OCR Document CONTENTS From the Editor ...................................................................... 2 1993 Conference Papers Child as Story-Maker Kay Stone .......................................................................... 3 "Postmodern Fairy Tales" in Contemporary Children's Literature Cynthia Anne Cox ........................................................... 13 CFS: 1993 Annual Meeting ....................................... 20 Notes and Announcements………………………….24 Contributors…………………………………………..24 Cover: Photograph of W.W. Newell courtesy of Harvard University Archives. FROM THE EDITOR. . . It has been a long and busy winter. For various reasons (some of them even good ones and not mere procrastination), the printing and mailing of CFR 16.1 dragged on into the new year. I was delighted to receive a progress letter from Jan Brunvand and discover that others are even later than I getting their encyclope- dia articles done. Speaking of letters, Herb Halpert wrote to suggest that the four articles in the last issue were somewhat vague about the location of the research and that it was "a weakness in the papers that the authors did not give the geographical settings for their observations" and that CFR should also provide the names, addresses, and academic affiliations of its contributors. I must say that I have been thinking the latter myself and have done nothing about it. Henceforth, however, CFR will provide brief notes about the contributors. This issue of CFR continues two themes discussed at previous children's folklore section panels at AFS and also reported in previous issues of this review. The fall 1992 issue (15.1) of CFR carried the complete panel on children and narrative from the 1991 AFS meeting. Kay Stone's "Child as Story-Maker" was originally presented as a paper at the 1993 American Folklore Society Meeting in Eugene, Oregon, and carries on the concern with how children learn and use narrative. In addition, Stone also examines her dual role as mother/folklor- ist and Rachel's dual role as daughter/informant. Cynthia Anne Cox's "'Postmodern Fairy Tales' in Contemporary Children's Literature" follows lines established by Pack Carnes in "Arnold Lobel's Fables and Traditional Fable Features" (CFR 15.2) and examines the way in which contemporary writers for children are "reinventing" well known works of fairy tale literature. This volume concludes, as all spring issues do, with the Minutes from the October meeting and various announcements. For those of you following the fortunes of Associate CFR Editor Laurie Evans, I can tell you that she has decided not to return to East Carolina University as my secretary, but will stay home with her new son; however, she is establishing an home- based editing and desktop publishing venture and will continue as Associate Editor of CFR –for a while at least. I look forward to seeing you all in Milwaukee. C.W. Sullivan III 2 Child as Story-Makerl Kay Stone When I was five, my parents tell me, I regaled them with rambling, disjointed stories of my adventures with Snaky the Rattlesnake, my "invisible" friend. My mother described how amazed she was that a small child could spin out such involved narratives. I assumed that my older brother had found other ways to express his creativity—but now I wonder. Shortly after my first child began spontaneously creating his own original stories at roughly the same age—five—I heard a presentation on children's stories by Brian Sutton-Smith.2 I began to understand that I was not, after all, a child prodigy, but merely passing through an exciting developmental stage of childhood that we all experience, in one way or another. I suppose my brother must have kept his stories to himself. In the early 1980s two particular storytelling incidents with my second child, Rachel, excited my curiosity as a folklorist with a primary interest in adults as story-makers. In order to document Rachel's stories, I had to shift roles from mother to scholar: while listening to and recording the stories and later preparing academic papers on them, I was aware that ethical concerns entered the situation. The delicate balance between my position as subjective parent and objective scholar colors the background of this writing. There are already studies of children at various ages telling stories: these present a broad spectrum of ages and genres, the emphasis being on the development of verbal skills (See Sutton- Smith; Pitcher and Prelinger; Chukovsky). Each of these studies has been carefully conceived and carried out, and each includes abun- dant examples gathered from dozens of children over a stretch of time. Sutton-Smith examines the developmental stages of children as verbal artists, while Pitcher/Prelinger and Chukovsky emphasize psychological interpretations. Chukovsky in particular insists that children have a deep need for fantasy and create their own even in the absence of external literary models. He also notes what he calls "the linguistic genius" of the child, who does not merely copy any adult models that are available but instead "introduces critical evaluation, analysis, and control," even as early as two years of age (Chukovsky 9). Obviously such conscientious approaches are needed for any meaningful generalizations to be made on children as storytellers. The stories I offer here, in contrast, were told by one child over a very limited time period in an uncontrolled environment. This serendipi- 3 Stone tous collecting was not part of a planned study, nor central to my overall work on folk narratives. My modest intent was to describe how one young teller composed two narratives using diverse elements and how she herself re- sponded to these events. However, the question of ethics, as relevant to incidental collecting as it is to other contexts, sheds new light on this topic. I have been acutely aware of my accountability as a folklorist, as well as a parent, in using stories that are by right the property of the teller. When I was asked to contribute a paper to a recent folklore panel on ethics, "The Folklorist's Responsibility to the Child," I thought immediately of my earlier descriptions of Rachel's storytelling. The result is a re-view of the context and process of a child's story-making and the complexities of interaction between folklorist and informant. In working with children we need to be respectfully aware of ethical concerns that arise from our "objective" scholarship. What is this folklorist's responsibility to this