New Wine in Old Bottles: Intertextuality and Creating New Myth in the Fantasy

Fiction of Gregory Maguire

Karen GrahamPhD Student, Religious Studies

University of Aberdeen

New Wine in Old BottlesWhat has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.Ecclesiates 1:9

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years

From time to time someone comes up with the idea that there are only seven stories in the world. Or only three, or only eleven, or whatever. Or else they claim to have discovered that every different story is a variant of one basic story, such as Cinderella, or the quest for the Holy Grail. And they find no lack of listeners, because our interest in how stories work and in what sort of stories there could be is almost as powerful as our appetite to hear them told. We could argue about it for ever, and our pleasure would never pall. But what is certain is that writers and novelists and poets, people who have a visceral need to tell stories, find themselves coming back again and again to those narrative shapes and forms and structures we call myths.Philip Pullman, A Word or Two About Myths

Contents

• Fantasy, folklore and myth: a short exercise in classification

• Approaches to myth in Maguire’s writing• Re-writing existing folklore: examples from

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked with of the West and Mirror, Mirror

• Conclusions: New Myth?

A Note on Fantasy

Kevin Crossley-HollardAngela CarterNeil Gaiman

Bill WillinghamLloyd AlexanderSusan CooperKate ThomsonJ. R. R. TolkienSusanna ClarkeTerry Pratchet

A Note on Fantasy

• A literary genre• An illusion or hallucination• The desire for an unobtainable object• A product of the imagination, a figment or

fiction• A supposition resting on no solid grounds• An artistic mode

Folklore and Myth

• Folkloric sub-categories: fairy tale, myth and legend

• Folklore and literature

• Why myth and what it means

Approaches to Myth in Maguire’s Writing

• Explicit re-writing

• Metadiegetic myth

• Existing motifs expanded into full myth

Parent Texts: Wicked

• L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories• 1939 MGM film The Wonderful Wizard of Oz• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight• The Red Shoes (Anderson)

Parent Texts: Mirror, Mirror

• Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (Grimm & Grimm)

• 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

• Genesis• The Book of Revelation

Fantasy in Maguire’s Writing

• Historical fiction with uncanny/supernatural elements within the narrative

• Other-world fantasy

• Magical realism

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Mirror, Mirror

Fantasy resists, and indeed mocks, the elaborate classification systems of academia that have grown up around it, just as it defies the view that its huge popularity is a sad reflection on the state of contemporary culture.Peter Hunt, Alternative worlds in Fantasy Fiction