Retelling

The reader knows the story. She knew it before she opened the book, and she knows what the ballroom is for, and she knows who the sisters are, and the writer has to do something with the fact that nothing can be a surprise. Retelling is a form in which a known narrative is rebuilt, and the source can be a fairy tale, a Shakespeare, an Austen, a myth, or a nineteenth-century novel. The specific origin matters less than the structural condition, which is that the reader arrives already holding the shape. What the form promises is the pleasure of variation over a known bass line. The reader is not reading to find out what happens. She is reading to find out what this writer thinks about what happens, which is a more sophisticated pleasure and one the genre is unusually good at delivering. The make-or-break element is whether the retelling has an argument. That is the whole test. A retelling exists to say something the original did not, or could not, or said badly. The stepsisters were not villains. The bargain in the original was monstrous and nobody in it said so. The woman who was a prize is here a person with an opinion about being one. Whatever the argument is, the reader should be able to state it by the midpoint, and every deviation from the source should serve it. The failure mode is transposition without argument. The story is moved to a new setting, the beats are hit in order, the characters are given contemporary jobs, and nothing has been added except relocation. That is a costume change. The reader who knows the source is reading a version she has already read, in different clothes, with no reward for the recognition. There is a second failure, which is the reverence problem. Some retellings are so respectful of the source that they will not contradict it, and so the interesting scenes, the ones where the new version disagrees, never arrive. Fidelity is not a virtue in this form. The source has already been written. There is an opposite failure, less common but real, which is the retelling that keeps only the title. Nothing structural survives, the resonances are gone, and the reader's foreknowledge does no work. At that point the writer has given up the form's one advantage. The strongest retellings understand that the reader's knowledge is a resource. Dread can be generated from it, because she knows what is coming and the characters do not. Relief can be generated by withholding it, because she is braced for a beat that does not arrive. And the biggest available effect is the corrected ending: the source's conclusion, arriving as expected, and then continuing past the point where the original stopped. There is a practical matter that shapes the form more than it should, which is copyright. Sources in the public domain, meaning fairy tales, myth, Shakespeare and the nineteenth-century canon, are retold constantly. More recent work is not, which means the form's raw material skews old, and its arguments are therefore frequently arguments with the values of another century. That is fertile ground and also a limitation, and it explains why so much of the shelf is in conversation with the same dozen stories. The ballroom scene happens. It goes the way it always goes, until it does not. That is the form. Not the familiar story, but the disagreement with it.