child, and how was it negotiated in the two-year period covered by Rachel's storytelling activities? From the beginning I asked her permission to record the stories and to use them as part of my research. I cannot take full credit for this, since Rachel herself was acutely aware that these stories "belonged" to her and reminded me of this fact every time the matter arose. But at age five she had only the vaguest notion of what it meant to use her material for academic research. I was surprised-and encouraged-by Rachel's closing comment on the taped variant of her first story. She concludes with "That's the end," and then adds cheerily, "And hello to all your students." She understood even before I did that I was not merely recording her story as a proud parent; I had no plans to examine her story at that time, but I did indeed use it as an example for students in my folklore classes. The two stories I introduce here, the legend of "Loon Man and Bone Woman" (told at age five) and the anecdote of "The Men With Hats" (age seven) struck me as unusual. (The titles were chosen by Rachel.) I had just begun examining contemporary storytelling by adults and was sensitive to the dynamics of verbal creativity. I had also told folktales in a number of Winnipeg schools and was intrigued by occasional children willing to respond with stories of their own-but children did not become the focus of my narrative studies. Thus my initial interest in Rachel's storytelling was a general curiosity with no serious intent to transform her into an informant. I had heard many of her spontaneous creations over the years, but these two had qualities that awakened the folklorist in me. They were fuller in their development and told with greater assurance, perhaps because they were each based on stories that Rachel had experienced orally. Because I had also heard them I could see more clearly how Rachel functioned as an expressive artist, using or discarding elements of the originals to produce her own narratives. 4 Child as Story-Maker She firmly claimed them as her own creations, establishing self-conscious- ness as an artist and also recognition of her responsibility as an entertainer. She was aware that she was not merely discoursing for a sympathetic ear, but consciously seeking to create coherent stories for which I happened to be a listener. This is much clearer in her second story, "The Men With Hats," told in the presence of an older brother and later to an adult friend. Let us look at each story within the context of its telling and then consider the ethical questions raised by publishing this article. Rachel, now seventeen and quite fiercely aware of her rights, has again given her full permission to use her material, though she asked why I was still working on "those old stories." "Loon Man and Bone Woman"3 In 1981, I was making lunch for the two of us when Rachel began a story about a man who became a loon. At this age she was in the plot stage of storytelling discussed at length by Brian Sutton-Smith (1981). At first "Loon Man" seemed to resemble her other rambling tales with no fixed characters and a loosely connected series of events, but I soon caught the thread of a coherent narrative that took shape as I listened: Loon Man became a well- defined protagonist who set off in search of his missing bird wife and children, stolen by Bone Woman. Aided by four intimidating giants and a leviathan pike, he arrived at Bone Woman's "eggloo" just in time to rescue his family from being cooked for supper. Her spontaneous narrative seemed to resemble what Sutton-Smith calls "folkstories," original narratives that "are not the same as folktales, but share common elements with them" (Sutton-Smith 1). I was intrigued by the literary sophistication of her story (which she very firmly claimed as her own) and asked if she could tell it again, not expecting her to be able to repeat it fully since all previous stories had been once-only events; she not only agreed, but permitted me to tape the retelling. I was surprised that she was able reproduce it accurately, and even improved on it as she went along. The story had a stronger beginning, a better motivated middle, and a more fully resolved conclusion; the characters and action remained stable, not shifting as I had expected. It had all the features of a completed narrative that had been consciously thought out, prepared, and rehearsed. Given the finished nature of the story and her ability to reproduce it, I thought she might have heard it in her kindergarten class, but when I asked where she had learned it, she answered with a slightly indignant tone, "I made it up." Her unambivalent claim to original ownership intrigued me so I asked how she got the ideas for the story. Without speaking she pointed to the wall 5 Stone behind me, where I found a colored print by Canadian Native artist Jackson Beardy. There, sure enough, was Loon Man—or more accurately, a loon who seemed to be battling a large fish; four domed shapes sat above them on the top left of the print, but there was no sign of giants or of Bone Woman and her "eggloo." She explained that the four domes were where the giants lived (in fact they are symbolic thunder-clouds in Beardy's print) and that Bone Woman and her house had been destroyed by Loon Man, so they were not in the picture. But if the giants and Bone Woman were absent from the print, did they spring from her imagination or from an outside source? When I asked, she reminded me that we had seen a puppet play based on the Inuit legend of "Kivioq" in which a hunter marries a bird woman who flies away one day. He follows after her and meets a threatening giant, a huge pike, and a cannibalistic Bee Woman, whom he defeats.4 Rachel told me that she had not enjoyed the play because it was "too scary" and added, "my story was better." Why? Because it had no puppets, and "it had a better ending." Rachel reunites Loon Man and his family, while in the puppet play Kivioq's Goose Wife and children refuse to return with him. Rachel's variant was also less violent and threatening without losing dramatic impact. In sorting out how she composed and repeated her story on the spot by imaginatively bringing together an Inuit legend, a Cree print, and her own reworking of plot, character, and motivation, I was able to see in miniature the interaction of text, texture, and context. With her permission I presented a paper at the 1984 American Folklore Society meeting ("At Home in the Field"), came home, and