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Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches

2022; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/style.56.1-2.0105

2374-6629

Katie Wales,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

The aim of this collection of essays, as Marina Lambrou states in her Introduction, is to provide “new insights into the diverse forms of fictional and factional narratives and the many ways they can be told and retold,” using an “empirical stylistic approach” (1) and “a range of methodologies and frameworks” (16) in the process. The “Retelling” of the title, in her own words (and with her own italics), can be interpreted very broadly as “adaptation, translation, recounting, reimagening, reconfiguring, recreating, restorying, revising, remembering, manipulating, rereading, rewriting, reframing, reinterpreting, editing, disnarrating, transferring, migrating, repeating, experimenting, transposing, and transforming” (11). The actual twelve chapters in the book produce other terms, including reconstructing, reworking, recycling, repetition, return, recapitulating, reevaluating, reconceptualizing, reconstrual, and reexperiencing. And as Jeremy Scott playfully puts it in Chapter 2 restorying “involves a restoration of other texts . . . a rejuvenation, a re-energizing, even a resurrection” (23) (my italics).As Lambrou also states in her Introduction, there have been earlier studies of “retelling”: in schema theory, conversational narratives, psychotherapy, and pedagogy (3–5). In classroom, stylistics could be added the influential work of Pope (1995) on “textual intervention”: indeed this is invoked by Ian Cushing in Chapter 11. Outside academia, most people are aware of the concept through the adaptation of fiction, for example, into film: and two of the chapters here are concerned with Jane Austen (by Joe Bray and Anne Furlong). The book is divided into three parts: five chapters on “Fictional Retellings”; four chapters on (misleadingly) “Factual Retellings”; and three chapters on “Pedagogical Applications.”If the concept of “retelling” is broadly defined, so too is “narrative.” Take Chapter 8 in Part Two by Jean Boase-Beier: “Retelling Catastrophe through Translation.” Her premise is unarguable, that people having experienced terrible events like the Holocaust need to tell someone else about them; and that some of their “stories” are poems. She analyzes a short 12-line poem (O strangely light life close to death) written in 1943 for his fiancée by Alfred Schmidt-Sas awaiting execution in a Berlin prison, published posthumously in 1954 and translated into English in 2019. She argues that there is a narrator, a location, and a “temporal sequence of events” (134); but nevertheless her own conclusion is that the whole “point” of the poem is not actually his execution but the “fac[ing of] devastating events with calm” (140): such a feeling likeliest to be associated with lyric poetry. There is no doubting the persuasion of her analysis, however. My quibble about definitions resurfaces in Chapter 10 of Part Two: “ ‘This is a sponsored post, but all opinions are my own’: Advertising (Re)tellings on Social Media” by Helen Ringrow. She is looking at advertorials for cosmetics by “influencers” or “Instagram celebrities”: the “retelling,” however, is simply using the “brief” given by the brand representative, albeit personalized; and the examples she gives are really product reviews or testing, not narratives proper. What is interesting to note is that the structure of the advertorials, essentially product endorsements, seems to have changed very little over the years, despite the change in media platform from magazine to TV, and so on, and hence her telling use of Michael Hoey’s “problem-solution” model from 1983, nearly fifty years ago.Although all the chapters offer some points of value, I wish here to focus on three of them which are particularly well argued and thought-provoking. Chapter 6 by Christiana Gregoriou is concerned with “Rewriting Misdirection: A Stylistic Approach to Crime Fiction Writing.” Drawing on the University of Leeds UK Brotherton Library’s special collection of crime fiction, she looks closely at early drafts and related notebooks of Peter Robinson’s Gallows View (1987), featuring DCI Alan Banks, to show how a narrative can be “retold” in editing and redrafting. Given that crime fiction generally and traditionally conforms to certain rules of “misdirection,” her main research question is this: “What are the stylistic means through which Robinson operates the workings of reader misdirection . . . while responding to the challenge of ‘playing fair’?” (96). She draws on the valuable work of Emmott and Alexander (e.g., 2014), who have analyzed misdirecting techniques and reader efforts to “repair” and reconstruct.Chapter 7 by Marcello Giovanelli looks at “Siegfried Sassoon, Autofiction and Style: Retelling the Experience of War.” Sassoon reshaped and retold large parts of diary entries, letters, and poems in his two trilogies of prose memoirs (1928–45) and Giovanelli looks particularly at a retelling of his 1917 poem Lamentations in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). Here, “narrative events are retold across time and different genres” leading to “reconstruction” and “reevaluation” (114). As a result, there are “ontological distortions, combining the recounting of real events . . . with various degrees of fictionality” (114). The reader constructs “a series of nested viewpoints” which results in a “stronger emphasis on the act of remembering rather than the remembered” (124).Chapter 9 by Patricia Canning on “Retelling Hillsborough: A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Witness Statements” is an interesting foray into forensic stylistics. She looks at the retellings of the infamous Hillsborough Football Stadium disaster in Sheffield, United Kingdom in 1989, through analysis of the institutional practice of witness statements. These are essentially recapitulations of an oral narrative, but coconstructed between the witness and police officer(s). Her argument is that these narratives are invariably “steered” along “institutionally sanctioned lines,” hence compromising “the evidential value of a witness’s testimony” (145). Stylistic features that are her particular focus include negation, which can “help steer to the very expectations it refutes” (148). Rhetorical terms are aptly deployed to denote “saying what you cannot or will not say” (paralipsis) and “the correction of a proposition” (metanoia) (149). The negations certainly suggest topic control by the interviewer; and it would appear that witnesses have been probed to elicit negative appraisals of Liverpool fans.Lambrou apparently drafted her Introduction during the coronavirus pandemic (6). Perhaps, she can be forgiven, therefore, for irregularities of punctuation (especially commas); and of syntax (“passages from Austen’s novels with its modern retellings” (12)); and typographical errors. I had to read a sentence in the Acknowledgments several times: “. . . as while the editor edits the contributors’ chapters, who edits the editor.” Perhaps a question mark would help? Lambrou notes of the pandemic that “personal and collective narratives of grief and hope” are emerging daily on all media platforms (6). To reinforce the theme of the volume, she might have added that the global narrative of the pandemic itself, in its varied political contexts, fake and true, is constantly being rewritten, reconceptualized, and reevaluated.