Breezes from Wonderland

Here’s Bollywood’s update of “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,” a story added to the French translation of the Arabian Nights by Antoine Galland, who had the tale from a Syrian storyteller. Aladdin may have his origins in Arabic cultures, but he is actually Chinese, though living in an Islamic culture in China. Note that the press copy for this film describes India as the “land of myths and legends”–a not so subtle effort to claim that Aladin is really an Indian hero. Is the new spelling part of an effort to make Aladin native?

“A Tale of Secrets and Mysteries, Power and Passion, and a Loser”–the trailer reminds us that fairy-tale heroes often begin as simpletons, numbskulls, dummies, or, in today’s terminology, losers.

This is the second Bollywood production, the first going back to the 1960s. “Everything is possible. Look at this!” is spoken with a distinctly U.S. midwestern accent.

Thanks to Holly Hutchison for sending me a link to the trailer.

Here’s the website for the trailer and a press release follows:
 http://www.apple.com/trailers/independen…

From the land of myths and legends – India – comes a fantasy adventure for the entire family. Directed by Sujoy Ghosh, ‘Aladin’ is a modern re-imagining of the classic tale of ‘Aladin and The Magic Lamp’. Aladin Chatterjee (Riteish Deshmukh) lives in the city of Khwaish, an orphan who has been bullied since childhood by Kasim and his gang. But his life changes when Jasmine (Jacquiline Fernandes) gives him a magic lamp – because it lets loose the genie Genius (Amitabh Bachchan). Desperate to grant him 3 wishes and seek the end of his contract with the Magic Lamp, the rock-star Genius makes Aladin’s life difficult until the real threat looms on the horizon : the ex-genie Ringmaster (Sanjay Dutt). Why does Ringmaster want to kill Aladin? What is the dark secret about Aladin’s past that Genius is carrying? And what is Aladin’s destiny? Find out more in this swashbuckling fantasy adventure film from Eros Entertainment and Boundscript Motion Pictures.

Psychologists at UCSB and at the University of British Columbia make the following claim: reading texts that challenge our ability to make meaning also enhances cognitive mechanisms related to implicit learning functions. The researchers had their subjects read a story by Kafka, then tested them on detecting patterns and structures. Below is a link to a fuller report on the study in The Guardian. The findings remind me that nonsense and the surreal challenge us to do the work of creating meaning in ways that “realistic” narratives do not. Noam Chomsky’s “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” was constructed as a sentence that produces nonsense in semantic terms, yet the minute we read it, we work hard to make sense of it by turning literal meaning into figurative meaning. “Colorless” becomes “dull” and green becomes “immature,” and so on. Is there poetry in Chomsky’s “nonsense”? And what drives us to turn the nonsensical and surreal into something meaningful?

This week, in my course on the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, we read Bruno Bettelheim on the uses of enchantment and what he calls the “struggle for meaning.” Robert Darnton’s famous essay “Peasants Tell Tales” has the subtitle “The Meaning of Mother Goose.” The psychoanalyst and the historian provide competing models for constructing the “meaning” of fairy tales, with one arguing that children make psychological sense on their own of fairy tales, and the other making the case for the fairy tales as repositories of folk wisdom and programs for survival.

And to return to Kafka: his stories have often been compared to fairy tales. Patrick Bridgwater’s Kafka: Gothic and Fairytale elaborates on the fairy-tale quality of Kafka’s shorter narratives, pointing out resemblances to fairy tales and to what he calls the anti-fairytale.

Here’s to more nonsense in children’s books. And now, more than ever, I understand the importance–if not the meaning–of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep…

How close is the “Wolf and the Seven Kids” to “Little Red Riding Hood”? Don Haase calls our attention to an article in the Toronto Star about Jamie Tehrani’s work on those tales.  Did Perrault “invent” the figure of Little Red Riding Hood? Or was the story derived from oral tales circulating in the culture? Clink on the link below to read the article by Lynda Hurst.
 http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/arti…

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scien…

The Telegraph reports that Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, claims that versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” have a “common ancestor dating back more than 2,600 years.” Tehrani will present his work on Tuesday at the British Science Festival.

The original ancestor is thought to be similar to another tale, The Wolf and the Kids, in which a wolf pretends to be a nanny goat to gain entry to a house full of young goats.

Stories in Africa are closely related to this original tale, whilst stories from Japan, Korea, China and Burma form a sister group. Tales told in Iran and Nigeria were the closest relations of the modern European version.

Perrault’s French version was retold by the Brothers Grimm in the 19th century. Dr Tehrani said: “We don’t know very much about the processes of transmission of these stories from culture to culture, but it is possible that they may being passed along trade routes or with the movement of people.”

Yes, it is a challenge to identify exactly how the tales were transmitted, but I can’t help wondering if Tehrani has read Alan Dundes on “Little Red Riding Hood” and whether he has consulted the work of folklorists, most of whom never embraced the view that Perrault “invented” the figure of Little Red Riding Hood. Here’s hoping that the lecture will appear in print soon.

Below is a link to Jamie Tehrani’s home page at Durham University.
 http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology/staff/…

The New York Time Magazine has a feature article on Spike Jonze’s film.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazi…

The reporter tells us that he saw, scrawled on a legal pad in Jonze’s office, the following note: “There is no difference between childhood and adulthood.” Not so sure about that one, and Martin Bashir’s interview of Michael Jackson made it fairly clear that adults should not deny the differences but rather learn to value what the child has that we are missing (imagination, creativity, energy, joy, and so on).    Still, this film will be worth seeing, although the reference to its “narrative shortcomings” seems a recurrent theme. My bet: the direct visceral hits will come from visual effects rather than from the power of the story–just the opposite of what gets us in Sendak’s book.

An implicit question precedes his artistic choices: Wouldn’t it be cool if . . . ? Wouldn’t it be cool if we made Christopher Walken fly? Wouldn’t it be awesome if we rigged a staircase with blast caps?That sensibility pervades “Where the Wild Things Are” too, in the monsters’ propensity for jumping 20 feet in the air and crashing into trees, in the astounding skyscraper fortress they build out of logs and branches. And for some potential viewers, the sheer coolness of those moments will likely be enough to transcend what others might see as the movie’s narrative shortcomings.