2023-08-27 06:51:12
Once upon a time there was a princess named Snow WhiteBefore all, the most beautiful in the kingdom. Being very small, the young woman she lost her mother. And her stepmother, living with a poisonous envy that eats her to the core, sends her into the woods with the intent to kill her. We would all be able to continue this story because we have grown up with it. However, this same story changes if it is told through the eyes of a stepmother who is not as evil as they propose. Neil Gaiman y Colleen Doran in ‘Snow, Crystal, Apples’ (Comic Planet), and even more so if Snow White, the girl with the palest skin in the kingdom, instead of being a sweet and childish princess turns out to be a vampire ready to attack her subjects. And colorín colorado, changing the narrative and the nature of the protagonist, this familiar fairy tale is transformed into a horror story. The story is still recognizable, but it is told in another way, told again: it is a ‘retelling’.
‘Retelling’ is a phenomenon that has spread rapidly in recent years, conquering thousands of readers around the world and also making the leap to the screen through series films that adapt and reshape them: the In the case of the seven seasons of ‘Once upon a time’, which ended in 2018 but can be seen on Disney+, it would be a good example. We can also find him in the Spanish series ‘Tell me a story’, which deals with a different story in each of its episodes. In the first, the three little pigs are brothers who are dedicated to robbing banks.
Is he art of retelling stories, recovering already existing stories –such as fairy tales, or Greek and Latin myths– but introducing variations. For example, changing the point of view of the narrator, or focusing on the version of the villains of the stories or forgotten characters, such as women who played secondary roles or had a passive attitude towards the heroes who saved them. But you can also write a ‘retelling’ by introducing new characters that give a twist to the plot, or by changing the space in which the story takes place. Thus, the far distant realm of all life can be abandoned for an apocalyptic future conquered by artificial intelligence.
Everything is possible in ‘retelling’, as it is a continuous game of intertextuality that has a single condition: the original story must be recognizable, its essence cannot be diluted. Put like this, it no longer seems like such a novel phenomenon: the history of literature is a game of influences and topics where authors from different eras or from remote places connect and influence each other, creating new stories that link to texts. previous. However, in the 21st century we are witnessing an unprecedented boom. What do children’s stories have that appeal to us so much? What is the force of the maverick ‘what if’ in the endings of those stories?
The origin of the stories
The essence of the story, the moral of the end after “they were happy and ate partridges”, has a clear intention: to transmit a lesson from parents to children. “Do not trust strangers”, “love always triumphs”, “be humble and generous” and a long etcetera are ideas that were transmitted orally for generations to the point of creating a whole system of values. Even so, it is difficult to answer the question of why or where the stories appeared. It is not about pointing out the Bavaria of the Grimm brothers in Germany on the map, because the stories, in reality, have such a transcendental dimension that they are capable of overcoming borders and traveling to the other side of the world to tell the same story, with other names and other landscapes.
All the stories share a series of similar characteristics that distinguish them and that are essential for their message to overcome the barriers of time and space. summarizes them Laura Venturainternational doctor in Hispanic Philology and professor of Literature at the Carlos III University of Madrid, who explains that these are “universal and timeless, but they also have very recognizable characters: the archetypes”.
Ventura recalls an anecdote with his students of Chinese origin from the master’s degree he teaches at the university. They were talking about fairy tales and as an example he told them the story of ‘Hansel and Gretel’. At one point, the students began to look at each other in amusement. “‘What’s going on?’ I asked them. They explained to me that this story is not ‘Hansel and Gretel’, but another story that they already knew when they were little that turned out to be another version. It’s funny because China had little What to do then with the Germany of the Grimm, and even so the story was identical. That is why fairy tales have a universal component.”
