Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale (review)

Elaborating on the ongoing discussions of fairy tales and narrative technique, Marvelous Geometry takes its place within Wayne State University Press’s Series in Fairy-Tale Studies, which includes Stephen Benson’s seminal engagement with narrative theory in Cycles of Influence (2003) and, more recently, Vanessa Joosen’s excellent Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales (2011), also reviewed in this volume. Within this company, Marvelous Geometry demonstrates the need for continued rigor in the study of the relationship between fairy-tales studies and narrative theory. The book begins with a theoretical introductory chapter, followed by three chapters on the fairy-tale work of James Thurber, Angela Carter, and A. S. Byatt. The last three chapters cover the fairy tale in contemporary popular narratives in genre fiction; popular, primarily Hollywood, production and live action and animated film; and a short concluding chapter on fairy-tale parody.

The marvelous geometry of the title refers to the fairy tale’s “highly encoded and recognizable qualities of structure and pattern and [to] its deliberate and self-conscious distancing of itself from realistic representation, whether in logic and detail or in its operation as magic narrative” (8). The modern fairy tale of the title refers to the corpus of writers and texts studied, which is limited to English-language literary and cinematic productions ranging from the mid-twentieth to the early-twenty-first century. Tiffin carefully delineates her criteria for the choice of texts studied: the texts must clearly retain fairy-tale structures rather than simply include fairy-tale motifs, and they must deliberately accept the marvelous and the fairy tale’s “flatly textured sparsity of tone” (27).

Marvelous Geometry is well grounded in fairy-tale studies. Tiffin’s glosses of and elaborations on discussions and debates about fairy tales and narrative structure, postmodernism, and feminist debates around Angela Carter, and her discussions of the relationship between folkloric, literary, and cinematic texts are cogent. Unfortunately, this familiarity does not extend to postclassical narratology, which is ostensibly the other approach that Marvelous Geometry should engage. In particular, Tiffin’s use of the term metafiction is problematic throughout the text; in Marvelous Geometry metafiction is made to mean any number of forms of textual self-consciousness.

Referring to Patricia Waugh’s definition of metafiction as self-conscious and systematic “attention to [a text’s] status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (qtd. on 23), Tiffin goes on to assume that the “oral voice of the folktale” does the work of bringing the form of tale as tale to the fore and, even more surprisingly, she argues that “the unashamed presentation of the marvelous, as well as the unrealistic use of pattern and repetition in describing events, similarly draws attention to a nonrealist form of representation…. In this sense, then, fairy tale has some inherently metafictional elements” (23). Tiffin’s argument that fairy tales are inherently metafictional depends on an understanding of metafiction that extends well beyond useful categorization. Her primary sources for defining the term are, appropriately enough, Robert Scholes’s Fabulation and Metafiction (1979), Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1984), and Linda Hutcheon’s Theory of Parody (1985) and Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) but interestingly not Narcissistic Narrative (1980). However, reference to any of the studies that have expanded and refined the term since the 1980s are absent. Since the 1980s a great deal has been written to complicate and expand on understandings of metafiction. Marvelous Geometry would have benefited from more recent articles on metanarrative and metafiction, in particular, Monika Fludernik’s “Metanarrative and Metafictional Commentary: From Metadiscursivity to Metanarration and Metafiction” (2003) and Ansgar Nünning’s “On Metanarrative: Towards a Definition, a Typology, and an Outline of the Functions of Metanarrative Commentary” (2004).

Crucially, in her claims for fairy tales as inherently metafictive, Tiffin dismisses one of the primary criteria for metafiction according to Waugh. Tiffin writes: “Fairy tale by my...