The Poetics and Politics of Adaptation: Traditional Tales as Children's Literature

To create for children of one culture written and sometimes illustrated versions of traditional oral tales from another culture is an activity fraught with difficulties. Must modern retellers remain faithful to the original contexts in which the stories were probably presented and received, or can they deviate widely? Are they successful in fulfilling the double requirements of accurately reflecting the culture of the narratives and meeting the needs, abilities, and expectations of modern child audiences? Have they the right to attempt the recreation of the stories, particularly when those come from cultures of which they are not members? These issues and problems underlie the twenty-three essays in Sitting at the Feet of the Past: Retelling the North American Folktale for Children, an extremely useful and interesting collection edited by Gary D. Schmidt and Donald R. Hettinga.

The book is divided into four sections, each containing essays by creators and critics examining four major categories of North American tales: the Native American folk tale, the African-American folktale, the retold Western European folktale, and the American tall tale. Most of the authors re-create tales from cultures not their own; only one writes from within a minority culture. Although it might have been worthwhile to hear from more minority authors and from authors dealing with minority cultures other than African-American, Hispanic, and Native American, the selection here is no doubt appropriate. Most adaptations of traditional stories are by people of Anglo-European heritage, and stories about these three minority groups are most frequently published in children's versions. Thus, the limited range of the coverage also serves as a kind of implicit commentary on the state of this segment of children's book publishing. However, the authors address the major issues surrounding the subject of adaptation, so that the inclusion of essays by, for example, individuals of Far Eastern backgrounds would probably have extended, but not radically altered, the nature of the discussion. The critics' articles reflect both the basic elements of academic debate and the types of ideas examined in university-level classes on children's literature.

Although the critical articles are placed at the conclusions of each of the sections, they provide, in a way, overviews of and contexts for the authors' statements that precede them. James Gellert surveys over a century of Canadian books presenting the history and tales of traditional Native peoples, from stereotyped portrayals of "good" and "bad" Indians, to non-Native adaptations that achieve degrees of success in embodying sympathy and accuracy, to the recent Native Renaissance, in which such authors as Maria Campbell, Basil Johnston, and George Clutesi have recaptured "the element of self-actualization, of developing through stories" (56), which was an essential component of the original oral tellings.

Two articles examine the history of written versions of the African-American tales of Br'er Rabbit. Working on the premise that "literary works can be copyrighted; oral tales cannot" (82), Hugh T. Keenan examines the role of retellers, both authors and narrators, especially Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus. Harris himself shifted his attitude toward the nature of the stories, his role in their transmission, and his sense of audience; and scholars of folklore have been divided in their assessment of his achievement. Keenan emphasizes the importance of dialect in the narrative voice of the retellings, stating that the narrator's language is "grounded in classical rhetoric" (85), and traces the attitudes toward dialect in later African-American and white adaptors. For Tonny Manna, Harris's modern importance lies in his having left subsequent authors "a legacy to mine as they form their own new versions which . . . mirror their own values" (94). He praises the African-American author Julius Lester, who draws on Harris for basic events and then relates them in his retellings to "some timely, timeless, and controversial issues" (106).

Tall tales, those indigenous narratives referred to as "fakelore" by scholar Richard...