Retelling Stories, Framing Culture

Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children's Literature

John Stephens, Robyn McCallum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136601491
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What happens to traditional stories when they are retold in another time and cultural context and for a different audience? This first-of-its-kind study discusses Bible stories, classical myths, heroic legends, Arthurian romances, Robin Hood lore, folk tales, 'oriental' tales, and other stories derived from European cultures. One chapter is devoted to various retellings of classics, from Shakespeare to "Wind in the Willows." The authors offer a general theory of what motivates the retelling of stories, and how stories express the aspirations of a society. An important function of stories is to introduce children to a cultural heritage, and to transmit a body of shared allusions and experiences that expresses a society's central values and assumptions. However, the cultural heritage may be modified through a pervasive tendency of retellings to produce socially conservative outcomes because of ethnocentric, androcentric and class-based assumptions in the source stories that persist into retellings. Therefore, some stories, such as classical myths, are particularly resistant to feminist reinterpretations, for example, while other types, such as folktales, are more malleable. In examining such possibilities, the book evaluates the processes of interpretation apparent in retellings. Index included.

1 PRE-TEXTS, METANARRATIVES, AND THE WESTERN METAETHIC

As the cauldron bubbled, an eldritch voice shrieked: “When shall we three meet again?”

There was a pause.

Fi nally another voice said, in far more ordinary tones: “Well, I can do next Tuesday.”

—Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

When compared with general literature, the literature produced for children contains a much larger proportion of retold stories. In part this is because some domains of retellings, especially folk and fairy tale, have long been considered more appropriate to child culture than to adult culture, but this relegation is not entirely because such materials might seem ingenuous and accessible to children. Rather, retold stories have important cultural functions. Under the guise of offering children access to strange and exciting worlds removed from everyday experiences, they serve to initiate children into aspects of a social heritage, transmitting many of a culture’s central values and assumptions and a body of shared allusions and experiences. The existential concerns of a society find concrete images and symbolic forms in traditional stories of many kinds, offering a cultural inheritance subject to social conditioning and modification through the interaction of various retellings. Although the notional significance of a story is thus potentially infinitely intertextual, subject to every retelling and every significance that has ever accrued to it, it is also arguable that the processes of retelling are overwhelmingly subject to a limited number of conservative metanarratives—that is, the implicit and usually invisible ideologies, systems, and assumptions which operate globally in a society to order knowledge and experience. The major narrative domains which involve retold stories all, in the main, have the function of maintaining conformity to socially determined and approved patterns of behavior, which they do by offering positive role models, proscribing undesirable behavior, and affirming the culture’s ideologies, systems, and institutions.

The ideological effect of a retold text is generated from a three-way relationship between the already-given story, the metanarrative(s) which constitute its top-down framing, and its bottom-up discoursal processes. Obviously enough, to be a retelling a text must exist in relationship to some kind of source, which we will refer to as the “pre-text,” though it is perhaps only a minority of cases in which this source is fixable as a single work by an identifiable author. Even when this is so, few retellings are simple replications, even when they appear to reproduce the story and point of view of the source. In such cases, the purpose is generally cultural reproduction, in the sense of transmitting desired knowledge about society and the self, modes of learning, and forms of authority. The most overt example we will discuss in this study is the plays of Shakespeare (see chapter 9). But that example shows two things: because retellings do not, and cannot, also reproduce the discoursal mode of the source, they cannot replicate its significances, and always impose their own cultural presuppositions in the process of retelling; and second, even the most revered cultural icon can be subjected to mocking or antagonistic retellings. The resulting version is then not so much a retelling as a re-version, a narrative which has taken apart its pre-texts and reassembled them as a version which is a new textual and ideological configuration.

