Why do you think that E T A Hoffmann, who wrote the book The Serapion Brethren at the start of the 19th century, is one of the greatest writers of literary fairy tales?

I think that he was most original in developing plots, such as the one in which a dog tells his own story. And he had a style that was extraordinary, with clever motifs such as the doppelganger. He was also involved in art of all different kinds. Not only was he a writer, but he was a composer of different types of music, including a fairy-tale opera called The Water Spirit, and other musicians used his fairy tales for their own operas – Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann is a case in point. He was a talented artist and he also had a powerful influence as a judge in Germany. All these things make him a fascinating character. 

His style was so unusual that it had a profound influence on a lot of writers in the 19th and 20th centuries. I would say he was the founder of magic realism. The Serapion Brethren was a multi-volume work with a narrative frame in which friends get together at a tavern to drink and tell stories. And in that frame Hoffmann talks about an eccentric recluse by the name of Serapion, and he developed the Serapion principle, which was an eidetic concept of art. He argued that if an artist is going to be devoted to his writing, everything that you see in your imagination has to be as real as reality or, if anything, more real than reality. 

His fairy tales quite often start off with a very factual or realistic setting and gradually draw you into a world that is imaginative and very complex because it deals with all sorts of questions, such as insanity or the politics of his time. He was writing at the time of the Holy Alliance, 1815-1825, which was an extremely reactionary period. He stood up to the archconservatives in Prussia, and in one of his last stories, Master Flea, he criticises the police chief of Berlin in a very subtle way. 

I think he also paved the ground for existentialism because he believed there was no God, and he proposed that we are all artists of our own lives and that many of the stories to do with God are fairy tales. 

Your next choice is by one of the great Marxist philosophers Ernst Bloch – The Principle of Hope.

Ernst Bloch writes in a complicated, abstract and poetic style that is very difficult to comprehend. A lot of contemporary writers think that he has his own type of language, which is true to a certain extent. He wrote many different books, and the book I admire the most is The Principle of Hope. It is a three-volume study which he began writing in Europe in the late 1930s while he was escaping the Nazis. He was not only a Marxist but also a nonpractising Jew. 

He fled Germany and went to America rather than the Soviet Union because he didn’t trust the Soviet Union. The book came at a time when the political difficulties stimulated him to develop a notion of hope that was to offset the terrible wars that had been going on. In this book he also, surprisingly, deals with fairy tales and popular culture. He felt that fairy tales and popular culture had traces of hope that made them really important and relevant to the lives of the majority of the people. For example, he was interested in characters whom he called the small hero, like Tom Thumb. He talked about the importance of fairy tales because they provided encouragement and stimulus for the masses of people who read them. 

Why do you think the concept of utopia is so important in fairy tales?

Bloch believed that fairy tales represented a way for us to gain humanity. In other words, life is a struggle, and there is a focus in fairy tales on what we can gain from the struggle to bring meaning to our lives. One of his concepts concerns the upright gait, and he argued that we shall not learn to be humane until we differentiate ourselves from apes and learn to walk upright with integrity. He talks about the utopian disposition in human beings to be immortal and gain the deepest of pleasures. These are the types of themes that he looks at in his philosophical works. Of course, we don’t know what utopia is. The word utopia means ‘no place’, and those people who put a face on utopia, like the Nazis or the Communists of the Soviet Union, are mistaken because we have to determine what utopia is through the struggles and through our hope for a better life. All the best works of art, including popular culture, have what Bloch calls anticipatory illumination. In other words, they anticipate utopia and they illuminate the way towards it. For me this is very important when I look at the philosophical aspect of fairy tales. 

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter introduced you to feminist fairy tales.

Yes. Angela Carter played a very important role in my life because I was born in 1937, a few years before she was born, and although we didn’t grow up together, we both grew up in a world where sexism was out in the open. There was no critique of the type of sexism that I experienced when I grew up, and I think the same is true for her. And we both experienced what a lot of people called the second wave of feminism in the 20th century. 

I did not know her writing until I came across The Bloody Chamber, and it struck me as particularly relevant to the ongoing gender struggles. She had a position and perspective on gender and feminism that I thought was much more sophisticated and nuanced than a lot of the other feminist writers of the time. 

Why?

She wrote three or four books during the 1960s and 1970s emphasising that the most important element in feminism was the argument that women should take their destiny into their own hands and gain pleasure out of life. They are strong enough and smart enough to do this. Her position is fully developed in her controversial book The Sadeian Woman. A lot of her tales, such as The Company Of Wolves, show a young girl taking over her destiny. Here the wolf ends up more or less tamed in her lap. She also wrote two children’s stories, which are out of print now. One is called Miss Z, The Dark Young Lady and the other is called The Donkey Prince. These are also two books in which young girls from the working classes assert themselves and are able to resolve difficult problems. For example, in The Donkey Prince there is a peasant girl who enables a prince who was a donkey to attain his goal. 

Her writing is also exquisite. She has a great command of metaphor, and the writing is very sensuous without being mannered. She has that ironic humour that Hoffmann has, which I think is another reason I like her. They both use irony to suggest alternative ways to think.