We all know about that terrible Monster Book of Monsters in Harry Potter, but how many other literary books have magical properties?  Walter Benjamin tells us about one of those magical books in a short story by Hans Christian Andersen:

“In one of Andersen’s tales, there is a picture-book that cost ‘half a kingdom.’  In it everything was alive.  ‘The birds sang, and people cam out of the book and spoke.’  But when the princess turned the page, “they leaped back in again so that there should be no disorder.’  Pretty and unfocused, like so much that Andersen wrote, this little invention misses the point by a hair’s breadth.  Things do not come out to meet the picturing child from the pages of the book; instead, in looking, the child enters into them as a cloud that becomes suffused with the riotous colors of the world of pictures.”

There is also Lucy’s book in the Chronicles of Narnia–that intoxicating story in the Magician’s Book that she forgets as soon as she turns the pages–and she can’t go back!  Any others? Inkheart?

Dark Skies has a wonderful homage to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Sandman,” when we learn about a bogeyman who scratches out children’s eyes and takes them to feed his children, who live on the moon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lg1ZAp99agE

Dwight Garner reviews Maurice Sendak’s My Brother’s Book, and quotes the author on his misanthropic tendencies:

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) cultivated an image as a curmudgeon. “I’m not Hans Christian Andersen,” he told Bill Moyers. “No one’s going to make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won’t have it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/books/my-brothers-book-by-maurice-sendak.html

Sendak actually had more in common with Andersen than he knew.  When a sculptor proposed to create a statue of the author, surrounded by children to whom he would be reading, Andersen protested: 

I pointed out that I could not bear anyone behind me, nor had I children on my back, on my lap, or between my legs when I read; that my fairy tales were as much for older people as for children.  The naïve was only a part of my fairy tales; humor was the real salt in them.

Sendak had more in common with Andersen than he realized. And the character of Jack in the new book must be modeled on Kay in Andersen’s Snow Queen:

Jack is catapulted “to continents of ice.” He is “a snow image stuck fast in water like stone./His poor nose froze.”

Poor Andersen: children today are now on his back, on his lap, and between his legs when they visit  statues of him in Copenhagen and in New York City’s Central Park.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130206-folktale-europe-human-culture-dna-geography-science/

Above a link to a fascinating new article about resistance to changing features of a story at a local level.  Improvisation is not necessarily all it’s cracked up to be, and I’m reminded of the cultural conservatism of folklore.  The upside to its conservatism is the preservation of tales from times past.

In a new study, evolutionary psychologist Quentin Atkinson is using the popular tale of the kind and unkind girls to study how human culture differs within and between groups, and how easily the story moved from one group to another.

Atkinson, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and his co-authors employed tools normally used to study genetic variation within a species, such as people, to look at variations in this folktale throughout Europe.

The researchers found that there were significant differences in the folktale between ethnolinguistic groups—or groups bound together by language and ethnicity. From this, the scientists concluded that it’s much harder for cultural information to move between groups than it is for genes.

In my course on fairy tales and fantasy literature, we had a session on “Little Red Riding Hood.”  I contrasted Dickens’ love of the girl in red ( “Little Red Riding Hood was my first love.  I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.”) with the anxieties of Freud’s Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff), who read the story as a child.  The Wolf Man, as Freud tells us, was haunted by a dream about wolves, creatures connected with the predator in “Little Red Riding Hood”:

He had always connected this dream with the recollection that during those years of his childhood he was most tremendously afraid of the picture of a wolf in a book of fairy tales.  His elder sister, who was very much his superior, used to tease him by holding up this particular picture in front of him so that he was terrified and began to scream.  In this picture the wolf was standing upright, striding out with one foot, with its claws stretched out and its ears pricked.  He thought this picture must have been an illustration to the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

I have always been on the lookout for that illustration, and I’m wondering if it might not be the one above.  I had always pictured the Wolf Man’s creature as full frontal, but now I realize that the description fits Dore’s illustration, even if the wolf has its back turned to us.

Any other candidates?

Here’s Tony Kushner on Maurice Sendak as an artist who creates his own fairy tales by taking the raw material of psychic experience and translating it into images and words.

“What I think is great about Maurice is that people who he borrows from are fairly adult artists — William Blake, Herman Melville, William Shakespeare, John Keats, his pantheon of heroes. Mozart, who meant everything to him, and opera in general Maurice really loved — Verdi was a figure that haunted Maurice a lot. … He really wanted to do with this book what he felt Verdi had done at the end of his life with Falstaff. … In his early 80s, Verdi broke a long silence and composed one of the great comic operas, and Maurice was hoping that this book,My Brother’s Book, would be sort of his farewell masterpiece. But I think that the borrowing from these people, his indebtedness to adult artists, is recognizable. He doesn’t really borrow from fairy tales as much as generate his fairy tales from the same sources. His psyche was really an open book.”

http://www.npr.org/2013/02/04/170757799/sendaks-brothers-book-an-elegy-a-farewell

And more in Vanity Fair on Sendak “hiding” in children’s literature and engaging in guerilla warfare.

http://www.npr.org/2013/02/04/170757799/sendaks-brothers-book-an-elegy-a-farewell