Fairy Tales in Contemporary Australian Fiction

Wood Strategic, stylistic and notional intertextuality University of Tasmania Danielle Wood Strategic, stylistic and notional intertextuality: Fairy tales in contemporary Australian fiction Abstract: While Canadian scholar Lisa M Fiander argues that fairy tales are ‘everywhere’ in Australian fiction, this paper questions that assertion. It considers what it means for a fairy tale to be ‘in’ a work of contemporary fiction, and posits a classificatory system based on the vocabulary of contemporary music scholarship where a distinction is made between intertextuality that is stylistic and that which is strategic. Stylistic intertextuality is the adoption of features of a style or genre without reference to specific examples, while strategic intertexuality references specific prior works. Two distinct approaches to strategic fairy-tale revision have emerged in Australian writing in recent decades. One approach, exemplified in works by writers including Kate Forsyth, Margo Lanagan and Juliet Marillier, leans towards the retelling of European fairy tales. Examples include Forsyth’s The Beast’s garden (‘Beauty and the Beast’), Lanagan’s Tender morsels (‘Snow White and Rose Red’) and Marillier’s short story ‘By bone-light’ (‘Vasilisa the Beautiful’). The other, more fractured, approach is exemplified in works by writers including Carmel Bird and Murray Bail, which do not retell fairy tales but instead echo them and allude to them. This paper proposes that recent Australian works that retell fairy tales are less likely to be set in a recognisably Australian context than are works which take a more fractured approach to fairy tale. It also explores the notion that, presently, transporting European fairy tales, whole, into an Australian setting, seems to be a troubling proposition for writers in a post-colonial settler society that is highly sensitised to, but still largely in denial about, its colonial past. Biographical note: Dr Danielle Wood completed her PhD at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. Her thesis included the novel The alphabet of light and dark, which won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 2002 and the Dobbie Literary Award in 2004. Her works include Rosie Little's cautionary tales for girls, Mothers Grimm and Housewife superstar: The very best of Marjorie Bligh. Dr Wood has collaborated with fellow Tasmanian writer Heather Rose, under the pen name 'Angelica Banks', to produce a trilogy of adventure stories featuring a young writer, Tuesday McGillycuddy. Finding TEXT Special Issue 43, Into the bush: Australasian fairy tales eds Nike Sulway, Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, Belinda Calderone, October 2017 1 Wood Strategic, stylistic and notional intertextuality serendipity, A week without Tuesday and Blueberry pancakes forever have been published in Australia, Germany and the USA. Keywords: Creative writing – Fairy tales – Australian fiction TEXT Special Issue 43, Into the bush: Australasian fairy tales eds Nike Sulway, Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, Belinda Calderone, October 2017 2 Wood Strategic, stylistic and notional intertextuality ‘Fairy tales are everywhere in Australian fiction’, writes Canadian scholar Lisa M. Fiander in a 2003 article in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (2003: 157). She is not being literal, of course; I take her to mean that fairy tales are a common feature in Australian fiction, especially in the last two decades of the twentieth century, the period in which she focuses her reading. But – even if we resolutely leave on the shelf that can of worms containing the debate over the meaning of the term fairy tale (and we will do just that) – there is much in Fiander’s statement to consider. Is she right? Are fairy tales prevalent in Australian fiction? How we might evaluate this will depend on how the term Australian fiction is defined. Does it mean fiction by Australian writers, or fiction set in Australia, or fiction that is both by Australian writers and set in Australia, or something else? Also, since fairy tales can provide, for works of contemporary fiction, everything from the lightest touch of influence to their entire structural core, we might also ask precisely what it means for a fairy tale to be considered to be ‘in’ a work of fiction. In this essay, and writing from the position of one who is both a reader of fairy tale-inflected fictions and a writer of the same, I put forward (yet another) possible vocabulary for discussing the different ways in which fairy tales appear in contemporary fictions. Following this, I offer the observation that the use of fairy tales in contemporary fiction by Australian writers appears to be more constrained when those fictions are in set in a recognisably Australian context than when they are set in other