Roald Dahl

Ann Alston, Catherine Butler

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781350309012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Roald Dahl is one of the world's best-loved authors. More than twenty years after his death, his books are still highly popular with children and have inspired numerous feature films – yet he remains a controversial figure. This volume, the first collection of academic essays ever to be devoted to Dahl's work, brings together a team of well-known scholars of children's literature to explore the man, his books for children, and his complex attitudes towards various key subjects. Including essays on education, crime, Dahl's humour, his long-term collaboration with the artist Quentin Blake, and film adaptations, this fascinating collection offers a unique insight into the writer and his world.

1

Fairy Tale and Anti-Fairy Tale: Roald Dahl and the Telling Power of Stories

Deborah Cogan Thacker

Towards the beginning of Matilda, Roald Dahl portrays his eponymous heroine as someone who is knowledgeable about the power of story to have a controlling effect on a listener.¹ Matilda has put superglue on her father’s hat and it is stuck to his head. She tells her traumatised father about a boy who got superglue on his finger without knowing it and then got it stuck up his nose.

Mr Wormwood jumped. ‘What happened to him?’ he spluttered.

‘The finger got stuck inside his nose,’ Matilda said, ‘and he had to go around like that for a week. … He looked an awful fool.’²

Matilda is both knowing and subversive in her use of a cautionary story to teach lessons, and she neatly reverses the relationship of power in the father–daughter relationship through the telling of the tale. Mr Wormwood is unkind to Matilda – but the lesson itself does not change his behaviour. However, Matilda, the ignored and powerless child, attains a fleeting position of authority and control as the ‘teller’, deepening her father’s foolishness. In this way, she exacts some vestige of satisfaction through her power as a ‘storyteller’. While at no point does Matilda exact a lasting revenge on her father for her mistreatment, this sense of power over him reaches its culmination when Matilda leaves her family altogether at the end of the book, to start a new life with Miss Honey. According to Maria Tatar, ‘[t]he economy of the cautionary tale operated in such a way as to provide maximum advantage to the teller’,³ and Dahl, by giving Matilda a role usually taken by adults, celebrates the power of stories over and above the valorisation of literature elsewhere in the book.

By embedding the telling of this ‘cautionary’ tale within his fictional narrative, Dahl demonstrates his tendency to put his child characters in powerful positions. The complex awareness of the nature of traditional tales that he displays throughout his novels for children is a distinctive feature of his work and goes some way to explain not only why he is often reviled by adult readers, but also why he continues to be so popular with children. The familiar tropes of folk and fairy tales, such as the orphaned child triumphing over adversity in order to attain selfhood, the predominance of fantastical violence as a method of retribution, and a fascination with eating and being eaten, provide allusive richness to his stories. His ability to call attention to the use of such tales to indoctrinate and suppress children can be seen to characterise the particular quality that defines his distinctiveness. By reversing the roles of teller and recipient of the tale, as he does in Matilda, Dahl is able not only to show his debt to folk and fairy tales, but also to undermine their controlling force by playing with ‘the scaffolding’.

Even Dahl’s own autobiographical writing, according to Catriona Nicholson, is built on a fairy tale framework, blurring the lines between the struggles and tragedies of his own life and his fictions:

The themes and conflicts made manifest in Dahl’s Tales of Childhood pre-figure the forces for good and evil in his tales of fantasy. Characterised by brave children, malevolent adults, and magical possibilities, they replicate the structure of fairy tales where fortunes are reversed, the ordinary becomes fabulous, and native cunning outwits pompous stupidity.⁴

The connection between Dahl’s own life and his approach to children’s fiction, as well as his bizarre and disturbing adult fiction, is marked by a declared mistrust and resentment of the adult world and the mistreatment of children, himself among them. Peter Hollindale claims that knowledge of Dahl’s own life struggles informs the reading of his fiction, and finds consistency in ‘a pattern widely discernible in Dahl’s work, of adult authority falling contemptibly short of the good and necessary reasons why authority exists’.⁵ This position inflects all of his work with a subversive flavour, as he appears to reject the power relationships inherent in adult–child story interactions. Similarly, although it is admittedly impossible to erase or entirely reverse the normative author–reader relationship, Dahl’s ability to destabilise it is distinctive and, through metafictive play, he is able to show irreverence for the expected authorial presence.

Throughout his fiction for children, Dahl uses and abuses folk and fairy tale conventions, entering into a conspiratorial relationship with his child readers ‘against adults’,⁶ whose need to control and improve is considered by contemporary critics to have motivated the translation of folk tales into print form. Though his humorous rewritings of familiar fairy tales in Revolting Rhymes (1982), for instance, more deliberately reverse and, thus, undermine the moral emphasis of the stories, his adoption of the formal aspects of narrative relationships offered by such tales challenges the use that adults have made of them in the transition from folk culture to children’s literature.⁷

