Riddles in the Dark: On Fairy Tales, Interpretation, and 'Rapunzel'

Fairy tales are among the most familiar cultural objects, so familiar that we let our kids play with them unsupervised. At the same time, they are also the most mysterious of artifacts, their heimlich giving way to unheimlich as soon as we give them a closer look and ask ourselves what they are really about. Indeed, these imaginal nomads, which seem to evade all cultural and historical capture, existing in various forms in every time and place, can become so strange as to make us wonder if they are cultural at all, and not some unexplained force of nature — the dreaming of the world. In this episode, JF and Phil use "Rapunzel" as a case study to explore the weirdness of fairy tales, illustrating how they demand interpretation without ever allowing themselves to be explained.

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SHOW NOTES

Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" in Illuminations (Hannah Arendt, ed.; Harryn Zohn, trans.).
Novalis, Philosophical Writings. (Margaret Mahony Stoljar, trans.).
Cristina Campo, The Unforgivable and Other Writings (Alex Andriesse, trans.)
William Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment
Marie-Louise von Franz,, Swiss Jungian psychologist
Sesame Street, “Rapunzel Rescue”
Disney’s Tangled
The Annotated Brothers Grimm
Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index
Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time
W. A. Mozart, The Magic Flute
Dante Alighieri, Il Convito
Panspermia hypothesis
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature
John Mitchell, Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist
Clint Eastwood (dir.) The Unforgiven