Postmodernist_remakes_of_the_fairy-tale.pdf

POSTMODERNIST REMAKES OF THE FAIRY-TALE: DONALD BARTHELME’S SNOW WHITE AND JOHN BARTH’S “DUNYAZADIAD” Ishmael Reed, was characterized by the formal suspension of traditional narrative procedures tal formal interventions by the abovementioned authors, e.g. the disruption of linearity and chronology, the fragmentation, the intertextuality, or the blend of the high and low culture, the revision of traditional genres became a prominent aspect of the postmodern hybridity. Barthelme’s novel Snow White

from his Chimera The Thousand and One Nights

that the authors’ deliberate play with the fairy-tale conventions are inseparable from and and gender themes. In other words, the paper offers a reading that foregrounds the redefinition of the genre in the service of displaying Barth’s and Barthelme’s views on the act of (postmodernist) writing as well as on the limitations of patriarchy and challenges of the second-wave feminism.

1. INTRODUCTION thelme, Thomas Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed was characterized by the formal suspension and subversion of traditional narrative procedures that went along with mental formal interventions included the disruption of linearity, the fragmentation, the intertextuality, the blend of the high and low culture as well as the revision of novel or the fairy-tale. 179

Snow White (1967), or rather a collection of Chimera Thousand and One Nights as its hypotext.

one of three novellas from his The

both formally and thematically, since the experimental form is intertwined with the of displaying the authors’ views on the act of (postmodernist) writing as well as on the limitations of patriarchy and challenges of the second-wave feminism.

2. THE FAIRY-TALE IN THE POSTMODERN LITERARY CONTEXT interest in this genre among the postmodern authors of the 20th century (e.g. Robert Coover, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, or Italo Calvino) and it may be useful many postmodernists and why many among them came to see the fairy-tale as a particularly convenient genre for their postmodern narrative and thematic exploraa deliberate and conscious construction of itself within a set of codes recognized the fairy-tale as a simply told story with recognizable patterns are the use of the opening formula “once upon a time”; the recurrent characterization patterns i.e. and enchantments) as well as predictable plots in storytelling (e.g. the triumph of themselves within the realm of the marvelous and that they openly deny the causality usually associated with reality, demanding from the reader to accept them on out that the fairy-tale became “a favored playground of many postmodern writers” not in spite of, but because of the highly complex, patterned and formalized structure, stressing that postmodernists recognized that the fairy-tale “exhibits a

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authors decided to emphasize what the traditional fairy-tale tended to obscure in order to lay a claim to the universality of its messages, namely the socio-historical context. Therefore, the postmodern rewritings of traditional fairy-tales laid hidden ideological subtext of the fairy-tales, their investment into the selling of ideology under the disguise of universality. Hence, postmodern handling of the which seethes complex historical and ideological layering which begs to be disrecognized as the underlying ideological discourse of the fairy-tales, which started to be accurately and systematically researched and documented with the rise of which meditate on the challenges, rewards and/or limitations of feminism in the revived interest of postmodern authors in the possibilities of creative rewritings of the fairy-tales was not only stimulated by new critical assessments of the fairycriticism that stressed the new importance of the fairy-tale.

3. BARTHELME’S SNOW WHITE Barthelme’s Snow White which came out in 1967 preceded or coincided with Alison Lurie’s “Fairy-Tale Liberation” (1970) and Marcia Lieberman’s “‘Some to Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) and Colette Dowling’s The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence (1981)1. It is possible, therefore, to view Barthelme’s Snow White as an early postby providing them with a model text that successfully destabilized the patriarchal ideological matrix of the traditional fairy-tale. Indeed, regardless of whether the 1

For a detailed overview of the early feminist fairy-tale criticism see Chapter 1 “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship” by Donald Haase in Donald Haase (Ed.), Fairy-tales and Feminism: New Approaches,

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feminist fairy-tale critics of the 1970s were either aware of Barthelme’s novel or willing to admit that awareness, many of their critical contributions prove useful for investigating important aspects of Barthelme’s revision of the old fairy-tale

explicit and implicit references to the intertext/hypotext. Thus, the reference to a fairy-tale in the title counts among the more explicit references, while the allusion to a fairy-tale within the text in the form of characters’ proper names and character descriptions belongs in the class of more implicit references (Smith 2007). intertext and represents another implicit reference to its textual predecessor. FurBill, Clem, or Dan cannot be misleading since they are given to characters generBarthelme decided to issue instructions for the readers in case they missed the

to the motifs and structural patterns of its intertext, e.g. by references to her psy((Barthelme 1996:23) or to her traumatic memories of “the huntsman, the forest, At the same time Barthelme underlines the ways in which the old fairy-tale no longer functions in the changed social and cultural context of the late 20th century. The creative tension arises at the intersection of the old and the new between the obsolete and modern social and gender patterns as well as narrative strategies. Beside the discrepancy between the old fairy-tale script and new cultural climate, the author emphasizes the sway that the outmoded notions still hold over people living in the 20th century: “The revolution of the past generation in the religious

