Folk Materials, Re-Visions, and Narrative Images: The Intertextual Games They Play

Introduction

Today's children read any number of postmodern tales that join together disparate and distorted pieces of an ageless master text made of folk materials or literary tales from a long-gone past. The foundation of those retellings is well inscribed in readers' memories and gives rise to various responses that are essentially dictated by a shared cultural heritage. Modern rewrites transform the ancient materials by progressively adding new layers in the manner of a palimpsest, to borrow from the title of Gérard Genette's seminal work. Les Contes de Perrault is a good example of an original text that has made room for new ones, its imprint still shining through more recent layers of narrative. "Recycled" tales (Sandra Beckett may well have coined this expression used in the title of her most recent book) grow from old roots and gain vitality in the process. Children thus receive the legacy of those retold stories, which now constitute a large part of the field of children's literature. They share this legacy with adults, who can also appreciate the intertextual play between multiple models, copies, parodies, and their representations, and the blurring of the borders between one genre of literature and another. Carole Scott comments that there is "a collaborative relationship between children and adults, for picture books empower children and adults much more equally" (101). Parodic retellings assign to both adults and children the role of textual interpreter, forging a strong bond of complicity between readers or listeners and authors or storytellers. Indeed, the multilayered nature of parodies of texts and images in contemporary children's books enables the inclusion of a "cross audience" made of adults and children, reminding us of the practice of traditional storytelling, in which adults and children, as well as peasants and nobility, were united for a moment in the sharing of tales that transcend ages and classes.

John Stephens and Robin McCallum, in their book Retelling Stories, Framing Culture, observe that folk materials lend themselves naturally to this phenomenon because of the uncertainty of their origins and, in some cases, the lack of a dependable "pre-text." They note also that "the process of retelling is always implicated in processes of cultural formation, of recycling frames used to make sense of culture" (ix), insisting thus that the creation and/or adaptation of new versions of an old tale still reproduce certain models of social practice and reinforce cultural beliefs and ideologies shared in the Western world. I would like to add that the "process of retelling" discussed by Stephens and McCallum involves the word, whether it is oral or written. It becomes truer and even more complex when combined with and sustained by what French author and illustrator Claude Lapointe calls "images narratives," which is in his view a more meaningful expression to refer to illustrations (13). Stephens and McCallum's "Western metaethic" is conveyed not only by layers of narrative but also in the multiple and widely differing illustrations that accompany and decode the text, providing the critic with a rich source of socio-cultural material in the form of interacting images and words and underlining the inherent social nature of intertextuality (3). Illustrators today provide as fertile a field of research as writers in that modern picture books are now a significant cultural sign in a booming market that targets an increasingly sophisticated audience. Intertextuality, with its multiple layers of cultural allusions, is just as much a force in the illustration of recycled folk materials as it is in the retelling of tales. The "narratives images" of late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century picture books allude to a variety of media from famous masterpieces of painting to comic strips, cartoons, films, and other icons of popular culture...and they speak a thousand words!

The Three Little Javelinas, by Susan Lowell, is a southwestern example of an old palimpsest of The Three Little Pigs, which retells a familiar story with "a new chile flavor" (as is indicated in the book's introduction, n.p.), demonstrating the type of relationship between an anterior narrative (or hypotext...