In August 2006, before the final installment of Harry Potter was released, major newspapers published articles begging Rowling not to kill off Harry. The advice—even warnings—to Rowlings continued an ongoing literary tradition of authors struggling with audiences for control of fictional narratives. Writers have storified this contest in works as diverse as Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and King’s Misery—but William Goldman’s novel The Princess Bride takes the contest to new heights, creating an interactive, eternally contested metanarrative that extends, I would argue, outward to the screenplay and filmed version.
Published critiques on the novel seem to discuss it primarily as raw material for the film. Henry and Rossen-Knill, for example, base their analysis of the film’s “parodic impulse” on Bakhtin’s theories of novelistic discourse and parody. Alfonso and Frago examine the novel’s characters to explain their reading of Frye’s “ironic mythos” as adapted for the film version.
Goldman’s narrative is indeed both ironic and parodic, but I believe the ground for both these impulses is that contested territory between writer and reader. Goldman continually traverses this territory with his framed narratives, “fake outs,” and unreliable narrators to re-enact the author’s negotiation of the terms of fiction with those who consume and are affected by it. That negotiation begins with the reception of S. Morgenstern’s “original” story, continues with a suggestion that readers write the novel’s publisher to obtain mysteriously missing pages (many, according to the New York Times, actually did write in), and ends (or does it?) with the abuptly broken off sequel, Buttercup’s Baby. Like Misery,—which, in fact, figures into an episode in Goldman’s saga—Princess Bride depicts a battle of wills between writers and their fans. The film, with its changes and re-imagining, continues that battle.
About the presenterLauraAnne Carroll-Adler
Associate Professor of Writing (Teaching), University of Southern California.