Pratchett, Terry (1948– ), English writer of comic fantasy novels. He worked as a journalist and then as a press officer between 1965 and 1987, when he became a full‐time writer. Most of his novels are intended primarily for adults, but like much popular fantasy they also have a strong appeal to adolescent readers. Stories, themes, and motifs are drawn from very diverse areas of history, literature, popular culture, and traditional story, whether the novels are set in the Discworld he has invented as the setting for most of his adult novels, or whether the fantastic irrupts into the everyday modern world, as in his trilogy for young readers, Truckers (1989), Diggers (1990), and Wings (1991). Amongst his many inventive and engaging rereadings of literature, culture, and society, Pratchett has presented readers with playful and at times parodic versions of Homer and Dante (Eric, 1989), of Shakespeare (Wyrd Sisters, 1988, and Lords and Ladies, 1992), of The Phantom of the Opera (Maskerade, 1995), and the origins of pop music in the 1950s (Soul Music, 1994). Specifically fantastic elements are drawn extensively from myths, legends, and fairy tales, and borrowings or allusions appear throughout the novels. Part of the game is to draw attention to the processes of borrowing and refashioning, as when a character in Guards! Guards! (1989) explains an item of knowledge as ‘Well known folk myth’.
Folk‐tale motifs pervade the novels, but their function is usually comic or ironic. Guards! Guards!, for example, pivots on a legend about the finding of a descendant of a vanished royal line, and this heir to the throne is easily identified by readers because he is an orphan possessing a special sword and a birthmark. He himself never realizes the truth, however, remaining in his humble station and so exemplifying a point Pratchett made overtly in his note to the 1992 revision of Carpet People (originally 1971): ‘the real concerns of fantasy ought to be about not having battles, and doing without kings.’ The Truckers trilogy has elements of the folk‐tale quest narrative, but is largely a parody of Tolkienesque ‘high fantasy’, with touches of science fiction. The first volume, Truckers, introduces a world on the periphery of human society inhabited by nomes, small beings whose various social formations reflect and parody the familiar human ‘real’ world (the spelling foregrounds their difference from the ‘gnomes’ of fairy tale). Through his depiction of the nomes Pratchett critiques familiar social systems and behaviours, especially customs associated with religion, class, and gender. He does this by means of parodic citation of familiar texts and discourses and by playing with signs and meanings. The nomes have a society, culture, and religion which is a bricolage of discourses misappropriated from department store signs and advertising, mixed with parodic forms of biblical and religious discourse, philosophical and pseudo‐scientific discourse, and clichéd everyday utterances. The parody draws attention to the constructedness of the represented world and, through that, to the ways in which representations of the world outside the text are similarly constructed and ascribed with meanings.
The novels which make most particular and extensive use of folk and fairy tale are Witches Abroad (1991) and Hogfather (1996). Hogfather can in part be read as a manifesto about the value and functions of fairy tales within culture. The Hogfather of the title is a Santa Claus figure in danger of disappearing because of the pervasive failure of belief under the hegemony of rationalism. Against this threat, the novel's protagonists assert a kind of ontology of the fantastic whereby belief brings concepts into being. Death, for example, whose character has evolved through the Discworld series into the embodiment of a deeply humanistic view of existence and the imagination, asserts that ‘Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.’ The point is to be able to imagine a different world, other possibilities. Thus elsewhere in the novel, Death interrogates and dismisses Andersen's ‘The Little Match Girl’ because its recourse to religious consolation constitutes an evasion of social justice and responsibility. In a more light‐hearted way, the novel mocks the rationalizing binary opposites of structural anthropology: if there is a Tooth Fairy who collects there can also be a Verruca Gnome who delivers, and all it takes to bring the latter into being is a linguistic formulation of the idea of it.
Earlier, in Witches Abroad, Pratchett had examined the more negative possibilities of fairy tales, their capacity to be implicit purveyors of ideology within powerful teleological structures. In this novel, Lilith, an evil‐minded magic‐worker, has set herself up as a fairy godmother and compels people to live their lives as if they were fairy‐tale characters. The frame tale is a version of ‘Cinderella’, with various other tales incorporated, from classics such as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ to modern tales like The Wizard of Oz. Three ‘good’ witches set out to oppose Lilith, striving to bring about endings other than the traditional ones, and hence striving to avert the ideological implications of the tales. Fairy‐tale schemata have their own momentum, however, so on their way to a successful outcome the three witches must resist becoming absorbed into Lilith's version of the narrative, whereby she is the ‘good’ one and they are assigned the adversarial function and are hence destined for defeat.
Beyond the comic turns and surface humour, Pratchett's refashioning of familiar fairy tales addresses large themes: the responsibility of authors in shaping stories, the role of readers in challenging the grand cultural narratives which inhere in fairy tales, and finally the central importance of creativity and imagination to the humanity of human beings.
Bibliography
- Broderick, Kirsten, ‘Past and Present: The Uses of History in Children's Fiction’,
Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature , 6.3 (1996). - Stephens, John, ‘Gender, Genre and Children's Literature’,
Signal , 79 (1996). - ——‘Not Unadjacent to a Play about a Scottish King: Terry Pratchett Retells Macbeth’,
Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature , 7.2 (1997). - ——and McCallum, Robyn, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children's Literature (1998).
— John Stephens
