Like a fairy godmother, along comes an encyclopedic book about fairy tales, prepared by a literature professor, which will test whether we must entomb or can yet enliven the genre. Which means that the fairy tale could be headed for the place where all our good used-up things go, America's Island of Misfit Toys, the college English department.
For the not merely wise but wised-up children of this new century, other tales and other, more skittish ways of telling seem to have usurped the old stories and styles. A thought crosses at least one parental mind as he shepherds the children toward the exit and the fried clams: Is it possible that we have actually come to the end of fairy tales as an available, rather than an archival, entertainment? Fairy tales, however many times they are transformed, depend in some part for their effect on an air of sincerity, of urgent seriousness. Peabody stories on the 'Bullwinkle' videos." Instant enlightenment crosses their features oh, that familiar thing, and, almost visibly, the work of interpretation-O.K., what's being kidded here? Although "Beauty and the Beast" and, perhaps, "The Little Mermaid" are part of the children's cultural baggage-or, rather, among their cultural parachutes we are their cultural baggage-the tales exist for them only in highly sweetened, song-filled forms.
At last, one parent whispers, "It's a parody, a kind of joke-you know, like the Mr. Puzzled looks from the seven-year-olds: the kids, the startled parents realize, just don't know the fairy tales, don't know the material or the usual spirit in which they're told. At the sand-logged, mildewy tail end of a beach vacation, four exhausted parents take two seven-year-olds to a rainy-day play, "The Fairy Tale Detective": the tales of the Three Bears and Hansel and Gretel and Red Riding Hood, retold as though in a film noir, complete with raincoated detectives and lynx-eyed blondes.
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