Reversions are frequent in a second common circumstance of retelling, when narratives emerge within a network of story versions for which there is no identifiable “first telling” or else the latest version is based on intermediate forms. A familiar fairy tale such as Cinderella may derive from Perrault’s version, or the Disney film, or British pantomime tradition, but is more apt to borrow freely from amongst these and from versions of them circulating orally. Even where there is a strong pre-text such as Perrault, retellers are most likely to use intermediate versions—to produce a retelling of a retelling. Similarly, Robert Leeson’s (1994) retelling of selected “Robin Hood” stories is unusual in its story area because it is based mainly on the oldest extant source for much of the legend, A Gest of Robyn Hode, which probably dates from the early fifteenth century (Dobson and Taylor, 1989, p. 74). Leeson’s expressed motive in seeking pre-texts without the accretions of the last hundred years is to allow the legend’s innate “message” to speak for itself: that is, “that truth, justice and courtesy should be defended, if need be against the law” (p. 96). Even this retelling, however, is influenced by motifs that entered with Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), and a famous episode such as the contest for the silver arrow (Leeson, pp. 72–77) departs from the stated pre-text in story detail, structure, and character motivation. In other words, the “message” of the story has to be reproduced by substantial intervention. At another extreme lies Tony Robinson’s spoof of this story as “Robert the Incredible Chicken” in his television series Maid Marian and her Merry Men (1988–89). Robinson can and does assume that his audience is familiar with some specific details—especially that Robin goes to the contest in disguise—which were introduced by Pyle but have long been generally considered intrinsic to the story and disseminated throughout retellings.¹ The assumption enables the effects of incongruity to be heightened as the production drastically transforms the mode and tenor of the story by drawing on pantomime, ironic farce, and feminist reversal (Knight, 1994, p. 241).

A still looser form of pre-textual context is genre. Here a particular narrative has its relationships not so much with a recognizable story but with a range of genric features.² In including such narratives, we are aware that we push the notion of retold story or reversion to its limit, and many readers will prefer to consider these narratives as standing in intertextual relationships to genres (as expounded in, say, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism). We do, however, see some point in including them here as part of a distinguishable cline beginning with replication and moving away towards more diffuse or merely allusive reversions. We argue, for example, that a moral story consciously mapped onto a Bible story is in effect a reversion; that The Lion King is a reversion of the pattern of a hero’s life, rather than a genrically identifiable narrative; that certain modern novels about female heroes are reversions which invert that pattern; and that a motif invented after but not based on The Arabian Nights—the “setting the genie free” motif—generates multiple reversions (as well as being exported back into reversions of the Aladdin story). To a great extent, such reversions are constituted by motifs; by narrative structures isomorphic with those visible in genric pre-texts; and/or by a shared habitus—that is, a conjunction of physical and social spaces where sociality is organized by social distances and hierarchies, and where a system of schemata (that is, social codes) organizes action and practice, and thought and perception (see Bourdieu, 1986, chapter 3; 1990, chapter 8). Feudal castles and the tents of desert tribes in Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness sword-and-sorcery tetralogy are clear examples of such a functioning of habitus.

METANARRATIVE AND METAETHIC

The pre-texts for a retelling, then, are known, or already given, “stories,” however precisely or indeterminately evoked. The principal domains in children’s literature include biblical literature and related religious stories; myths; hero stories; medieval and quasi-medieval romance; stories about Robin Hood, which constitute a large and distinctive domain; folktales and fairy tales; oriental stories, usually linked with The Arabian Nights; and modern classics. Two central aspects about such traditional materials are that they come with predetermined horizons of expectation and with their values and ideas about the world already legitimized. In other words, they are always already shaped by some kind of metanarrative, and their status makes them a good site on which to impose metanarratives expressing social values and attitudes prevailing in the time and place of the retelling. As we said above, a metanarrative is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience. A simple illustration is offered by Leeson’s summary of the message of Robin Hood stories which we cited earlier. The statement that “truth, justice and courtesy should be defended, if need be against the law” is presented as if it expresses self-evident propositions. It only does this, however, because it is enabled to do so by evolved cultural assumptions which furnish the statement’s metanarratives: in all stories, in Western cultures at least, where truth and justice are an issue, the metanarrative which informs and shapes the outcomes of particular stories furnishes the assumption that they will—or morally should—prevail. Moreover, truth and justice are transcendent significations which occupy positions in a moral and intellectual hierarchy above attempts to codify them specifically as law; truth and justice are absolute values, whereas law is contingent and relative. An interesting place is then occupied in this larger schema by “courtesy,” since its interlinking with the other terms offers the presumption that it, too, is the outworking of a metanarrative; people whose behavior is prompted and guided by intersubjective relationships, by consideration for others, and by self-modesty, represent an exemplary ideal in culture. Key words which have been used to express such a concept, apart from courtesy itself,³ are civility and piety (that is, in the old Oxford English Dictionary definition as “faithfulness to the duties naturally owed to parents and relatives, superiors, etc.; dutifulness”). Leeson’s statement, then, comes charged with an enormous weight of culturally determined beliefs and assumptions which not only function as ideological presuppositions but also have a presence as narrative forms. When a particular exemplification replicates the metanarratival shape, the outcome is socially and emotionally satisfying and confirms the metanarrative; if the shape is not replicated, the outcome is recognized as “tragic.” In other words, metanarratives both supply the structure for individual narratives and the criteria for perception and appreciation by which sense is made of that structure. This is why ideas about the social world can seem self-evident.

