While Bettelheim reveals no doubts that fairy tales are the ultimate answer to children struggling to find meaning in their own lives, Robert Darnton admits the obstacles and faults of using fairy tales as universal truths.
Bettelheim writes from a solely psychological perspective, one that views the mother as the villain and the disturbed child as a being simply lacking meaning. These obscure beliefs are vast assumptions that make the piece more juvenile than Darnton’s. Bettelheim is very sure of himself, declaring “more can be learned from [fairy tales] about the inner problems of human beings, and of the right solutions to their predicaments in any society, than from any other type of story within a child’s comprehension” (270). Rather than strengthening his argument, this confidence reads as naivety. He makes great generalizations to prove what he thinks is true, rather than using examples that we can believe.
Darnton understands that even if we cannot be certain of details or the origin of a particular fairy tale, we can nevertheless discover some cultural clues from the story. While these stories are not recorded from the illiterate peasants themselves and are therefore not historical artifacts, they are all that we have of an unenlightened populace lost in an age of enlightenment, and the implied maybes and possibilities of their world are better than nothing.
According to Darnton, what we can learn from the stories are cultural generalizations. Germans infused their stories with horror and fantasy, while the French held a tone of comedy and domesticity. These 18th-century French stories explore realities of rape, incest, cannibalism, and sodomy, choosing to explicitly show the brutal reality of life, rather than masking it with symbols for practiced analyses. We learn, if nothing else, that these peasants did not fear explaining the world as it was.
Darnton discusses the shortcomings of taking a view like Fromm did, one in which the origins and transformations of the text are ignored and often not even known, simply because the interpreter got the story that he needed to make his claim. Darnton even explores Bettelheim’s idea while sarcastically naming him one “of the best known psychoanalysts” (281). He defines Bettelheim’s goal as conveying the ability of folktales to “permit children to confront their unconscious desires and fears and to emerge unscathed, id subdued and ego triumphant” (283). He identifies Bettelheim’s deepest flaws as treating the stories “as if they had no history” and making assumptions based on one particular version because “he knows how the soul works and how it has always worked” (283). However, key to Darnton’s claim is that fairytales are first and foremost historical documents, and that rather than showing the continuity of the universal human mind, they instead relay the differing of mentalités, or changing attitudes, over time. Because of this rebuking of Bettelheim’s ideas, one cannot simultaneously agree with the two articles. While I find Bettelheim’s piece more intriguing because of its content (the search for meaning), Darnton’s is much more convincing because of its modesty. Darnton accepts the impossibilities and admits that any implications are simply implications, yet he still conveys the underlying cultural reality inside the stories.
This may seem a slight triviality, but if it does, then good... because it is.
ReplyDeleteBut, Darnton is not being ironic nor sardonic in his labeling Bettelheim as one of the best-known psychoanalysts. He actually is--which is why there are two of his articles in the short section on literary criticism in the book. It should here be noted, however, that psychoanalysis is only one school of psychology--a very verbal school that talks about a lot of things, especially literature--and has, for the most part, been rejected and disproven by modern psychology. In the psychoanalytic world, Bettelheim was a very strong figure and an important theorist; it simply turned out that the psychoanalytic method turned out to be wrong most of the time. Darnton tries to address these in a very serious and academic way and, in my humble opinion, does an outstanding job of refraining from degrading argumentation or biting sarcasm.
I actually agree with you and thought this after I realized what I wrote. Sarcastic wasn't the right word, maybe ironic would have worked? Maybe not. However, the juxtaposition of Darnton's opinion with his choice to include the title "of the best known psychoanalysts" was worth noting. But you're right. He does respect Bettelheim even while disagreeing with his limited perspective.
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