Snow White as a 182

revision, that is, a critical re-examination of the old in the sense that the new version supplants and improves the old one. ous in its handling of the fairy-tale conventions: “[... ] Barthelme obviously feels that previous mythic structures no longer can serve the writer as useful framing formed” (McCaffery 1982: ing dwarfs, dreaming of a prince who would come into her world and bring a miraculous change, it simultaneously undermines the traditional plot, adapting the latter to the modern sexual and social mores. Stanley Trachtenberg in Understanding Donald Barthelme listed elements that are not present in Barthelme’s novel, she also spends time going into therapy, attending college courses, reading, trying to write a poem and admiring herself in the mirror (Trachtenberg 1990). Thus, of the late 1960s, torn apart between the old and new values: the internalized roindependence and emancipation. This might be Barthelme’s feminist commentary on the harmfulness of patriarchal norms promoted in the fairy-tales, anticipating the abovementioned avalanche of feminist fairy-tale criticism in the years after the novel’s publication. Despite her many modern ways and her awareness of the by the old script. Her inability for a profound change is further ironized in her attempt to replace the Snow White Rapunzel which leaves her as frustrated as before, because it prescribes passive for the princely rescuer. Needless to say, the prince never comes, whether Snow simultaneously a comment on the age in which old gender roles are no longer felt as something natural: No one has come to climb up. That says it all. This time is the wrong time for me. I am in the wrong time. There is something wrong with all those people being able to supply a prince. For not being able to at least be civilized enough to supply the correct ending to the story. (Barthelme 1996: 132) 183

tions nourished by the traditional fairy-tale plot, the readers, Barthelme seems to their experience of standard fairy-tale conventions. The section thus serves both tale and patriarchy. The author suggests that the modern world has to be met on world comply with the traditional fairy-tale structure and its patriarchal messages. The 20th-century authors and readers have to liberate themselves from the old narrative patterns in order to appreciate new artistic forms, just as the 20th-century women and men have to liberate themselves from the traditional gender concepts reluctance with which women accept their own independence as the crucial obstaof gender stereotypes in which the fairy-tales, among other cultural items, have played a vital role. Barthelme’s novel thus predates important insights won by critics such as roles validated in the fairy-tales and changed social reality of the 1960s and the 1970s that left women in an unresolved tension between “between the cultural could be seen as just such a woman plagued by contradictory impulses and para(Barthelme 1996: 187) signals a possible end scenario for all half-reluctant wouldbe feminists and warns about the possible failure of the feminist project. Society be condemned to revert to conservatism, offering entrapment in the guise of the tary on the importance of accepting literary change, including a new poetics that Snow White. princely role, representing one of Barthelme’s neurotic anti-heros. He resists being that comes closest to heroic, he gets poisoned. The death of a prince represents the most radical violation of the traditional fairy-tale storyline, while the manner of

with her responsibilities of sorts” (Barthelme 1996: 13-14). Paul is tragicomically 184

away with that ideal, denying princeliness to men. In fact, Paul’s life path is a para stereotypical motif in traditional literature and movies, then he travels around surveillance system in the cellar.

of the novel, their leader Bill, another self-conscious sociophobic neurotic, has torture, just as they show capable of real violence when they hang Bill in the end and choose the sinister Hogo as their new leader. Although they are occasionally critical of the middle-class values, they are in reality very bourgeois in their consent the average modern man condemned to banality, a metaphorical emotional and intellectual dwarf, without either princely prerogatives of the past or genuine sophistication that would signal the New Man for the new age. Thus, when Snow

where the traditional gender models no longer apply, yet the satisfactory new ones have not been found. He seems to be saying that in the modern age patriarchal by buying her things, from the new shower curtains to the golden pants. The range of male characters in the novel shows that the modern man turns into either a brute chauvinist (Hogo), a self-concious neurotic (Paul) or a banal consumerist whose one charismatic enough to impose himself as a leader (dwarfs). However, as previously stated, consideration of gender issues is inseparable

strictly artistic concerns and include socio-political commentary. Therefore his 185

addressed more directly, but they are mostly presented less obviously through the in dealing with language and communication, including their mistrust of words, symbols or the very communication rules and processes. The novels’ minimalist form operates with the fragmentation and collage pointing at two related problems that have come to determine the postmodern semnsibility, namely, the sense of life having become complex to the point of unrepresentability and the poststructuralist sense of inability of language to represent ‘chapters’ or entries are usually extremely short, rarely exceeding the length of two or three pages, while several are nothing more than one- or two-line inscriptions or slogans, without proper transitions between them, and often without any indication of how, if at all, they are interconnected. Mistrust of language is among the more

straightforwardly is demonstrated in various ways in the novel, including Barthelme’s favorite method of deliberately ‘infecting’ his texts with slang, suggesting ences and the inclusion of what he calls the verbal dreck or blague. Characters are the dwarfs give attention to “those aspects of language that may be seen as a model I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!” (Barthelme 1996: 12). The poor functioning of language as a communication device is repeatedly challenged throughout the novel in numerous passages in which the author feels compelled to additionally explain the meaning of certain words or phrases.