Regarding the characters, these archetypes are “necessary”, says Ventura, because they establish a series of patterns and without them the stories lose their structure. They have some very specific features: a hero undertakes a journey full of adventures and dangers, at a certain moment he hits rock bottom and goes through a turning point, to later recover, defeat the villain and start the journey back home. That could be the case of Ulysses in the ‘Odyssey’, but also of Frodo Baggins in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ or of the Darling brothers in ‘Peter Pan’. This hero needs a villain to defeat, a nemesis to face him and who represents a series of negative connotations, like stepmothers in stories or the fearsome dragon. And of course, the princess to be saved, such a passive subject that she almost rebounds into the action, that she hopes and despairs that someone will drag her out of her high tower. Others that are also repeated in different stories are the protagonist’s best friend, the magician, the kings…
Faced with such defined characters, ‘retelling’ allows authors to play with the relationships and roles played by the protagonists of the stories. Even so, a figure like the hero is still essential, because he is the backbone of the story and is the one who initiates the action. Only instead of being an example to follow, ‘retelling’ can turn him into an antihero, in the same way that the villain can stop being the bad guy in the story to become only the character who confronts him. “There were already greys in mythology: Apollo killed and raped and Dionysus was the one who made the field fertile,” warns Laura Ventura, who also makes it clear that “stories are perennial, but we approach them with the interpretations that our society elaborates”.
The same story can be read in very different ways simply by attending to the historical context. It is not the same to listen to the story of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in the 18th century than in the 20th or 21st, because what used to be read as just another love story, today can lead to an interpretation of the importance of consent in couple relationships. Society’s look at these stories has changed, but the stories are immortal. Even so, thanks to ‘retelling’ you can bring fairy tales and myths to the present to update their messages and adapt them to today’s historical and social circumstances.
Looking back to look forward
We already found works like ‘The Kings’, by Cortázar, in which the Minotaur confessed to Theseus that he was also a victim of his imposed fate; ‘Ulises’, by Joyce, where the story takes place in Berlin in 1904 and several parallels are established with the work of Homer; ‘Penelope and the Twelve Maids’, by Margaret Atwood, in which Penelope tells her version of her husband’s return to Ithaca, deliberately murdering his maids for considering them traitors; either ‘Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan’, by Carmen Martín Gaitein which Little Red Riding Hood is called Sara Allen and the forest she enters are the skyscrapers of New York.
Now ‘retelling’ has also found its place in youth literature, with sagas like ‘A Court of Thorns and Roses’, by Sarah J. Maas, who transfers the tale of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ to a cursed fairy kingdom where its protagonist, Feyre, accidentally hunts the wrong wolf and to settle his mistake he must go to court; either ‘To kill a kingdom’, by Alexandra Christo, who makes The Little Mermaid a murderer who must end the life of the prince of humans and who is transformed by the Queen of the Sea into a human to carry out her mission. Both sagas have been a success in sales and have been very well received in the TikTok booktoker community. Publishers find in ‘retelling’ the speeches that today have a greater impact, such as concern for the environment or different social movements.
Irina C. Salaberteditor and owner of Nocturna Ediciones, says that ‘retelling’ respects “the original essence of the stories but at the same time makes them current.” An example is Wrath and Dawn by Renee Ahdieh Published by her label, which recovers ‘The Tale of a Thousand and One Nights’ but gives it a twist through a feminist look. In it, Scheherazade volunteers to marry the caliph, a cruel man who murders his wives at dawn, to avenge the death of her best friend.
‘Retelling’ is a phenomenon that is fashionable today in the same way that dystopias became very popular in youth literature just a few years ago. Salabert explains that for a publisher “it is much easier to propose to a reader a story that he already knows”, especially when they add new elements and go further. Bruno Bettelheim said in his classic ‘Psychoanalysis of fairy tales’ (1976) that children’s stories have no irony. On the other hand, Salabert believes that thanks to ‘retelling’ “the conflict becomes more complex, addressing issues such as the sexual identity of the characters, the impact of artificial intelligence or reflecting current social changes.” AND far from replacing the original source, these new versions invite the reader to turn to itbecause they work as “a tribute”.
voices within other voices
One of the criticisms that ‘retellings’ have received is that they have adhered to the values of political correctness, acting as a kind of censorship that throws overboard the most problematic elements of the stories seen with today’s eyes. Martha Sanz wrote in ‘Monstruas y centauras’ (Anagrama, 2018) that “we read the texts ideologically”.
However, and as the author also states, it must be taken into account that representing the world through literature is “a way of building it, of intervening in it”, so ‘retelling’ is a way of giving voice to the characters who were underrepresented by tradition.
Sanz explains to this newspaper that “desacralizing the texts is the way to show them the greatest respect”, and that throughout the history of literature we have metabolized stories to build others. “This is not only legitimate, but also unavoidable.” It is necessary, therefore, to be aware of this mutation of the stories, but above all “do not delete, in any case, the original reference. Not lie. Do not forget”.
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