The Postmodern Fairy Tale: Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Fiction (review)

This scholarly book develops Terry Pratchett’s point in Hogfather: “‘All right,’ said Susan. ‘I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need fantasies to make life bearable.’ . . . NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN” (Pratchett 270; italics in original). The back cover of Kevin Paul Smith’s The Postmodern Fairy Tale: Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Fiction describes the book as a study that “attempts to explain why fairy tales keep popping up in the most unexpected places.” This attempt takes the shape of an exciting stroll through the different ways that fairy tales are used in postmodern fiction. It looks at how autobiography might be told through a fairy-tale mode, and the repercussions of such a telling. Further, it discovers hidden connections between magic realism and fairy tale through select readings of works by contemporary authors such as Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Kate Atkinson, and Terry Pratchett. Altogether, Kevin Paul Smith’s contribution to fairy-tale studies constitutes a highly innovative, profound, and serious work.

Starting from the premise that “the history of popular fiction . . . is suffused with fairytales” (1), Smith sets out to examine “why the fairytale has become so important” in the last three decades. The answer to this question walks the seductive, at times convoluted, path of intertextuality in its plurality of meanings and for “ends which can be called ‘postmodern’” (1). Before plunging deep into a somewhat structuralist analysis of fairy tale and intertextuality, however, Smith starts by facing the problem of finding what he calls a “working definition of fairytale” (2) by resorting to the work of the specialists on the field: J. R. R. Tolkien, Tzvetan Todorov, Bruno Bettelheim, and Maria Tatar. All of these, incidentally, seem to pose in their definitions of fairy tales a fundamental problem for the author: they place magical events in an entirely other world, thus aligning fairy tales with fictions of a utopian nature. Here, precisely, is one of the most revealing contributions of Smith’s study: in their many variations and regional versions, fairy tales become particularly historically determined texts and, therefore, far from universal. Within Smith’s innovative proposal, fairy tales are regarded at once as a product of their time and still relevant today because of their formulaic nature.

Smith devotes quite a lengthy section of the book’s introduction to the critical approaches to the intertextual use of fairy tales, where he finds many interesting variations, thus suggesting the vigor of this type of literary criticism. His line of action, however, is somewhat detached from that of his predecessors. His interests are, he claims, “more to do with the use of the fairytale as a genre” (7), thus walking away from studies on particular tales (Casie Hermansson’s 2001 Reading Feminist Intertextuality through Bluebeard Stories; Cristina Bacchilega’s 1997 Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies), considerations on individual authors (Sharon Rose Wilson’s 1993 Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics), examinations of fairy-tale intertexts in postcolonial works and feminist works (Jack Zipes’s 1986 Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England), and other more historical/chronological approaches. The next four chapters into which the study is divided detail Smith’s original way of looking for or finding fairy-tale tropes in contemporary fiction.

Chapter 1, “The Eight Elements of Intertextual Use of Fairytales,” proposes a thorough investigation of the issue of intertextuality through the use of the theories of Gérard Genette and Mikhail Bakhtin. Readers find a very detailed compendium of the eight different elements of intertextuality that provides examples for each category and underlines those that might be more useful for Smith’s study.

Chapter 2, “Architextual/Chronotopic Intertextuality and Magic Realism in Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet,” proposes a line of approach to magic realism that proves not only creative and ingenious, but also seductive in so far as it discusses the similarities this subgenre may...