4. JOHN BARTH’S “DUNYAZADIAD”

famous essay on the exhaustion or used-upness of traditional literary forms, came out in the same year 1967 as Barthelme’s Snow White. Barth suggested a new, -

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“Dunyazadiad” from his tryptich Chimera (1972), Barth set about to revisit the old collection of Oriental fairy-tales of Thousand and One Nights, demonstratcommentary on the relation between the literary past and present and a demonstrathe plot and content of the fairy-tale that serves as its intertext, Barth established parallels between past and present while, on the structural level, he did not revisit the individual tales told by Scheherazade, but focused on the frame-story and on the position of Scheherazade as a storyteller. In “Getting Oriented: The Stories Thus Far” Barth returns to his lifelong fascination with the frame-story of The Thousand and One Nights and Scheherazade’s position, explicitly stating that he artists in general” (Barth 1984: 135). In “Muse, Spare Me”, he sees Scheherezade alter ego, and states that “The whole frame of those thousand nights and a night aspect of “Dunyazadiad,” a brilliant postmodern demonstration of the possibilities of the ancient device of the framing story that Barth claims was used particularly impressively in The Thousand and One Nights. Barth constructed “Dunyazadiad” by focusing on the frame-story in which the storyteller is not Scheherazade, but her younger sister Dunyazade, who appears in the traditional version as a minor character. Barth’s story begins at the point when Scheherazade, after thousand nights, has run out of the stories and, unable to the story of how Scheherazade had understood her storytelling as a potentially suiliberals and feminists, she says her older sister was “so appalled at the state of the nation that she dropped out of school in her last semester to do full-time research (Barth 2001: 5-6). However, in Barth’s version Scheherazade has forgotten all of the old stories her from the future to supply her with the stories. The Genie in turn gets the stories from the volumes of The Thousand and One Nights in his private library. On in “The Literature of Replenishment” (Barth 1980), about creative revisiting of premodernist, traditional literary forms and texts that enabled the postmodern lit187

de (tradition) survive by providing her with her own, forgotten stories, conver-

Genie reminds Scheherezade of her own tradition goes to show that the process have been forgotten if it had not been for its (post) modern revisions. Nevertheless, as much as the Genie/Barth hurries to help Scheherezade across the limits of time and space, the hero of the story is the little sister Dunyazade cannot continue because the Genie announces that he has no more stories for her and that she will have to stop relying on the recorded tradition. Scheherezade, however, in all her greatness, is incapable of inventing and improvizing: “I don’t invent. [...] I only recount” (Barth 2001: 29). The survival, Barth suggests, depends on the courage to improvize and that is precisely where Dunyazade steps in. She is the master of improvisation and a prototype of a postmodern writer in that she survives and saves both herself and her sister (tradition) by recurring to the same strategy as the Genie and Barth, namely by admitting her own cluelessness and confusion. Once the sisters are informed by the Genie that they have to rely on new

taught him to appreciate women. There is also to be a double wedding because he announces that his brother Shah Zaman, another reformed misogynist, is to marry Dunyazade. Scheherazade’s further plan for her and her sister is to castrate humiliations she and her little sister have suffered, and bids Dunyazade farewell he and she of the story, told by Dunyazade, ends with the scene in which Dunyazade has tied Shah Zaman to bed, preparing to castrate and then murder him with a dagger she has smuggled into the chamber. Yet, contrary to Scheherazade’s instructions, she herself by his guards, having little to lose. Dunyazade thus comes to represent the postmodern writer who tells stories at the critical moment when all faith in the restoring power of storytelling seems to be lost and who is unexpectedly rewarded with a happy ending at the moment of utter hopelessness. Only now do the words revealed, to Dunyazade’s surprise, that the story would be titled after her, that she was going to be its main character, and that the circumstances of her weddingnight-to-come will be “arresting for taletellers of his particular place and time” 188

(Barth 2001: 32). So, it is Dunyazade’s courage fueled by hopelessness of her situbeyond tradition by abandoning Scheherazade’s revengeful plan and allowing the with completing “Dunyazadiad” so that the narrative collaboration of the old and As for the treatment of gender issues, Barth recognized that the frame story of The Thousand and One Night subordinate women, yet contained subtle and potentially feminist messages. He story: that he sleeps him; and how that wonderful young woman Scheherazade, the Vizier’s daughter, beguiles him with narrative strategies until he comes to his senses. For a time, I regarded the Nights as an “the Savior to his women well. (Barth 1984: 135) Barth embraced the opportunity and developed the gender theme, creating

by their wives which convinced them that women can not be trusted and must be punished, intimidated and controlled. The hurt pride, the wish to control fedescribes Scheherazade by using the liberal jargon of the 1960s: she is “Homecoming Queen, valedictorian-elect” with “the highest average in the history of the campus” and “every graduate department in the East was after her with fellowships” (Barth 2001: 5). She made it her goal to stop Shahryar’s “gynocide” by and decapitated Moslem girls was past nine hundred” (Barth 2001: 6) That the help comes in the form of the male Genie/Barth is thus an indication of necessary 189

cooperation between men and women, as between past and present. Still, after or “win some victory for our sex by diverting our persecutors with naughty stunts and stories!” and concludes by telling Dunyazade they have accomplished nothfeels that her position as a storyteller was giving her only temporary power, while fury over the injustices of patriarchy that inevitably leads to violent confrontation where the gender relations are burdened with distrust. Expectedly, Scheherazade does not believe in the true, everlasting love between any given woman and man. terrorist” hoping Allah would grant her reunion with her sister in the other world Yet, throughout the story Barth recurrently draws parallels between storyand the listener is “by nature erotic” (Barth 2001: 25), that the position of the storyteller is “essentially masculine” and that “regardless of his actual gender” (Barth 2001: 25-26), the position of the listener/reader feminine, while the tale is the “medium of their intercourse” (Barth 2001: 26). He uses the terms masculine and feminine as metaphors for an active and passive relation to a story, without favoring one over the other. He promotes the exchange and cooperation between the teller and the listener, and man and woman, brought about by permanent renegotiation of their positions. The positions of power or powerlessness between and robbed of power. In the second part, Dunyazade and Zaman’s cooperation results from the genuine desire to understand each other and to alter the “wretched state of afand boredom and resentment the rule” (Barth 2001: 46). This section focuses on the constructive reversal of roles between women and men, as both lovers and consumers or producers of stories, demonstrating the Genie’s claim that the narrative relation is “a love relation-not a rape: its success depended upon the reader’s consent and cooperation, which she could withhold or at any moment withdraw” (Barth 2001: 26). Thus, Dunyazade and Zaman symbolize a revision of patriarchy as well as a revision of narrative tradition. Barth shows the position of storyteller does not automatically guarantee power and that the position of the listener does not automatically imply inferiority or powerlessness. By assigning women in his story the positions of storytellers 190

cause the patriarchal system clearly reserves the real power for men. Yet, Dunyazaof, just as her sexual and narrative partner Zaman, who turns from her potential molester and rapist into her lover and husband, is prepared both to admit gender to put the old gender hostilities behind, but not before they honestly assess the situation in their respective stories. Dunyazade, on her part, gives reasons for her condemnation of patriarchy, Zaman for his previous half-reluctant accompliceship in the upholding of patriarchy: male and brotherly solidarity with Shahryar along with social and political pressures to maintain the conservative image for fear of ridicule and rebellion. Yet, he reveals to astonished Dunyazade that he consented to of its founder to create a separate female society. Zaman’s readiness to challenge himself and perhaps be granted life, love and forgiveness. Position of the storyteller thus again implies powerlessness just as it invests both Zaman and the sisters with various degrees of manipulative power. Yet, Barth shows that renegotiation his domination. For example, although Zaman is tied to bed and Dunyazade can shape of his guards at the entrance, as he himself recognizes. Yet he also admits that he is no longer willing to use that power in the awareness that the solution lies in the necessary reaching out towards women. The aim towards which both women and men have to aspire is to cease otherizing one another, despite the realization Zaman tells Dunyazade that Shahryar has been reformed in accepting that women resolved to live as if ideal love exists despite the awareness of the contrary. Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo [email protected] REFERENCES Bacchilega, Cristina. 1997. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. The Atlantic 220: 29-34. The Atlantic 245: 65-71.

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Chimera Barthelme, Donald. 1996. Snow White Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press. Dowling, Colette. 1981. The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence. Haase, Donald (Ed.). 2004. Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Detroit, MI: the Fairy Tale. College English 34/3: 383-395. Lurie, Alison. 1970. Fairy Tale Liberation. The New York Review of Books 15/11: 42-44. McCaffery, Larry. 1982. Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6: 237-257. The Postmodern Fairy Tale: Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Fiction Palgrave Macmillan. Tale Trachtenberg, Stanley. 1990. Understanding Donald Barthelme. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

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