Grimms' Tales around the Globe: The Dynamics of Their International Reception

14. Fairy-Tale Scripts and Intercultural Conceptual Blending in Modern Korean Film and Television Drama

275 14 Fairy-Tale Scripts and Intercultural Conceptual Blending in Modern Korean Film and Television Drama SUNG-AE LEE Western folktales have circulated in an active, two-way dialogue with Korean culture and folktales for almost a century, and some of the tales have become so embedded in Korean culture that they are as readily used as narrative frames in contemporary film and TV drama as are local Korean folktales. However, as U. C. Knoepflmacher has aptly observed, “Any transmitted narrative that is persistently subjected to multiple cultural revisions must necessarily be impure” (15) in the sense that the narrative accrues traces of often disparate cultures. When Western tales function as a structural frame or recurrent motif, they are often blended with local analogues, with unrelated local traditions, or with each other. At the same time, there seems to be little overt acknowledgment of origins, whether by producers or consumers, and any allusions made to sources within the narrative itself are likely to name Disney. One of the titles most extensively drawn upon as a script in film and television drama in the first decade of this century was “Cinderella ,” but because these texts reference what I will call a “Cinderella-script,” rather than a specific pre-text, audiences will not inevitably associate the tale with the Grimms’ Aschenputtel (or Perrault’s Cendrillon), even when they do share common motifs, but will have in mind a blended version, or what Donald Haase terms a “network” or “hypertext” (223). Usually, although not always, even when a pre-text is named the reference is to a script, not to a specific source. 276 Sung-Ae Lee The notion of script, in the sense I am using here, is derived from Roger Schank and Robert Abelson: “Specific knowledge exists in detail . . . with respect to every standard situation that [a person] has been in many times” (38). As a recognizable narrative form, David Herman defines a script as “a knowledge representation in terms of which an expected sequence of events is stored in the memory” (10). A script may draw core schemas from several related folktales but will not necessarily be narratively equivalent to any particular version. The “innocent persecuted heroine” script includes the following schemas: a female orphan; physical poverty; persecution by an older woman; one or more female peers as rivals; a helper; a shoe that, linked only with her, is lost and found; a future husband of high birth. As John Stephens and Sylvie Geerts argue, the transmission of stories as scripts enables an adaptation to take a drastically new form while remaining constant to the script. simple blending and conceptual blending The blending of folktales occurs at two levels of complexity. On the one hand, there is a simple merging or combination of components of what is perceived as a common story, whereby, for example, the names “Cendrillon ” (Charles Perrault) and “Aschenputtel” (the Brothers Grimm) come to be interchangeable and then, in popular knowledge, one generally displaces the other. This primary blending has readily happened in the West as well and is obvious in the generalizing of the name “Cinderella” for the (now) eponymous heroine of the tale. This practice was effectively naturalized by Jack Zipes’s decision to use “Cinderella” in his 1987 translation of the Grimm tales and by his note that the 1812 text was “obviously influenced by Charles Perrault’s ‘Cendrillon’” and had been “mixed with additional versions” (729). Elisabeth Panttaja’s perceptive discussion of the Grimms’ tale likewise begins “Modern criticism of the Grimms’ ‘Cinderella’” (85). In Korean film and drama, the name “Cinderella” has been similarly generalized to identify any adaptation, however loose, of the script. In addition to this simple blending, there is also a more complex process that falls within the sphere of what, following the work of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, is referred to as “conceptual blending.” This idea describes the mind’s capacity to blend different and even apparently contradictory concepts to develop a third, blended concept that contains more and different Fairy-Tale Scripts in Modern Korean Film and Television Drama 277 information than the two initial concepts. Whereas Fauconnier and Turner were primarily interested in blends of seemingly incompatible concepts or stories, there is a comparable, but slightly different, process at work when a narrative uses incompatible scripts. “How can it be that quite incompatible stories do not suppress each other’s activation in the...