The Key to the Treasure

No one would quarrel, I think, with the basic premise of Retelling Stories: that "any particular retelling may purport to transmit elements of a culture's formative traditions and even its sustaining beliefs and assumptions, but what it always discloses is some aspect of the attitudes and ideologies pertaining at the cultural moment in which that retelling is produced" (ix). Given that premise, what John Stephens and Robyn McCallum seek to accomplish, in a series of studies of canonical texts and their retellings, is to "identify a common impulse or, better, informing metanarrative" (ix), a "global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience" (6) and which molds the process of retelling. But instead of one metanarrative, as indicated by the plural in the title of their book, they locate a series of metanarratives, "a large interlocked set which implies the existence of a less readily definable meta-meta narrative, so to speak, operating at a still more abstract level . . . the Western metaethic" (7). The authors stress that this metaethic "expresses a [European] culture-specific idea of transcendence and not a universal." For this reason, they have chosen not to examine works from non-Western, indigenous, and postcolonial cultures, whose tellings and retellings "would require a book in themselves" (7).¹

As they explain in their initial chapter, "Pre-texts, Metanarratives, and the Western Metaethic," the strategy for each subsequent chapter will be to start with a canonical text or group of texts, such as the Bible, Greek myth, or the Matter of Britain, whose original target audience may have been an adult or inclusive one (the "pre-text"), and then look at retellings for children that purport to be more or less faithful to what is judged to be the original. Each chapter will conclude with an examination of some contemporary "reversions" (or revisions) that seek to question the original metanarrative by disclosing its ideologies and by introducing new or rival metanarratives.

I do not fully understand why the explanation of this project in the first chapter seems so opaque. Perhaps it is the sometimes unnecessarily pretentious critical language, a language largely abandoned, thankfully, in subsequent chapters. I have no quarrel with an initial chapter setting the stage, critically speaking, for subsequent examinations, and some of its concepts may not be easy, but it does not have to be one that the reader has to reread. In any case, the chapter warns us that because the original metanarratives may well be "androcentric, ethnocentric, and class-centric," retellings are apt to be "culturally conservative" as well, either consciously or unconsciously. But "when new metanarratives are acutely incompatible with the older metanarratives that have shaped a given story," for example, "if feminist metanarratives become socially dominant—and hence implicit and invisible—many traditional stories will be rendered unreadable and beyond recuperation" (9) as part of children's culture.

The first chapter goes on to explain that close attention will be paid to language and its register: hieratic (figurative, metaphorical, or allegorical and "implicitly grounded in transcendent significance"); epic ("exemplary, grounded in more mundane or material significances"), which may contain archaisms and other indicators of an elevated style; and demotic, everyday discourse and sometimes dialect or slang (11). The use of these registers can, in reversions, "be used to destabilize norms" and to underscore a change in focalization from the pre-text (12). The authors use the examination of language in these terms in their subsequent explorations of retellings and reversions most effectively.

Finally the initial chapter turns to the question of ideology with respect to contemporary Western humanism, a complex that "promotes tradition and the conserving of culture; imagination and its cultivation; . . . [and values] altruistically intersubjective social and personal relationships and the organic unity of texts shaped towards teleological outcomes" (18). As far as children's literature is concerned, liberal humanism emphasizes the value of the child as an individual human being...