Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale

6. Theorizing Fairy-Tale Fiction, Reading Jeanette Winterson

Theorizing Fairy-Tale Fiction, Reading Jeanette Winterson   What theoretical issues arise at the beginning of the twenty-first century from thinking about the use of the fairy tale in postmodern fiction? This is a grand question that, upon examination, could fan out in a variety of different permutations, but one constant is the need to define one’s terms. What do we mean by postmodern fiction and its practice of intertextuality? How is the fairy tale conceived of at the turn of the century? With these two parameters explored, we can take the next step and examine the theory surrounding postmodern fictions’ use of the fairy tale as its intertext. But such a simple three-step procedure becomes complicated by the wealth of positions argued within each step, and, moreover, by postmodern critiques of any attempt to fix positions across the disciplines. If postmodernism proves a treacherous term and postmodern critiques of the fairy tale have positioned the latter as rather slippery, too, how much more difficult will it prove to put the two together in order to look at postmodern use of the fairy tale? Finally, having wrestled my way to some tentative but crucial conclusions in relation tohowsuchatheoreticalcontemporarypositionimpactsthereadingof post6 modern fiction, I put theory into practice in examining the work of Jeanette Winterson. Postmodernism and Intertextuality So, what is postmodern fiction and how do critics theorize postmodernism’s intertextual use of other texts? Even in the twenty-first century, decades after the debates of the s and s, postmodernism is still a slippery term as it spans many disciplines and means different things to different critics. “The term ‘postmodernism’ has had a troubled and hotly disputed beginning . However . . . it has nevertheless entered the language, although what it designates is still very much at issue” explains Alison Lee pragmatically (x). Writing a decade later than Frederic Jameson and Stuart Hall, she agrees with their designation of it as a postwar American multinational cultural production, though she more hesitantly posits her task as a “provisional totalization . . . to sketch out an introduction to advanced postmodernism” (Carmichael and Lee ). Patricia Waugh suggests it now has two phases, the first spanning the s–s when postmodernism was “the description of a range of aesthetic practices involving playful irony, parody, parataxis, selfconsciousness , fragmentation,” but because of the dominance of consumerism during the s it shifts toward “a pervasive cynicism about progressivist ideals of modernity” (). Usefully, she encapsulates one of the debates: “Detractors of postmodernism see it as a narcissistic and ethically insouciant expression of commodified culture. Defenders view it as an authentic exposure of the illusions of preceding systems of knowledge” (). In relation to postmodern fiction, the awareness of the paradox involved in trying to define something so provisional, resistant, and playfully unstable has had Brian McHale, whose Postmodernist Fiction () proved seminal for a range of critics of postmodern texts, acknowledge his embarrassment with the attempt to be encyclopedic and, in his later Constructing Postmodernism (), refute such a project for the more relative and plural readings of individual texts. Nevertheless, in this critical quagmire there is one consensus: a large number of postmodern texts are intertextual. Intertextuality is an important trope of postmodern fiction, and as Steven Connor notes: “One particularly marked feature of postwar fiction, both in Britain and elsewhere . . . is the practice of rewriting earlier works of fiction. . . . In contemporary fiction, telling has become compulsorily beTheorizing Fairy-Tale Fiction, Reading Jeanette Winterson  lated,inextricablyboundupwithretelling,inallitsidioms:reworking,translation , adaptation, displacement, imitation, forgery, plagiarism, parody, pastiche ” (Postmodernist ). Connor argues further that intertextual referencing is different in contemporary texts because it tends to be a consistent and conscientious focus on “a single textual precedent,” but the intertextuality “can take different forms and have different effects” (Postmodernist ), which he designates as either “reduplication” or “rewriting.” McHale takes this further, seeing intertexuality as a strategy of polyphony to disrupt monologic narrativity: “the strategy of ‘injecting’ a specialized register of language into a homogenous discourse-world, as a means of inducing polyphony, is typical of postmodern fiction” (Postmodernist –). Connor ’s distinction between different uses of intertextuality in postmodern fiction deserves further scrutiny because a major debate focuses precisely on intertextuality in relation to power and resistance, and it is in relation to this debate that I believe the theoretical impact of postmodern use of fairy tales is most felt. Jameson, in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” opened the debate by claiming that postmodern...