What Shall We Tell The Children? : The beauty of fairy tales is that they give us only as much dark reality as we can handle. : THE OXFORD BOOK OF MODERN FAIRY TALES <i> Edited by Alison Lurie (Oxford University Press: $25; 455 pp.) </i>

The fairy tale that haunts me most is “Hansel and Gretel.” It says that in families, hunger comes first. Children reading the story might read about hunger as a subtle biological gnawing; some adults might understand that other appetites are involved; and plenty of children, no matter what they tell us or themselves, will have a suspicion, a tickle in the under-mind, of what grown-ups know.

We can reason about the story, if we wish. For example Bruno Bettelheim can tell us (in “The Uses of Enchantment”) that the story prepares children for being weaned. I can tell you that the story prepares children for being sacrificed and devoured. But we will all tell each other, finally, that the fairy tale is not light and pleasant, that, despite its middle-class rewards--lots of gold, the bad mother murdered through the cooking of the witch, her double--there’s little joy in it.

Fairy tales are the straight, dark stuff. In fairy tales, we are transformed into what we truly are or hope (or fear) we deserve to be. So, in Charles Dickens’ fairy tale “Oliver Twist” an abandoned, terrorized, starving child is transformed through the agency of a rich, generous man (Mr. Brownlow, the novel’s fairy godmother) into the clean, wealthy, respectable boy whose inheritance is restored when his identity is given back to him. But to get to that state, Oliver must roam a dangerous countryside, sleep in a coffin, be subject (it is persuasively argued by Garry Wills) to the fancies of a child molester named Fagin. If life before the transformation is a dream, and the transformed state is the reality our hero has always deserved, then life’s a nightmare for Oliver Twist and others.

Dickens understood the nightmare world of children and tried, through fairy-tale transformations, to rescue them and himself. Stephen King does the same. So do a number of the writers in Alison Lurie’s “The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales.” Some of the writers of fairy tales try to use rhetoric as a weapon, warning the reader that life can be a nightmare if we disobey the Rules. As children, we learned that the Rules change; they are what the big people say they are. Think of George Orwell’s “1984,” think of Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” or think of a story by Catherine Sinclair, dated 1839, called “Uncle David’s Nonsensical Story about Giants and Fairies.” I assume Lurie begins her collection with it to show us how fairy tales can be bludgeons, forcing children to obey The Rules--in this case, about idleness and industry.

It’s boringly written, pendantic and tedious. Compare it to the next story in the collection, Hawthorne’s Promethean “Feathertop,” which charms with its particularity, its humor, the life of its prose, its powerful anger. Hawthorne reminds us that fairy tales are about what’s hidden in the world and in the reader. Comparing these two stories, and recalling her essays in “Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups,” one has to lament that Lurie’s introduction to this book doesn’t contain more of her witty and penetrating analysis of how fairy tales work and why these, particularly, strike her as the ones to present.

If she doesn’t tell us discursively, she does show us. Malamud’s brilliant and funny “The Jewbird” is included here, and so is Donald Barthelme and Angela Carter (the wonderful “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon”) and Ursula LeGuin, whose “The Wife’s Story” I will never forget. The diverse composition of this book suggests that fairy tales, related as they once were to peasant stories, have evolved. They have become the province of the educated, of the aristocratic, of diverse faiths and intellectual stances. The change of being--into a devastating or a wonderful state we somehow owe to the continued natural order of things--takes many shapes, still has to do with polarities (the shift from poverty to wealth, from ugliness to beauty, from happiness to dread, from stasis to motion, comprehension to confusion), but is adaptable to the needs of any age in the life of the world.

Since in fairy tales one so often wishes, I have some wishes of my own. I wish that Lurie had included Gail Godwin’s brilliant, icy, and terrifying story of a woman’s transformation and her family’s consumption of her. “A Sorrowful Woman” begins “Once Upon a time there was a wife and mother one too many times. By the end of the story, the mother, locking herself in a housekeeper’s room, has become “a young queen, a virgin in a tower.” Her fate is exemplary and unforgettable.

I wish, too, that Franz Kafka were represented in the collection. His “A Hunger Artist” or “A Country Doctor” or “The Bucket Rider” surely deserve consideration. If Barthelme and Malamud are here, Kafka should be too. And, speaking of Malamud, while I’m pleased by the inclusion of “The Jewbird,” I lament the exclusion of “Angel Levine,” one of the great fairy tales of Jewish life in America. “The Magic Fishbone” by Dickens has some of the inimitable’s charm, but less of his bite than, say, “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton”--a prototype of “A Christmas Carol” and “The Chimes,” those fairy tales that Dickens employed for the frightening of adults into joy.

Stories that found their way into England from the Empire are in short supply in this book. So are Native American tales one finds in the works of James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko. Since Toni Morrison has reminded us in, say, “Song of Solomon”; since Albert Murray has reminded us in “Trainwhistle Guitar”; since David Bradley has reminded us in “The Chaneyville Incident”; since Amy Tan and Fay Ng and David Wong Louie have reminded us of the interfusion of their cultures’ tales that speak to young and old simultaneously about transformation and our shared dreams, it’s a surprise that the transformation of the fairy tale itself is not more fully displayed.

Still, I’m grateful for what’s here. Lurie knows that inside us each is the child so many of us have been privileged to sit upon our laps and read to. There is the tension of waiting at the start, and then, once “Once upon a time” or its equivalent is read aloud, there is the gradual sagging into the story, muscles slack and mind engaged, the breathing to the rhythm of sentences about how the secret world is upon us and within us, transforming everything into what we knew or feared we knew or dreamed to know that our lives might one day be.

The Beans in the Quart Jar

Angela Carter has edited her own collection of fairy tales, entitled “Strange Things Still Happen: Fairy Tales From Around the World” (Faber and Faber: $22.95.) Carter, who died in February, 1992, had a long-standing passion for the female-dominated tradition of tale-telling. “Strange Things” is a collection of women’s wisdom: fairy tales that celebrate midwives, enchantresses, rascal aunts and odd sisters. This Hillbilly tale is a sample.

The old man had taken sick and thought he’s gonna die anyway, so he called his wife in and confessed, he said, “I been stepping out, and I want to be honest with you, and I want to ask your forgiveness before I go.” And she said, “All right,” and “I’ll forgive you.” She forgive him.

By and by, she was taken sick and she called him in and she said, “No, look, I stepped out quite a lot, and I want to ask forgiveness.” He said, “Yes, I’ll forgive you.” She said, “Every time I stepped out I put a bean in a quart jar. And you’ll find they’re all there on that mantlepiece, except that quart I cooked the other Saturday.”