[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Here s the good deal for you as writer: You don t have to use the whole story. Sure, it has X, Y, and B, but not A, C, and Z. So what? We re not trying to re-create the fairy tale here. Rather, we re trying to make use of details or patterns, portions of some prior story (or, once you really start thinking like a professor, prior text, since everything is a text) to add depth and texture to your story, to bring out a theme, to lend irony to a statement, to play with readers deeply ingrained knowledge of fairy tales. So use as much or as little as you want. In fact, you may invoke the whole story simply by a single small reference. Why? Because fairy tales, like Shakespeare, the Bible, mythology, and all other writing and telling, belong to the one big story, and because, since we were old enough to be read to or propped up in front of a television, we ve been living on that story, and on its fairy variants. Once you ve seen Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck in a version of one of the classics, you pretty much own it as part of your consciousness. In fact, it will be hard to read the Grimm Brothers and not think Warner Brothers. Doesn t that work out to be sort of ironic? Absolutely. That s one of the best side effects of borrowing from any prior text. Irony, in various guises, drives a great deal of fiction and poetry, even when the work isn t overtly ironic or when the irony is subtle. Let s face it, these two clandestine lovers are hardly babes in the woods. But maybe they are. Socially out of their depth in this part of town. Morally misguided, perhaps. Lost and in danger. Ironically, their symbols of power BMW, Rolex watch, money, expensive clothes don t help them a bit and actually make them more vulnerable. Finding their way and avoiding the witch may be as hard for them as for the two pint-sized venturers of the original. So they don t have to push anyone into an oven, or leave a trail of crumbs, or break off and eat any of the siding. And they are probably far from innocent. Whenever fairy tales and their simplistic worldview crop up in connection with our complicated and morally ambiguous world, you can almost certainly plan on irony. In the age of existentialism and thereafter, the story of lost children has been all the rage. Coover. Carter. John Barth. Tim O Brien. Louise Erdrich. Toni Morrison. Thomas Pynchon. On and on and on. But you don t have to use Hansel and Gretel just because it s the flavor of the month. Or even of the last half century. Cinderella will always have her uses. Snow White works. Anything in fact with an evil queen or stepmother. Rapunzel has her applications; even the J. Geils Band mentions her. Something with a Prince Charming? Okay, but tough to live up to the comparison, so be prepared for irony. I ve been talking here as if you re the writer, but you know and I know that we re really readers. So how does this apply? For one thing, it has to do with how you attack a text. When you sit down to read a novel, you want character, story, ideas, the usual business. Then, if you re like me, you ll start looking for glimpses of the familiar: hey, that kind of feels like something I know. Oh wait, that s out of Alice in Wonderland. Now why would she draw a parallel to the Red Queen here? Is that the hole in the ground? Why? Always, why? Here s what I think we do: we want strangeness in our stories, but we want familiarity, too. We want a new novel to be not quite like anything we ve read before. At the same time, we look for it to be sufficiently like other things we ve read so that we can use those to make sense of it. If it manages both things at once, strangeness and familiarity, it sets up vibrations, harmonies to go with the melody of the main story line. And those harmonies are where a sense of depth, solidity, resonance comes from. Those harmonies may come from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from Dante or Milton, but also from humbler, more familiar texts. So next time you go to your local bookstore and carry home a novel, don t forget your Brothers Grimm. 9 - It s Greek to Me IN THESE LAST THREE CHAPTERS we ve talked about three sorts of myth: Shakespearean, biblical, and folk/fairy tale. The connection of religion and myth sometimes causes trouble in class when someone takes myth to mean untrue and finds it hard to unite that meaning with deeply held religious beliefs. That s not what I mean by myth, though. Rather, what I m suggesting is the shaping and sustaining power of story and symbol. Whether one believes that the story of Adam and Eve is true, literally or figuratively, matters, but not in this context. Here, in this activity of reading and understanding literature, we re chiefly concerned with how that story functions as material for literary creators, the way in which it can inform a story or poem, and how it is perceived by the reader. All three of these mythologies work as sources of material, of correspondences, of depth for the modern writer (and every writer is modern even John Dryden was not archaic when he was writing), and provided they re recognizable to the reader, they enrich and enhance the reading experience. Of the three, biblical myth probably covers the greatest range of human situations, encompassing all ages of life including the next life, all relationships whether personal or governmental, and all phases of the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |