A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS, or Postmodernism for young readers

DIPARTIMENTO DI SCIENZE DELLA FORMAZIONE, SCIENZE UMANE E DELLA COMUNICAZIONE INTERCULTURALE CORSO DI LAUREA IN LINGUE PER LA COMUNICAZIONE INTERCULTURALE E D’IMPRESA A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS, or Postmodernism for young readers Relatore Prof. Simona Micali Tesi di laurea di Michele Di Palma Anno accademico 2019/20 Table of Contents CHAPTER 1- An Idiosyncratic Introduction .......................................................................... 1 1.1 Foreword to the reader ............................................................................................... 1 1.2 Who is Lemony Snicket? ............................................................................................ 1 1.3 What is Postmodernism? ............................................................................................ 4 1.4 The Postmodern aesthetic ........................................................................................... 6 1.5 Understanding Middle-Grade Fiction ....................................................................... 10 1.6 Crossingover and a purpose ..................................................................................... 12 CHAPTER 2 - The Jolliest Journey ....................................................................................... 13 2.1 About a most upsetting story .................................................................................... 13 2.2 About a somber fictional world ................................................................................ 15 2.3 Seeing the world as make-believe ............................................................................ 18 2.4 Of sardonic references ............................................................................................. 22 2.5 The comical irony of a treacherous world................................................................. 25 CHAPTER 3 - A Whimsical Writing..................................................................................... 29 3.1 The importance of language ..................................................................................... 29 3.2 The Postmodern perspective ..................................................................................... 29 3.3 The intrusive narrator ............................................................................................... 30 3.4 The world of words .................................................................................................. 36 3.5 V.F.D. — Various Foggy Definitions .......................................................................... 38 3.6 Elements of whimsy ................................................................................................. 41 3.7 Foreshadowing......................................................................................................... 44 CHAPTER 4 - The Awful Adaptations .................................................................................. 47 4.1 Different Medias ...................................................................................................... 47 4.2 The intricacies of adaptations ................................................................................... 51 4.3 The Netflix Adaptation ............................................................................................. 56 Conclusion - The Great Unknown ...................................................................................... 64 5.1 The Recap ................................................................................................................ 64 5.2 Before the ending..................................................................................................... 65 5.3 The coconut cordial: a utopia................................................................................... 67 5.4 The sense of a non-ending........................................................................................ 74 5.5 Chapter 5 ................................................................................................................. 79 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................... 83 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................. 84 I WEB REFERENCES .............................................................................................................. 88 II CHAPTER 1- An Idiosyncratic Introduction Dear Reader, If you have just picked up this book, then it is not too late to put it back down. Like the previous books in A Series of Unfortunate Events, there is nothing to be found in these pages but misery, despair, and discomfort, and you still have time to choose something else to read. - Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator 1.1 Foreword to the reader In true Lemony Snicket fashion, I must warn you: this might well be the worst dissertation you have ever had the displeasure of reading and I therefore must call your attention to the possibility of reading something eloquently better worded. You are now probably finding yourself wanting to get as far away as possible from this text. Maybe to go for a refreshing beverage would be a much better choice. But I would like you to stay and were I the Italian writer Italo Calvino, I would now advise you to find the most comfortable position in which to read these words: «Prendi la posizione più comoda: seduto, sdraiato, raggomitolato, coricato. Coricato sulla schiena, su un fianco, sulla pancia. In poltrona, sul divano, sulla sedia a dondolo, sulla sedia a sdraio, sul pouf. Sull'amaca, se hai un'amaca»1. Nevertheless, I know how odd my addressing you directly must sound, and that right now you may be thinking: «God, what is this student on about?»; but for the time being, indulge me, will you? As it is my duty as a third-year student to present you a well-researched and somewhat original paper and given that I am also incredibly passionate about literature, I can assure you that this bizarre behaviour of mine does have an explanation. One you will find in this idiosyncratic2 introduction. One you would understand were you to ask yourself: «Who might this Snicket person be?». 1.2 Who is Lemony Snicket? Much as Mr. Snicket himself wouldn’t want me to speak of such matters, I find myself obliged to disclose important details about his life for the purposes of my analysis. Lemony Snicket is a mysterious novelist best known for having written A Series Of Unfortunate Events, a project published in thirteen instalments by HarperCollins, which has gained a modest success between young readers of age 9 to 15-16 and on which our academic interest falls. But in order to learn more about Lemony Snicket, we need to refer to his Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography (2002). It is in this companion novel that we, Italo CALVINO, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, p. 1. Idiosyncratic, adjective, a word which here means “distinctive, quirky, yet very personal feature pertaining to the text you are reading”. 1 2 1 the readers, can reconstruct his life by reading between the typical unclear lines of the author’s style. Born at Valorous Farms Dairy3, situated «across the “pretty deadly” lake», date unknown, Lemony Snicket was an intelligent child and in all likelihood was for this very reason kidnapped by the secret spy organization called V.F.D to start his training as a member. In yet one more series called All The Wrong Questions, consisting of four children’s novels and published between 2012 and 2015, we learn about Snicket’s formative years starting at thirteen and leading up to some of the events prior to the original series (although these are always reported in an off-hand manner with brief mentions and passing comments). Snicket portrays himself as a selfless boy willing to go out of his way to help others; a child with interests such as: taxidermy; playing the harpsichord; and Dino Buzzati’s La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia (1945) which appears to be his favourite book. In the first novel Who could that be at this hour? (2012) and in the second one When did you see her last? (2013), we follow him as he learns the quintessential skills of a V.F.D member, such as eavesdropping, following strangers without them noticing and learning secrets. As the novels progress, we can notice how Lemony slowly starts to turn into the morose, depressed and cynical character we encounter in A Series Of Unfortunate Events. This character development is made more blatant in the final book Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights? (2015), for example with the following conversation between him and Ellington Feint, a deceitful green-eyed girl who is a major character in the novels and has just found out that her father has been killed by the evil Hangfire. «"The world is full of disappointment," I said. "Yes," she said, "I heard him say that. And every creature is simply trying to get what it wants, and to make their way through a difficult world. Do you believe that?" "No," I said. "There's more than that." "Like what?" "Like good books," I said, "and good people. And good librarians, who are almost both at once"» 4 As you have surely noticed, Lemony utilizes a first-person narrative and all his books seem to have autobiographical elements. He is the main character of the four All The Wrong Questions books; he is a character in the thirteen novels of A Series Of Unfortunate Events; he has interests, abilities, he grows, loves, feels true pain. He could very well be a fully-fledged flesh and blood person, especially since I referred to him as being the author of these books. But here is the peculiarity of it all: Lemony Snicket does not exist. The man I have told you about is a fictitious character in these novels. In her essay The language of fiction. Pratiche di lettura del testo narrativo, Donatella Montini states that: «La voce è l’istanza produttrice del discorso narrativo, dunque il 3 4 Lemony SNICKET, Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, pp. 10-11. Lemony SNICKET, Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights?, p.198. 2 narratore […] il cui nome di norma compare sulla copertina del libro. Il narratore non è neanche l’autore implicito (implied author), «”the author’s second self”, come lo chiama [W.C] Booth»5. Lemony Snicket blurs the line enclosed by these roles: he is the first-person narrator, he is the implied author and the supposed “real” author whose name appears on the cover of the novels that you may find in any bookstore, online store or library. But in spite of that, he only belongs to a world made of ink and paper because he is a pseudonym, a name used by someone instead of their real name. The author behind the mask is really Daniel Handler, who likes to present himself as Snicket’s “official representative”, since Snicket rarely shows up in public places being a very secretive person and on the run. Daniel Handler is an American writer and musician, born February 28th, 1970 in San Francisco, California. He always brings a little notebook with him when he is out, so that when he gets ideas he can immediately write them down and later type them on a computer; he usually extensively mulls over things and he chose the pen name Lemony Snicket when he was researching his first satirical fiction novel The Basic Eight (1998): «I was calling up a right wing religious organization and political groups in order to make fun of them. I thought to myself: “I better not tell them my real name, I’ll be on their mailing list forever.” So she said, “What is your name?”. I said, “Lemony Snicket”».6 An ironic presentation with the author seemingly having come up with the pseudonym right on the spot. The Basic Eight might be read as a precursor to all that A Series Of Unfortunate Events will later be. We follow the main character Flannery through a traditional journalentries style and letters to a certain character called Adam State. Thereby, the novel is her teenage diary, but the twist is that she is currently editing it from prison in order for it to get published. As we keep on reading, we find Flannery to be a neurotic and unreliable first-person narrator. She seems to be slowly losing awareness of her reality, she treats time with a rather choppy manner. The reader cannot trust her to be telling the truth, because she is editing what she once wrote to suit her own new narrative. She adds in anecdotes for the sake of dramatization, she randomly includes ideas for other novels and, what’s more, she acknowledges her writing process. At one point in the story, her friend “V__” offers Flannery a ride to school and they then have a conversation which leads her friend to make a remark about the true nature of The Basic Eight being some sort of secret society. Flannery is put-off by the aforementioned remark and tells the reader: «Whatever we were, we were bound together unofficially, casually; and I objected to it loudly from the start. Or would have, anyway; the truth of the matter is that I walked all the way to school, but that conversation happened sometime, surely; 5 6 Donatella MONTINI, The Language Of Fiction. Pratiche di lettura del testo narrativo, p.70. PBS NewsHour, How Lemony Snicket channels his bewilderment into words: https://youtu.be/ghhfgJ7HYxQ 3 plus, I needed to fully introduce V__ and voice my objections to my reading public, to all wary parents and curious teenagers»7. In addition to that, the novel is written in a textbook-like style, with a “Vocabulary”8 list of words and “Study Questions” for the reader at the end of each chapter which display a fairly snarky tone. «Vocabulary: […] ELOCUTION DROSOPHILA* *May be difficult to find in some dictionaries. Study Questions: […] 2. Is it rude to bring an uninvited guest to a dinner party? Should you be excused if it’s your boyfriend? What if he’s dumb?»9. The narrator is wholly aware of what she is doing and wants the reader to have the same level of awareness. Come rain or shine, she wants the reader to appreciate her untrustworthiness and she does so by clearly exposing her narrative mechanisms and by using the “Study Questions” as a mean to further the plot. But that is not the end of it, for the reader’s certainties are once more destroyed by the epilogue in which Flannery’s doctor and therapist, Eleanor Tert, takes the stage. «You’ve just read the diary of Flannery Culp, the famed teenage Satanic murderess who led her cult, the Basic Eight, to notoriety this year with the murder of Adam State»10. The fourth wall is now even more demolished as the doctor explains how all the events and characters have been filtered through Flannery’s deranged point of view only to make her look as likeable as possible to the reader. With that said, all these features can already point us in the direction of the genre of literature which we are here to investigate. 1.3 What is Postmodernism? Varying are the definitions surrounding the term Postmodernism, a movement which managed to spark the interest of many intellectuals who tried to give their own contribution in order to define it. For some it was, for others it still is, a movement that took over the fields of philosophy, art, architecture and so on, putting itself as the counterpart to Modernism. The literary critic Jean-François Lyotard in his essay Answering the question: what is postmodernism? (La condition postmoderne, 1979) states: «The postmodern would be Daniel HANDLER, The Basic Eight, p. 32. This idea about providing the reader with uncanny words, will evolve in the thirteen novels of A Series Of Unfortunate Events. 9 Daniel HANDLER, The Basic Eight, p. 120. 10 Daniel HANDLER, The Basic Eight, p. 375. 7 8 4 that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable»11. Lyotard believed Postmodernism to still be in action. He wrote about the existence of a degree zero, present in the foundations of our contemporary global culture made out of McDonald’s and where knowledge only pertains to Tv game shows. As opposed to Lyotard’s stance, John Frow’s essay What Was Postmodernism? (1990, republished 1997)12, explores the idea of Postmodernism being «a moment of the modern», progressively continuing with the strive for innovation which moved modernism. Truthfully, Postmodernism was born in a world which had just barely made it out of two World Wars and where the field of literature was fairly shell-shocked and looking for safety in new forms of experimentation, affirming what Paola Splendore defines in her essay Il secondo Novecento as «eclectic» realism, developing the most disparate styles and techniques13. It is most challenging to try and give a precise time-division to a movement; such developments do not happen overnight, but they are outstretched throughout long periods of time. In Italy, the academic Remo Ceserani asserts in Raccontare il postmoderno that we may find the birth of Postmodernism in an epoch-making change happened in the 1950s: «un mutamento che ci ha cambiato nel profondo, che ha agito sulla nostra struttura percettiva, di pensiero e di comportamento, sui nostri rapporti con la natura e con la società, sui modi del lavoro e della produzione, su quelli della conoscenza e dell’immaginario, sui modi della comunicazione»14. Additionally, he also refers to an English critic, Brian McHale, finding his idea about the different questions Postmodernism and Modernism pose themselves to be quite interesting. Where modernism’s dominant is epistemological, asking itself questions about knowledge and how we can gain it, postmodernism’s dominant is ontological, wondering what exactly existence is, how many worlds are really out there and whether or not we exist in these worlds. To furtherly explain how far apart these two movements really are, two examples can be brought forward. For instance, as regards Modernism, McHale proposes William Faulkner’s «canonically modernist novel» The Sound and the Fury (1929)15, describing it as epistemological in that it is difficult «knowing anything for sure, or anything at all» while reading through the three interior monologues of the three brothers (one of whom is also an unreliable narrator) and in that it asks readers to become detectives and piece the story together by themselves. Jean-Francois LYOTARD, The Posmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p. 82. Brian MCHALE, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 4. 13 Paola SPLENDORE, Il secondo Novecento, p. 250. 14 Remo CESERANI, Raccontare il postmoderno, p. 10. 15 Brian McHale, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism, pp. 14-15. 11 12 5 Conflictingly, in respect to Postmodernism, we are bound to bring in one of the leading exponents of this movement: American author Thomas Pynchon, with his historical satire science fiction novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Set in the last years of World War II, Gravity’s Rainbow presents many postmodern characteristics: a complex plot packed with digressions, characters and where the modern linear narrative line fails in favour of hallucinations and dreams which interrupt the narrative thread. What is to be done with a world that does not know extinction but only transformation, as stated in the novel’s epigraph by Wernher von Braun16? The readers are no longer detectives, they simply find themselves overwhelmed by the vast scope of the narrative and by the questions raised. Remo Ceserani finds more contrasts: for instance, where Modernism followed characters lost in the sense of alienation which permeated society, Postmodernism presents fragmented, decentralized characters who reflect the reality around them. This fragmentation also affects time and history: «Il passato e il futuro si schiacciano sul presente, l’esperienza della temporalità, [...] l’aspirazione utopica vengono sostituite da rappresentazioni della crisi della temporalità e della storicità»17. That is to say that Postmodernism questions the concept of history as a single narrative because, in actuality, it is just as fragmented as time. This is also explored by British writer Julian Barnes in the short story collection A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), where he proposes the idea that we can only write one of the many possible histories of the world based on the many different point of views which can tell them. In addition, the 6th story in this collection, The Mountain, summarizes for us one more important feature of this movement, which will also later be useful in our understanding of Snicket’s novels: skepticism. Postmodernism is skeptical about the possibility for us humans to fully comprehend our world, be it through the divine or the scientifical. In the short story, Colonel Fergusson is an old, dying man who has always believed in science and sound reason, whereas his daughter Amanda is a religious woman who believes in the Almighty, and their different interpretations of reality clash leaving them also unable to understand each other. «Where Amanda discovered in the world divine intent, benevolent order and rigorous justice, her father had seen only chaos, hazard and malice. Yet they were both examining the same world»18. 1.4 The Postmodern aesthetic Postmodernism is nuanced to say the least. Subversive in regards of modernist ideology, this movement presents some distinctive characteristics and given its multifaceted nature, does allow for new and experimental practices to fall under its name. Thomas PYNCHON, Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973. Remo CESERANI, Raccontare il postmoderno, p. 142. 18 Julian BARNES, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, p. 148. 16 17 6 J. F. Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) states: «the narrative function is losing its functors»19, he furtherly explains how the modern grand récits (grand narratives) are losing their credibility and that Postmodernism should now rely on self-reflective structures meaning metanarration, a term coined by Lyotard himself, to create the petits récits. As Lyotard explains, Postmodernism cannot be dissociated from metanarration (although some Postmodern main works do not present metanarrative devices), because it is in the metanarrative structures that we can organize knowledge and find the inherent meanings in our subjective experience as individuals. Here in Italy, we can boast one of the most blatant examples of metanarrative fiction in the already mentioned Italo Calvino. Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore is a tale which calls into question narrative devices, reflects upon itself and about the ultimate aim of writing. It is the very definition of what we would call metafiction. In the introduction to Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (1981), Linda Hutcheon affirms: «”Metafiction”, as it has now been named, is fiction about fiction - that is, fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity»20. She then goes on to define such narrative as “narcissistic” not in a derogatory way, just as a suggestive way of describing its selfawareness. As reported by Remo Ceserani in Raccontare il postmoderno: «In realtà una letteratura postmoderna in Italia c’è stata e c’è, solo che si nasconde, preferisce non presentarsi come tale»21. Adding to this we can bring forward, as he does himself, the lack of studies concerning Calvino’s link to postmodernist culture; but still, we can boast many authors who delved into the techniques belonging to this movement: Umberto Eco, Dacia Maraini, Antonio Tabucchi. A wider list can come to us from overseas with writers of the likes of John Fowles, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, David Foster Wallace. Particularly in Atwood’s case, to this day there still are debates regarding The Handmaid’s Tale final “Historical Notes”. This section, serving as the epilogue, is set on June 25, 2195 and is a transcript of a symposium held in a university in the Arctic. What the man, Professor Pieixoto, is supposed to give a speech about gives the reader one final strike: «As you all know, he is co-editor, with Professor Knotly Wade, also of Cambridge, of the manuscript under consideration today, and was instrumental in its transcription, annotation, and publication. The title of his talk is “Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale”»22. In a metanarrative fashion, the fictional world of the novel will now have its own version of what the reader has just finished reading, as transcribed by the male perspective of Professor Pieixoto. J.F. LYOTARD, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p. xxiv. Linda HUTCHEON, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, Waterloo, p. 1. 21 Remo CESERANI, Raccontare il postmoderno, p. 166. 22 Margaret ATWOOD, The Handmaid’s Tale, p. 312. 19 20 7 Moreover, Postmodernism has a knack for quotations, parodies and pastiche. Postmodernism does express the desire of detaching itself from the past, but at the same time it quotes it, recalls it, reuses it and rewrites it to fit its needs. In a dialogue between Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés, Hutcheon states that: «The postmodern does indeed recall the past, but always with the kind of ironic double vision that acknowledges the final impossibility of indulging in nostalgia, even as it consciously evokes nostalgia’s affective power».23 With John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, we encounter a parody of the Victorian novel. Set in 1867, the novel presents a harsh critique to the Victorian age’s strict morality and it cunningly does so through its characters, all which seem to be almost anachronistic, meaning out of their time. Let us take one of the major characters, Sarah Woodruff casted away from society because of false rumours about her presumed escapade with the French lieutenant of the title. Sarah is in reality a woman ahead of her time, a woman who does not wish to be held accountable to anyone’s authority, a woman who wants to satisfy her passions while not having to tie herself to a man. A woman who seemingly does not belong to the second part of the XIX century and is incredibly modern in her longing not to be understood. Proceeding with our list we find the Pastiche or pasticcio. As French translator Antoine Berman puts it: «L’imitazione e la sua forma minore, il pastiche, sono le modalità più vicine all’atto di tradurre. Esse consistono nel selezionare un certo numero di tratti stilistici di un’opera»24, for example Tom Stoppard’s tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966). As opposed to Aeschylus’ Oresteia retelling Mourning Becomes Electra by American playwright Eugene O'Neill, in which the characters parallel those of the original Greek tragedy and their emotional states are depicted in the typical naturalist almost clinical way, Stoppard’s not only takes his characters right out of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and renders them the main characters of his play but also appropriates Shakespeare’s scenes. The two characters struggle to make sense of their actions in the original play and as Benjamin Vonwiller proposes in the revised version of his long essay for English IV Honours (1997): «The ghost of Shakespeare constantly haunts Ros and Guil. They struggle to act independently of Shakespeare’s plot, to operate outside of Shakespearean boundaries, and much of the play centres on the dramatic potential of the limitations imposed by Shakespeare»25. Linda HUTCHEON, Mario J. VALDÉS, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern: A Dialogue”, Poligrafías. Revista de Literatura Comparada, MCMXCVIII, NO. 3 (1998): p. 23. 24 Antoine BERMAN, La traduzione e la lettera o l’albergo nella lontananza, Gino Giometti (a cura di), Macerata, Quodlibet, 2003, p. 31. 25 Benjamin VONWILLER, The Spectre of Shakespeare in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, University of Sydney: https://core.ac.uk/reader/229392092 (last consulted: 16/07/2020). 23 8 Parody is undoubtedly another Postmodernist trope. For instance, Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978-2009) is a parody of the science fiction genre but also an ironic social critique on our species. In the Introduction to the first novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy presents itself saying that it has: «supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica»26, a parodic reference to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (1942-1993). One more important aspect is the paratext. The paratext comprises all those elements brought by authors, editors and publishers to the text’s final form: the title, subtitle, exergue, preface, index, internal division and generally each and every textual artifice which helps the reader through the text and influences the reading of it. In Postmodernism, the paratext dims the line between fictional and metafictional, wanting to be of help to the reader in a very direct way. In Postmodern Paratextuality And History (1986), Linda Hutcheon explains how footnotes (an element of the paratext) can serve as a personal commentary from the author and also interrupt the reading experience for readers who find themselves drawn to the lower depths of the page. In Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), the 999-line poem by the same name is accompanied by a foreword and commentary from Charles Kinbote, neighbour of John Shade, author of the poem. A non-linear narrative is offered to the readers along with the choice of reading the text in any way they wish. Postmodernist novels may also be defined as scattered in the way they give information about the characters and plot. The reader often has to piece the puzzle together in order to get a complete overview and becomes a detective looking for hints and trying to read among the lines. Time itself is fragmented in the complex narratives of postmodernist novels. The fragmentation often comes from the blurred line between fiction and reality and also by the way the narration is constantly interrupted. For instance, in the previously mentioned Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the complex plot brims with digressions and ramblings and the plot is frequently obscured by hallucinations and fantasies. But narration can also be interrupted by the use of an omniscient narrator, which seems to be a recurring choice in postmodern novels. This type of narrator can also become obstructive, as is the case with Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) in which the author blatantly inserts himself in the narration as a character, frequently addresses the reader directly and more often than not uses the tool of digression to further his critique of the Victorian times27. Douglas ADAMS, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, p.6. «One of the commonest symptoms of wealth today is destructive neurosis; in his century it was tranquil boredom. It is true that the wave of revolutions in 1848, the memory of the now extinct Chartists, stood like a mountaionous shadow behind the period», Little Brown and Company, 1969 (riedizione 2010), p.12. 26 27 9 Finally, these elements can be found in Snicket’s novels of A Series Of Unfortunate Events as well. But before we delve into their unconventional world and find the strands of connections between these novels and postmodernism, we need to speak about the genre they belong to first and foremost. 1.5 Understanding Middle-Grade Fiction Orsetta Innocenti defines ‘Youth literature’ in her essay La letteratura giovanile as a mysterious object which does not lend itself easily to interpretation: «Il termine «letteratura giovanile» indica infatti comunemente (e indifferentemente) un insieme assai variegato di testi, non troppo omogeneo e nemmeno chiaramente delimitabile»28. Youth literature spans genres, from the Bildungsroman type of novel (today known as coming of age novel) to fantasy and is as of today still not highly regarded in the field of literary studies. It is for this very reason that there aren’t many studies carried out on the matter. Up to the present moment, we are able to divide Youth literature in two ramifications: Middle Grade Fiction and Young Adult Fiction. An article by writer and freelance editor Brian Klems on the site Writer’s Digest clearly explains the differences between the two genres: «What sets a middle-grade novel apart from a young adult novel? If you said MG is for readers ages 8–12, and YA is for readers ages 13–18, then give yourself a check plus»29. Although I do not wholly agree with this statement since I personally think that the age limit for Middle Grade could be brought up to 14, this difference regarding the age groups the two genres are aimed at, has been made purely for marketing reasons and takes into consideration the different interests and maturity of the readers but also implies a different manuscript length (Middle grade fiction is generally 30,000–50,000 words; Young adult fiction is generally 50,000–75,000)30, and most importantly different themes which can be tackled. If you are writing Middle Grade Fiction then you should stray away from issues such as drugs, graphic violence, cursing, sex, issues which are not thought of as being appropriate for very young readers. Virtually, two are the touchstones responsible for the creation of the distinction between MG and YA, which is to be noted wasn’t always there and when it came into existence, it was almost as if it had created itself on its own. It was 1997 when the publishing industry got a struck of luck with the publication of J.K. Rowling’s novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997), which quickly turned into a bestseller and spread around the globe. Each novel in the Harry Potter series follows the main-character Harry Orsetta INNOCENTI, La letteratura giovanile, p.8. Brian KLEMS, The Key Differences Between Middle Grade vs Young Adult, Writer’s Digest: https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/the-key-differences-between-middle-grade-vs-young-adult (last consulted: 13/07/2020). 30 Jamie EVANS, Young Adult vs. Middle Grade Fiction: Which Are You Writing?, reedsyblog: https://blog.reedsy.com/ya-vs-mg-fiction/ (last consulted: 13/07/2020). 28 29 10 through one year of his formation at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, starting out at age 11 and therefore, if we refer back to Klems’ definition, falling into the Middle Grade Fiction category. But two problems seem to arise before us. First of all, back in 1997 the MG definition did not exist and second, Harry grows up in each novel and with him so does the writing style, themes and readers. Where in book one Harry is an eleven-year-old boy taken to a world of magic, wonder and danger, book two, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998), already takes him to darker and scarier places which do not shy away from seriously dealing with themes of marginalization, fear and death. By the time Harry turns 14 in book four, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000), the series has officially taken a turn for darker topics and the dreaded matters of the heart, completely distancing itself from Middle Grade’s limits. And then 2005 comes, it is now the turn of a more mature audience as the publishing industry gets its second struck of luck. Stephenie Meyer publishes the first novel in a four books cycle called Twilight (2005)31. Heart matters take the centre of the stage as main-character Bella Swan, age 17, a broody and clumsy adolescent girl falls in love with the most mysterious guy at her new school. The guy turns out to be a vampire who doesn’t have much in common with the thirsty, blood-sucking creature of the night that fascinated Gothic literature and is in turn a handsome and forever young boy ready to steal the heart of many teenagers. Thus, the YA genre came into existence. While Harry Potter and Twilight are incredibly different if only on a literary level, they not only have made reading look ‘cool’ again, but they also both share the merit of having brought the spotlight back on a type of literature aimed at children and teenagers and to have given way to many other novels of the likes, hence creating marketing-wise the distinction between MG and YA Fiction. We now have the middle-grade Percy Jackson & the Olympians novels and spin-offs by Rick Riordan (2005-2017)32, the YA dystopian Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (2008-2010)33, the middle-grade The School for Good and Evil series by Soman Chainani (2013-2020)34 and the YA A cycle which also includes the short novel The short second life of Bree Tanner (2010), a genderbent version of the first book called Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined (2015) and the recently published Midnight Sun (2020) which tells Twilight’s story from Edward Cullen’s point of view. 32 A series of novels about the young Percy Jackson who finds out he is the son of the Greek god Poseidon, meets other demigods like him, such as Annabeth Chase, and befriends the satyr Grover Underwood. In the first novel, they are tasked by the Greek gods to retrieve Zeus’ Master Bolt in order to prevent a war between Zeus, Poseidon and Hades. The original series, consisting of five novels, follows Percy from twelve to fifteen years old. 33 In the futuristic and dystopian Panem, once known as North America, sixteen years old Katniss Everdeen will volunteer in place of her sister to fight to the death in the annual Hunger Games, a bloody live tv game show used by the high powers of Capitol City to keep the districts at bay. 34 Every four years, two girls are kidnapped from the village of Gavaldon and sent to the fabled School for Good and Evil. Best friends Sophie and Agatha are chosen, the first sure she will end up in Good having always dreamt of being a princess, the latter just wants to go back home. The two girls will be placed on opposite sides: Sophie will shockingly end up in Evil and Agatha in Good. Thus, begins a fairytale of rivalry and friendship 31 11 contemporary novels and graphic novels by Alice Oseman35. Youth literature has never before been so thriving and successful. 1.6 Crossingover and a purpose But finally, we arrive at the core of our analysis and find that A Series Of Unfortunate Events, which started its run in 2000, does indeed belong to the Middle-Grade genre yet offers a different point of view, a parodic one to be precise. Daniel Handler does not believe in talking down to children: «I actually find it really offensive when people talk about children like they're some entirely different animal. There's often a sense of children just being entirely different creatures which, if it were any other category, everyone would agree was monstrous».36 For this very reason, the thirteen novels in A Series Of Unfortunate Events never hesitate to present gruesome themes, because children are able to understand the world just as well as adults, if not better. What’s more, presenting such adult themes in a children’s series makes it a crossover between genres. In her essay Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives (2009), Brock University French professor Sandra L. Beckett states: «The extraordinary success of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, who was featured on the cover of Time in the fall of 1999 with a caption informing readers that “he’s not just for kids,” made crossover literature front-page news and brought the amazing phenomenon to the attention of millions around the world»37. In much the same way, although with a less traditional storytelling, A Series Of Unfortunate Events does cross over not only the boundary between MG and YA fiction, but also Adult fiction, and as an example of this I advance myself. It was the summer before my first year of high school when I first started reading these novels and at the time all the elements which I now see as being related to Postmodernism, went over my head. Just like this, I didn’t notice all the paratextual components, the metafictional, the particular language used, the blurring of the line between the fictitious world and my own, the black humour even but most importantly, the constant self-reference, the creation of the character-author and his relationship with the reader. Now that I have provided you with background information, I can tell you exactly how Postmodernist features can be found in this children’s book series. I will be doing so by ushering you into the strange world of the main novels and the companion ones, unveiling examples and comparing them to postmodernism. The aim of my study is finally to reveal how also young readers, while they may not be able to fully understand a work by Pynchon, can still be introduced to the literary world of Postmodernism. which will reveal the gilrs’ true nature. 35 British YA writer who published her first novel Solitaire (2014) at seventeen. Her novels are famous among young readers because of their range of diverse characters and central lgbtq+ themes. 36 Interview: Articulate with Jim Cotter, The Very Fortunate Daniel Handler, October 3, 2017: https://www.articulateshow.org/articulate/the-very-fortunate-daniel-handler (last consulted: 17/07/2020). 37 Sandra L. BECKETT, Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives, p.1. 12 CHAPTER 2 - The Jolliest Journey Dear reader, If you have picked up this book with the hope of finding a simple and cheery tale, I’m afraid you have picked up the wrong book altogether. The story may seem cheery at first, when the Baudelaire children spend time in the company of some interesting reptiles and a giddy uncle, but don’t be fooled. - Lemony Snicket, The Reptile Room 2.1 About a most upsetting story I truly admire your perseverance, reader, but once again I must warn you: the title of this chapter is quite misleading, for nothing jolly ever happens in the lives of the three Baudelaire children, the main characters in A Series of Unfortunate Events, and this you will notice as you regrettably read on. From the oldest to the youngest, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire are three promising young children whose parents perish in a fire right at the start of The Bad Beginning (1999), the first novel. Our supposed “real” author Lemony Snicket gives himself the task of chronicling the lives of the children following this dreadful event, while keeping his reason for doing so hidden and unclear (readers can ultimately only try and give their best guess). The three orphans are presented to us during the day in which their misfortune starts, at Briny Beach. Violet, age 14 at the start of the series and 16 by the end of it, is an intelligent inventor and: «anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes»38. In the third novel The Wide Window (2001), while staying with their fearful Aunt Josephine, Violet mentions that she has invented a telephone before and offers to take Aunt Josephine’s telephone apart to show her that it is harmless39; her skills are also shown best in moments of dire need, for instance, in the tenth book The Slippery Slope (2003) after a terrible fall Violet finds herself at the bottom of a frozen waterfall with her brother Klaus and Quigley Quagmire40 and quickly has to think of a solution to climb back to the top: “My shoes?” Quigley asked. “The waterfall will be very slippery,” Violet explained, “so I’m using the ukulele strings to tie these bent Lemony SNICKET, The Bad Beginning, p. 3. Lemony SNICKET, The Wide Window, p. 16. 40 Quigley Quagmire is one of the Quagmire triplets along with Isadora and Duncan. Their parents died in a terrible fire, just like the Baudelaire’s, sometime after the events of The Reptile Room (1999). In the same fire the Quagmire’s mother manages to hide Quigley in a secret passageway before dying. Quigley gets separated from his siblings who are both sent to Prufrock Preparatory School. There, they meet the Baudelaire’s children in The Austere Academy (2000). 38 39 13 forks to the toe area, to make fork-assisted climbing shoes. We’ll hold two more forks in our hands”41. Moving on, we have the middle-sibling Klaus, age 12 at the start and 14 by the end. In The Bad Beginning Klaus is a little older than twelve and: «wore glasses, which made him look intelligent. He was intelligent»42. Before the fire at their mansion, Klaus used to spend his days in the Baudelaire library, an enormous room filled to the brim with books about any subject, surely the dream of each and every lover of literature. He is able to retain information from the books he reads thanks to his photographic memory, a skill which comes in handy when his sibling fail to understand words or phrases, or better yet when in The Hostile Hospital (2001) Violet is kidnapped and risks getting a cranioectomy by a false doctor, Klaus and Sunny disguise themselves in order to try postponing the operation and get their sister out of peril. While in the operating room, Klaus thinks of a way to stall as much as possible relying on his memory: «”The cranioectomy will be performed with a knife,” Klaus said, “which is the oldest surgical tool in the world.” He was remembering the section on knives in A Complete History of Surgical Tools, which he had read when he was eleven»43. Finally, the infant Sunny, age between some months to one year at the start and three years by the end, who has a knack for biting on things with her unusually sharp teeth. For instance, in the finale of The Miserable Mill (2000) Sunny manages to defend herself with her teeth in a sword fight against the evil Dr. Orwell: «But Sunny, being only an infant, had no sword. She only had her four sharp teeth, and, looking Dr. Orwell right in the eye, she opened her mouth and pointed all four at this despicable person»44. At Briny Beach, they receive the terrible news of their parents’ death brought by the executor of their family’s estate Mr. Poe45. The executor also informs them that they are the sole heirs to the family’s fortune, which will be theirs once Violet comes of age. After taking them to his house for a few days, Mr. Poe tells the orphans that their parents’ will instructs him to have them raised by a close relative: «“I have made arrangements,” he said finally, “for you to be raised by a distant relative of yours who lives on the other side of town. His name is Count Olaf”». Although his kinship to the children is never clarified46, but we can be sure that the Baudelaire’s parents would never have wanted their children to be raised by such a figure, Count Olaf, failed actor and criminal mastermind, is the main antagonist of the three children and only wishes to steal their fortune and then kill them. Thus, begins the repetitive structure of the tale of the Baudelaire orphans: «If you have been following Lemony SNICKET, The Slippery Slope, p. 195. Lemony SNICKET, The Bad Beginning, p. 3. 43 Lemony SNICKET, The Hostile Hospital, p. 198. 44 Lemony SNICKET, The Miserable Mill, p. 167. 45 A most strange character whose peculiarity is the constant coughing in his handkerchief. 46 «“He is either a third cousin four times removed, or a fourth cousin three times removed. He is not your closest relative on the family tree, but he is the closest geographically», The Bad Beginning, p. 15. 41 42 14 the story of these three orphans since the very beginning, then you know that Count Olaf is always lurking around these poor children, plotting and scheming to get his hands on the Baudelaire fortune»47. From The Bad Beginning to The Ersatz Elevator, the three children will be brought by Mr. Poe from one relative to the other as they try to escape from the clutches of the villainous Count Olaf who constantly stalks them, disguises himself in order to fool the adults who are supposed to take care of them and at times kills some of them. But just as constantly the children manage to reveal his identity to the adult world, mostly thanks to the strange eye-shaped tattoo the Count has on his left ankle. The repetitiveness of the narrative is broken when at the end of the seventh book The Vile Village (2001) the Baudelaire flee the village of V.F.D. after being falsely accused of murdering Count Olaf48. Now, from The Hostile Hospital (2001) right to The End (2006) the Baudelaire orphans will be on the run trying to escape from Count Olaf, who always seems to be one step ahead of them ready to kill anyone who helps them along with any sort of happiness they might find. 2.2 About a somber fictional world In order to understand a fictional world, you must first start at the bottom and see what the engine which moves it really is. Much the same happens when trying to understand a literary genre. The first brick necessary to understand Postmodernism is the concept of fabulation49. Fabulation, is according to Ronald Bogue: «closely associated with fiction, invention and the ‘power of the false’. But at a certain point, one must ask, what has fabulation to do with narration?»50. This term takes a more psychological nuance in Julian Barnes’ collection A History of the World in 10½ Chapters through the words of a doctor, in the fourth story, who is treating the probably mentally ill main character Kath: «the technical term is fabulation. You make up a story to cover the facts you don’t know or can’t accept. You keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them»51. Taking into account these two definitions, we see that postmodernism rejects the conditions of realistic representation in novels, their unilinear and coherent narratives as well as the conventional distinctions among true and false, reality and fiction. It refuses the existence of a singular historical truth in favour of the multiple perspective able to give their own version of the story, to adapt itself to the new multicultural society which has more than one truth to offer. In our introduction we have seen how Daniel Handler hides behind the alias of Lemony Snicket, but also presents him as a real person and character. Much the same happens Lemony SNICKET, The Miserable Mill, p. 109. The dead body found by the villagers is in reality that of Jacques Snicket, Lemony’s elder brother, who was only trying to help the children and get them to safety, but he is killed by Count Olaf disguised as Detective Dupin. 49 From the Latin Fabula, which means ‘conversation’, but also ‘tale’. 50 Ronald BOGUE, Fabulation, narration and the people to come, 2006, p. 214. 51 Julian BARNES, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, p. 109. 47 48 15 in the novels where the boundary between reality and fiction the fictional world of the page is often crossed and made murky. To use one of the author’s catchphrases52, reality is a word which here means “the world where the reader is enjoying the novels’ story while holding a physical or digital version of them”; fiction on the other hand, is a word which here means “the world in which the story the reader is enjoying unfolds”. These two definitions make matters incredibly problematic when the two worlds seem to literally flow into each other, as happens with Snicket. So, what happens to the young reader who does not know the first thing about Postmodernism, nor do they know Lemony Snicket does not exist and is in reality the nom de plume of author Daniel Handler? The answer could lie in Thomas G. Pavel’s essay Fictional Worlds (1986): «how can we define a function that attributes individuals to possible worlds? This question is a modern version of an old philosophical problem: "does everything that exists necessarily exist?"»53. Starting from early modern philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s theory about our world being the best one God could have created, narratology developed the concept of possible worlds created by texts of fiction. Worlds which have their own universe and logic, rules, a personal geography and a history. Lemony Snicket is, in fact, an individual attributed to the gloomy fictional world of A Series Of Unfortunate Events54 by a living and breathing author and this world has functions and laws of its own. Let us now focus on Lemony’s figure: he is the first-person narrator of the novels which are also supposedly written by him, and never misses a chance to make sure that this is very apparent to the reader, but he also is the product of a fervid imagination. Reading The Bad Beginning’s incipit: «If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle», the reader is led to believe in the existence of this fictional world where the three orphans’ endless search for a place to call home appears to be based on actual events; where someone named Lemony Snicket really is telling them the unwelcoming tale of three unlucky children. It is also a world which merges with their own because it is Snicket’s name the one which appears on the cover and it is Snicket himself the one who is building up the illusion. Through the notion of world-building, meaning creating an imaginary world, Snickets creates a parallel world where he exists and where his sole purpose is to report the Baudelaire’s story. Additionally, he builds a story for himself trying hard to establish a two-way correspondence between the reader’s reality and the See Chapter 3 of this thesis. Thomas PAVEL, Fictional Worlds, p. 45. 54 It probably would be far more correct to define it using the world “universe”, since it does span two series, different medias and many companion novels. 52 53 16 text’s reality, but before we delve deeper into the way he does it we need to, as I have stated at the start of this paragraph, look at the bottom of the fictional world presented to us. Science journalist Robert J. Matthews writes in the magazine «Scientific American»: «Life’s little annoyances are not as random as they seem: the awful truth is that the universe is against you»55. This statement he presents is based on a popular wisdom idea named Murphy’s Law and makes a strong case for it having been around for centuries. The first evidence he brings forward is: «In 1786 the Scottish poet Robert Burns observed that: The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft agley (“Are prone to go awry”)». Moreover, the popular belief of Murphy’s Law is also summarized by Douglas Adams when his character the white mouse Frankie Mouse says: «there comes a point I’m afraid where you begin to suspect that if there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs»56. Now to clarify, Murphy’s Law is based on the idea that anything which can go wrong will, in fact, go wrong and as a matter of fact in an interview for the magazine “Moment”, Daniel Handler says: «The narrator mentions at one point that the characters often felt as if there was something powerful over them, which made no move to help them and was perhaps even laughing at their misfortune. But whether that person was God or the author is up for grabs»57. We can now make a strong case ourselves for the principle of Murphy’s law being at the root of the world of A Series of Unfortunate Events. The Baudelaire’s parents die and soon after the children are placed in the care of an evil Count who is only after their inheritance. The aforementioned unpleasant Count does anything he can to make their stay as horrible as possible making them do chores, frequently losing his temper and developing terrible plans to steal their fortune. As much as they try and appeal to other adults, nobody ever believes them, and they are always dismissed simply because they are children and cannot possibly understand. Case in point, when in The Bad Beginning Count Olaf orders the children back to their beds and Klaus reminds him: «“You mean our bed!” he shouted. “You have only provided us with one bed!”»58. And when thereafter the Count tells him to go buy themselves a bed with their fortune, Klaus replies: «“That money,” Klaus said, remembering what Mr. Poe said, “is not to be used until Violet is of age”», and this final remark grants him a slap across the face. They later go with this story and many other complaints to Mr. Poe, who constantly gets distracted by his telephone and dismisses Robert J. MATTHEWS, “The Science of Murphy’s Law”, Scientific American, MCMXCVII, Vol. 276, No. 4 (1997): p. 88. 56 Douglas ADAMS, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, pp. 132-133. 57 Ross BISHTON, The Jewish Secrets of Lemony Snicket, “Moment magazine”: https://momentmag.com/jewishsecrets-lemony-snicket/ (last consulted: 19/07/2020). 58 Lemony SNICKET, The Bad Beginning, pp. 52-53. 55 17 them saying: «he has acted in loco parentis, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Your money will be well protected by myself and by the bank, but Count Olaf’s parenting techniques are his own business»59. Misfortune does not leave them as the novels progress, and also as we will see in the following sections, for each time they are placed in the care of a better-suited guardian, Count Olaf always manages to show up and ruin their lives once again as the universe appears to have it in for them. Or perhaps the truth really is that the adults who surround them essentially are not up nor ready to fulfil their duty finding it easier to fail the children. Relevant instance, one of the children’s biggest disappointment: sixth guardian Jerome Squalor whom at the end of The Ersatz Elevator (2001) abandons the children thinking that following Count Olaf, after he had kidnapped their friends Isadora and Duncan Quagmire, would be too dangerous. He wishes them good luck, leaves and just like that: «the Baudelaires were once again alone in the world»60. By and large, it is ultimately up to the reader to decide whether or not it is the author who wishes the Baudelaires ill, some maniac, or some otherworldly, perhaps religious, godlike entity. 2.3 Seeing the world as make-believe Kendall L. Walton, while discoursing about representational works of art - such as novels, plays, films – consisting of make-believe tells us that: «It goes without saying that in speaking of "games" of make-believe we must disavow any implication that they are mere frivolity. Children's games serve purposes far more significant than that of keeping them happy and out of mischief»61. Children while inventing games utilize the make-believe: they imagine, they play pretence, they fabulate, meaning they make-up stories. For example, when playing Lupus in fabula62 which is sometimes played with cards (but they are not necessary), a new world is created where the participants assume new identities as a chosen narrator weaves the story. In this new world there exist an evil wolf, innocent farmers, a seer, a killer, a bodyguard and each and every day they wake up to a new murder happened during the night while everyone was asleep. Conversely, when playing Strega comanda colore (Witch says colour) they imagine the temporary existence of a witch, a creature of the supernatural far from reality, which can get to them if they do not touch an item of the colour chosen. In much the same way, A Series Of Unfortunate Events is a form of make-believe, a postmodern play of Lemony SNICKET, The Bad Beginning, p. 67. Lemony SNICKET, The Ersatz Elevator, p. 258. 61 Kendall L. WALTON, Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, p.12. 62 Note that this game appears to be known with many different names: Lupus, Lupus in tabula, ‘Strega, lupi e contadini’, Fortunella, Mafia. 59 60 18 pretences for children. A game which starts right from the cover and which has rules, like all games do. The first rule is to never, ever, treat children as inferiors. Postmodern works, as American architect and cultural-theorist Charles Jencks explains in The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-Modernism (1977) seems to attract two different kind of publics. One is the masses which find these works to be pleasant and almost familiar, the other is the cultured public who is able to recognize the hidden meanings lurking below the surface. This is the «double-coding» theory describing two different ways in which the sophisticated elements present in texts can be understood by a certain kind of public and disregarded by the other, who does not have the means necessary to understand. This, in fact, applies to Snicket’s audience. Whatever the author throws at them it does not matter whether or not they will understand it at the time of reading or when they get older and revisit or think about the novels. The elements are all there for them to interpret as they like. This does also apply to the mature themes explored: the author is not afraid of building Olaf as a murderous villain, nor does he stray away from talking about loneliness, good versus evil, greed and the likes. In Middle Grade fiction such themes, if used, are never portrayed in a gritty way whereas Snicket is not so squeamish. In The Reptile Room (1999) when Count Olaf, disguised as the assistant Stephano, kills Uncle Montgomery, Snicket tells it as it is using terms such as «heartlessly slaughtered» and describing the body in detail as the orphans find him, or even ironically refer to the body’s paleness when describing the missing tattoo on Count Olaf’s left ankle: «The Baudelaire orphans stared at a patch of smooth skin, as blank and pale as poor Uncle Monty’s face»63. The second rule is to never stop playing and keep up the game of pretence. With the intention of doing so, our “real” author Daniel Handler signs the novels with the alias of Lemony Snicket and fully gets in the part from the first page to the last with the aid of yes the text itself, in which Snicket narrates the story, but also using the paratext. Readers open The Bad Beginning and, a few pages in, they find what can be described as an epigraph although in a very peculiar way. An epigraph, as G. Genette states in his work Seuils (1987), is: “[...] a quotation placed en exergue [in the exergue], generally at the head of a work or a section of a work”64. Genette then goes on to clarify the four functions of an epigraph: 1. “[…] the epigraph as a justificatory appendage of the title”. Creating a link between the epigraph and the title going as far as to take the title straight from the quote. For instance, E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime quotes the instructions given by Scott Joplin, an American composer and pianist, to those who play his music 63 64 Lemony SNICKET, The Reptile Room, p. 108. G. GENETTE, R. MACKSEY, Epigraphs. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, In J. Lewin (Trans.), 1997, p. 144. 19 and which he had printed at the start of his publications: “Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play Ragtime fast…”. 2. “[…] commenting on the text, whose meaning it indirectly specifies or emphasizes”. Case in point, the extremely metanarrative epigraphs from Kara Kitap (1990), a mystery novel which in the even-numbered chapters reads like a succession of essays, by the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. In Chapter one, the first epigraph states: “Never use epigraphs ― they kill the mystery in the work!”65, which translates to: “Do not use epigraphs: it kills the mistery of the text”. jkkjjkjkkjjkjkkkjk 3. “[…] with a great many epigraphs, the important thing is simply the name of the author quoted.” Sometimes, it is not the quote itself which tells you something about the text but rather the author from which the quote has been taken. That is the case with John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s woman, when as the epigraph to chapter five Fowles uses an extract from “In Memoriam”, a poem by the British Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson: “More fellowship of sluggish moods,/ Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape/ Had bruised the herb and crush’d the grape/ And bask’d and batten’d in the woods”66. For this particular chapter, in which Fowles further explores the character of Ernestina Freeman67, Tennyson is only there in order to emphasize the period in which the novel is set. 4. “The presence or absence of an epigraph in itself marks (with a very thin margin of error) the period, the genre, or the tenor of a piece of writing”. Personally, I would here add a fifth function mostly pertaining sci-fi and fantasy novels. In these genres, epigraphs may come from texts and authors which only exist in the fictional world of the novel itself, as an example Isaac Asimov quotes, in the first novel in the Foundation series (1942-1993), from the Encyclopedia Galactica, a text which does not exist in our world. In Snicket’s case, the epigraph adds to the make-believe illusion and comes in the form of a letter to the reader containing a warning not to go forward and a summary of the dreadful elements the reader will find in the novel. You have already seen two examples of this in my own epigraphs to Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, and you will see more in the chapters to follow and in the next sentence which presents the epigraph to The Carnivorous Carnival (2002). Orhan PAMUK, The Black Book, p. 3. John FOWLES, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969, pp. 25. 67 Ernestina is a conventional Victorian-era woman, who appears as shallow and ultimately does not rebel against the dull conventions of the Victorian age as opposed to her male counterpart, but who is in reality also battling against the moral code of her time. 65 66 20 «Dear Reader, The word “carnivorous,” which appears in the title of this book, means “meat-eating,” and once you have read such a bloodthirsty word, there is no reason to read any further. This carnivorous volume contains such a distressing story that consuming any of its contents would be far more stomach-turning than even the most imbalanced meal». Snicket writes to the reader, goes on to summarize the distressing elements of the story and concludes saying that although all his time must be devout to researching and telling the Baudelaire’s story, the reader’s time: «might be better filled with something more palatable, such as eating your vegetables, or feeding them to someone else. With all due respect, Lemony Snicket»68. These epigraphs are filled with his peculiar tonguein-cheek humour which so dearly appeals to children and never fails to set the mood of the story. Turning the page, we find an element which is common to any novel but, once again, here takes on an uncanny tinge: the dedication. Lemony Snicket dedicates each and every novel to a mysterious woman named Beatrice. A woman whom he had fallen in love with and who sadly is not amongst the living anymore. The dedications are at the same time funny and sad, presenting the author’s black humour and adding to the building of the character as a morose and depressed narrator. Here I leave you a few instances like the dedication to The Carnivorous Carnival which goes: «To Beatrice — Our love broke my heart, and stopped yours». Or, in The Grim Grotto (2004): «To Beatrice — Dead women tell no tales. Sad men write them down». And one more, in The Penultimate Peril (2005): «To Beatrice — No one could extinguish my love, or your house». Thus, hints are given to the reader creating the illusion of a possible world, a reality which juxtaposes to the reader’s own. In the last instance you have read, you can clearly understand that Beatrice’s house was destroyed by something that cannot be extinguished, a fire perhaps. And if you still couldn’t tell: «To Beatrice — darling, dearest, dead», Beatrice is no longer alive. These along with other clues given in the actual text, more so the last word at the end of The End (2006) which completes the world for the readers who finally understand what they had suspected all along: that Beatrice is in reality the Baudelaire’s mother. The game does not stop there, for in order to keep the make-believe illusion up the author goes as far as to include at the end of each novel letters to his own editor, hence breaking the fourth wall even more. In The Bad Beginning the letter «To My Kind Editor» informs the editor that Snicket is currently trying to find out about the tragic events happened to the orphans while in the care of Dr. Montgomery Montgomery and instructs the editor on how he will be able to find the manuscript: «An associate of mine will place a small waterproof box in the phone booth of the Elektra Hotel at 11 P.M. 68 Lemony SNICKET, The Carnivorous Carnival, p. III. 21 next Tuesday. Please retrieve it before midnight to avoid it falling into the wrong hands»69. Consequently, we understand that Snicket is on the run and that those who are following him could be interested in having the Baudelaire’s story. Another example can be found at the end of The Ersatz Elevator, when a very wet page is presented to the reader: «To My Kind Editor, I am sorry this paper is sopping wet, but I am writing this from the place where the Quagmire Triplets were hidden»70. This implies the presence of Lemony Snicket, researching and looking for clues, in the places71 where the readers have just seen the story unravel and hands them the true look of the real letter, just as wet as the Editor received it, thus blurring the line between the real and the unreal. 2.4 Of sardonic references As I have stated before, Postmodernism has an inclination towards referencing the past and quoting other authors. This is competently explained by Umberto Eco in Postille al nome della rosa (1983) where he states: «La risposta post-moderna al moderno consiste nel riconoscere che il passato, visto che non può essere distrutto, perché la sua distruzione porta al silenzio, deve essere rivisitato: con ironia, in modo non innocente»72. And so, often with irony, does Lemony Snicket using references to build his own version of reality. But unlike Isaac Asimov, the works of the past he refers to are not from the fictional world he created, they come from the world of the reader seemingly to furtherly cloud the line dividing fiction and reality. Surely all the following could not be picked up on by young readers, but nonetheless we could first allude to one more very dark dedication: «To Beatrice — My love flew like a butterfly/ Until death swooped down like a bat/ As the poet Emma Montana McElroy said:/ 'That's the end of that.'»73. Emma Montana McElroy was a middle-grade girl who in 2000 participated in HarperCollins Children’s Books “Miserable Poetry Contest” with her poem about an orphan boy, won and had the last line of her poem published in the aforesaid dedication74. Emma is inserted from reality to the fictional page of the novel surpassing the line between the two. References are usually of the humorous kind, like in The Ersatz Elevator when Violet, Klaus and Sunny along with their new guardian Jerome Squalor make a reservation for Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning, p. 167. Lemony SNICKET, The Ersatz Elevator, p. 264. 71 The Quagmire triplets, I need to shockingly tell you, were hidden in a cage at the bottom of an elevator shaft at 667 Dark Avenue. 72 Umberto ECO, Il nome della rosa, e-book, p. 401. 73 Lemony SNICKET, The Miserable Mill, dedication page. 74 Meredith MAY, Berkeley Girl Triumphs With Unfortunate Story: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Berkeley-Girl-Triumphs-With-Unfortunate-Story-2789361.php (last consulted: 19/07/2020). 