filed it away. "The Men With Hats" Two years later I again happened to be present when Rachel tried a very different kind of story, a narrative joke. A joke is a very challenging genre, as its success depends on the precision of the wording and the successful delivery of the punch line. Up to this time Rachel had only told simple one- line jokes with no plot line to remember. In the spring of 1984 a few adult friends gathered at our home for an informal afternoon of conversation and joke-telling. Rachel, age seven, moved in and out of the room as she went about her own affairs. I was not aware that she was even present when the following joke was told by a woman already known in our circle as an irreverent jokester:5 Two Sikhs wearing turbans are challenged at Heaven's gates by St. Peter, who asks each, separately, a question. The first is asked what would happen if he lost one eye and then the other, 6 Child as Story-Maker to which he responds that he would be half blind and then totally blind. St. Peter allows him to enter Heaven, then questions the second man about what would happen if he lost one ear and then the other. He responds (having heard the first answers but not the questions) that he would be half blind and then totally blind— because his turban would slip down over one eye and then the other. St Peter, impressed, lets him in as well. I was putting Rachel to bed that night, a time when we often shared casual stories, when she offered to tell the joke "about the men with hats." She surprised me by repeating the joke with absolute accuracy, making only one change from exotic turbans to prosaic hats. I complimented her on her good memory and said good night. The next morning she offered to tell "that joke" again before going off to school, this time in the presence of her older brother who was not normally appreciative of her attempts at joke-telling. As I prepared breakfast, she introduced an entirely original joke based on the pattern of the one she heard the previous day:6 There were two kids getting ready for school and their mother said, "I want to ask you two questions first. You first" So the first boy went in [to the kitchen] and the mother said, "What would happen if I gave you only half your breakfast?" "I'd be half hungry." "So, what if I didn't give you any breakfast?" "I'd be totally hungry." "O.K., you can go." "Just a minute. I want to say bye to my brother." "So she let him." So he went in and he whispered, "The first answer is half hungry and the second one is totally hungry. Bye!" So then the mother asked the second one, "What would happen if I turned the radio down?" "I'd be half hungry." "Well what would happen if I turned it all the way off?" "I'd be totally hungry." "Are you crazy? Why would you be hungry?" "Well, if you were so busy turning the radio on and off you wouldn't have time to make me breakfast" So she let him go too. My son and I both laughed, and Rachel seemed embarrassed by the total success of her performance, responding by saying, "that was just a silly joke." When they left for school, I sat down and wrote out her text, and thought again of "Loon Man and Bone Woman," also told while I was preparing a meal-that is, a casual rather than a formal setting, with my attention directed elsewhere rather than focused on her. As folklorist rather than mother, I noted that she was able to change the text without losing the original joke pattern, but at this point I had nothing more to say about the process. 7 Stone It took a third and unsuccessful retelling of this joke to fully reveal her understanding of her own creativity and to bring my folkloric curiosity to full life. Some weeks after the breakfast performance she was sitting with me and another friend, a man whom she felt entirely comfortable with and whom she knew to be a joke teller himself. He had just told a joke, and she uncharac- teristically offered another; "Here's one I made up," she said proudly, apparently buoyed up by her previous successes. She used the kitchen setting again and remembered that the success of the joke depended on the questions and answers: This mother is making breakfast for her two kids, I think, and she had to ask them some questions before they went to school. So she said to one, "What would you do if I made you stay home from school today?" "I'd be dumb." "Well what if I made you stay home for a whole week?" "I'd be dumber." [The teller realizes that she will have difficulty developing this question and reveals her discomfort nonverbally by pausing, grimacing, shifting her weight, as she tries to figure out what to say next.] Well, so she says, "You can go to school now." "I have to tell my brother something first," and he runs into the living room and says "The answers are dumb and dumber." And he goes away. So then she asks the other kid, "What would happen if I took away your books?" "I'd be dumb." "What would happen if I took away your pen and paper?" "I'd be dumber." She does not bother to end the joke with the "You can go now" closing, but simply stops, pauses, and comments, "Well, that wasn't very good, was it!" This was a rhetorical rather than an actual question, and we ALL laughed—- not at the joke but at her acknowledgment of its failure. I realized that her failure—and her recognition of it—was a clearer demonstration of creativity than her successes had been. I could see how she was using structure to build her new narrative, and I also understood how she had matured as a performer by accepting her responsibility to complete the story even when she understood that it was not going to work-and by gracefully acknowledging her failure. Later that year I asked her permission to use these three storytelling events for a paper to be given at the Canadian folklore meeting, and she agreed-after asking me who would be there and ascertaining that no one she knew would hear her joke.7 My initial interest was in Rachel's gradual recognition of herself as a conscious performer with a responsibility to herself as artist and to her listeners as entertainer. Now, several years later, I have tried to reframe these experiences with the idea of addressing the ethical problems raised in this 8 Child as Story-Maker Panel—MY responsibility to HER. I began by showing Rachel, now 17, the abstract for the 1993 AFS panel and asking her to read what I'd written up to that point, explaining that she had complete control over what was to be included (I had already received permission to reuse the