grouped together in recognisable patterns which allow readers to expect and locate them,
and to cause them to seek out like texts.
Texts of quotation are probably the simplest level at which child readers can recognise
intertextuality. Examples are works such as Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s The Jolly
Postman (1986), John Prater’s Once Upon a Time (1993), Jon Scieszka’s The Stinky
Cheese Man (1992) and his The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! (1989), and Roald Dahl’s
Revolting Rhymes (1987). All these fictions are characterised by their allusive qualities.
They make explicit assumptions about previously read fairytales: ‘Everyone knows the
story of the Three Little Pigs. Or at least they think they do’ (Scieszka 1989: first
opening), and ‘I guess you think you know this story. You don’t, the real one’s much
more gory’ (Dahl 1987:5). So, as well as assuming familiarity with an ‘already read’
intertext the ‘focused texts’ are at the same time foregrounding their own authenticity;
that is, they purport to be more authoritative than the texts they are quoting and are
thereby undermining the ‘truth’ of their pre-texts. They cleverly destabilise the security
of their readers by positioning them ambivalently in relation to (1) what they think they
know already about the fairy tales and (2) the story they are now reading. At the
discursive level, then, these particular examples of texts of quotation are doing much
more than simply alluding to other texts; they are challenging their readers’ ‘already
read’ notions of the reliable narrator by an act of referring back which says it was all a
lie. And The Jolly Postman is, at the very least, breaking readers’ ‘already read’ boundary
of fictionality by presenting them with a clutch of touchable, usable, readable literary
artefacts from and to characters of fiction, which are themselves facsimile versions of
their real-life counterparts.
Every text of quotation which relocates the so-called primary text in a new cultural
and linguistic context must be by definition a parody and a distortion. All the examples I
have given parody the telling of traditional tales: Once Upon a Time (Prater 1993), ‘Once
upon a time’ (Scieszka 1992: passim), and ‘Once upon a bicycle’ (Ahlberg 1986: first
opening). But the challenge to authority and problems of authenticity for these quotation
texts of fairy tales lies in the fact that the tales themselves are a collage of quotations,
each of which has assumed a spurious ‘first version’ authenticity but for which the ur-
text does not exist, or at least, cannot be located. The situation of fairy tales in
contemporary culture is analogous to Barthes’s notion of ‘lost codes’. The tales are
intelligible because they build on already embedded discourses which happened
elsewhere and at another time; they are part of the sedimented folk memory of discourse
and they function now by the simple fact that other tales like them have already existed.
Children’s exposure to other media such as film, television animations, and video,
means increasingly, that they are likely to encounter these media adaptations of a
children’s fiction before they encounter the written text and to come to regard it as the
‘original’ from which to approach and on which to base, their (later) reading of the
written version. This has particular implications for a theory of intertextuality because it
raises questions about whether the nature of the later reading is qualitatively and
experientially different if the ur-text happens to have been a Disney cartoon version of,
say, ‘Snow White’. Children’s intertextual experience is peculiarly achronological, so the
question about what sense children make of a given text when the intertextual
experience cannot be assumed, is important.
130 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES