POSTMODERNIST REMAKES OF THE FAIRY-TALE:

DONALD BARTHELME’S SNOW WHITE AND JOHN

BARTH’S “DUNYAZADIAD”

Ishmael Reed, was characterized by the formal suspension of traditional narrative procedures
-
tal formal interventions by the abovementioned authors, e.g. the disruption of linearity and
chronology, the fragmentation, the intertextuality, or the blend of the high and low culture,
the revision of traditional genres became a prominent aspect of the postmodern hybridity.

Barthelme’s novel Snow White from his Chimera

The Thousand and One Nights

that the authors’ deliberate play with the fairy-tale conventions are inseparable from and

and gender themes. In other words, the paper offers a reading that foregrounds the redef-
inition of the genre in the service of displaying Barth’s and Barthelme’s views on the act
of (postmodernist) writing as well as on the limitations of patriarchy and challenges of the
second-wave feminism.

1. INTRODUCTION

-
thelme, Thomas Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed was characterized by the formal sus-
pension and subversion of traditional narrative procedures that went along with
-
mental formal interventions included the disruption of linearity, the fragmentation,
the intertextuality, the blend of the high and low culture as well as the revision of

novel or the fairy-tale.

179
 Snow White (1967), or rather a collection of

one of three novellas from his

Chimera The
Thousand and One Nights as its hypotext.

both formally and thematically, since the experimental form is intertwined with the

of displaying the authors’ views on the act of (postmodernist) writing as well as on

the limitations of patriarchy and challenges of the second-wave feminism.

2. THE FAIRY-TALE IN THE POSTMODERN LITERARY

CONTEXT

interest in this genre among the postmodern authors of the 20th century (e.g. Rob-
ert Coover, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, or Italo Calvino) and it may be useful

many postmodernists and why many among them came to see the fairy-tale as a
particularly convenient genre for their postmodern narrative and thematic explora-

a deliberate and conscious construction of itself within a set of codes recognized

the fairy-tale as a simply told story with recognizable patterns are the use of the
opening formula “once upon a time”; the recurrent characterization patterns i.e.

and enchantments) as well as predictable plots in storytelling (e.g. the triumph of

themselves within the realm of the marvelous and that they openly deny the cau-
sality usually associated with reality, demanding from the reader to accept them on

out that the fairy-tale became “a favored playground of many postmodern writ-
ers” not in spite of, but because of the highly complex, patterned and formalized
structure, stressing that postmodernists recognized that the fairy-tale “exhibits a

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authors decided to emphasize what the traditional fairy-tale tended to obscure in
order to lay a claim to the universality of its messages, namely the socio-histor-
ical context. Therefore, the postmodern rewritings of traditional fairy-tales laid

hidden ideological subtext of the fairy-tales, their investment into the selling of
ideology under the disguise of universality. Hence, postmodern handling of the

which seethes complex historical and ideological layering which begs to be dis-

recognized as the underlying ideological discourse of the fairy-tales, which started

to be accurately and systematically researched and documented with the rise of
-

which meditate on the challenges, rewards and/or limitations of feminism in the

revived interest of postmodern authors in the possibilities of creative rewritings

of the fairy-tales was not only stimulated by new critical assessments of the fairy-

criticism that stressed the new importance of the fairy-tale.

3. BARTHELME’S SNOW WHITE

Barthelme’s Snow White which came out in 1967 preceded or coincided with

Alison Lurie’s “Fairy-Tale Liberation” (1970) and Marcia Lieberman’s “‘Some

to Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) and Co-
lette Dowling’s The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence
(1981)1. It is possible, therefore, to view Barthelme’s Snow White as an early post-

by providing them with a model text that successfully destabilized the patriarchal
ideological matrix of the traditional fairy-tale. Indeed, regardless of whether the

1
For a detailed overview of the early feminist fairy-tale criticism see Chapter 1 “Feminist Fairy-Tale
Scholarship” by Donald Haase in Donald Haase (Ed.), Fairy-tales and Feminism: New Approaches,

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feminist fairy-tale critics of the 1970s were either aware of Barthelme’s novel or
willing to admit that awareness, many of their critical contributions prove useful
for investigating important aspects of Barthelme’s revision of the old fairy-tale

explicit and implicit references to the intertext/hypotext. Thus, the reference to a

fairy-tale in the title counts among the more explicit references, while the allusion
to a fairy-tale within the text in the form of characters’ proper names and character
descriptions belongs in the class of more implicit references (Smith 2007).

intertext and represents another implicit reference to its textual predecessor. Fur-

Bill, Clem, or Dan cannot be misleading since they are given to characters gener-

Barthelme decided to issue instructions for the readers in case they missed the

to the motifs and structural patterns of its intertext, e.g. by references to her psy-

((Barthelme 1996:23) or to her traumatic memories of “the huntsman, the forest,

At the same time Barthelme underlines the ways in which the old fairy-tale
no longer functions in the changed social and cultural context of the late 20th cen-
tury. The creative tension arises at the intersection of the old and the new between
the obsolete and modern social and gender patterns as well as narrative strategies.
Beside the discrepancy between the old fairy-tale script and new cultural climate,
the author emphasizes the sway that the outmoded notions still hold over people
living in the 20th century: “The revolution of the past generation in the religious

Snow White as a

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revision, that is, a critical re-examination of the old in the sense that the new ver-
sion supplants and improves the old one.

