Plus ce différence, plus ce MEME chose: How Zipes Indirectly Connects Darnton and Bettelheim

Two weeks ago, I thought the difference between Robert Darnton’s and Bruno Bettelheim’s arguments would be perpetually unsolvable. I saw their works as two sides of the same coin, although they (and Darnton, especially) saw their own works as completely irreconcilable. However, while reading “What Makes a Repulsive Frog So Appealing” by Jack Zipes, I discovered a way that the original two arguments can be approached simultaneously.

I found the thesis of Zipes’ argument to be “I would like to suggest that an evolutionary psychological approach might be able to provide a method for interpreting ‘The Frog Prince’ (and other classical tales) that not only sheds greater light on the conflicts within the Grimms’ text but also enables us to comprehend why and how the tale has retained its relevance throughout the world, has become a meme [“defined as a cultural artifact that acts as a cultural replicator or cultural adaptor that manages to inhabit our brains. It becomes so memorable and relevant that we store it and pass it on to others” (Zipes 110)], and continues to exercise its memetic force today” (117).

As you recall, Robert Darnton is invested in an anthropological way of extracting historical and cultural information based on the oral tradition of peasants’ recounting of folk tales. On the flip side, Bruno Bettelheim depends on psychoanalysis in order to document how fairy tales – and “our cultural heritage” (Bettelheim 269)” – shape the imaginations and self-importance of children. When Jack Zipes interprets how certain folk fairy tales stick with readers/listeners because they “enable us to comprehend our strategies and to learn how to court and mate” (Zipes 117), this angle blends the cultural coding of Darnton’s work while simultaneously involving the mind – wondering specifically how the human mind retains the information of a folk tale better than others and puts this information to work in its cultural context. In this way, Zipes’ argument indirectly finds the point where Darnton’s and Bettelheim’s work merge. The meme becomes the cross-section where it is useful to ponder the psychology of how people come to latch onto a particular meme and to analyze what the use of the meme then says about the user’s anthropological context.

Zipes goes on to provide some psychoanalytic interpretation of the motifs of golden rings and phallic frogs, but he never loses sight of what these motifs – when put to use – begin to say about a culture’s interests, thoughts, fears, and practices. As I said before, are Bettelheim’s and Darnton’s respective arguments not two sides of the same coin? With the introduction of Zipes’ work, I think they are closer to the same side than ever before.