MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper examines the meta-fictional discourses in William Goldman’s 1973 novel The Princess Bride and discusses its “reduction” to a singular representation of the storyteller/audience relationship in Rob Reiner’s 1987 adaptation. Goldman’s novel is self-conscious as it creates a paratextual discourse of the novel’s history; the premise of the novel is that what Goldman presents is not his own work, but his careful abridgment of a longer text (written initially in a fictional foreign language). Goldman also introduces a significant intertext, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which serves as a point of reference for the adventure novel Goldman constructs (though Goldman claims that the “original” novel predates Butch, and in fact inspired the film’s famous cliff-jump scene). Goldman repeatedly interrupts the telling of the story to comment on the fictional author’s writing style, and to address questions of genre, including reported conversations with literary critics, academics, and publishing professionals. At varying times the reader is encouraged to skip portions of the novel, and at one point to write the publisher to receive a copy of a scene Goldman himself wrote but could not publish (since legal issues prevent him). This playful, meta-textual discursive practice becomes primarily a singular discursive practice in Reiner’s film. Goldman explains that as a child the book was read to him (by his father, who left only “the good parts” in, the adventure tale); the film re-enacts this dynamic, having a grandfather read the story to his grandson. These two characters do interrupt the storytelling at various times, but these interruptions build on their own relationship, rather than a meta-fictional discussion of storytelling itself as with Goldman’s interruptions. I will be using the writing of Robert Stam, Linda Hutcheon, and other recent writings on adaptation to examine the question of self-consciousness in novel and film.