stories). I also asked her to add her own responses. It was my intention to encourage her to be an active collaborator rather than a passive informant. She promised to read what I had written, but never went beyond the abstract. "That's old stuff," she said when I urged her to give me a response. It has been helpful for me to reframe my work with Rachel in this altered perspective: if I had not been aware of the significance of our subtle role shifts from child and mother to informant and folklorist, it would have been impossible to reframe the present article. It has also been a challenge to maintain perspective because of the split focus of this article. On one hand it is an example of oral creativity, and on the other it is a commentary on ethical relations between researcher and child. There is obviously an advantage to being parent, teacher, or anyone else who is in steady contact with children on a long term basis. The child is familiar as both a human being and a creative, expressive individual. This is a subjective position given the privileged connections between the adult and the child. On the other hand, an academic researcher who may see a child only a few times has the advantage of objectivity, since personal connections are secondary to research interests. Scholarly training prepares the viewer to examine the young artists and what they create without the potential drawbacks of subjective personal relationships. I have enjoyed the challenge of attempting to be both parent and researcher, trying to find a balance between subjectivity and objectivity. What has guided me is the central issue of ethics, which can be even more critical when one is dealing with children who are close and familiar. It is hardly a unique situation, given the ground-breaking work of father/scholar Piaget, but the central issue remains the same: the child and the creations of the child must be as fully respected and protected from exploitation as those of any adult. As I noted earlier, I cannot take full credit for treating Rachel and her stories with consistent respect; she seemed to understand from the very beginning that her voice was her own possession and managed to let me know that she was aware of her rights. If she had at any point withdrawn her permission, there would be no article. I leave Rachel's stories with a sense of incompletion similar to that expressed by Pitcher and Prelinger, who conclude: We feel vividly how our analyses and interpretations have fallen short of doing justice to or even comprehending the complexity, 9 Stone the richness, and the literary quality, poetry, and beauty which many of the stories contain (240). *** As I wrote these final words and asked again if Rachel would read this paper and comment, she said, with more than a touch of 17-year-old sarcasm, "I don't need to read this again—I made the stories." She added that she expected a percentage of any royalties I received. While in this case it was a deliberately ironic request (she has learned that academic royalties are not impressive), it might have been less ironic if I were indeed earning money from a book of children's folklore. "And," Rachel might add, "hello to all your students." University of Winnipeg Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada Notes 1. This is a slightly revised version of the paper I presented at the 1993 AFS meeting in Eugene, Oregon. I am indebted to C.W. Sullivan III for requesting it; and also to Mary Louise Chown, Nathaniel Stone, and Carol McGirr for their responsive readings. 2. By coincidence Sutton-Smith's presentation was at the 1976 AFS meeting in Philadelphia, which I attended with three-month-old Rachel, the subject of the present article. Sutton-Smith's paper, "Structural Parallels Between Children's Creative Activity and Children's Folklore," seems to be a bridge between his initial work on children's games and play and his later work on storytelling by children. 3. The title was suggested by Rachel after the fact, in recognition that the taped telling had become a formal rather than a casual storytelling event and seemed, to her, to require a proper title. 4. "Kivioq" was performed by the Manitoba Puppet Theatre in 1981, with realistic and accurately costumed puppets. It was not in any way a "precious" or diminished telling of a complex and challenging Inuit legend. Rachel was not the only young child in the audience who found it disturbing. 5. Since this was an informal storytelling event the joke was not recorded. It is summarized from memory and checked with the original teller, who also gave her permission to include it here. 6. I wrote it down immediately after she left for school, trying to recreate her exact wording as well as I could and checking it with her on her return. 7. "The End of the Story" was presented at the annual meeting of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada in Winnipeg in 1984. 10 Child as Story-Maker Works Cited Chukovsky, Kornei. From Two to Five. Translated from the 1925 Russian edition, Malen’kie deti (Little Children), by Miriam Norton. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1965. Pitcher, Evelyn Goodenough, and Ernst Prelinger. Children Tell Stories. New York: International UP, Inc., 1963. Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Folkstories of Children. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. 1981. 11 "Post modern Fairy Tales" in Contemporary Children's Literaturel Cynthia Anne Cox Publishers of children's literature have shown a renewed interest in fairy tales over the past several years, and especially noteworthy are recent releases which wreak conspicuous—and comic—variations on familiar characters and themes. In their playful experiments with the traditional form and content of Märchen, the authors of these highly artistic books reference and re-envision well-known folk narratives as their titles should indicate: The Frog Prince Continued, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, Cinderella: The Untold Story, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. Unlike the beloved fictions upon which they draw, these reworkings of folk stories deny order. They feature antiheroes and anti-heroines. They relinquish the notion that it is possible to exert any sort of control over the fragmented universe of human experi- ence. They acknowledge that every situation is fraught with endless possibilities and that all we can ever hope to pursue is individual perception in its purely subjective