Dahl expressed the view that stories are a part of a process, driven by ‘the relentless need to civilize “this thing that when it is born is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all” ’.⁸ Through his novels for children, he at once performs the process and undermines it in a way that offers children, as readers, a dimension of authority, or at least, a sense of collusion in the process of storytelling. What is more significant is that Dahl’s own recognition of the power of fairy tales to indoctrinate, control and encourage conformity anticipates the examination of power structures in the author–reader relationship by contemporary critics. Recent criticism has re-evaluated the history of folk and fairy tales, demonstrating the need to look beyond the tales themselves to the circumstances of their telling. By doing so, critics such as Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes provide a revisionary analysis of the genre that brings a new perspective to Dahl’s particular approach. According to Tatar: ‘Foucault’s point is … that the entire project of childrearing, including the telling of tales, is invested in a metaphysic of power and is therefore never really in the best interest of the child. Any attempt to pass on stories becomes a disciplinary tactic aimed at control.’⁹

Contemporary criticism of fairy tales, which re-examines and often challenges the previously dominant psychoanalytic and structuralist studies, draws on cultural theory to explain both the cultural construction of traditional tales and the importance of their use and reception. Fairy tale theory since the 1980s has developed approaches that at once emphasise the change in ideological force implicit in the transition from oral roots to written children’s stories, and provide an understanding of children’s literature in terms of the power relations embedded in adult–child encounters, as Tatar claims: ‘Whenever a book is written by adults for children, there is a way in which it becomes relentlessly educational, in part because the condition of its existence opens up a chasm between the child reader and the older, wiser adult who has produced the book.’¹⁰

It is this quality, and the shift away from the carnivalesque tendencies of folk tales – which, with their excessive and playful retributive violence and a fascination with bodily appetites, momentarily reverse the prevalent power structures of society – into improving texts for children that Roald Dahl appears to subvert. Both through subject matter and unconventional use of language, Dahl returns to the grotesque, the fantastical violence, and the undermining of authoritative power structures of folklore. These factors work to enhance the ‘conspiratorial’ engagement with children as his readers, interrupting the educational and improving qualities of much contemporary children’s literature. Paradoxically, it is Dahl’s attention to storytelling that does most to suggest a return to the complicit nature of the folk tale. By continually reminding his readers of the act of storytelling and representing that act in his fiction, Dahl returns to the dialogic circumstances of the folk tale, and thereby challenges the power relationships that surround most adult author–child reader encounters.

Although it is a common assumption that children choose to read Dahl’s books for themselves against the wishes of disapproving adults, it is adults who often read his books aloud to children. The role that adults take in these reading situations provides a further layer of transgressive complicity, since they, as readers, must give voice to Dahl’s narrative approach. If Dahl sees himself as an ally to children in a world of foolish adults exercising arbitrary power, then the shared reading experience brings complex power relationships into play. Whether it is a teacher reading in The Witches that a child’s teacher might be a witch,¹¹ or a parent who earlier in the evening has insisted on table manners reading about ‘whizzpoppers’ in The BFG,¹² Dahl’s playful use of the narrative contract provides a deep pleasure in the power of stories to challenge compliance, similar to the original circumstances of the transmission of folk tales. As Tatar remarks: ‘[i]n cultures that consistently play adult authority and privilege against childish impotence and inadequacy, these stories have a liberating power that should not be underestimated’.¹³

Fairy tale theory and the instability of the text

While many critics point to Dahl’s anarchic humour, often denigrating it,¹⁴ a more considered view can be gained if his work is viewed through the lens of fairy tale theorists such as Zipes and Tatar. The recognition that children’s literature derives from a folk tradition that rests on the playful transgression of normative power structures has a particular significance to the work of Roald Dahl, whose reputation might be summed up in Tatar’s definition of childhood and its difference from adulthood:

Exuberance, energy, mobility, irrepressibility, irreverence, curiosity, audacity – these are traits that we are right to envy of youth. But they are also the very characteristics that make the child intractable – resistant to the civilizing powers of the adult world. The boundless transgressive energy of children will forever confound and vex adults as they set about the task of socializing the young.¹⁵

This is precisely the attitude that Dahl has expressed in his remarks about the ‘relentless’ need of adults to civilise children.

Tatar, in Off With Their Heads: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood, rejects the notion upon which previous commentators have relied that fairy tales are stable texts. Rather, her emphasis is on the fact that the text that we readily accept as the ‘ideal text’, ‘is nothing more than one of many constructs created by adults’.¹⁶ Jack Zipes, similarly, in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, relies on a predominantly Marxist approach to reconceptualise fairy tales as ‘part of a social process, as a kind of intervention in the continuous discourse, debate, and conflict about power and social relations’.¹⁷ This view emphasises the use of fairy tales to indoctrinate and control, but also draws attention to the instability of any particular text. While w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Fairy Tale and Anti-Fairy Tale: Roald Dahl and the Telling Power of Stories
• 2. Discomfort and Delight: The Role of Humour in Roald Dahl’s Works for Children
• 3. ‘Don’t gobbelfunk around with words’: Roald Dahl and Language
• 4. ‘The problem of school’: Roald Dahl and Education
• 5. The Unlikely Family Romance in Roald Dahl’s Children’s Fiction
• 6. ‘When one is with her it is impossible to be bored’: An Examination of Roald Dahl’s Contribution to a Feminist Project in Children’s Literature
• 7. An Unsuitable Read for a Child? Reconsidering Crime and Violence in Roald Dahl’s Fiction for Children
• 8. All Grown Up: Filmic Interpretations of Roald Dahl’s Novels
• 9. Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake
• 10. Roald Dahl and the Commodification of Fantasy
• Further Reading
• Index