doc, the excursions of Hansel cannot be reduced to Freudian simples. The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is more than the "potentially destructive tendencies of the id"; he is a wolf as well. Of course a child walks in a giant's world. Of course boys and girls dream of transformations into wondrous and powerful creatures, i.e., adults. Of course the tears and truths...
Last week Die Tote Stadt was finally revived by the New York City Opera, with Jeritza, now a remarkably robust and handsome 87, sitting in the fourth row center. Even in the 1920s, Die Tote Stadt was an anachronism. Korngold was to Richard Strauss what Engelbert Humperdinck (Hansel und Gretel) was to Wagner-a brilliant but minor follower. The style of Die Tote Stadt is a lush, clamorous, occasionally schmaltzy orchestral sonorama that lies somewhere between Der Rosenkavalier and Elektra, with special added effects from Puccini, Debussy, Mahler and Rimsky-Korsakov. The best of its vocal moments, like the taunting...
...forests where German children hear the originals. During this time, Sendak and Segal winnowed their favorite stories from the original 210. "By the time I was ready to draw," says Sendak, "I felt that the stories were my own." Indeed, he even put his German shepherd Erda into Hansel and Gretel...