form. In short, postmodernism has reached the fairy tale. On its way toward "reinventing" a work of fairy-tale literature, each of these picture books directs our attention to the printed documents that contain the stories we read and the images we see as do so many "postmodern" works for grown-up readers. For instance: facing each "ordinary" page of The Jolly Postman or Other People's Letters is an envelope, and each of the epistles enclosed in these envelopes is addressed to a fairy-tale character. In the manner of a conventional fairy tale, the book follows the course of a journey, tracing the route of a mail carrier as he makes his appointed rounds. In effect, then, The Jolly Postman is a story about stories. As we watch, Mr. and Mrs. Bear—of Three Bears Cottage, The Woods—receive a note of apology from Goldilocks; Hobgoblin Supplies Ltd. offers the OCCUPANT of Gingerbread Bungalow a catalog of products "for the modern witch"; B.B. (as in "Big Bad") Wolf is contacted by Attorney Harold Meeny and ordered to cease his harassment of Meeny's client, Miss Riding-Hood; Mr. V. (as in "Very") Bigg, resident of Beanstalk Gardens, receives a postcard from the vacationing Jack. And the correspondence of Cinderella constitutes a story about a story about a story: from the managing editor of the Peter Piper Press comes a letter asking Her Royal Highness to examine a book he hopes to publish for young readers 13 Cox in celebration of her marriage; enclosed with the letter is a tiny book which tells Cinderella's "rags to riches" story in "ordinary" fashion. Equally aware of itself as a text is The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. This book is an anthology containing fairy-tale parodies- among them "The Tortoise and the Hair," "The Really Ugly Duckling," and "The Princess and the Bowling Ball" (rather than "the pea"). "The Stinky Cheese Man" spoofs the tale of "The Gingerbread Man," replacing the cute with the disgusting: the title figure is no longer a sweet cookie with raisins for facial features; now, his head is a wheel of limburger, his mouth a piece of bacon, his eyes two green olives. But the volume is much more concerned with the workings of books than the exploits of characters. The narrator, Jack, makes himself visible to the reader, and he continually intrudes on the various stories he is "supposed to" share with us, by offering editorial remarks and showing up in the artwork. He argues against the necessity of a title page (because he has mistakenly placed one in the book upside down); he admits to padding his introduction to the stories "so it [fills] up the page and [makes] it look like I really [know] what [I'm] talking about"; his rendition of "Chicken Little" is cut short because the inadvertently omitted table of contents—rather than the sky—falls down on the characters. Throughout the volume, Jack badgers and is badgered by the characters of other well-known tales—generally because he isn't telling their stories the "right" way. As he introduces the tale of "Little Red Running Shorts," for example, he accidentally "gives away" the entire plot: This next story is . . . about this girl who runs very fast and always wears red running shorts….That's where her name comes from, get it? So anyway, this girl is running to her granny's house when she meets a wolf. He tricks her into taking the long way while he takes the shortcut. ...Red runs so fast that she beats the wolf to granny's house. He knocks on the door. Red answers it. And guess what she says? "My, what slow feet you have." And that's it. The End. Is that great or what? So sit back, relax and enjoy—"Little Red Running Shorts." And now like I already said—"Little Red Running Shorts." Jack is interrupted at this point by Red Running Shorts herself and the wolf— who appear at the bottom of the page, walking away from Jack. "You just told the whole story," Red tells him. "We're not going to tell it again." "You can't say that," Jack objects. "You have to start with 'Once upon a time'." "No way," replies the wolf. "You blew it. We're out of here." On the facing page is a drawing of granny's cottage: the spaces Red Running Shorts and the wolf 14 Postmodern Fairy Tales were to fill are white, and the following page is blank. Unfortunately, Jack had budgeted three pages for the saga of the characters that have gone "on strike. " Elsewhere, too, the pictures call attention to themselves as pictures, the same way the stories call attention to themselves as stories. One especially intricate picture about pictures that appears in The Stinky Cheese Man, in fact, sums up what these "postmodern fairy tales" are all about. Midway through the book we learn that Jack the narrator is one and the same with Jack the boy who trades his cow for magic beans in the traditional "Jack and the Beanstalk." As Jack launches his tale—"the best story in the whole book," of course—the giant intrudes and demands that he be allowed to share a tale of his own creation. This creation turns out to be an enormous, visually arresting pastiche: the ogre has cut up a number of storybooks and pasted the pieces together randomly. The giant's collage spans two pages. The left page consists of phrases taken from many texts, each in a different typeface: "THE END/ of the evil stepmother/ said 'I'll HUFF and SNUFF and/ give you three wishes.' / The beast changed into/ SEVEN DWARVES/ HAPPILY EVER AFTER/ for a spell had been cast by a Wicked Witch/ Once upon a time." On the facing page, drawings that correspond to the texts from which these lines have been taken—and drawings that would appear alongside other texts, as well—have been put together to form a large male figure. We can make out Aladdin's lamp, Cinderella's glass slipper, a black cat, a blackbird emerging from a pie, a wolf's ears, Pinocchio's nose, a donkey, a witch, a red rose, a drawing of Aesop, Puss in Boots, a half-eaten apple, a tin man, a gingerbread man, a harp, a crown, and a golden egg. The message is clear: every story is a hodgepodge of other stories; we all have our own ways of piecing the same materials together. Other volumes feature pictures that call attention to themselves in more subtle ways. In The Frog Prince Continued (whose cover is a painting of a book cover) and The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs (whose cover depicts the front page of a newspaper), the illustrations rarely fill an entire page, as they do in many children's picture books. Instead, a picture that covers approxi- mately