Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter Page A

visitor, lends his name to inauspicious tracts of land like the Devil’s Dance Floor, and the Devil’s Pillow, a boulder on which the very mark of his ear may still be seen. Dwarfs borrow pots and pans for their weddings. Fairies borrow human midwives for their lyings-in.
    Some narratives start out like true fairytales, only to collapse in grand anti-climax, pricked balloons from which the magic suddenly leaks out. A young man releases a dwarf from a spell but no good fortune accrues; he can’t get rid of the dwarf, an unwelcome lodger, thereafter. A girl sees another dwarf pouring water in front of a house; shortly afterwards, the house is saved from fire. Some time later, the dwarf is out with his watering-can again; and what happens this time? A big fat nothing happens, this time.
    Often the very magical matter of the fairytale comes down to earth with a bump in these matter-of-fact renditions of wonderful occurrences. The anti-hero makes his appearance. A poor girl who, like the Fairy Melusine, is a snake from the waist down, must be kissed three times by a chaste youth to regain her natural shape. But the lad from our village dared kiss her only twice! ‘Each time, in great anticipation for the unhoped-for miracle, the maiden made such dreadful gestures that he feared she was going to tear him to pieces. He, therefore, did not dare kiss her for the third time, and instead departed in haste.’ Departed, in fact, to forthwith lose his virtue to an ‘impure woman’ and, with it, all his fairytale eligibility for the task of rescue.
    Some of the legends are, in fact, shaggy-dog stories. The boy in Freiburg in 1545, for instance, who was cursed to remain standing up. Eventually his feet wore grooves in the floor. Because he was standing near the stove he got in everybody’s way, so they picked him up and stowed him away in corners. At last they all got bored with him and covered him up with a cloth.
    Amongst many other such delights may be found the true stories of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and of Bishop Hatt and theRats. There is a delicious little giant girl who scoops up plough, horses, ploughmen, and all in her apron and takes them home to play with: ‘Oh, Father, it’s such a marvellous toy!’
    Volume Two is a very different kettle of fish, a collection of heroic legends very few of which come from the living traditions of real people. The Grimms say these stories could be called Legends of Teutonic Tribes and Royal Families and, here, they are as much concerned with myth-making as with folklore. They embrace the historic with disturbing enthusiasm: ‘ . . . it is . . . a noble attribute of people . . . any people . . . when both the dawn and the dusk of their day in history consists of legends.’ The relation between the rise of folklore studies and that of modern nationalism is an interesting one; there are things here that uncomfortably tease the mind.
    To quote King Dagobert who, while he lay on his deathbed, said to his dogs: ‘No company is so good, that one cannot take leave of it.’
    (1981)

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Georges Bataille:
Story of the Eye
    There’s a photograph – among the surrealist souvenirs – of the poet, Benjamin Peret, insulting a priest. One lesson of Georges Bataille’s erotic novella,
Story of the Eye
, is that French intellectuals are made of sterner stuff than we are.
    We think blasphemy is silly. They are exhilarated by it. Bataille’s hero and heroine end up doing a lot more to a priest than just insulting him. The fine European tradition of anti-clericalism is central to the preoccupations of this grand old surrealist fellow-traveller and sexual
philosophe
. It underpins Bataille’s theory of active sexuality as the assertion of human freedom against the laws of church and state. There can be few texts that illustrate so precisely the cultural differences between the Roman Catholic and the