-
ous in its handling of the fairy-tale conventions: “[... ] Barthelme obviously feels
that previous mythic structures no longer can serve the writer as useful framing
-
formed” (McCaffery 1982: -
-
ing dwarfs, dreaming of a prince who would come into her world and bring a
miraculous change, it simultaneously undermines the traditional plot, adapting the
latter to the modern sexual and social mores. Stanley Trachtenberg in Understand-
ing Donald Barthelme listed elements that are not present in Barthelme’s novel,

she also spends time going into therapy, attending college courses, reading, trying
to write a poem and admiring herself in the mirror (Trachtenberg 1990). Thus,

of the late 1960s, torn apart between the old and new values: the internalized ro-

independence and emancipation. This might be Barthelme’s feminist commentary

on the harmfulness of patriarchal norms promoted in the fairy-tales, anticipating
the abovementioned avalanche of feminist fairy-tale criticism in the years after
the novel’s publication. Despite her many modern ways and her awareness of the

by the old script. Her inability for a profound change is further ironized in her
attempt to replace the Snow White
Rapunzel which leaves her as frustrated as before, because it prescribes passive

for the princely rescuer. Needless to say, the prince never comes, whether Snow

simultaneously a comment on the age in which old gender roles are no longer felt
as something natural:
No one has come to climb up. That says it all. This time is the wrong time for
me. I am in the wrong time. There is something wrong with all those people

being able to supply a prince. For not being able to at least be civilized enough
to supply the correct ending to the story. (Barthelme 1996: 132)

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 -
tions nourished by the traditional fairy-tale plot, the readers, Barthelme seems to

their experience of standard fairy-tale conventions. The section thus serves both

tale and patriarchy. The author suggests that the modern world has to be met on

world comply with the traditional fairy-tale structure and its patriarchal messages.
The 20th-century authors and readers have to liberate themselves from the old
narrative patterns in order to appreciate new artistic forms, just as the 20th-century
women and men have to liberate themselves from the traditional gender concepts

reluctance with which women accept their own independence as the crucial obsta-

of gender stereotypes in which the fairy-tales, among other cultural items, have
played a vital role.
Barthelme’s novel thus predates important insights won by critics such as

roles validated in the fairy-tales and changed social reality of the 1960s and the
1970s that left women in an unresolved tension between “between the cultural

could be seen as just such a woman plagued by contradictory impulses and para-

(Barthelme 1996: 187) signals a possible end scenario for all half-reluctant would-
be feminists and warns about the possible failure of the feminist project. Society

be condemned to revert to conservatism, offering entrapment in the guise of the

-
tary on the importance of accepting literary change, including a new poetics that
Snow White.

princely role, representing one of Barthelme’s neurotic anti-heros. He resists being

that comes closest to heroic, he gets poisoned. The death of a prince represents the
most radical violation of the traditional fairy-tale storyline, while the manner of

with her responsibilities of sorts” (Barthelme 1996: 13-14). Paul is tragicomically

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away with that ideal, denying princeliness to men. In fact, Paul’s life path is a par-

a stereotypical motif in traditional literature and movies, then he travels around

surveillance system in the cellar.

of the novel, their leader Bill, another self-conscious sociophobic neurotic, has

torture, just as they show capable of real violence when they hang Bill in the end
and choose the sinister Hogo as their new leader. Although they are occasionally
critical of the middle-class values, they are in reality very bourgeois in their con-

-
sent the average modern man condemned to banality, a metaphorical emotional
and intellectual dwarf, without either princely prerogatives of the past or genuine
sophistication that would signal the New Man for the new age. Thus, when Snow

where the traditional gender models no longer apply, yet the satisfactory new ones
have not been found. He seems to be saying that in the modern age patriarchal

by buying her things, from the new shower curtains to the golden pants. The range
of male characters in the novel shows that the modern man turns into either a brute
chauvinist (Hogo), a self-concious neurotic (Paul) or a banal consumerist whose
-
one charismatic enough to impose himself as a leader (dwarfs).
However, as previously stated, consideration of gender issues is inseparable

strictly artistic concerns and include socio-political commentary. Therefore his

185
addressed more directly, but they are mostly presented less obviously through the

in dealing with language and communication, including their mistrust of words,

symbols or the very communication rules and processes.
The novels’ minimalist form operates with the fragmentation and collage
pointing at two related problems that have come to determine the postmodern
semnsibility, namely, the sense of life having become complex to the point of un-
representability and the poststructuralist sense of inability of language to represent

‘chapters’ or entries are usually extremely short, rarely exceeding the length of two
or three pages, while several are nothing more than one- or two-line inscriptions or
slogans, without proper transitions between them, and often without any indication
of how, if at all, they are interconnected. Mistrust of language is among the more

straightforwardly is demonstrated in various ways in the novel, including Bar-

thelme’s favorite method of deliberately ‘infecting’ his texts with slang, suggesting
-
ences and the inclusion of what he calls the verbal dreck or blague. Characters are

the dwarfs give attention to “those aspects of language that may be seen as a model

I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!”
(Barthelme 1996: 12). The poor functioning of language as a communication de-
vice is repeatedly challenged throughout the novel in numerous passages in which
the author feels compelled to additionally explain the meaning of certain words or
phrases.

4. JOHN BARTH’S “DUNYAZADIAD”

famous essay on the exhaustion or used-upness of traditional literary forms, came

out in the same year 1967 as Barthelme’s Snow White. Barth suggested a new,

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“Dunyazadiad” from his tryptich Chimera (1972), Barth set about to revisit the
old collection of Oriental fairy-tales of Thousand and One Nights, demonstrat-

commentary on the relation between the literary past and present and a demonstra-

the plot and content of the fairy-tale that serves as its intertext, Barth established
parallels between past and present while, on the structural level, he did not revisit
the individual tales told by Scheherazade, but focused on the frame-story and on
the position of Scheherazade as a storyteller. In “Getting Oriented: The Stories
Thus Far” Barth returns to his lifelong fascination with the frame-story of The
Thousand and One Nights and Scheherazade’s position, explicitly stating that he

artists in general” (Barth 1984: 135). In “Muse, Spare Me”, he sees Scheherezade

alter ego, and states that “The whole frame of those thousand nights and a night

aspect of “Dunyazadiad,” a brilliant postmodern demonstration of the possibilities

of the ancient device of the framing story that Barth claims was used particularly
impressively in The Thousand and One Nights.
Barth constructed “Dunyazadiad” by focusing on the frame-story in which
the storyteller is not Scheherazade, but her younger sister Dunyazade, who appears
in the traditional version as a minor character. Barth’s story begins at the point
when Scheherazade, after thousand nights, has run out of the stories and, unable to
-

the story of how Scheherazade had understood her storytelling as a potentially sui-

liberals and feminists, she says her older sister was “so appalled at the state of the
nation that she dropped out of school in her last semester to do full-time research

(Barth 2001: 5-6).

However, in Barth’s version Scheherazade has forgotten all of the old stories

her from the future to supply her with the stories. The Genie in turn gets the sto-
ries from the volumes of The Thousand and One Nights in his private library. On

in “The Literature of Replenishment” (Barth 1980), about creative revisiting of

premodernist, traditional literary forms and texts that enabled the postmodern lit-
-

187
de (tradition) survive by providing her with her own, forgotten stories, conver-

Genie reminds Scheherezade of her own tradition goes to show that the process

have been forgotten if it had not been for its (post) modern revisions.
Nevertheless, as much as the Genie/Barth hurries to help Scheherezade
across the limits of time and space, the hero of the story is the little sister Dunyaza-
-
de cannot continue because the Genie announces that he has no more stories for
her and that she will have to stop relying on the recorded tradition. Scheherezade,
however, in all her greatness, is incapable of inventing and improvizing: “I don’t
invent. [...] I only recount” (Barth 2001: 29). The survival, Barth suggests, depends
on the courage to improvize and that is precisely where Dunyazade steps in. She
is the master of improvisation and a prototype of a postmodern writer in that she
survives and saves both herself and her sister (tradition) by recurring to the same
strategy as the Genie and Barth, namely by admitting her own cluelessness and
confusion.
Once the sisters are informed by the Genie that they have to rely on new

taught him to appreciate women. There is also to be a double wedding because

he announces that his brother Shah Zaman, another reformed misogynist, is to
marry Dunyazade. Scheherazade’s further plan for her and her sister is to castrate

humiliations she and her little sister have suffered, and bids Dunyazade farewell
he and she
of the story, told by Dunyazade, ends with the scene in which Dunyazade has tied
Shah Zaman to bed, preparing to castrate and then murder him with a dagger she
has smuggled into the chamber. Yet, contrary to Scheherazade’s instructions, she

herself by his guards, having little to lose. Dunyazade thus comes to represent the
postmodern writer who tells stories at the critical moment when all faith in the
restoring power of storytelling seems to be lost and who is unexpectedly rewarded
with a happy ending at the moment of utter hopelessness. Only now do the words

revealed, to Dunyazade’s surprise, that the story would be titled after her, that she
was going to be its main character, and that the circumstances of her wedding-
night-to-come will be “arresting for taletellers of his particular place and time”