three-quarters of a page appears above or below the text to which it corresponds, and the illustration is framed by an elegantly ragged border or deckle edge. And frequently, this frame is broken: as the Frog Prince flees a potential persecutor, for example, his right foot and left elbow extend past the borders for the illustration, and in the background, smoke curls from the chimney of a witch's house and drifts out above the picture's top boundary. Sometimes, however, things are reversed, so that the pictures are framed by the words on the page—as when the second witch offers the Frog Prince the 15 Cox remains of Snow White's poisoned apple. (Interestingly enough, the drawing of the apple recalls that which appears in the Disney version of "Snow White," in the visual equivalent of a parody's reference to a "real" version of a tale.) In myriad other ways, too, these "sequels" to traditional stories are self- reflexive and intertextual. Most important, they figuratively go about the business of standing on end some of our most treasured fairy tales. By taking up where such tales leave off or re-viewing the adventures of established characters whose journeys we have traveled many times, the authors of these books are not simply contributing to a body of literature; they are taking that literature itself as their subject and calling into question that literature-along with the nature of all history, tradition, and truth. The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs is A. Wolf's attempt to "set the record straight." Directly addressing his audience, he begins: "Everybody knows the story of the Three Little Pigs. Or at least they think they do. But I'll let you in on a little secret. Nobody knows the real story, because nobody has heard my side of the story." He remarks, "I don't know how this whole Big Bad Wolf thing got started, but it's all wrong"—and then explains that "Way back in Once Upon a Time time" he had set out to make a birthday cake for his dear old granny; a sneezing fit and the need for a borrowed cup of sugar set in motion a series of events that resulted in the destruction of the porky trio's homes. And in a book from the Birch Lane Press series of "Upside Down Tales," we get "two-books-in one." Read the first time through, "the traditional story of Cinderella is brought to life through glorious illustrations"; turn the book the other way around, and we see Cinderella: The Untold Story, as narrated by one of the allegedly wicked stepsisters. In this "variant," our narrator tells us that "Cinderella changed [the real story] a good bit. [She was] pretty and smart, but she had one very bad habit. She liked to make up stories." According to Dora, Cinderella is the one whose behavior was bad: "[She] was always in trouble for telling stories. Her father made her stand in the comer by the fireplace for punishment. She stood there so often, getting cinders in her hair, that one day she cried, 'You might as well call me Cinderella!' That's how she really got her name." Dora also apprises her readers of the following facts: Cinderella's father actually gave her the gown and slippers she wore to the ball; her own carelessness resulted in the loss of her slipper; and she mistook the Prince's second cousin for the Prince himself. She did marry this royal cousin, we are told, in a brilliant bit of meta-narration: he shared Cindy's tendency to embellish stories, so together, they did live happily ever after, having "gone into the fairy tale business" to "make up all sorts of wonderful stories and tell them to the children of the kingdom." 16 Postmodern Fairy Tales The Frog Prince Continued is concerned with similar reversals: joy turns to sorrow, and so the "good guy" must seek out the bad. Shortly after their wedding, the formerly amphibian prince and his royal bride discover that oddly enough they were happier together when they were members of different species. To rectify the situation, the Frog Prince sets out to find someone who can reverse his transformation. Over the course of his search through the woods, he meets characters from four other stories, and these characters supply the complications which always mark the journey of a fairy- tale hero. The trouble caused by his antagonists is unique, though: removed from their proper context, they are confused and incompetent; they needlessly threaten the prince. Each sorceress is baffled when the Prince refers to himself as a frog, but each shrugs off the confusion to threaten him via a reference to another fairy tale. Luckily, the Prince possesses a wealth of fairy-tale knowledge which saves him from getting into desperate straits. He wisely flees when the first old crone greets his request for a spell by saying: "I'll have to cast a nasty spell on you. I can't have any princes waking up Sleeping Beauty before the hundred years are up." The next responds with, "I can't have any princes rescuing Snow White. Here—eat the rest of this apple"; at this, the prince knows he'd best hurry off. He is once more on the run when the third witch reveals that she is expecting Hansel and Gretel for dinner. Finally, the prince does find someone who can help him, and this character, too, belongs to another fairy story: he meets a Fairy Godmother who tells him she is "on the way to see a girl in the village about going to a ball." She accidentally turns him into a broken-down carriage, but with another nod toward the tale of "Cinderella," a clock in the village eventually strikes midnight, and the prince is again human. He runs home by the light of the moon, vowing to make the best of his lot with the princess, who after all "had believed in him when no one else had." Love is all he needs: when he returns to the castle and kisses his wife with renewed passion, they both turn into frogs and "hop off happily ever after." Critics of Märchen have for decades examined and evaluated the strong sense of order that prevails throughout virtually all of fairy-tale literature, attributing to this orderliness the great appeal of such stories over vast time and space. In his well-known work on the subject, Bruno Bettelheim notes that evil wishes always have bad consequences but good will can always set things right: "The fairy tale's example provides assurance that the child will receive help in his endeavors. . . and that eventual success will reward his sustained efforts" (71-73). And in his extensive writings on these matters, Max Luthi contends, "fairy tales are experienced by