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  • Old Heroes in New Dress
  • Hans-Heino Ewers (bio)

In the literary traditions of all cultures there are powerful hero figures from folklore, myth, religion, and literature who appear again and again in new stories and new guises, reflecting the values and world view of the cultures that re-create them. Western literature possesses a wealth of drama in which figures based on Ulysses or Antigone or Electra appear anew. Historical characters like Joan of Arc also continue to be the focus of literary reenactment and interpretation. Writers work freely with these models. They may make similarities between the old and the new explicit or they may only suggest the new hero's origins. In either case the tension between the old and the new gives complex meaning to the new creation. The new character may function to parody the old one, to criticize the values embodied in that figure, or it may draw its power from the truth that character originally dramatized.

Unlike adult literature, however, children's literature does not seem to allow its authors to reclothe its old heroes, to change them, to create a new perspective, to parody, to satirize, to treat them ironically, or to make them look foolish. There must be no toying with their identity. This does not mean that they do not reappear in new works, but children's literature uses other devices to keep them alive.

There are a few significant exceptions to this rule that should be mentioned. There are, for example, adaptations of works like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels. But these adaptations do not rest on the reader's recognition of the hero's origins. Adults may recognize the model, but children, by and large, do not draw the story's meaning from its intense connection to tradition. Rather the adaptation replaces the model; it appropriates the model's place. The new versions are represented as being unique, authentic, without forerunners in children's eyes.

The fairy tales often present a second exception to this rule. The West German writer Janosch, for example, writes Grimms' fairy tales retold for the children of today. In the United States many tales have been retold from a feminist or a minority perspective. Children reading the new versions often do have a sense of the relationship between the old and the new; they are shown that such redressing of old [End Page 70] figures is possible in literature. Numerous fairy tale parodies written in the 1970s are polemical; they criticize the problematic aspects of the fairy tales of the early nineteenth century.1 Whether children inculcate this criticism is questionable. But they are nevertheless exposed to the strange effects of literary parodies. In addition, children acquire important information about literature: they may realize for themselves that literary heroes and events are invented, that they can be treated playfully, and varied or distorted according to the author's desire. They become familiar with the fictional quality of storytelling. Before this, they may have read fairy tales as factual information. According to Maria Lypp, "The yet unschooled reader, when faced with a literary story, behaves in such a way [as to indicate] that he/she is inadequate to appreciate its fiction. . . . [H]e/she understands the fictitious story as being real information" (45).

Thus, there is a prerequisite in order for readers to take part in the literary game of appreciating "old heroes in new array." They must be able to understand the idea of fiction, to be conscious of the fact that a unique and fictitious world arises from language and imagination. Only then will they see any sense in an author's depicting a known literary figure in a new way. If the characters are understood as truly existing now or in the past, then there can only be one truthful way of seeing them; every other way will seem false.

For that reason, I think, narrative fiction for children has not lent itself to remodeling and redressing its heroes. How, then, do the old heroes live on in new children's stories? I see three basic ways in which fiction writers create new literary existences for old heroes. The simplest...

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