Our argument throughout this book is that the retelling of traditional stories for young audiences takes place within the frame of such metanarratives. They do not function randomly, however, but as a large interlocked set, which implies the existence of a less readily definable metametanarrative, so to speak, operating at a still more abstract level. This is what determines that a particular narration has value because it offers a patterned and shapely narrative structure, expresses significant and universal human experiences, interlinks “truth” and cultural heritage, and rests moral judgments within an ethical dimension. We are going to refer to this as the “Western metaethic,” which is not a pretty phrase but is definitely preferable to meta-metanarrative. We think it is important to remember that this metaethic has been evolved within European-based or derived cultures; so, “Western” always has the effect of a reminder that, despite any implicit or overt assumptions to the contrary, the metaethic expresses a culture-specific idea of transcendence and not a universal. Because of this, there are some domains of retold story we have deliberately excluded from our discussions because the metaethic will always be imposed from outside, and we have decided that such retellings lie outside the scope of our present enquiry. One such domain is narratives which appropriate the beliefs and stories of indigenous peoples within the post-colonial societies of North America, Australia, New Zealand, and so on. We think such retellings are of a drastically different order, even when not extremely insensitive to the metanarratives of another culture, and would really require a book in themselves (see the discussion of some of the problems in Nodelman, 1996, pp. 264–267). Second, stories retold from other cultures involve not just questions of trampling on religious beliefs in quest of some vague intercultural understanding, important as this consideration may be, but also involve misapprehension and misapplication of metanarratives, as will happen with stories borrowed from, say, Chinese cultures. Regardless of whether or not retellers are equipped with appropriate cultural knowledge, such as the metanarratives generated by Confucianism or by the centrality of the family in a Chinese habitus, it is practically certain that the majority of audiences will have little alternative but to misread by contextualizing such stories within the Western metaethic, even if, as Nodelman suggests, audiences are provided with some of the distinctive qualities and conventions of these stories (p. 267). Because metanarratives are invisible and self-evident and Western audiences assume their metaethic is naturally universal, it is very difficult to resist Westernizing a story at the stages both of production and reception.