their hearers and readers as . . . symbolic poetry" (66); taking in these tales, the children see the basic 17 Cox conflict of good versus evil and come away with the message that "all [desirable] things are possible"—"all sorts of miracles can occur"; "the lowest can rise to the highest position"; "those in the highest position can fall and be destroyed" (138); the genuine will win out over the inauthentic. So what are we to make of "postmodern" renderings of fairy stories in which chaos is the order of the day? We can't take any reassurance from books containing stories in which there are no simple truths, no guarantees— where one character's reality is another's "myth." In the politically correct 90s there are no villains, only misunderstood, unlucky innocents. There isn't any magic, either—at most, if we're lucky, we might be allowed to borrow Daddy's credit cards. And forget neat and tidy conclusions in which any conflicts are resolved-in the postmodern world, there's no such thing as a "happy ending" because there are no endings at all: there is always another perspective or installment; life insists on moving forward. Certainly, the smaller scale implications for any sort of fanciful literature are somewhat grim: Can we take much delight in fairy tales if 1) we're told that more fun than hearing or reading them is ridiculing their "fairly stupid" content and 2) we see that the creative process is only hindered by the adherence to fiction's formal conventions? I don't mean to suggest that fairy tales are to be regarded with hushed reverence or that all of civilization hangs in the balance if we poke a little fun at them. In the end, the "postmodern" picture books do not stray so very far from tradition: each of their protagonists still must make journey; each still must pass three tests or endure three trials; each ultimately arrives safely home (except for A. Wolf, who appears on the last page garbed in prison stripes). These books I've described are clever and colorful and a great deal of fun. And they might well encourage their juvenile audience to ask some important questions about who we are and what we do when we read, as do the adult fictions that these unusual storybooks recall. I wonder, though, if we really need hip three and four-year-olds who can appreciate irony. I do think enchantment continues to have its uses. Belmont University Nashville. Tennessee Notes 1. A version of this paper was presented at the 1993 AFS meeting in Eugene, Oregon. 18 Postmodern Fairy Tales Works Cited Ahlberg, Janet, and Allan Ahlberg. The Jolly Postman or Other People's Letters. Boston: Little, Brown, 1986. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy tales. New York: Knopf,1976. Luthi, Max. Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales. Trans. Lee Chadeayne and Paul Gottwald. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976. Scieszka, Jon. The Frog Prince Continued. New York: Viking, 1991. _______. The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs. New York: Viking, 1989. Scieszka, Jon, and Lane Smith. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. New York: Viking, 1992. Shorto, Russell. Cinderella: The Untold Story. New York: Birch Lane, 1990. 19 Children's Folklore Section 1993 Annual Meeting President Joe Edgette called the 1993 meeting of the Children's Folklore Section to order at 7:10 a.m., Friday, October 29. The minutes of the 1992 meeting were approved. Secretary-Treasurer Danielle Roemer reported that the Section's bank account (as of August 31,1993) contained $14,373.17. This amount included $7804.93 in the Newell Prize Endowment and $6568.57 in the general operating fund. Review editor Chip Sullivan reported that East Carolina University currently contributes $1900.00 a year toward publication of the Review, a contribution for which the section is very grateful. Currently, the Review costs $700-800 per issue to produce. According to Archivist Simon Bronner, the materials in the Section's archives are growing slowly—but they are growing. Children's folklore files donated by Mac E. Barrick are being added to the archive. The archive will also be happy to accept student papers dealing with children's folklore. Joe Edgette announced that there were no submissions for the 1993 Newell Prize; hence, no prize was given. Also, no Opie Prize was awarded for 1993. On behalf of the prize committee, Linda Morley reported that there were 134 nominations for the Aesop Prize, twice as many as in the previous year. The two co-winners of the 1992-1993 Aesop Prize are: 1. Love Flute. Written and illustrated by Paul Goble. New York: Bradbury Press, 1992. 2. Cut from the Same Cloth: American Women in Myth, Legend, and Tall Tale. Written by Robert D. San Souci and illustrated by Brian Pinkney. New York: Bradbury Press, 1993. The Aesop Prize Committee also proposed an Aesop Accolade List and named six titles to it for the 1992-1993 year. Recognized for special achievement are: 20 Children' s Folklore Section 1. Ishi’s Tale of Lizard. Written by Leanne Hinton and Susan Roth. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992. 2. Northern Lights: The Soccer Trails. Written by Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak and illustrated by Vladyana Krykorka. Buffalo: Annick Press, 1993. 3. Sundiata: Lion King of Mali. Written and illustrated by David Wisniewski. New York: Clarion Press, 1993. 4. Surtsey: The Newest Place on Earth. Written by Kathryn Lasky with photographs by Christopher G. Knight. New York: Hyperion Books, 1992. 5. The Green Gourd: A North Carolina Folktale. Retold by C.W.Hunter and illustrated by Tony Griego. A Whitebird Book. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1992. 6. Big Man, Big Country: A Collection of American Tall Tales. Edited and retold by Paul Robert Walker and illustrated by James Bernardin. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich Publishers, 1993. On behalf of the Lifetime Achievement Award Committee, Priscilla Ord announced that Roger Pinon has been named as the Section's 1993 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award. Under Old Business, Chip Sullivan reported on his continuing quest for material to be used on the Section's proposed t-shirts. He has located a portrait photograph of W.W. Newell from the Harvard University Archives. (The photograph appeared on the cover of the fall 1993 issue of the Review.) Chip proposed that this photograph be used on the front of the t-shirt with the words "Children's Folklore Section" on either the front or the back of the shirt. Members present offered various suggestions. By consensus, they agreed that Chip should continue his investigations and report again at the 1994 meeting. Priscilla Ord passed around possible designs for the Aesop Prize medallion sticker (which the publishers will purchase from the Section and attach to the 21 Children's Folklore Section front cover of the Aesop Award-winning book). The members present discussed the offered designs and agreed that the Executive Board, with input from the membership, should decide on the particular design to be used. Nominations were then opened for the office of President-Elect. Margaret Read MacDonald was nominated and elected by acclamation. Under New Business, incoming President Carole H. Carpenter proposed the re-appointment of Chip Sullivan as Review Editor and Simon Bronner as Archivist. The re-appointments were moved, seconded, and passed unani- mously. Chip Sullivan announced that Laurie Evans would continue to serve as Associate Editor of the Review and would assist with matters of editing, layout, and production. The Executive Board reported its recommendation that the Associate Editor receive an honorarium of $100.00 per issue for her work. The recommendation was moved, seconded, and passed. Mailing costs for the Review were discussed, and a motion was made, seconded, and passed to add $5.00 for the members outside the U.S. who want their copies of CFR airmailed. Dues will remain $10.00 for those willing to wait for surface mail. Priscilla Ord advised those present that the Aesop Medallion artist Richard McClintoch needed to be paid for the rights to his medallion designs. The Executive Board proposed remuneration of $200.00. The proposal was moved, seconded, and passed. The Aesop Prize Committee for 1993-1994 will consist of Linda Morley and Carole Carpenter (co-chairs) as well as new member Ruth Stotter, who replaces outgoing member Gary Alan Fine. Each committee member serves a three-year term. Carole Carpenter advised those present of a special issue of the Joumal of the Canadian Children's Literature Association. This publication (which at the time of the present writing has actually been expanded to two issues) deals with reworkings of fairy tales. The journal is produced at Guelph University, Guelph, Ontario, Canada. 22 Children's Folklore Section On behalf of herself and her co-author, Graham Seal, Gwenda Davey announced the recent publication of their book, The Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore. Priscilla Ord reminded those present of the 1994 meeting of the Children's Literature Association to be held at Southwest Missouri State University, Springfield, Missouri, June 2-5. Those present were also reminded of the 1993 AFS Section-sponsored Children's Folklore Panel, "The Folklorist's Responsibility to the Child." The panel was organized and will be chaired by Margaret Read MacDonald. It will be held on Friday, October 29, 1993, from 1:15-3:00 p.m. The participants are: 1. Priscilla A. Ord (Longwood College), "Alvin Schwartz (1927-1992): A Retrospective of a Modern Day Pied Piper." 2. Kay Stone (University of Winnipeg), "Child as Story-Maker." 3. Carole H. Carpenter (York University), "Developing an Appreciation for the Cultural Significance of Childlore." 4. Margaret Read MacDonald (King County Library), "A Folktale Goes to the Inauguration. " 5. Discussant: Ruth Stotter (Tiburon, California). Simon Bronner then raised the question of a Section-sponsored panel at the 1994 AFS meeting. Carole Carpenter agreed to organize the panel. The meeting was adjourned at 8:00 a.m. Respectfully submitted, Danielle M. Roemer Secretary -Treasurer 23 Notes and Announcements The Children's Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society annually offers the W.W. Newell Prize (which includes a cash award of $350.00) for the best undergraduate or graduate student essay on a topic in children's folklore. Students must submit their own papers, and published papers are eligible. Instructors are asked to encourage students with eligible papers to enter the competition. Papers must be typed, double-spaced, and on white paper. On the first page include the author's name, academic address, home address, and telephone numbers. Deadline for each year's competition is March 1st. Submit papers or write for additional information: Joe Edgette, 509 Academy Avenue, Glenolden, PA 19036. Contributors Cynthia Anne Cox is in the Department of Literature and Language at Belmont University in Nashville where she is currently completing a dissertation on using folklore to teach critical writing. She is also working on a textbook on the same subject. Kay Stone, a storyteller as well as a university professor, is in the English Department at the University of Winnipeg and was one of the founding members of the Children's Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society. 24 The Children’s Folklore Review is available only to members of the Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society. To become a member, send $10.00 yearly dues to Danielle Roemer, Literature and Language, Northern Kentucky Univer- Sity, Highland Heights, KY 41076. Dues are $15.00 for non-U.S. members who wish airmail delivery of CFR; non-U.S. members Wishing surface mail delivery of CFR will still pay $10.00 yearly dues CFR requests manuscripts that are prepared using laser printed text or letter quality text. We request that authors using typewrit- ers or dot-matrix printers have their manuscripts redone and a laser printed copy made. This will enable us to scan the copy, thereby eliminating rekeying the manuscript. Please send manuscripts to: C.W. Sullivan III, Editor Children’s Folklore Review Department of English East Carolina University Greenville, NC 27858-4353 Children’s Folklore Review is published twice a year and sent to all members of the Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society. Published by East Carolina University ISSN: 0739-5558 Copyright © 1994 Children’s Folklore Section CFR Editorial Board C.W. Sullivan III, Editor Judith Haut, Book Review Editor 2733 Halsey Road Topanga, CA 90290 Jay Mechling American Studies University of California-Davis Davis, CA 95616 Priscilla A. Ord Department of English, Philosophy, and Modern Languages Longwood College Farmville, VA 23901 Laurie Evans, Associate Editor 2060 Quail Ridge Road Greenville, NC 27858 Child as Story-Maker Postmodern Fairy Tales