188
(Barth 2001: 32). So, it is Dunyazade’s courage fueled by hopelessness of her situ-

beyond tradition by abandoning Scheherazade’s revengeful plan and allowing the

with completing “Dunyazadiad” so that the narrative collaboration of the old and

As for the treatment of gender issues, Barth recognized that the frame story
of The Thousand and One Night
subordinate women, yet contained subtle and potentially feminist messages. He

story:

that he sleeps

him; and how

that wonderful young woman Scheherazade, the Vizier’s daughter, beguiles
him with
narrative strategies until he comes to his senses. For a time, I regarded the
Nights as an

“the Savior

to his women

well. (Barth 1984: 135)

Barth embraced the opportunity and developed the gender theme, creating

by their wives which convinced them that women can not be trusted and must
be punished, intimidated and controlled. The hurt pride, the wish to control fe-

describes Scheherazade by using the liberal jargon of the 1960s: she is “Home-
coming Queen, valedictorian-elect” with “the highest average in the history of
the campus” and “every graduate department in the East was after her with fel-
lowships” (Barth 2001: 5). She made it her goal to stop Shahryar’s “gynocide” by
-

and decapitated Moslem girls was past nine hundred” (Barth 2001: 6) That the
help comes in the form of the male Genie/Barth is thus an indication of necessary

189
cooperation between men and women, as between past and present. Still, after

or “win some victory for our sex by diverting our persecutors with naughty stunts
and stories!” and concludes by telling Dunyazade they have accomplished noth-

feels that her position as a storyteller was giving her only temporary power, while

fury over the injustices of patriarchy that inevitably leads to violent confrontation
where the gender relations are burdened with distrust. Expectedly, Scheherazade
does not believe in the true, everlasting love between any given woman and man.

terrorist” hoping Allah would grant her reunion with her sister in the other world

Yet, throughout the story Barth recurrently draws parallels between story-

and the listener is “by nature erotic” (Barth 2001: 25), that the position of the
storyteller is “essentially masculine” and that “regardless of his actual gender”
(Barth 2001: 25-26), the position of the listener/reader feminine, while the tale is
the “medium of their intercourse” (Barth 2001: 26). He uses the terms masculine
and feminine as metaphors for an active and passive relation to a story, without
favoring one over the other. He promotes the exchange and cooperation between
the teller and the listener, and man and woman, brought about by permanent re-
negotiation of their positions. The positions of power or powerlessness between

and robbed of power.

In the second part, Dunyazade and Zaman’s cooperation results from the
genuine desire to understand each other and to alter the “wretched state of af-

and boredom and resentment the rule” (Barth 2001: 46). This section focuses on
the constructive reversal of roles between women and men, as both lovers and
consumers or producers of stories, demonstrating the Genie’s claim that the narra-
tive relation is “a love relation-not a rape: its success depended upon the reader’s
consent and cooperation, which she could withhold or at any moment withdraw”
(Barth 2001: 26). Thus, Dunyazade and Zaman symbolize a revision of patriarchy
as well as a revision of narrative tradition.
Barth shows the position of storyteller does not automatically guarantee
power and that the position of the listener does not automatically imply inferiority
or powerlessness. By assigning women in his story the positions of storytellers
-

190
cause the patriarchal system clearly reserves the real power for men. Yet, Dunyaza-

of, just as her sexual and narrative partner Zaman, who turns from her potential
molester and rapist into her lover and husband, is prepared both to admit gender

to put the old gender hostilities behind, but not before they honestly assess the
situation in their respective stories. Dunyazade, on her part, gives reasons for her
condemnation of patriarchy, Zaman for his previous half-reluctant accompliceship
in the upholding of patriarchy: male and brotherly solidarity with Shahryar along
with social and political pressures to maintain the conservative image for fear of
ridicule and rebellion. Yet, he reveals to astonished Dunyazade that he consented to

of its founder to create a separate female society. Zaman’s readiness to challenge

himself and perhaps be granted life, love and forgiveness. Position of the storytell-
er thus again implies powerlessness just as it invests both Zaman and the sisters
with various degrees of manipulative power. Yet, Barth shows that renegotiation

his domination. For example, although Zaman is tied to bed and Dunyazade can

shape of his guards at the entrance, as he himself recognizes. Yet he also admits
that he is no longer willing to use that power in the awareness that the solution lies
in the necessary reaching out towards women. The aim towards which both wom-
en and men have to aspire is to cease otherizing one another, despite the realization

Zaman tells Dunyazade that Shahryar has been reformed in accepting that women

resolved to live as if ideal love exists despite the awareness of the contrary.

Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo

sanjasos@hotmail.com

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