The Western metaethic is perhaps no more clearly evident than in notions about canons. For some time now theorists of mainstream literature have been actively engaged in defining the literary canon—“a body of texts larger than the sum of its members, a grand cultural narrative” (Gorak, 1991, p. 259)—in order to dismantle it. Gorak’s “grand cultural narrative” points in the same direction as our “metaethic,” and the postmodern world is skeptical of metanarratives, as everybody knows—everybody, that is, except most of the people who retell traditional stories for children. Theorists and practitioners of children’s literature are generally still quite active in the construction of a canon of children’s literary texts, an enterprise that can be seen quite clearly in the Children’s Literature Association’s publication of the Touchstones volumes (1985-87). These volumes, subtitled “Reflections on the Best in Children’s Literature,” seek to identify those “classic” texts, or “touchstones,” written for children: “book[s] beside which we may place other children’s books in order to make judgments about their excellence” (Nodelman, 1985, p. 2). Canonization does have a pragmatic function, in that it enables definition of the parameters of children’s literature as a genre, what that genre consists of, what matters in it, and “what needs to be discussed and studied and understood” (Nodelman, p. 6). Such an enterprise is only ostensibly informed by notions of literary excellence, however. Instead it is largely driven by ideologies—ideologies which inform the decisions made by the culture about “what matters” in children’s literature, including decisions as to the criterion of literary merit. As Nodelman contends, a list of “classic texts,” such as the Touchstones volumes provide, is not prescriptive in so far as it simply “describes communal values” (p. 11), but, to continue Nodelman’s line of argument, it is precisely those values, or ideologies, which implicitly prescribe the parameters of the literature. As Nodelman suggests, these values can be discussed, explored, explained, and disagreed with, and thus the Touchstones enterprise seeks to “open a dialogue,” to show that “far from being sacrosanct and unquestionable, [the ‘classic’ texts] do indeed offer much to think about, much to disagree about” (p. 11). The practice of retelling and rewriting classics for children is part of this dialogue. Reversions disclose the ideologies and metanarratives driving those classic texts because they both legitimize and open to question their “classic” pretexts. They affirm the status of such classic texts, while at the same time entering into a dialogue and calling into question the ideologies informing both the texts and, by implication, the ideological basis of the canonical enterprise. So while what we are arguing here about the retelling of traditional stories may seem intellectually and culturally oppressive, there are always possibilities for resistance, contestation, and change. This occurs on two fronts: by the introduction of new or rival meta narratives, which effectively dispute the grounding metaethic, and in actual textual processes, the bottom-up production of narrative discourses.

The relationships between a retelling and its pre-text(s) are, in the main, dominated by metanarratives which are androcentric, ethnocentric, and class-centric, so the purposes of inducting audiences into the social, ethical, and aesthetic values of the producing culture are colored by those particular alignments. Any retelling is oriented towards those metanarratives and their informing metaethic in stances which are usually legitimizing, but may develop interrogative positions. The pre-text is always bearer of some historically inscribed ideological significances, but does not invariably fix ideological significance. Rather, it functions as a site on which metanarratival and textual processes interact, either to reproduce or contest significance. Because both of these are subject to change between one historical moment and another, any particular retelling becomes, at least potentially, a new negotiation between the already given and the new. When new metanarratives are acutely incompatible with the older metanarratives that have shaped a given story, the outcome can be a moment of cultural crisis. For example, the modern women’s movement, and feminist social and critical analysis in particular, has produced a bundle of metanarratives so incompatible with the metanarratives which have informed many traditional stories in the past that if feminist metanarratives become socially dominant—and hence implicit and invisible—many traditional stories will be rendered unreadable and beyond recuperation.

A domain where we see this already happening is classical mythology, where inherent metanarratives are more persistent than in any other domain of retellings. It is not hard to argue that the metanarratives which informed classical mythology until well into the modern era were grounded in social assumptions which were masculinist, misogynistic, socially elitist, imperialistic, and often militaristic and violent. Thus Barbara G. Walker’s Feminist Fairy Tales (1996), a collection of New Age, goddess-focused feminist stories and reversions, quite systematically addresses and overthrows these assumptions in most traditional story types we are concerned with here. Walker’s collection does not, however, attempt to rework any of the better-known classical myths, and where she do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Pre-Texts, Metanarratives, and the Western Metaethic
• Chapter 2: Authority, Wisdom, and Cultural Heritage: Biblical Literature as Pre-Text
• Chapter 3: Classical Mythology: The Mystery Underlying Everyday Things?
• Chapter 4: Distinction, Individuality, Sociality: Patterns for a Heroic Life
• Chapter 5: An Affirmation of Civilization Against Barbarism: Arthur and Arthurianism in Medievalist and Quasi-Medieval Romance
• Chapter 6: The Boys in the Greenwood: Stories of Robin Hood
• Chapter 7: Folktale and Metanarratives of Female Agency
• Chapter 8: The Idea of the Orient: Stories and Motifs from the Arabian Nights
• Chapter 9: Reversions of Early Modern Classics
• References
• Index