geographical locations, or, indeed, in the ‘timeless, spaceless, quasimythic sphere’ (Thomas 1986: 126), that is traditionally conjured with the words ‘once upon a time’. There is no shortage of ready-made classificatory systems for describing how fairy tales appear as intertexts in contemporary texts. For my purposes, I wanted a classificatory system that had more categories than Zipes’s binary duplication/revision model – in which contemporary fairy-tale texts either ‘[reinforce] the deeply entrenched modes of thinking, conceiving, believing that provide our lives with structure’ (1994: 8) or ‘create something new that incorporates the critical and creative thinking of the producer and corresponds to changed demands and tastes of audiences’ (1994: 9) – or De Caro and Jordan’s binary, which proposes that some contemporary works are scaffolded by the ‘formal or stylistic framework’ of folkloric texts, so that folklore becomes the ‘“exoskeleton”’ of the new work, while other contemporary works use folklore as an ‘“endoskeleton” of plot, reference, or meaning’ (2004: 7). However, I did not require so many categories as the eight that Smith offers in The postmodern fairytale. Nor did I require the seven categories, elucidated by Joosen, wherein contemporary fairy-tale re-tellings disrupt the ‘horizon of expectation’ (Joosen 2011: 12-13) that readers are bound by when they encounter a traditional fairy tale. For my purposes, a useful place to look for a suitable vocabulary to describe the degrees and purposes of fairy tale incorporation within contemporary fiction is the world of popular music, where older songs are referenced, recycled and repurposed through new ones. In this analogy, fairy tales are, of course, the old and well-known songs whose success, longevity and familiarity make them appealing hooks for contemporary writers to employ when constructing new fictions. Warner has noted that fairy tales, rather than existing in fixed form, are more like ‘tune[s] that can migrate from a symphony to a penny whistle’ (2014: n.p.). As in music, literature provides a range of models for the TEXT Special Issue 43, Into the bush: Australasian fairy tales eds Nike Sulway, Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, Belinda Calderone, October 2017 3 Wood Strategic, stylistic and notional intertextuality ways in which artists might choose to respond to, and incorporate elements of, those prior texts that have inspired or influenced them. In 1985, music theorist Robert Hatten announced that he was borrowing from literary studies the term intertexuality. In an article that acknowledges but ultimately rejects what Hatten calls a radical understanding of the term (in which intertextuality is seen as a fundamental condition of all texts), he propose the usefulness, to music studies, of the term in its more commonly understood and limited definition. He argues that music scholars might helpfully ‘distinguish the contexts of style and strategy as regulators of relevant intertextual relationships’ (1985: 70, emphasis added). Following Hatten, Mark Spicer elucidates as follows: [s]tylistic intertextuality occurs when a composer adopts distinctive features of a pre- existing style without reference to any specific work in that style [while s]trategic intertextuality is more pointed, occurring only when a composer makes deliberate reference to a particular earlier work or works, and this can involve a variety of techniques such as quotation, structural modeling, variation or paraphrase. (2009: 353) As an example of stylistic intertextuality, Spicer cites the Beatles’ song ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and its appropriation of high-Baroque devices in its memorable strings accompaniment. Here, Paul McCartney, the songwriter, does not reference a specific prior composition, but instead an entire musical style. By borrowing attributes of this style, he effectively layers its textures into his song; the listener, whether consciously, subconsciously or semi-consciously, then imports into a listening experience whichever associations they attach to the source style. Analogously, a fiction writer might choose to reference fairy tale in a work of fiction, not by referencing a specific tale, but by gesturing to the entire genre through use of particular stylistic devices. These could include such things as patterns of three (three daughters, three sons, three wishes, three challenges), starkly opposed character types (good sister/bad sister, clever son/stupid son, weak husband/nagging wife), the setting of impossible quests, or the appearance of magical helpers. Through stylistic intertextuality, a fiction writer can leverage the entire repertoire of associations that a reader attaches to fairy tale in general, and these associations are often powerful. An example of stylistic

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