69 70 22 a famous restaurant of the City named Café Salmonella, salmon-themed and located in the Fish District. Salmonella is basically a virus which shares the same name with salmon, that can make you sick and can be found in many foods including pork, eggs, chicken and vegetables. At times, though, the references can be ironically historical: «The moral of “The Three Bears,” for instance, is “Never break into someone else’s house.” The moral of “Snow White” is “Never eat apples.” The moral of World War One is “Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand”»75. But more often than not, the allusions are literary. The name Baudelaire clear as day comes from the French poet Charles Baudelaire and this was confirmed in the same interview mentioned before. Daniel Handler says: «I am fond of the poet Charles Baudelaire whose most famous work is The Flowers of Evil, a cycle of poems that discusses dreadful circumstances and finds beauty in them». The name Beatrice could also be connected to Baudelaire and his poem La Béatrice in the lyrical collection Les Fleurs du mal (1857), where a bunch of demons seem to taunt the poet and among them, he sees la reine de mon Coeur, the Beatrice of the title. Another link could be made to Beatrice Portinari, muse and inspiration of the Italian XIII/XIV century poet Dante Alighieri, aside from the name also from the fact that Dante was in love with his Beatrice just as Snicket loved his own Beatrice. Moreover, we have the painting Beata Beatrix (1864-1870) by Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti depicting on an oil canvas a woman inspired by none other than Dante Alighieri’s Beatrice and modelled after Rossetti’s deceased wife. Other literary references come in a rather casual way. In The Reptile Room (1999) Uncle Monty while explaining about his reptiles particularly warns the children about never letting «the Virginian Wolfsnake near a typewriter», in obvious ironic reference to Modernist British author Virginia Woolf and to her stream of consciousness technique76. In The Hostile Hospital one more reference is made to Virginia Woolf: one of the characters in Heimlich Hospital is named after one of the two main characters in Mrs. Dalloway (1925): «Clarissa Dalloway, who did not seem to have anything wrong with her but was staring sadly out the window»77. In a digression from the same novel, Snicket makes a reference to one of his friends: «I must interrupt for a moment and describe something that happened to a good friend of mine named Mr. Sirin. Mr. Sirin was a lepidopterist». This is a reference to the famously known pseudonym used by Russian author Vladimir Vladimirovič Nabokov, who first published under the name of Sirin. Lemony SNICKET, The Wide Window, p. 212. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner are the greatest representatives of the stream-ofconsciousness fiction, a new writing technique developed in the 20th century. It makes use of ‘Direct interior monologue’ which is a direct presentation of the character’s thoughts with no punctuation and without the reader feeling the presence of the author (a famous example is Ulysses by James Joyce); and ‘Indirect interior monologue’ with the character’s thoughts as filtered by the author (For example, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927)). 77 Lemony SNICKET, The Hostile Hospital, p. 140. 75 76 23 Next, the character Esmé Gigi Genevive Squalor, who first appears in The Ersatz Elevator (2001) and later reveals herself to be a villain, is a reference to a short story by American writer J. D. Salinger called For Esmé—with Love and Squalor (1950) about two episodes the first of which is narrated in first-person and tells of the meeting between the narrator and a girl who draws his attention; the second episode on the other hand moves the setting to a World War II military base and the point of view to a character named Sergeant X. To say nothing of when at the end of The Slippery Slope (2003) the children are trying to figure out what’s next and where to find more of the surviving members of the mysterious V.F.D.78 and: «“Godot,” Sunny said, which meant “We don’t know where to go, and we don’t know how to get there.”», a self-evident reference to Waiting for Godot (1953) by Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett, a tragicomic play about two tramp-like characters named Estragon and Vladimir endlessly waiting for the mysterious Godot. Literature is extremely important in the world of A Series Of Unfortunate Event for it is only in books and stories that the children can find solace, the help they need and a place more comforting than the one they live in. Literature also seems to be able to touch the children closely by essentially summarizing their life: for instance, when Klaus talks about Herman Melville stating: «He’s one of my favorite authors,” Klaus said. “I really enjoy the way he dramatizes the plight of overlooked people, such as poor sailors or exploited youngsters, through his strange, often experimental philosophical prose”»79. This sentence could very well apply to the novels which tell the story of exploited youngsters and which do so using the postmodern experimental prose. Now, although we could fill the remaining parts of this dissertation with even more literary references80, we must move on to our final stop in the understanding of this particular fictional world with the help of optometrist Dr. Georgina Orwell81 who lives in Paltryville and first appears in The Miserable Mill. Georgina has an eye-shaped office and is an incredibly skilled hypnotist. She frequently uses this skill by saying the word ‘lucky’ out loud to command and the word ‘inordinate’ to break off the hypnosis. Adding to the notion adults in this world have about young people not being able to understand complicated matters, Dr. Orwell is also incredibly shocked when in The Miserable Mill’s finale she finds out that mere children such as the Baudelaire would know a word like ‘inordinate’: «”How in the world would a child know a complicated More on this secret organization in Chapter 3. Lemony SNICKET, The Grim Grotto, p. 39. 80 I have not talked about how the sick banker Mr. Poe references American writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe, or how the name Briny Beach where the story starts comes from the poem The Walrus and the Carpenter by famous Victorian author Lewis Carroll: «A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,/Along the briny beach:/We cannot do with more than four,/To give a hand to each». 81 To add to the mature content, Dr. Georgina meets an untimely death at the end of The Miserable Mill. Her accident involves a saw and happens in front of the children, right after the sword fight with Sunny we have previously mentioned. 78 79 24 word like ‘inordinate’?”»82. Her character appears to be the female equivalent of our very own British writer and journalist Eric Arthur Blair, someone which you may know better by his pseudonym George Orwell. The eye-shaped office and the hypnosis surely refer back to the plot of Orwell’s novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949). In the dystopian nightmare of the novel, the citizens of Oceania are closely controlled by the enigmatic Big Brother and they are brainwashed by slogans, the rewriting of history made at the Ministry of Truth to make the Party appear infallible, the constant change of who the enemy really is and the punishment of any thought which strays away from the Party’s ideology83. While not being as nightmarish as 1984, A Series Of Unfortunate Events does have ironic elements deriving from a world not totally fit for children and which could be described as a nightmare by them. 2.5 The comical irony of a treacherous world The world of A Series Of Unfortunate Events is incredibly ambiguous as regards the setting. Oftentimes it goes as far as to make the time period unclear, we could call it anachronistic (meaning out of time). This sense of anachronism was heightened by the original covers made to look old-fashioned and by a re-release of the series with covers from illustrator Brett Helquist, made to look Victorian and with new titles, to imitate the Lemony SNICKET, The Miserable Mill, p. 165. In addition, we could also mention Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil (1985), reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984. The movie surely isn’t appropriate for children, but it is worth mentioning given that it helped to build on Orwell’s nightmarish dystopia, adding sci-fi, grotesque element along with very disturbing comical aspects. The main character Sam Lowry escapes his numbing job and mayhem-filled reality by creating a possible world through his imagination where he is an angel-like warrior fighting to save a mysterious woman. The characters drown in their bureaucratic society. The technology presented in this futuristic world is whimsical, reminds us of the steampunk aesthetic and needs a lot of maintenance. Moreover, it shows how poor citizens live a life of paranoia due to sudden terroristic attacks (which appear to be a government’s machination to keep people at bay) while rich citizens enjoy their meals and futuristic surgical operations unconcerned by what surrounds them. 82 83 25 penny dreadfuls84 (sadly, the publication stopped after The Wide Window, or Disappearance! (2007)). The series mentions a variety of different technologies, some familiar to us, some older than us and some very much absurd. In The Austere Academy (2000) there is mention of an advanced computer system able to keep Count Olaf out of the children’s way (although seeing the outcome of the book, it must not have been as advanced as stated). Some characters use phones, others use telegraphs, we even find inventions which only belong to the world of the series, the Devil’s Tongue knot for instance which Violet needs to use in order to save Sunny trapped by Count Olaf in the tower room: «The Devil’s Tongue was a very useful knot, and when Violet tied the cloth strips together, end to end, it formed a sort of rope»85. Yet the Baudelaire children are illustrated by the aforementioned Brett Helquist in the novels as to be wearing clothes coming straight from the Victorian era. But there is also mentions of made-up places such as the Mortmain Mountains situated near the Hinterlands, a place located near the City, and home to the Snow Gnats which are dangerous flying insects or Lucky Smells Lumber Mill from The Miserable Mill which is a metaphor for England’s eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Industrial Revolution. Were we to look at the whole series from the point of view of children, we could see their worst nightmare come true. These thirteen novels present the worst possible version of reality a child could think of. It’s not really about the confusion of obscure technologies from different time periods coexisting, nor is it the vague geographical location of the places visited by the Baudelaires in “the City” or the surrounding areas. It is mostly about the recurring theme in the novels about adults who do not care for children, they disregard and dismiss them, they think they are not intelligent enough to understand those difficult matters only adults can fathom. We can here see a great deal of influence coming from Roald Dahl who also wrote books for children where bad things happen, and adults are scary. In fact, absurdism, black humour and violence are themes prominently present in Dahl’s novels, so much that we could safely state Roald Dahl to be Daniel Handler’s inspiration. For instance, in James and the Giant Peach (1961) the main character James Henry Trotter becomes an orphan and goes to live with his aunts: Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge. James’ stay with Spiker and Sponge is terrible, the two women force him to sleep on the floor, beat him, do not feed him properly, have him do chores and keep him locked in their house. Eventually, James exacts his revenge and is able to free himself from his aunts who meet a grim fate86. In Snicket’s Cheap and popular nineteenth century serial literature in England with characters like Sweeney Todd and Varney the Vampire. 85 Lemony SNICKET, The Bad Beginning, p. 117. 86 They get crushed by a giant peach. 84 26 novels the children do get punished by never-ending misfortune but ultimately it is always them against the treacherous world they live in. Conversely, Dahl reserves punishment to his children characters almost in attempt to give a moral and teach a lesson. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), for example, the “naughty” children who give in to their vices are comically punished: Violet Beauregarde, selfabsorbed and chewing-gum obsessed ignores Wylly Wonka’s warnings, tries the new type of chewing gum she and the other children were being shown and ends up with a gigantic body of an indigo colour; or Mike Teavee, television obsessed boy who shrinks himself to get inside Willy Wonka’s television. Dahl’s characters stand as warnings for readers about not giving in to their faults, Snicket’s characters act as a reflection of the reader’s reality and not as warnings, given that their author refuses any possible type of moral one could find in his stories. Sometimes, children feel like adults do not listen, well in A Series Of Unfortunate Events they never do. Adults are dim witted and easily fooled, often they are cruel too and if they are kind-hearted then it means that they are destined to death. In The Austere Academy the three orphans are forced by the school’s Vice Principal Nero to stay in a moldy, little shack, and as much as they try to make the most of it there’s only so much you can do in such a place and Principal Nero, the adult, is too busy: «“I’m a violinist!” Nero cried. “I have no time to make exceptions! I’m too busy practicing the violin. So if you will kindly leave my office, I can get back to work”»87. Over and above that, in The Miserable Mill they are put in the care of Sir who to Charles’, his partner, protests has them work in his lumber mill in order to teach them responsibility. In a normal situation, an adult in possession of common sense would never put children to work, much less in a dangerous environment. What’s more, the laws are nonsensical. In book the first, Count Olaf develops an almost successful ploy to steal the Baudelaires fortune: a play named The Marvelous Marriage and signed with Olaf’s pseudonym Al Fancoot. The main character is a man «brave and intelligent», played by Olaf, who «marries the young, beautiful woman he loves, in front of a crowd of cheering people»88, a young woman played by Violet. The ploy is to make the wedding real by having the unsuspecting Justice Strauss, Olaf’s neighbour and the children’s friend, play the part of the judge, which is her actual job, and by having Violet sign an actual marriage contract. It is Justice Strauss the one that, surprised by having been so easily tricked, that announces to the shocked crowd: «“I’m afraid this dreadful nonsense is the law”»89. But in the end, to Count Olaf’s dismay, it always is the children’s cleverness what saves the situation. The law states the bride needs to sign with her own hand, but Violet says: «But I signed the document with my left hand»90. Lemony SNICKET, The Austere Academy, p. 28. Lemony SNICKET, The Bad Beginning, p. 75. 89 Lemony SNICKET, The Bad Beginning, p. 147. 90 Lemony SNICKET, The Bad Beginning, p. 151. 87 88 27 The absurdist irony continues when in The Vile Village, in the village of V.F.D., the despotic Council of Elders keeps many absurd rules like: «”Rule #67, for instance, clearly states that no citizen is allowed to build or use any mechanical devices”»91 and «rulebreakers are punished properly»92 states the Chief of Police, the punishment though is being burned at the stake. During the cranioectomy in book eight which I mentioned before, there is an audience watching the operation and hoping to see Violet’s head removed to cure mental illness and moreover, the three children are forced to look for jobs and shelter right after The Vile Village. Finally, in one more reference to Orwell’s 1984, there exists a newspaper named The Daily Punctilio, the most unreliable source of information which constantly distorts the truth and provides nothing but disinformation. This certainly reminds us of Orwell’s fictional Ministry of Truth where history is rewritten to the Party’s approval. All these surely sounds absurd and impossible, some adjectives which also describe our own reality. In fact, the universe of these novels, much like our own, is hostile and corrupt. We could describe A Series Of Unfortunate Events as an absurd satire of our own world, «the genre which is furthest removed from "high seriousness," but not always»93 and which according to Northrop Frye could also be the genre closest to realism. But whereas in our world we can at times enjoy rays of happiness, in the Baudelaires’ absurdly gloomy world there’s nothing happy to be found. Even when an adult seems to care about the children, it never ends well for them as we have seen with Uncle Monty, but also Aunt Josephine, Justice Strauss and all the adults who could have provided the orphans with a safe and caring place. Now, with all the new information acquired, we can move forward to examine the peculiarities of our narrator and ‘real’ author’s writing style and all that we have left to analyse. Lemony SNICKET, The Vile Village, p. 57. Lemony SNICKET, The Vile Village, p. 37. 93 Northrop FRYE, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, p. 156. 91 92 28 CHAPTER 3 - A Whimsical Writing Dear Reader, Unless you are a slug, a sea anemone, or mildew, you probably prefer not to be damp. You might also prefer not to read this book, in which the Baudelaire siblings encounter an unpleasant amount of dampness as they descend into the depths of despair, underwater. - Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto 3.1 The importance of language Despite all my warnings I see you are still stubbornly here and that must mean you have either ignored them or simply skipped over them. It seems to me the meaning of the word warning needs some clarification: a warning is a noun but also a cautionary word which here means “stay away from this text if you value your time” and I would most definitely recommend you doing just so. But alas I am certain you will be ignoring this third warning and keep on following me along as I expose my analysis, in the following paragraphs, about Snicket’s distinctive writing style. Lemony Snicket’s language, which can be seen through his writing style, is full of whimsy, humour, puns and so forth, all elements intended for young readers to understand complicated concepts about their reality while never giving the moral of the story which is too often the official aim of Middle Grade fiction where authors almost feel obliged to leave readers with some sort of lesson (an idea refused both by Daniel Handler and Lemony Snicket). But language is also something of particular importance to the Postmodernist movement, which we will discuss in the next section. 3.2 The Postmodern perspective Between the sixties and the seventies, a new intellectual tendency stepped forward in response to the structuralist movement94: post-structuralism. This tendency builds on the linguistic theories by Ferdinand de Saussure95, Claude Lévi-Strauss with his theories about structuralism96, and the deconstructionist theories of Jacques Derrida which question the oppositions in Western philosophy by analysing the language of literary and philosophical texts97. An article on “Encyclopedia Britannica” clearly explains the A philosophical, scientific and literary criticism movement with thinker such as the already mentioned Jakobson and Levi-Strauss, then Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and others. The ideas around structuralism are complex, particularly we should focus on the fact that works of art and literature were thought of as dismountable organic wholes which could be disassembled in elements and constructs. 95 Ferdinand DE SAUSSURE, Corso di linguistica generale, a cura di Tullio De Mauro, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2009. 96 Encyclopedia Britannica, Structuralism: https://www.britannica.com/science/structuralism-anthropology (last consulted 14/08/2020). 97 Critical Legal Thinking, Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction – Key Concept: 94 29 complex concept of poststructuralism: «language is not a transparent medium that connects one directly with a “truth” or “reality” outside it but rather a structure or code, whose parts derive their meaning from their contrast with one another and not from any connection with an outside world»98. However, from the subject of Poststructuralism we will only be taking what the postmodern acquired. It is stated by Brian McHale in The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015) that Postmodernism is deeply skeptic about language: «in particular, about the capacity of language to reflect or represent reality. Instead, from the poststructuralist point of view language should be seen as constructing reality, or rather constructing a reality»99. Consequently, postmodern thinkers theorize that if each culture has their own language, then it means that each speaker of that language is able to construct their own possible reality grounded in their individual experience. The reality constructed is: «neither inevitable nor natural […] but arbitrary, and shot through with disparities of privilege and power attributable to the structure of language itself»100. This poststructuralist and postmodern idea shares some traits with The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966) by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann and which McHale poses as an example to present reality as: «a kind of collective fiction – a novel that we are all writing together – constructed and sustained by processes of […] everyday social interaction, and especially through the medium of language»101. Language is ultimately an artificial product made by humans to fit their needs according to the circumstances. But language also enables us to think and imagine, therefore it is also the mean through which narrators weave their invented stories. As Lubomír Doležel explains in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (1998), possible worlds are things we can imagine or in which we can believe and most importantly they are human constructs: «i mondi possibili della fiction sono artefatti prodotti dalle attività estetiche: poesia […] narrazione […] cinema e televisione, e così via»102. Language gives us the power of creation, we can create imaginary worlds which defy the laws of physics and nature, we can have them be just like our own world, we can inhabit them with imaginary characters and, sometimes, we can insert ourselves in these worlds. 3.3 The intrusive narrator We have said that worlds can be created and that language is the instrument which helps us through this storytelling process. In Postmodernism, metanarratives subvert traditional storytelling and put the reader on the same level as the author by creating https://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/05/27/jacques-derrida-deconstruction/ (last consulted: 14/08/2020). 98 Adam AUGUSTYN, Poststructuralism, Encyclopedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/art/poststructuralism (last consulted: 26/07/2020). 99 Brian McHale, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism, p. 49 100 Brian MCHALE, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism, p. 49. 101 Brian MCHALE, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism, p. 49. 102 Lubomír DOLEŽEL, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, translated by Margherita Botto, p. 15. 30 what we could describe as a sort of augmented reality. The metanarrative device Snicket is very fond of is addressing the readers directly, completely pulling them into the story. We have seen earlier some instances like the incipit of The Bad Beginning, but it does not stop there. Snicket frequently intrudes in the narration by commenting on the events, digressing to other connected topics, giving the reader intel on his current situation or judging characters. In The Austere Academy at Prufrock Preparatory School103 «the least delightful person on Earth» is presented to us and it is the obnoxious Carmelita Spats, probably the most hated character alongside Count Olaf and Esmé Squalor104. Snicket describes her with words such as filthy, rude, violent and he regrets having to even speak about her since: «there are enough ghastly and distressing things in this story without even mentioning such an unpleasant person»105. Carmelita is nosy, always calls the orphans cakesniffers for reasons only known to her and is a self-proclaimed Tap-Dancing Ballerina Fairy Princess Veterinarian and Ball-Playing Cowboy Superhero Soldier Pirate. Carmelita Spats is such an obnoxious and self-centred character that she wrote an at least 793 pages-long novel about herself titled Me: The Completely Authorized Autobiography of the Prettiest, Smartest, Most Darling Girl in the Whole Wide World106 and Snicket never misses a chance to call her out on her pestiferous behaviour. As for digressions the narrator often goes off on tangents which are sometimes pointless and sometimes inherent to the story. In The Reptile Room Snicket tells the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, «a very dull boy» who only wanted to prank the villagers when a wolf was nowhere to be seen, but when he cried «Wolf!» and the animal was actually there nobody came to his rescue. Now, if someone ever told you this story, they must have also told you that the moral is to never, ever lie. But in one more attempt at undermining the Middle Grade tendency to find something of value to forcibly teach children, Snicket ironically explains that the true moral of the story is to: «never live somewhere where wolves are running around loose» and then goes on to controversially say, much to parents dismay, that: «sometimes not only is it good to lie, it is necessary to lie»107. That is the case with the Baudelaire children who find themselves having to lie about the dangers of the Incredibly Deadly Viper108 in order to reveal Count Olaf’s true identity109. Digressions are also used for the author to speak to the reader and guess what they might be wondering. A clear example comes in The See Chapter 2. Later on, the girl is actually adopted (although I have to remind you that legal law in this series works differently than in our world) by Olaf and Esmé and is asked to join V.F.D. She obviously accepts because it would mean being able to keep tormenting the Baudelaire orphans. 105 Lemony SNICKET, The Austere Academy, p. 1. 106 Lemony SNICKET, Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, p. 171. 107 Lemony SNICKET, The Reptile Room, pp. 141-142. 108 «one of the least dangerous and most friendly creatures in the animal kingdom» 109 Which you will remember in this particular book was disguised as Uncle Monty’s assistant Stephano and had killed Uncle Monty. 103 104 31 Slippery Slope when Sunny is momentarily separated from her siblings, having been kidnapped by Count Olaf and his henchmen, Snicket explains himself saying: «you may well wonder why there has been no account of Sunny Baudelaire in the first two chapters of this book, but there are several reasons why this is so», and he then tells the reader that it has been difficult for him to find the tire tracks of Olaf’s car since they have vanished long ago because of the frequent blizzards in the Mortmain Mountains. Snicket makes one more use of digressions, and that is to adjust the story and expose the writing mechanisms. In a very metanarrative fashion, Snicket writes about writing and also breaks the fourth wall. Once again, we must refer back to The Reptile Room and the Baudelaire’s first encounter with the Incredibly Deadly Viper right at the end of the second chapter. Uncle Monty takes off the cloth covering the snake’s cage and the snake manages to exit the cage and goes to bit little Sunny on the chin. Right there, the chapter stops, and it does so with a cliffhanger, i.e. a frequently used plot device in literature and cinema which briskly and dramatically interrupts the narration leaving the spectator or reader literally hanging. In this case, the reader is left to wonder whether or not the Incredibly Deadly Viper has killed Sunny or poisoned her and they are anxious to find out what happens next leading them to turn the page to the next chapter. But Snicket is not one for conventions therefore the following chapter does not start where the previous one left off, instead it starts with Snicket saying: «I am very, very sorry to leave you hanging like that, but as I was writing the tale of the Baudelaire orphans, I happened to look at the clock and realized I was running late for a formal dinner party given by a friend of mine, Madame diLustro»110. He describes Madame diLustro as a fine cook and detective and as someone who might get very mad if her guests arrived even five minutes late111, but despite the digression explaining why he had to stop he quickly assures the reader that Sunny survives the attack which was only playful. As I have told you, the snake is harmless. One more very interesting example of the narrator exposing his narrative devices is, again, in The Reptile Room: «it is now necessary for me to use the rather hackneyed phrase “meanwhile back at the ranch” […] a phrase used to link what is going on in one part of the story to what is going on in another part of the story»112. The three children find themselves doing different activities: Klaus is scouring Uncle Monty’s library, Sunny is guarding the door and «meanwhile, back at the ranch, Violet went to listen at the kitchen door, trying to catch what the adults were saying»113. Metanarrative devices also come in the form of unconventionally written pages, for Lemony SNICKET, The Reptile Room, p. 27. The name Madame diLustro is probably an alias, for in The Grim Grotto when Lemony describes great conversation openers sentences to fill awkward pauses at a dinner party and inspire discussions and accusations which are sure to make the party more interesting, one of them is: «Madame diLustro, I believe I’ve discovered your true identity!”». 112 Lemony SNICKET, The Reptile Room, p. 127. 113 Lemony SNICKET, The Reptile Room, p. 128. 110 111 32 example in The Reptile Room there is one page only devoted to show you an endless concatenation of the word “ever” only for the author to say that you should never ever fiddle with electronic devices unless you are Violet Baudelaire who does know a thing or two about them, or strange illustrations connected to the narrative as happens in The Ersatz Elevator. Each and every novel in the series presents something both quirky and absurd: the second one The Wide Window has Aunt Josephine, a woman afraid of everything that could kill her and who ironically lives in a house dangerously perched on the edge of a hilltop right above Lake Lachrymose; The Ersatz Elevator presents the strange idea of the neighbourhood at 667 Dark Avenue deciding what is “in” (meaning what is considered fashionable) and what is “out” (which is the opposite meaning unfashionable). The Baudelaire orphans and Mr. Poe learn about this right away when they arrive at the penthouse of 667 and are told by the doorman that they will have to climb the stairs and not use the elevator for: «the elevator isn’t out of order. It’s just out. The neighbourhood decided that elevators were out, so they had the elevator shut down. Stairs are in, though»114. When they manage to climb all the way up the very long staircase and reach their new guardians’ house they are told by Jerome that he wanted to adopt them as soon as he heard about the fire but that was impossible as Esmé Squalor, who cares a lot about what is in and what is out, explains because: «”Orphans were out then,” the woman explained. “Now they’re in”»115, and now all her friends will be jealous to learn she is living with three real orphans. This sort of game is played throughout the all novel: aqueous martinis are in, Light is out, Dark is in, nevertheless these fashions are quick to change in what surely is a social commentary on the quick trends in our own world. But I digress, the real point was to show an instance of metanarration through the use of an illustration. At one point the orphans, having found out where Olaf and his henchmen hid the Quagmire triplets, go to Esmé hoping to get some help and tell her that the pin-striped suit auctioneer named Gunther is actually Count Olaf in disguise and that he has removed the elevator in order to hide the Quagmires at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Esmé is quick to take matters into her own hands and calmly leads the orphans out of the penthouse, a calmness the children find particularly disconcerting given the situation. The orphans believe they are going to use the stairs but Esmé puts her arms around them, in what they mistake as a much needed gesture of affection, takes them to the elevator’s sliding doors, presses the button and smiling she: «pushed the Baudelaire orphans into the darkness of the elevator shaft»116. What follows is two pages showing a black square and representing the darkness of the elevator shaft in which the orphans are falling. The author uses this image because sometimes words are not enough and in this particular occasion he has no words capable of describing: «the terror and woe that the Baudelaire orphans felt Lemony SNICKET, The Ersatz Elevator, p. 13. Lemony SNICKET, The Ersatz Elevator, p. 27. 116 Lemony SNICKET, The Ersatz Elevator, p. 181. 114 115 33 after Esmé pushed them into the elevator shaft is one of those most dreadful circumstances that can be represented only with two pages of utter blackness»117. Metanarrative devices can also be pushed to some extremes. As we have seen Snicket likes to interrupt the narration to give the reader some intel into his current situation: where he is, what he has to do. But could he perchance get the blurry line between fiction and reality we talked about in chapter 2 of this thesis even more out of focus? In the postmodern novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles we have an omniscient narrator telling the story, a narrator who most certainly is Fowles himself. The narrator can assume many forms in order to watch his characters. For instance, in chapter one he is the local spy of Lyme Regis118 who looks at the characters with the help of a telescope, in chapter twelve he is a passing owl able to see Sarah Woodruff crying at her open window, but it is in chapter thirteen that all pretences fall and the Victorian convention of the narrator being a Godlike figure is now fully broken. «This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind»119 says the narrator. He is not afraid of revealing he doesn’t really control the characters nor the story and that just like many other novelists he does not have a plan, novelists only: «wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was». Novelists create and therefore they are like gods yet not fully-fledged puppet masters, the characters still maintain some sort of freedom. What really interests our analysis at this point though is chapter fifty-five. Charles Smithson, the main male character who throughout the novel lives an internal struggle between the reasons of science, religion and his own desires which are out of his time, is sitting on a train when suddenly a bearded latecomer arrives and sits right in front of him. Charles looks at the new character with intent and reckons he is: «a decidedly unpleasant man […] and so typical of the age»120. Of course, both the reader and the author know that there is nothing typically Victorian about Fowles, if anything he stands against that age. Charles falls asleep and in that moment the bearded man reveals himself as the narrator and looks at Charles almost with a «cannibalistic intensity» and asks himself «Now what could I do with you?». The author, who is also the narrator, has inserted himself in the narration and, right there on the page, is wondering where he should take his character from this point forward. Lemony Snicket is no stranger to this, throughout the novels there are many instances of Snicket existing in the same universe as the three children whilst never clearly acknowledging it. You already know that in The Vile Village the Baudelaires meet Jacques Snicket, Lemony SNICKET, The Ersatz Elevator, p. 184. Lyme Regis is the West Dorset town in England where the novel takes place and in which Fowles lived from 1965 to 2005 when he died. 119 John FOWLES, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 95. 120 John FOWLES, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, p. 404. 117 118 34 Lemony’s brother, and that he gets viciously murdered by Count Olaf. This provokes no reaction from the narrator as he probably decides to hide his personal feelings from the reader. In the following novel The Hostile Hospital the children find a picture depicting their parents standing outside 667 Dark Avenue along with Jacques and a strange man whom they do not recognize: «a man who was turned away from the camera, so the children could not see his face, only one of his hands, which was clutching a notebook and pen, as if the obscured man were a writer of some sort»121. Again, Snicket offers no insight about this, but readers can make their own assumptions about who the writer described really is. Lastly in book the twelfth The Penultimate Peril the children outside Hotel Denouement, witnesses to yet one more murder, are approached by a tall and skinny taxi driver smoking a cigarette. They exchange a brief conversation in which the man asks them if they need a taxi and they say they are not sure. “You’re not sure?” the man asked. “Whenever you see someone in a taxi, they are probably being driven to do some errand. Surely there must be something you need to do, or somewhere you need to go. A great American novelist wrote that people travel faster now, but she wasn’t sure if they do better things. Maybe you would do better things if you travelled at this very moment”122. They answer that they have no money, but the taxi driver tells them they don’t need any if they are who he thinks they are. The Baudelaires do not know whether or not they should trust this man, someone who quotes great American writers must be a good person but a stranger who asks you to get in his car could possibly not have good intentions. Sunny answers for her siblings too that they do not know if they are who the man thinks they are, and the encounter is then interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Poe. The taxi driver leaves along with the chance of knowing what would have happened if the children had accepted. «I have no way of knowing if the Baudelaires should have been sad or relieved to see him go either. I do know who the man was, and I do know where he went afterward», says the narrator and then carefully describes the items that were in the taxi, things that only the taxi driver himself could have known were there. Readers can guess with certainty that Snicket was in fact the man who approached the children and they can also guess that his attempt at tracking down the children and writing their story might come from a place of regret. Maybe he shouldn’t have run away as soon as Mr. Poe showed up, maybe he should have presented himself better, maybe he should have insisted. The story might have taken a decidedly different turn if this were so. We have discussed about digressions and metanarrative devices, now in the following section we are going to explain how exactly Lemony Snicket uses language to build his own particular world. 121 122 Lemony SNICKET, The Hostile Hospital, p. 108. Lemony SNICKET, The Penultimate Peril, p. 245-246. 35 3.4 The world of words As I have stated in previous chapters, postmodernism believes in the existence of more than just one truth. There is no room for things that are universal, truth is subjective to individual experience and has therefore a multiple nature. In much the same way Snicket, and consequently Handler too, believes that words have more than just one meaning and that this meaning can be ironically fitting to the situations presented. Snicket cares a lot about the world of literature and also about the meaning of uncanny words he often finds himself using. You have seen me utilize in this thesis the expression “a word which here means” more than one time, and in defining such words I took some liberties just as Snicket does. The very first instance can be found in The Bad Beginning when Snicket describes the rickety trolley the Baudelaire always take with them when they visit Briny Beach: «the word “rickety,” you probably know, here means “unsteady” or “likely to collapse”»123. This is pretty much correct given that the word “rickety” is usually associated with something which isn’t in good conditions. The explanations of words also come from the adults of the series who constantly think the children are not intelligent enough to know difficult terms, and Mr. Poe is always guilty of this thought. “‘Perished,’” Mr. Poe said, “means ‘killed.’” “We know what the word ‘perished’ means,” Klaus said, crossly124. But sometimes meanings can be changed as to suit the situations. When Mr. Poe finally finds the closest relative whom the children can be entrusted to and therefore manages to get them out of his house, he tells them they have to get up so as to leave as soon as possible. He says so in a brisk manner and the narrator swoops in explaining: «the word “briskly” here means “quickly, so as to get the Baudelaire children to leave the house”»125. Obviously, were you to open a dictionary and look for the word “brisk”, you would find no mention of three unlucky children soon to be put in the care of the vicious Count Olaf. The explanation is there to suit the narrator’s needs and expose Mr. Poe’s happiness about finally being able to get rid of the Baudelaires (a wish also shared by his wife Polly Poe and their two children Edgar and Albert). Snicket also spells out the meaning of particular expressions and he sometimes uses these explanations to warn readers. In The Carnivorous Carnival the phrase “in the belly of the beast” appears: «an expression which means “inside some terrible place with little chance of escaping safely,” and it is not an expression one should look forward to using»126. The narrator then tells the readers that they will encounter this phrase three Lemony SNICKET, The Bad Beginning, p. 2. Lemony SNICKET, The Bad Beginning, p. 8. 125 Lemony SNICKET, The Bad Beginning, p. 18. 126 Lemony SNICKET, The Carnivorous Carnival, p. 2. 123 124 36 times in the novel because three times they will see the characters in a dangerous place with little to no chance of escaping. It is particularly interesting to note that this tendency to define words is something that has always stuck with Snicket long since his younger years. Many instances of this can be found in the last book to the All the Wrong Questions series, which you may recall tells the story of Lemony’s training in and missions for the secret society V.F.D., Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? (2015). The concept is the same one, explaining words with convenient meanings: «My associates and I had formed an ad hoc branch of the organization that had sent me to this town. “Ad hoc” means we were all alone and making it up as we went along»127. The added nuance is that this peculiar characteristic is also acknowledged by other characters, for example amateur reporter Moxie Mallahan, one of Snicket’s friends and associate, who calls him out on it when he utters his catchphrase out loud. ”We’re in the middle of a quagmire, a word which here means ‘heap of trouble’”. Moxie gave me a smile. “Why do you always say that – which here means?”. “I’ll probably outgrow it,” I said128. But as we very well know, having analysed many instances of the narrator giving definitions of difficult words, Snicket will not outgrow it. This could also apply to Daniel Handler himself. As a matter of fact, in our introduction we have examined his first novel The Basic Eight where at the end of each chapter the narrator leaves a list of words related to the previous diary entry revealing the first instances of Handler’s love for the English vocabulary. While we are still on the subject of language, it would be fascinating to focus on the character of little Sunny Baudelaire. Sunny’s age is approximately between one to two years throughout the thirteen novels. We have met Sunny in chapter two already, we know about her very sharp teeth and what she can do with them given the absurd nature of the series (do not forget about the sword fight), we do not know much about her words. Sunny is a toddler in The Bad Beginning and as is the case with all toddlers she does not really speak in a coherent and grammatically correct way but only through unintelligible words that make sense only to her siblings. Also the narrator is able to understand her and tries his best to make her expressions clearer for the readers129. The first word she utters in the first novel as Mr. Poe approaches the siblings to deliver the bad news on Briny Beach is: «“Gack!” over and over, which probably meant, “Look at Lemony SNICKET, Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?, Kindle version, position 50-65 out of 2008. 128 Lemony SNICKET, Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?, Kindle version, position 990 out of 2008. 129 In Chapter 2 we have seen the use of Sunny’s word as literary quotations when she says: “Godot”. 127 37 that mysterious figure emerging from the fog!”»130. The narrator’s explanations make Sunny appear as quite the intelligent child in possession of a very large vocabulary: «“Pietrisycamollaviadelrechiotemexity,” Sunny said […] It meant something along the lines of “I must admit I don’t have the faintest idea of what is going on”»131. During the course of the series Sunny grows and adds to her love for biting stuff a love for cooking. She starts by changing recipes as she does in The Carnivorous Carnival when she teaches Hugo, one of the freaks at Caligari Carnival, that adding cinnamon to hot chocolate makes it delicious. She gets better and better at it when, later on, she devotes herself to more complex recipes. Along with the added interest for cooking, also her speaking capabilities change and by The End she is able to speak in understandable expressions and even full sentences. Sometimes what she says are words spelled backwards like in The Carnivorous Carnival: «“Edasurc,” Sunny said, which meant something like, “Maybe someday we can rescue these lions”»132, were we to read it backwards it would spell ‘crusade’. Moreover, her first sentence is in The Slippery Slope when Violet won’t leave Sunny behind with Olaf and to assure her Sunny says: «I’m not a baby»133 and then hugs her sister. She also shows her sense of humour in The End when asked if Count Olaf is a friend of theirs, Sunny answers: «”Fat chance”», an expression which here I think means “not at all likely, don’t you dare associate us with such a horrible person”. Word definitions and word plays bring us right to some very secretive and mysterious letters in the following section. 3.5 V.F.D. — Various Foggy Definitions Adding to the love for words, Snicket enjoys playing with his readers by throwing even more mysterious details at them, as is the case with the three letters which serve as the title for this paragraph. In 1938 British writer Edward Morgan Forster wrote an essay titled What I Believe where he states that he does not believe in Belief, but he does believe in aristocracy: «not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky»134 and which members come from all ages, places and social statuses. In the third book of the All the Wrong Questions series Shouldn’t you be in school? (2014) the Association of Associates135 questions Snicket about V.F.D. and he answers by paraphrasing Forster’s essay describing V.F.D. as a society of noble intents and stating that it has had many names and is on the verge of disappearance because of disagreements among members. Lemony SNICKET, The Bad Beginning, p. 4. Lemony SNICKET, The Hostile Hospital, p. 71. 132 Lemony SNICKET, The Carnivorous Carnival, p. 196. 133 Lemony SNICKET, The Slippery Slope, p. 227. 134 E.M. FORSTER, What I Believe, 1939, p. 16. 135 An organization created by the children who live in the city Stain'd-by-the-Sea, the main setting of the All the Wrong Questions novels, to fight the Inhumane Society. 130 131 38 That the acronym V.F.D. assumes many different definitions is true, Snicket does love his word plays. In A Series Of Unfortunate Events it is almost used as a red-herring for both the Baudelaires and readers, when finding out about the true meaning of this letters and their connection to the three children and their parents becomes of vital importance. A red-herring is an expression used to describe something misleading or that can distract you from more important matters, and in the thirteen novels the Baudelaires follow lots of red-herrings in the hopes of finding some truth. For instance, the village from The Vile Village where the children decide to go investigate is called Village of Fowl Devotees, in The Hostile Hospital the children end up in a van of cheerful people called Volunteers Fighting Disease, a group who visits Heimlich Hospital to help the patients smile, or to continue the Valley of Four Drafts in the Mortmain Mountains which the children first notice on a map in The Carnivorous Carnival. The orphans encounter these letters so much that it almost turns into a cosmic joke not so different from their own life but also something they can joke about: «"The only V.F.D. around here," Klaus said, leaning down to peer into a pool of water, "is our Very Flavorless Diet"»136. But if you have read this thesis carefully up to this point, you must know that V.F.D. is really a secret organization and its meaning lines up with none of the above. The letters V.F.D. stand for Volunteer Fire Department and it is now time to introduce a new character who can give us a general definition of what this secret society does. Kit Snicket is Lemony’s sister, but also a member of V.F.D, and in The Penultimate Peril explains: «”V.F.D. was once a united group of volunteers, trying to extinguish fires — both literally and figuratively. But now there are two groups of bitter enemies. Some of us continue to extinguish fires, but others have turned to much less noble schemes”»137. Much of what V.F.D. is remains a mystery, but what we know we can gather not only from the main novels and spin-off prequel series but also from the companion novels such as Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography and The Beatrice Letters (2006). The creation and past of this secret organization is obscure, but we know that when Kit Snicket was only four years old a split called “The Schism“ happened and divided the organization into a Fire-Starting Side, those who commit arson and cause mayhem, and a Fire-Fighting Side138, tasked to extinguish the fires and calm people down to make the world quiet again. In the novels the reason for all these fires and for why the schism happened in the first place is unclear, although readers can guess that it had something to do with or was caused by important characters such as Lemony, Count Olaf and Beatrice139. The Fire-Starting side can also boast two mysterious villains, members of V.F.D. long before the schism. The first one, feared even by Count Olaf, is Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 102. Lemony SNICKET, The Penultimate Peril, pp. 6-7. 138 To be noted that the majority of those who belong to this side have been murdered by Count Olaf. 139 In the next chapter we will be discussing the tv series version of these events. 136 137 39 the Man with a Beard but No Hair. The fires idea probably comes from him since in The Slippery Slope when talking about the many problem Sunny has caused to Olaf and his henchmen who have kidnapped her, he says: «“But we know how to solve problems, don’t we? Fire can solve any problem in the world”»140. The second one is his associate the Woman with Hair but No Beard and she really enjoys the destruction fire brings as confirmed by the excitement with which she tells of how they burned down the V.F.D. headquarters in the Mortmain Mountains: «then we burned down all the bathrooms, and then finally, we burned down the V.F.D. library last night. That was my favorite part — books and books and books, all turned to ashes so no one could read them»141. Before the schism Volunteers, as members of V.F.D. are called, were kidnapped by other members at a very young age if they showed themselves to have particularly brilliant minds and were permanently separated from their parents. Other than what I have already mentioned in the introduction, their training consists of learning how to disguise, getting the required eye-shaped tattoo containing the V.F.D. letters142 and how to use secret codes. V.F.D. cares a lot about remaining secret so they have various coded systems to communicate among members. In The Beatrice Letters the reader can find a secret poem written in Iambic Pentameter (as if it were a sonnet by Shakespeare) by Beatrice Baudelaire, the children’s mother, to Lemony Snicket. The poem’s title is My Silence Knot and if you took some time to rearrange the letters you would find that it is the anagram for Lemony Snicket. Anagrams are among V.F.D.’s favourite codes and Beatrice uses it in order to let Snicket know that the poem is for him and that its cryptic content hides a secret message. In addition, we also have the Sebald Code created by film director Gustav Sebald who once was Uncle Monty’s assistant. If Uncle Monty were aware of how this code works, he would have been able to not die by the hands of Count Olaf. In Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography an excerpt from the script of Sebald’s movie Zombies in the Snow, which Uncle Monty, Stephano and the Baudelaires go see in The Reptile Room, can be found with some underlined words which put together form the following secret message: «Attention, hidden in the snowman is a survivor of the fire. Meet us in the town where this film takes place. Bring the three children. Your new assistant is not one of us! Beware!»143. Undoubtedly, Sebald is trying to warn Uncle Monty about Stephano’s actually being Count Olaf but what is unclear is the talk about a survivor of the fire, although by the end of the series readers can guess that the fire referenced was the Quagmire’s and the survivor Quigley Quagmire. Lemony SNICKET, The Slippery Slope, p. 127. Lemony SNICKET, The Slippery Slope, p. 128. 142 You will remember this tattoo being the detail which helps the children to reveal Count Olaf’s true identity when he is in disguise. 143 Lemony SNICKET, Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, p. 61. 140 141 40 One more interesting code is the Verbal Fridge Dialogue, only used in the event of a fire. This code is first discovered by the children when in The Slippery Slope they find the burnt down V.F.D. old headquarters in the Valley of Four Drafts. Klaus finds a scrap of paper whose burnt words (Violet, Klaus and Quigley find out after trying to carefully guess the words) read: «‘In the event of a conflagration resulting in the destruction of a sanctuary, volunteers should avail themselves of Verbal Fridge Dialogue, which is concealed accordingly’»144. Later on, Klaus discovers the function of this code which «is an emergency communication system that avails itself of the more esoteric products in a refrigerator. Volunteers will know such a code is being used by the presence of very fresh dill»145. If in a fridge you find some very fresh dill, then it means a member of V.F.D. has left a secret message for you (and also that most probably your house has been set on fire). Additionally, this secret organization also has a motto. In Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography it is revealed that if someone approaches you with the sentence “I didn’t realize this was a sad occasion” you should answer saying “The world is quiet here”, a phrase which comes from the first line of The Garden of Proserpine by English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne which goes: «Here, where the world is quiet»146. In The Grim Grotto the children are stranded in the Stricken Stream in front of a submarine with the V.F.D. symbol on it and they are asked for a password in order to enter. Violet fortunately remembers the remnants of the ruined V.F.D. Headquarters’ library and the expression “The world is quiet here” which grants them access. What’s more, just like a true V.F.D. volunteer, Klaus even has his own commonplace book. A commonplace book is a notebook where members of V.F.D. write down notes and details they find to be important. Many of the young characters are shown to have such a notebook: Isadora Quagmire’s commonplace book is black; Quigley Quagmire’s commonplace book is purple; Klaus’ commonplace book is dark blue. Looking for clues, solving mysteries, going on missions of their own, using passwords and codes, by the end of the series it is as if the orphans have become qualified members of V.F.D. In the next section we will discuss about some uncanny elements which feature in the series. 3.6 Elements of whimsy Postmodern works always try to challenge traditional novel structure by playing with readers’ expectations, through particular writing styles (there also are novels written in verse for instance), through the choppy timeline which moves forward and backwards into the characters’ lives, parodying literary genres and so forth. In A Series Of Lemony SNICKET, The Slippery Slope, pp. 197-198. Lemony SNICKET, The Slippery Slope, p. 237. 146 Algernon Charles SWINBURNE, The Garden of Proserpine, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45288/the-garden-of-proserpine (last consulted: 30/07/2020). 144 145 41 Unfortunate Events this longing for defying novel’s conventions translates to creative, quirky and ironic elements which serve to build the Baudelaires absurd world even more. Some of the things you find in these novels are quite obvious and easy to spot, for instance the game hidden in the titles. You must have noticed too by now that each title presents an alliteration, a figure of speech used especially in poetry consisting in the repetition of similar sounds. An example could be the famous Peter Piper tongue twister: «Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?». As for the novels, The Bad Beginning alliterates the sound “BB”, The Grim Grotto has the sound “GG”, The Ersatz Elevator with the sound “EE”, the game is only broken by the final novel called The End, which presents no alliterations whatsoever. This figure of speech can also be found in the name of places like the Mortmain Mountains, in the dedications147 or in characters’ names like Quigley Quagmire and Beatrice Baudelaire. Some other word games are harder to find and need confrontation with more Snicket enthusiasts. Just the other day, while doing extensive research for this thesis, I stumbled upon a forum discussing the many anagrams which can be found in the series. One user explained to me how in The Hostile Hospital, when Klaus and Sunny are looking for their sister’s name on a list of patients whom that day were going to be operated, find the following name: «CARRIE E. ABELABUDITE»148. After having received the advice of looking closer at it and rearrange the letters, I quite amusingly saw that the name, as if the author was trying to wink at the reader, is the anagram for Beatrice Baudelaire and I had never noticed it before. Whimsical elements do not stop at alliterations and anagrams though. We have briefly seen in the previous chapter the incredibly popular newspaper which everyone in the City reads called The Daily Punctilio. This one is the most unreliable source of information you can find, full of fake news and purely researched facts usually about murders and natural disasters. Just like a clickbait article you would find surfing the net, The Daily Punctilio also uses its titles to lure gullible readers who believe each and every word they read. In The Vile Village we can read the following excerpt: «“‘Duncan and Isadora Quagmire,’” Violet read out loud, “‘twin children who are the only known surviving members of the Quagmire family, have been kidnapped by the notorious Count Omar. Omar is wanted by the police for a variety of dreadful crimes”»149. Of course, we know that Count Omar should actually be Count Olaf and that the Quagmires are actually triplets and not twins. Later on The Daily Punctilio goes to great lengths to depict the Baudelaires as murderers, guilty of having killed Count Omar As we have seen in Chapter 2: «To Beatrice – Darling, Dearest, Dead». Lemony SNICKET, The Hostile Hospital, p. 158. 149 Lemony SNICKET, The Vile Village, p. 3. 147 148 42 which once again we know isn’t true for the body found in the Village of Fowl Devotees is that of Jacques Snicket and that he was killed by none other than Count Olaf. On a positive note though, The Daily Punctilio is sometimes used as an ironic element especially in its headlines: «‘MURDERER ATTEMPTS TO MURDER MURDERER’»150, « ‘EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH COUNT OLAF, WHO IS NOT COUNT OMAR, WHO IS DEAD’»151 and «‘UNBELIEVABLY GLAMOROUS AND BEAUTIFUL WOMAN COMPLAINS ABOUT HOTEL SERVICE!’»152. In any case, you should never trust a newspaper or any other source of information which makes mistakes their editorial policy. To keep on following the whimsical wave, there are some more interesting topics to discuss or, to refer back at the previous paragraph, more red herrings. In The End when the Baudelaires find themselves in a threatening situation and go to Count Olaf for help, he says he will help them only if they give him the Baudelaires’ fortune to which Sunny replies: «"Mcguffin," Sunny said, which meant "Your scheming means nothing in this place."»153. To be honest, a Mcguffin or Macguffin has nothing to do with Count Olaf’s evil plans and is in reality a term created by director Alfred Hitchcock to describe a narrative device which pushes the plot forward. It usually is an item which the characters need to find or on which their attention is focused. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954) the Mcguffin is the One Ring the main character Frodo and his companionship need to safely bring to Mount Doom before it falls in the wrong hands of the antagonist Sauron. In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series the Mcguffin are the seven Horcruxes the antagonist Lord Voldemort made when using some very dark magic he split his soul in seven parts so as to be able to live forever, and Harry together with his friends Ron and Hermione needs to collect and destroy to kill Voldemort once and for all. An item with the same characteristics as a Mcguffin can be found in A Series Of Unfortunate Events: the sugar bowl, an item of great importance to both sides of the divided members of V.F.D. Now, what could be so special about a sugar bowl that a great deal of characters (including the three orphans too who get involved in the search without knowing why it is so vital to find the bowl) would relentlessly look for it. In The Hostile Hospital the narrator suddenly mentions that he stole the sugar bowl from Esmé Squalor and wonders whether it was really necessary. In The Carnivorous Carnival Snicket tells the reader that he often goes to Briny Beach looking for clues about the Baudelaires and that the sea makes him feel peaceful, but: «when I am cold and duck into a teashop where the owner is expecting me, I have only to reach for the sugar bowl before my grief returns»154. This probably implies, but could also be very well wrong, that at the time the narrator is writing the story, he is still in possession of the Sugar Lemony SNICKET, The Hostile Hospital, p. 209. Lemony SNICKET, The Carnivorous Carnival, p. 216. 152 Lemony SNICKET, The Penultimate Peril, p. 81. 153 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 312. 154 Lemony SNICKET, The Carnivorous Carnival, p. 114. 150 151 43 Bowl, has probably chosen a teashop as its hiding place (who would ever think of looking in a teashop to find a sugar bowl?) and that this item probably has something to do with him mourning his Beatrice. The mysterious content of this particular sugar bowl, a very common object which assumes symbolic nuances and pushes the characters and plot forward, is unknown. When asked about it, Handler replies that the mystery’s solution can be clearly found in the novels and that: «a piece of culture that asks questions is more interesting than one that answers them»155. Although this obvious answer is still debated among fans, what we can be sure about is that the Sugar Bowl contains something dangerous and able to inflict great damage. Sadly though, the lack of answers can become frustrating and bring readers to not completely buy into Daniel Handler’s postmodern attitude about the world being open to subjective interpretation and about the fact that whatever answer he could provide would only be arbitrary. One more dangerous element is the Medusoid Mycelium, a deadly fungus that could poison those who breath it in and which is said to be even worse than what the Sugar Bowl contains. It is possible to defend oneself against the Mycelium using: «wasabi, which is a sort of horseradish often used in Japanese food»156. In The End when this fungus is released by Count Olaf on the island157, Klaus remembers a poem that was recited to him by Fiona, a Queepeg member, in The Grim Grotto: «A single spore has such grim power / That you may die within the hour»158. The next lines in the poem reveal that horseradish is also a way to dilute the poison: «Is dilution simple? But of course I / Just one small dose of root of horse"»159. It was Gregor Anwhistle, Aunt Josephine’s brother-in-law, the one who created this poison to use it against the fire-starting side after the schism, but as with many dangerous weapons great harm can be produced when they fall into the wrong hands. 3.7 Foreshadowing We have stated before that literature is one of the vital bricks which supports the novels’ world, but what really drives it and gives it life is the narrator and his peculiar views on style and ambiguity. For Snicket, overthrowing readers’ expectations is as fundamental as making the novels’ timeline unclear. Snicket tells the Baudelaire’s story in a moment in time where the orphans have already lived through all those awful experiences, and to make the chronology more ambiguous he also uses a particular plot device called ‘foreshadowing’. The foreshadowing serves the purpose of hinting at things that are yet to come and enticing the reader to keep moving forward. In the very first paragraph of Dana SCHWARTZ, A Series Of Unfortunate Questions With Daniel Handler, https://observer.com/2017/01/aseries-of-unfortunate-questions-with-daniel-handler/ (last consulted: 31/07/2020). 156 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 88. 157 More on this in the conclusion to this thesis. 158 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 262. 159 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 265. 155 44 the YA dystopian novel The Hunger Games (2008) we can see an instance of foreshadowing through the main character’s Katniss Everdeen first-person narrative. She tells the reader that her little sister Prim must have gone to sleep with their mother because of some nightmare she had and adds: «Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping»160. Katniss is foreshadowing an event that will happen and be explained later on and that when the reader opens the novel does not know about. The reaping is the day in which the young citizens of Panem among the age of 12 to 18 are chosen to participate in the barbaric Hunger Games. In a different way, Lemony Snicket utilizes this technique to inform the reader about his characters’ future, regrets or things he wished could have happened to them. In The Slippery Slope when Violet’s mechanical talents come in handy again Snicket narrates: «It is one of the great sadnesses of the Baudelaire case that Violet never got to meet a man named C. M. Kornbluth, an associate of mine who spent most of his life living and working in the Valley of Four Drafts as a mechanical instructor at the V.F.D. headquarters»161. The man mentioned would have been happy to meet such a promising mechanical student as Violet Baudelaire and it is also to be noted that his name takes inspiration from science-fiction writer Cyril M. Kornbluth who wasn’t part of the secret society V.F.D. but was part of a group of science-fiction fans called Futurians162. For a closer look at what lies in the future we have a passage in The Reptile Room where Mr. Poe and the deceitful Stephano are deciding with whom the children should ride with to get far from Uncle Monty’s house and corpse and Stephano is trying to convince Mr. Poe to let them go with him. To get away from the adults and have time to think alone with her siblings, Violet briskly accepts and leads Klaus and Sunny to the Reptile Room. Snicket takes the opportunity to inform the reader about later years: «even years later, Klaus would lie awake in bed, filled with regret that he didn’t call out to the driver of the taxicab who had brought Stephano into their lives once more» whereas Violet in later years, although the many miserable times in her life did not let her sleep easily either, would also look at the silver linings: «she was always a bit proud of herself that she realized she and her siblings should in fact excuse themselves from the kitchen and move to a more helpful location»163. The foreshadowing technique is also used by Snicket to give us insight about his future life too. In The Carnivorous Carnival the children develop the plan of using a fan belt to get a roller-coaster cart up and running again so they can get away from Count Olaf who has followed them even at Caligari Carnival. The fan belt, which is a strip of rubber, is all Violet needs to finish her invention but gets somehow lost leaving Violet wondering whether it fell to the ground or in the terrible Suzanne COLLINS, The Hunger Games, p. 4. Lemony SNICKET, The Slippery Slope, p. 192. 162 URANIAblog: http://blog.librimondadori.it/blogs/urania/2013/02/06/pohl-kornbluth/ (last consulted 01/08/2020) 163 Lemony SNICKET, The Reptile Room, p. 121. 160 161 45 lion pit where earlier Madame Lulu164 and the Bald Man with the Long Nose165 had fallen and were devoured giving spectacle to many of those present. Snicket mentions that at the time he is writing the novels, probably purely for research, the fan belt’s location remains unknown to him: «I will probably never know the location of the fan belt, no matter how many times I return to Caligari Carnival to search for it»166. Foreshadowing also comes from companion novels. In The Beatrice Letters we find out about what happens to Sunny after the end of The End. Since it is not yet time to talk in depth about these letters, suffice to say that Sunny goes on to speak on the radio about her recipes, nothing is mentioned about what Violet and Klaus will be up to. When we will get to the conclusion of this thesis it will become clearer how these foreshadowing makes the narrative timeline unclear but first, we need to discuss about adaptations. We have talked about how language builds the novels’ world, but now we need to focus on the success A Series Of Unfortunate Events gained over the years. It is this very success which brought the creation of the many products surrounding it. The series has been made into audiobooks with their own soundtrack also published singularly and titled The Tragic Treasury: Songs from A Series of Unfortunate Events (2006) with thirteen tracks by indie-pop band The Gothic Archies. Moreover, it can boast a videogame, a boardgame and a card game. But most importantly, it was made into a 2004 movie and a 2017 three seasons Netflix tv series, which will be our objects of analysis in the next chapter. Alias for Olivia Caliban, she was a fortune teller at Caligari Carnival. The children become very fond of Olivia during the course of The Carnivorous Carnival but once again Count Olaf is ready to ruin everything. 165 One of Count Olaf’s most terrible associates. 166 Lemony SNICKET, The Carnivorous Carnival, p. 251. 164 46 CHAPTER 4 - The Awful Adaptations Dear Viewer, We present to you our opening credits, a phrase here which means ‘last chance to turn off this unfortunate story and stream something more pleasant’, as a final reminder that you have no obligation to stream this miserable tale. - Netflix on A Series Of Unfortunate Events 4.1 Different Medias We now enter our next-to-last chapter and just as Lemony Snicket tells us in the Dear Reader epigraph to The Penultimate Peril: «Next-to-last things are the first thing to be avoided». This chapter presents the next-to-last analysis of A Series Of Unfortunate Events and it is next-to-first in its supply of awful adaptations that are in no way awful but do contain lots of misery and unpleasantness, which as you know by now is custom for this series. Most probably the next-to-last things you want to read about are the rehashing of the story you are already familiar with thanks to previous chapters, the way postmodern strategies are brought to the screen, the multiplied presence of the nefarious Count Olaf and much more. So, one more time, allow me to recommend you stop reading this next-to-last chapter and find something else that could provide you with more engrossing next-to-last analyses. But lamentably, I know that ignoring this umpteenth warning you will follow my discussion for the next-to-last time. In paragraph 3.1 of the previous chapter we discussed about how storytelling is deeply rooted in our culture and has always represented a form of entertainment. This was true in the past when balladeers enlivened kings’ suppers with stories of heroes and their ventures; or when during the Middle Ages in Turkey there was the Meddhalik: «a Turkish theatre form performed by a single storyteller called a meddah»167 who publicly performed in cafés and would interpret each character of the story using different voices and pitch; or even in China where we can find the Yimakan storytelling which depicts «tribal alliances and battles, including the defeat of monsters and invaders» by the heroes of the Hezhen minority (this form is strictly oral because the Hezhen have no writing system)168. Each and every culture has their own way of creating narratives, their own purpose, their own heroes and villains but all these elements never remain fixed. Through the centuries, just as humans progressed and invented, storytelling also evolved with them: from the oral tradition of passing down myths and legends, we arrive to the theatre, to novels, most recently to interactive forms of narrations169, UNESCO, Arts of the Meddah, public storytellers: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/arts-of-the-meddah-publicstorytellers-00037 (last consulted: 03/08/2020). 168 UNESCO, Hezhen Yimakan storytelling: (last consulted: 03/08/2020). 169 That is “choose your own adventure” books like Romeo And/Or Juliet: A Chooseable-Path Adventure (2016) by Ryan North where the reader can decide which path the two characters should take in a series of what ifs 167 47 cinema and television. In summary, storytelling has blended with new technologies creating the new concept of “digital storytelling”. This last one unites oral traditions with new medias and incorporates audio files, videos, images and even 3D graphics (for instance, in the case of videogames). We have referred, at the end of the previous chapter, to A Series Of Unfortunate Events’ story as being a media-crossing franchise, a word which here means “a successful popular-culture product which takes on different forms”. For instance, the thirteen novels’ series was also turned into a boardgame called The Perilous Parlor Game (2002). It unfolds in 24 turns, one player plays Count Olaf and the other players are the Baudelaire children. Count Olaf can avail himself of Tragedy cards to damage the Guardian’s health and the children can fight back with Clever cards along with the items they find by moving forward on the board. To delve deeply into the game’s mechanics would be fruitless, even reviews from many users have found it extremely confusing due to the ridiculous amount of rules, therefore what really interests us is the way it adapts the series to a new medium. Miserable and dreadful are words that merrily combine with the series’ novels and as you may recall this is stated right in The Bad Beginning where the narrator tells us not to read forward because we will neither find happy endings nor happy beginnings in the Baudelaire’s story. Were we to turn the game box around we would find the same message, addressed to the «Dear Gaming Enthusiast» and adapted in order to fit the new just as grim form the story takes: If you wish to play a game where the hero always wins, the villain is forever defeated, and innocent children are brought to warmth and safety, then I encourage you to put this box down immediately and look for something involving lollipops, ponies or educational flashcards170. The warning then proceeds to tell gamers how depressing the game is, how much disaster it will bring them and that they should in no way feel any obligation to play it. Elements from the series also flow into the game itself and some examples are: the presence of Guardians; the way the orphans will only be saved by the arrival of Mr. Poe; the Clever cards which play on the children’s talents and sometime use alliterations: «Klaus reads the book All About Antidotes. Guardian recovers one Life Point»; or the Tragedy cards which are humorous and also use word definitions: that strays away from Shakespeare’s play. Sometimes the path the reader chooses can bring him to the untimely death of either Romeo and/or Juliet, sometimes it can bring them to the happily ever after, sometimes the story ends quickly and other times it goes on for a long time, but the constant is the feeling that the reader does not completely control the story since the author’s presence remains tangible. As for a different medium we could mention the dystopian Netflix series Black Mirror which published in 2018 an interactive episode called Bandersnatch where viewers could control the main character’s actions and choose different paths for him. 170 MATTEL, The Perilous Parlor Game: https://service.mattel.com/us/productDetail.aspx?prodno=B4833&siteid=27. 48 The Guardian’s bed is draped with a duvet, a word which here means “down-filled comforter that keeps one warm at night and is neither supposed to maim nor to damage you” ― unless it’s been stuffed with poisonous Fiddle-Backed Spiders. The resulting bites make for a fitful night of sleep and the loss of three Life Points. Moreover, in 2004 a card game was created, the second game inspired by A Series Of Unfortunate Events. It used the series’ trademark design (meaning the yellow colour), the characters illustrations and the V.F.D. eye on the back of the cards. Players need to complete their sets of characters by drawing cards from the draw pile or the discard pile and what is never to be forgotten is the warning which can this time be found in the rules: «Sadly the Object of this game is not to have a pleasant experience, for any game involving the Baudelaire Orphans will surely end in disappointment». In 2004 the novels started to be produced as audiobooks. The first two A Series Of Unfortunate Events audiobooks were read by British actor Tim Curry along with a group of readers creating a multi-voice recording. Then, from The Wide Window to The Austere Academy narration passed over to Daniel Handler himself. Sadly, Handler found it difficult to read out loud without pausing or making ‘um’ sounds: «“It was very, very hard. It was unbelievably arduous. It was the worst kind of arduous”»171, so the job went back to Tim Curry for the remaining novels. Once again we can bring forward the example of a warning from the audiobooks’ blurb, this time addressed to the listener, for instance the one from The Bad Beginning: «Like a car alarm, bagpipe music, or a doorbell ringing in the middle of the night, hearing this audio edition of The Bad Beginning will only upset you». In addition, as stated at the end of chapter three, the audiobooks are accompanied by songs performed by indie pop band The Gothic Archies and written by singer-songwriter Stephin Raymond Merrit. The songs, collected in the concept album called The Tragic Treasury: Songs from A Series of Unfortunate Events (2006), are inspired by the novels and have the same morose yet comic tone. One interesting example surely is the song “Dreary, Dreary” which is an ode to Beatrice, the woman perished in a fire whom Lemony loved and to whom he dedicates each instalment: «Gone, gone, my Beatrice/ Gone, the lips I longed to kiss/ Into a black and bleak abyss/ Gone, gone, gone». 2004 was a great year for the series given that it inspired one more media format: the videogame (made as a tie-in for the movie). Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is a multi-console (Playstation2, Xbox, Microsoft Windows, etc.) platform172 video game based on the first three novels of the series, just as the movie adaptation AudioFile Magazine, Talking with Lemony Snicket: https://audiofilemagazine.com/authors/lemony-snicket/ (last consulted 07/08/2020). 172 Platform games are a subgenre of action games and heavily use jumping and climbing to let the player move in the environment created. 171 49 which we will talk about later. Players take on the roles of Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire (voiced by the movie’s actors) and they can switch between them when the narrative requires it as they fight Count Olaf and his villains: the Hook-Handed Man173, the White-Faced Women174 and the Bald Man With the Long Nose. The game begins with a narrative sequence: a book with the secret society V.F.D. eye engraved on it opens up to show a series of sketches as Lemony Snicket, whose voice is that of Tim Curry (although it is Jude Law the actor who plays him in the movie), quickly summarizes the beginning of the story and presents the characters. Doubtless, the voice tells the player: «The videogame you are about to play is extremely unpleasant. If you are interested in casting magic spells or saving the Earth from alien invasions, you might as well stop right now» in yet one more rendition of The Bad Beginning’s incipit. The game first unfolds at Count Olaf’s house and then many other places from the first three novels (Uncle Monty’s home, Aunt Josefine’s home, Curdled Cave). These places can be explored as the player collects items and moves the plot forward by completing mini-games such as solving puzzles, fighting, moving things around and using the children’s talents. Sunny bites her way through a blocked door, Klaus gets rid of rats with his weapon called the Brilliant Bopper and Violet invents weapons. All the while the player is guided by the constant presence of the narrator’s voice, in remembrance of the novels and the postmodern metanarrative style. Finally, the dark tones, the humour, the warnings, the confusion along with all the other elements previously stated serve to mirror and build the series aesthetic. Surely you have not forgotten that the characters move in a grim and outlandish world, how could you when everything about this series never fails to remind you. You as a reader, player, listener, shouldn’t dare think to enter it. Instead, you are asked to find better alternatives. In lieu of playing the videogame, find yourself something happier that lets you save the planet from evil. Why bother listening to the terrible audiobooks when you can listen to the latest more cheerful novel by that author you like so very much. Instead of playing the boardgame and cards game you really should get your family together and play something funnier. Unfortunately for you though, curiosity pushes you to read, play and listen forward. As this is not the end of the series’ adaptations, we now have to talk about what was brought to the cinema screen and more recently on the screen of the devices you have at home. His name is Fernald, he is Count Olaf’s assistant and has hooks instead of hands. Members of Olaf’s theatre troupe, the two women always cover their faces with white powder and they are twins. 173 174 50 4.2 The intricacies of adaptations Lars Konzack in his essay Transmediality states that: «Transmediality has become more important in recent years due to easy access to different kinds of media»175. Through the many productions of A Series Of Unfortunate Events we have noticed how well the series lends itself to be reshaped by different medias and still maintain its essence. Whether you are playing it as a game or listening to it, the story of the Baudelaire children will be just as awful and horrific as it was in its original form. What the retellings through new medias bring to it is the easy access Konzack talks about in his essay. A videogame is accessible to young children and some may find it even more fun than having to tear through the pages of a novel. A card game can bring a family together. You can enjoy the Baudelaire’s audiobooks while doing chores. In any way, shape or form you approach it, the story is still being told and still spreads itself reaching more and more people. Doing so, it achieves the success which brings the author to obtain offers, in our case movie offers in particular. Now, the field of adaptation is certainly intricate and vast given the many art products that can go through the adaptation process. In the preface to A Theory of Adaptation (2006) Linda Hutcheon explains that poems, paintings, songs and so forth can be adapted, but for the purposes of this analysis we will keep ourselves to the matter of adapting these wretched novels to the movie screen and then, in the following section, to whatever digital device a viewer can play Netflix on. The movie, which adapted the first three novels in A Series Of Unfortunate Events all at once, was released in 2004 and called Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Surely 2004 was not the first time a successful series of novels for young readers was chosen to be adapted to the screen. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, first published in 1997, was made into a movie and released in 2001. The young orphan wizard’s story gave way to an incredibly profitable franchise now branded as Wizarding World™. This franchise is still up and running today and it counts several novels and companion novels from the main Harry Potter series, eight movies adapted from the seven original novels, a play which serves as a sequel176, various theme parks, merchandising and a prequel spin-off series supposed to consist of five movies all written by the author herself. Undoubtedly, the idea behind the making of the first movie in Snicket’s series was to emulate Harry Potter’s global success and it could have almost pulled it off. The movie was a box office success, won the Academy Award for Best Make Up and Hairstyling and received favourable reviews from critics. The Critics Consensus on the Rotten Tomatoes site reads: «Although it softens the nasty edges of its source material, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is a gothic visual treat, 175 176 Lars KONZACK, Transmediality, in The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds, p. 134. Much as many fans all over the world would beg to differ. 51 and it features a hilariously manic turn from Jim Carrey as the evil Count Olaf»177, whereas most of the public found it to be disjointed yet still entertaining. Why then didn’t they manage to turn it in a Harry Potter like phenomenon? Good intentions were surely there, but in 2008 when asked about a second movie, Daniel Handler said: «a sequel does seem to be in the works. Paramount has had quite a few corporate shakeups […] which has led to many a delay. Of course, many, many plans in Hollywood come to naught, but I'm assured that another film will be made. Someday»178. One year later director Brad Silberling stated in another interview: «Handler and I have talked about every film being in a different medium»179. This was due to the fact that the three actors who had played the Baudelaire children in the original movie had grown too much as opposed to their characters180. Obviously, nothing came of this impractical idea which would have also surely lost the audience’s interest. We have mentioned already in our introduction that what Harry Potter, both in its book and movie format, managed to do was letting the character grow along with readers and viewers thus building a loyal audience. In contrast, the Baudelaire’s story has more of an episodic nature rather than an ongoing one and would only find itself restricted by movie constraints. In fact, trying to shove three books worth of plot in a 108 minutes movie didn’t please the fans so much. Nevertheless, the movie still captured the book series’ feel, chose a very fitting and stylish gothic aesthetic and did not forget about the humour, as much as it does have a softer edge compared to the novels. What lacks in the movie is the boldness to truly do justice to the novels’ postmodern features. What stands out right away and is one of the few postmodern elements taken from the novels is the subversion of viewers’ expectations. The movie opens on a lovely animated spring day: the sun rises, a bird happily flies over flowers and grass, a cheerful song builds the atmosphere and a little blonde elf comes out of his little wooden house giggling as the title The Littlest Elf appears over his head. As a matter of fact, this sequence is a reference to a book mentioned in The Vile Village: «I know of a book, for instance, called The Littlest Elf, which tells the story of a teensy-weensy little man who scurries around Fairyland having all sorts of adorable adventures»181 and Snicket says that the reader would do better to read that story instead of the woeful tale of the Rotten Tomatoes, Critics Consensus: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lemony_snicket (last consulted: 09/08/2020). 178 Ronnie SCOTT, An Interview With Daniel Handler, BookSlut.com: http://bookslut.com/features/2008_10_013548.php (last consulted: 09/08/2020). 179 Eric DITZIAN, Lemony Snicket Director Brad Silberling Plans To Do Each Film In Different Medium, MTV News: https://web.archive.org/web/20090607050122/http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2009/06/03/lemony-snicketdirector-brad-silberling-plans-to-do-each-film-in-different-medium/ (last consulted: 09/08/2020). 180 In Chapter 2, you might remember, we learned that Violet, Klaus and Sunny are respectively 14, 12 and a few months old at the start of the series and that by the end of the last novel they have turned 16, 14 and 3 years old. 181 Lemony SNICKET, The Vile Village, p.2. 177 52 Baudelaires. Conversely, in the cinema the audience is led to believe they have clearly gone to the wrong movie theater or bought the wrong ticket. They are not here to watch a cheery little elf chasing a butterfly, they are here to witness the dreary life of three orphans. Needless to say, the little elf’s world suddenly turns dark as the sound of a tape rewinding itself is heard and an off-screen voice readjusts the focus: «I’m sorry to say that this is not the movie you will be watching»182 and the elf looks around confused as an eye shaped oval opens on the screen to bring the scene to a misty graveyard. «The movie you are about to see is extremely unpleasant. If you wish to see a film about a happy little elf, I’m sure there is still plenty of seating in theater number two»183. This surely reminds us of the computer-animated comedy film Shrek (2001) where a story book opens and Shrek’s off-screen narration accompanied by an idyllic music tells the usual fairytale story of a lovely princess locked away in a tower guarded by a dragon and whom could only be freed by true love’s kiss. The idyll is broken by Shrek tearing away the page and, presumably, using it as toilet paper. In our 2004 movie the off-screen voice is that of our narrator Lemony Snicket, played by British actor Jude Law, who finds himself in a clock tower typing the Baudelaires unhappy tale as it is his sad duty to document it. Throughout the movie Lemony Snicket is not there to stop the narration, provide humorous remarks, judgement on characters or blatantly address those who are watching. The mysterious writer is there to simply tell the tale of the three orphans in a toned-down but still regretful version of the novel’s narrator. The movie didn’t dare too much in fourth wall breaking, but it did the best it could. With some cuts during the movie, the viewer is shown the metanarration from the novels by sometimes seeing Snicket in the clock tower as he writes away the Baudelaire’s story on his typewriter. Moreover, the narrator voices the character’s thoughts and sometimes acknowledges that what the spectators are watching is a film. When Mr. Poe first takes the children back to their home which is now reduced to cinders, Lemony Snicket takes the opportunity to warn those watching: «This is an excellent opportunity to walk out of the theater, living room or airplane where this film is being show», he types on his typewriter, and then reminds the viewers that it is still possible to go enjoy The Littlest Elf movie. This metanarrative attempt brings to question the reason why a writer would write about a movie in his novel, when from what is shown to us it does not look like he is writing a screenplay. This brings about the matter of inconsistency. From one side, the movie tells viewers they can go see something else pushing forward the movie’s self-reflexive structure, while on the other side it uses a metaliterary tool which pertains to the literary world of novels. In the clock tower the narrator looks at some drawings which computer graphics bring to life and presents the characters during their excursion at Briny Beach. Now, you have heard all this before, but it does not hurt to hear it again. 182 183 Brad SILBERLING, Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, 01:46:32-01:46:30. Brad SILBERLING, Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, 01:46:27-01:46:19. 53 Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire are three promising young children played by three promising young actors. For Violet we have Australian actress Emily Browning who was fifteen at the time of filming (in contrast with her character who was fourteen in The Bad Beginning); for Klaus we have the charming Liam Aiken who was fourteen during filming (Klaus is twelve in The Bad Beginning); and finally, for Sunny we have twin sisters Kara and Shelby Hoffman184 who were two while shooting the movie (Sunny was a few months to a year old in The Bad Beginning). In the movie Violet still is an inventor, Klaus still likes to read a lot although his sight issues are omitted (in the movie he only uses glasses when he reads whereas in the novels he can’t see without glasses) and Sunny still likes to bite everything. Lacking the novels’ black humour, the funny element mainly comes from the character of Sunny. Being an infant Sunny has not yet developed the ability to speak, so her child-like sounds which can only be understood by the narrator and her siblings are translated for viewers with subtitles. Novels do not benefit from the use of subtitles, they benefit from author’s narration and in the case of Sunny Baudelaire, Snicket having to constantly translate for the reader to understand can in the long run appear formulaic. The movie’s rendition is able to make the original solution from the novels visually more entertaining for viewers who hear Sunny speaking gibberish and can read on the bottom of the screen what she actually meant. For instance, while Count Olaf recounts his evil plan to enjoy the Baudelaire’s fortune, Sunny bites him and makes a sound translated with: «Back off, parrot face!»185 and then proceeds to have a funny exchange with Count Olaf who does not speak “child language” and constantly mocks her. She threatens him to bite higher and when he mumbles and gestures at her in mocking response, she says surprised: «Wow. You are nuts»186. Snicket’s knack for word definitions becomes a mean for the movie to convey meaning and delve a little in the character’s emotions. When the story requires it, the narrator provides the definition using the same catchphrase from the books: «”Sanctuary” is a word which here means a small, safe place in a troubling world»187 tells the off-screen narrator’s voice as Violet, Klaus and Sunny build a little fort to have their own safe place inside the troubling world of their terrible villain’s home. This scene also provides us with an instance of foreshadowing or rather a simple anticipation of later novels, the last one to be precise, and supposed later adaptations which didn’t get to see the light. The narrator goes on to describe what other things could be considered safe places: «Like an oasis in a vast desert or an island in a stormy sea»188. In the next chapter we will see how this island in a stormy sea foreshadows the island from The End. Due to extensive movie shooting periods, it is custom in film industry to use twins to play infant characters. Brad SILBERLING, Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, 01:28:49. 186 Brad SILBERLING, Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, 01:28:38. 187 Brad SILBERLING, Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, 01:25:57-01:25:50. 188 Brad SILBERLING, Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, 01:25:48-01:25:45. 184 185 54 I promised you the multiplied presence of Count Olaf, so here we are. You know him as being nefarious and murderous in the novels, but you can forget about that. In the movie Count Olaf, played by actor and comedian Jim Carrey, is presented as a goofy and loud character and due to the movie being marketed for children, his murderous streak was also toned down. For example, while in the novel Count Olaf intentionally pushes Aunt Josephine in the water to let her be eaten by Lake Lachrymose’s leeches, in the movie he simply leaves her to her destiny on the sinking boat. Moreover, he calls Sunny “monkey” and disregards the three children so much that he even attempts to kill them. In the movie, the town court accepts Count Olaf’s request for full custody, and once he has got the paperwork out of the way he takes the orphans to Last Chance General Store. Leaving them in the car on the railroad tracks near the store with no way of getting out, Count Olaf watches them from the store’s windows as he waits for the train to hit them. Luckily, the children’s creativity allows them to divert the railroad’s tracks and save them just as Mr. Poe arrives. This scene was only added so that The Bad Beginning’s ending (which you know is the play The Marvelous Marriage where Count Olaf tries to marry Violet) could be used as the movie’s ending, what with it being more climactic. The scarier and murderous Count Olaf from the novels, though, would only have killed the children had he secured their fortune in his hands already. As regards the V.F.D. storyline, the movie only hints at it by surrounding the children with eye-shaped elements and by adding the mysterious spyglass. The spyglass is undoubtedly a McGuffin189 which serves to build the future secret society plot although it never got to be developed on the screen (the spyglass also appears in the Netflix adaptation, in a different way). While at Aunt Josephine’s house the fearful woman, played by the famous Meryl Streep, afraid of anything that could kill her (even doorknobs that might shatter) shows the orphans a photo album where they find a photo of particular interest. A group of smiling people in which the children recognize not only a younger Aunt Josephine and Uncle Monty, but also their parents. All the people in the picture have a spyglass with them and the camera makes sure the viewer sees it. When Klaus asks: «Wait, was this a sort of club? Why, why do you all have spyglasses»190, Aunt Josephine briskly dismisses him not wanting to answer the question. The spyglass also comes back at the end of the movie. When Mr. Poe takes the Baudelaires to their burned down mansion once again, a mailman arrives to deliver a letter. The letter is an old one from their parents and the envelope contains a spyglass which the narrator describes as a “rite of passage”, a passing down of the torch. The following scene shows the narrator in the clock tower holding a spyglass himself, hinting at the fact that he too is part of the secret and nameless club previously mentioned. 189 190 An object which is used to push the plot forward (see Chapter 3). Brad SILBERLING, Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, 00:56:42-00:56:40. 55 Moreover, whereas the books never wish to give precise answers, the movie longs for clarity and reveals it was Count Olaf who set fire to the Baudelaire’s house, and the houses of other members of V.F.D., killing the orphans’ parents (this has never been confirmed in the books and we will talk more about it in the next and final chapter). The movie explains that Count Olaf is able to start the fires by using a huge magnifying glass which focuses the light of the sun to burn down the houses. In addition, as a small act of revenge Klaus uses the same magnifying glass to burn Count Olaf and Violet’s marriage certificate. Lastly, as the finishing scenes show us Snicket having finished a manuscript called A Series Of Unfortunate Events: An Investigation of the Events Surrounding the Baudelaire Children – Chapter 1, we arrive to the moral of the story which borrows the format of the Dear Reader epigraphs from the novels: Dear reader, There are people in the world who know no misery and woe and they take comfort in cheerful films about twittering birds and giggling elves. There are people who know that there's always a mystery to be solved and they take comfort in researching and writing down any important evidence. But this story is not about such people, this story is about the Baudelaires. And they are the sort of people who know that there's always something. Something to invent, something to read, something to bite, and something to do to make a sanctuary, no matter how small. And for this reason I am happy to say the Baudelaires were very fortunate indeed.191 What the movie is trying to convey is that no matter what your life circumstances are, there always is something good to look forward to, something you yourself can create. The 2004 movie adaptation of A Series Of Unfortunate Events is in no way completely faithful to the novels but still manages to recreate their atmosphere and give you that teary-eyed ending feel that a story like this should provide. For a more faithful adaptation, not scared of using its format to the maximum, we must now take a look at the Netflix tv series version. 4.3 The Netflix Adaptation In 2014 the streaming platform Netflix announced they would develop a tv show based on all thirteen books in A Series Of Unfortunate Events (unlike the movie which only managed to adapt the first three novels), with author Daniel Handler participating on the project too. The Netflix tv show ran from 2016 to 2018 counting three seasons and twenty-five episodes, two episodes per book (apart from The End which only gets one episode). What’s important is that the Netflix adaptation ticks all the boxes of the series’ postmodern features we have discoursed in previous chapters and dares much more 191 Brad SILBERLING, Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, 00:13:46-00:12:45. 56 than the movie did, adapting them to the new medium. We start right off the bat with the Dear Reader epigraph turned into the Look Away series theme song as sung by Neil Patrick Harris, the actor who plays Count Olaf: «Look away, this show will wreck your evening, your whole life and your day. Every single episode is nothing but dismay»192. Just as the Dear Reader epigraph, the theme song serves as a warning to the viewer who shouldn’t be watching. The theme song to episode one of season one states it is hard to understand how the Baudelaires managed to live through their dreadful story, but it is even harder to fathom: «how a decent person like yourself would even want to view it»193, and were viewers to ask any stable person whether or not they should keep watching, the answer would be to simply look away. The metanarrative style is thrown at the face of viewers immediately and now plays on the story being told through the streaming service medium. Other instances of theme-song warnings addressed directly to viewers are in season two episode three The Ersatz Elevator: Part One: «you’ll need rescuing yourself before this grim tale ends»194, or in season three episode five The Penultimate Peril: Part One: «it may seem like Count Olaf will be finally brought to justice, but why would any viewers think that they could really trust us?»195 (the theme songs in all the Part Two’s episodes have the same lyrics but are sung in slightly different ways). Moreover, much like the novel’s epigraphs the theme song summarizes the elements of the plot which the two-parts episodes will contain. For instance, in season two the theme song to the first episode The Austere Academy: Part One sums up what the viewer will see: «At school the Baudelaires are forced to live in an old shack […] they run a lot of laps which keeps them in fantastic shape»196. In fact, in The Austere Academy Vice Principal Nero has them live in the “Orphans shack” as you recall, and Count Olaf disguised as Coach Genghis forces the children to run laps every night for S.O.R.E. (Special Orphan Running Exercises). Following the theme song, one more element from the books is shown: the Beatrice’s dedication. In the first episode A Bad Beginning: Part One the dedication appears as it is being typed on the black screen: «To Beatrice ― darling, dearest, dead»197. Only one dedication is different from that of the novels. In episode seven of season one The Miserable Mill: Part One the dedication is shortened to: «To Beatrice ― My love flew like a butterfly, until death swooped down like a bat», removing the part about poet Emma Montana McElroy which we talked about in chapter two. The theme song as a warning along with the dedications can be seen as the tv show’s version of the novels’ Barry SONNENFELD, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, A Bad Beginning: Part One, 00:49:34-00:49:28. Barry SONNENFELD, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, A Bad Beginning: Part One, 00:49:11-00:49:07. 194 Bo WELCH, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, The Ersatz Elevator: Part One, 00:51:42-00:51-38. 195 Barry SONNENFELD, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, The Penultimate Peril: Part One, 00:54:39-00:54:32. 196 Barry SONNEFELD, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, The Austere Academy: Part One, 00:45:56-00:48:23. 197 Barry SONNENFELD, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, A Bad Beginning: Part One, 00:48:30-00:48:23. 192 193 57 paratext, here meaning the way each episode presents itself to the viewer. One more important paratext element when talking about a tv series on a streaming service is its overview page that much like a novel’s cover, first presents it to the viewer. On the Netflix overview page for A Series Of Unfortunate Events a picture of the three Baudelaires is shown and on the left side of the page viewers can see the tv series title with its particular font and the following description: «The dreadful history of the Baudelaire children begins with a deadpan narrator, a terrible fire and the ominous arrival of a distant relative». Browsing some more on the page, viewers can also check how many episodes and seasons the series’ has, they can see details about how the tv series is described as “cynical” and “offbeat” and who is the target audience, in this case kids and families but it is also stated the series is «suitable for all ages». In season one episode one lights turn on to illuminate a dark tunnel and a shadowy figure lights a match. It is American actor and voice artist Patrick Warburton who here plays our narrator Lemony Snicket. To mirror the novels’ version of a direct approach to readers, he looks straight into the camera and speaks to those watching in a morose and monotone manner. «If you are interested in stories with happy endings, then you would be better off somewhere else»198 he says and proceeds to recount the first novel’s incipit about the lack of happy beginnings and happy things in the middle. He then states his name and his solemn duty to tell the Baudelaires’ story «as it happened so many years ago»199 but viewers do not have this obligation and should go watch something else. As in the novels, Lemony is telling the story in retrospect from an unspecified future. While in the movie Lemony was a rather passive figure detached from the story, here the narrator’s presence is constant and intrusive, he is more visible as a character just like in the novels. Lemony Snicket intrudes in the scenes and speaks directly to viewers telling the story and saying how sorry he is they have to bear through it, all the while keeping a perfect deadpan face which gives away no emotions whatsoever. For instance, while the orphans are at Briny Beach unaware of the news which soon will reach them, you can see Lemony sitting at the lifeguard station behind them, wearing swim shorts and a tank top. Furtherly, in the course of the series Lemony is able to control the narrative by rewinding scenes to provide his added insight or stopping scenes to address the audience. In The Reptile Room: Part One when Uncle Monty tells the children: «no harm will come to you in the reptile room»200, the camera moves away from the four characters to show Snicket sitting on an armchair. Now Lemony introduces the concept of dramatic irony. He explains that: Barry SONNENFELD, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, A Bad Beginning: Part One, 00:48:15-00:48:10. Barry SONNENFELD, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, A Bad Beginning: Part One, 00:47:59-00:47:57. 200 Mark PALANSKY, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, The Reptile Room: Part One, 00:33:56-00:33:54. 198 199 58 Dramatic irony is when a person makes a remark and someone who hears it knows something which makes the remark have a different, usually unpleasant, meaning […] For that reason when we hear Uncle Monty tell the children (we hear Uncle Monty’s sentence again)… we should be on guard for the unpleasant arrival of dramatic irony.201 Readers know that great harm will come to Uncle Monty in the reptile room and viewers expect something very bad to happen later on. Giving the narrator the power of stopping scenes and controlling the narrative is much more effective on screen than it is in the pages of a novel. Furthermore, to constantly have him on the screen makes him familiar to viewers thus creating a particular relationship with them. Viewers trust the narrator’s control over the story, accept him barging in on their entertainment at any given time and also become accustomed to putting up with all the narrator’s antics. We should not forget about word definitions which are featured in the series as well. Snicket stops the narration frequently and also uses the novels’ catchphrase. In The Wide Window: Part Two during an high-stake scene where the children are on the boat with Aunt Josephine, Lemony stops the scenes to explain what the “plethora” of dangers sailing through Lake Lachrymose entails for them: «Plethora is a word which here means “too many to list”» and as he lists them the scenes are played on the screen just as he describes. The series is also incredibly self-reflective, and often slyly talks about its structure made of episodes and seasons. At the start of this very episode for example Lemony tells viewers they should «look away from this ghastly new episode in the Baudelaires’ unfortunate lives»202 and the scene then moves to Violet, Klaus, Sunny and Mr. Poe as they drive to Uncle Monty’s house. Mr. Poe says: «It’s a brand-new episode in your lives Baudelaires»203. One more instance of funny on-the-nose self-referentiality is from season two episode one The Austere Academy: Part One. When V.F.D. member Larry the Waiter (who appears in the novels too but only in The Wide Window, while in the tv series he is a recurring character) is trapped by Count Olaf and his henchmen in a refrigerator unit, he calls another V.F.D. member, Duchess Jacquelyn Scieszka of Winnipeg disguised as Mr. Poe’s high executive assistant in order to keep track of the children and help them, and she tells him: «You sound cold. Are you in the mountains? We’re not due there until the end of the season»204. The “end of the season” refers to the end of season two when the Baudelaires will go along with Count Olaf and his henchmen to the Mortmain Mountains as happens at the end of the novel The Carnivorous Carnival. Four chapters into this thesis you know the drill, an expression which here means “you Mark PALANSKY, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, The Reptile Room: Part One, 00:33:45-00:33:19. Mark PALANSKY, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, The Reptile Room: Part One, 00:46:12-00:46:10. 203 Mark PALANSKY, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, The Reptile Room: Part One, 00:46:09-00:46:07. 204 Barry SONNEFELD, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, The Austere Academy: Part One, 00:05:59-00:05:55. 201 202 59 must be very bored of having to hear all this one more time“, therefore I will not bore you with details about Briny Beach, a terrible fire and a repetitive series of unfortunate events. But I will tell you that the series’ tone is both tragic and comic, more so than the novels but way less than the 2004 movie. The comedy sometimes comes from the deadpan way characters react to what happens: Violet, Klaus and Sunny respectively played by Malina Weissman who was thirteen when the first season was shot, Louis Hynes who was fifteen and young Presley Smith, for instance never cry in the series. Their emotions are never truly delved into and they appear as being very held-back at times, but that is probably just the various directors’ intention to achieve the comical effect about how numb endless misfortune can make someone. An element taken from the 2004 movie is the subtitles to explain what Sunny’s mumbling actually mean, and they are just as funny. In A Bad Beginning: Part Two when the children are describing to Mr. Poe how terrible Count Olaf is, Sunny makes a baby sound translated to: «He’s a lush!»205, meaning that he drinks a lot. Moreover, some of Sunny’s moments are taken away from the series due to the fact that their nonsensical nature wouldn’t have translated well to the screen. For example, Sunny’s sword fight with Dr. Orwell at the end of The Miserable Mill is not featured in the series and is simply substituted with Dr. Orwell taking Sunny away from her siblings during the ending and throwing her away before falling in the furnace. The series’ setting mirrors the novels ambiguity, it blends both modern elements with old ones. The characters use telephones handsets which appear to be from the 50’ and make references to James Brown’s music but can also buy things online. For instance, in A Bad Beginning: Part Two Count Olaf, who is just as murderous as in the novels but less scary and more on the comic side (although Harris finds the perfect balance as opposed to Jim Carrey) threatens the kids that once the sand in the hourglass finishes, Violet will be married to him. It takes the sand a couple of seconds to ran out as Count Olaf reappears to say: «I didn’t realize the sand went so quickly. I bought it online»206, or when the characters make references to streaming television like Count Olaf does in The Reptile Room: Part Two: «In all honesty, I prefer long-form television to the movies. It's so much more convenient to consume entertainment from the comfort of your home»207 and as he says this, he turns his head from Uncle Monty right to the camera and smiles as if talking to the viewers themselves. What is not ambiguous, just as in the movie, is the story. The V.F.D. storyline is incredibly prominent and hinted at very early on. The perspective shifts often to show what the other characters are doing, there even is a flashback to a V.F.D. party at the Barry SONNENFELD, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, A Bad Beginning: Part Two, 00:51:44-00:51:41. Barry SONNENFELD, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, A Bad Beginning: Part Two, 00:21:45-00:21:43. 207 Mark PALANSKY, A Series Of Unfortunate Events, The Reptile Room: Part One, 00:20:00-00:19:52. 205 206 60 end of season two and one that shows how the schism208 happened during one night at the opera in season three. The tv show goes as far as to reveal what hides in the mysterious sugar bowl: a chemically altered type of sugar which gives immunity from the Medusoid Mycellium we talked about in chapter three, the venomous mushroom we will mention again in the next chapter. While we are on the topic of McGuffins, you may recall me mentioning a spyglass in the previous paragraph. The Netflix adaptation takes the spyglass element from the 2004 movie and gives it the purpose of decoding secret messages and having V.F.D. members recognize each other. With the right combinations the spyglasses are also shown to be able to produce light but also, shockingly heat. Therefore, it is hinted that the Fire-Starting side of the Schism uses spyglasses to set houses on fire. Now, although author Daniel Handler was deeply involved in the production of season one, and wrote some episodes for season two and three, it is not clear whether all the answers given should be considered as canon, meaning officially part of the novels’ fictional world. Fans prefer to view the series as a sort of alternate reality, one more possible world which grants more answers than the original one. Cases of authors producing the same story for different medias are many. For instance, the science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was inspired by the Arthur C. Clarke short story The Sentinel (1951), and some other short stories of his too, and the screenplay was written both by Stanley Kubrick (who also directed it) and the author himself. The story though was modified so much and expanded that Clarke became impatient with those who described the movie as an adaptation of his short story: «I am continually annoyed by careless references to “The Sentinel” as “the story on which 2001 is based”; it bears about as much relation to the movie as an acorn to the resultant full-grown oak. (Considerably less, in fact, because ideas from several other stories were also incorporated.) Even the elements that Stanley Kubrick and I did actually use were considerably modified»209. It is to be noted that before the start of season two’s filming, author Daniel Handler was asked not to be so involved in the making of the tv show as he was in season one210. He kept on writing some episodes for season two and season three, but we could say that his distance probably helped in giving the series’ a clearer creative direction regarding the more questions it answered as opposed to the novels. See Chapter three for more ambiguous information. Scraps from the Loft, SENTINEL OF ETERNITY (1951) by Arthur C. Clarke: https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/01/28/sentinel-of-eternity-1951-by-arthur-c-clarke/, (last consulted: 14/08/2020). 210 Terence CAWLEY, Daniel Handler (a.k.a Lemony Snicket) explains why he’s less involved with ‘Unfortunate Events’ on Netflix, The Boston Globe: https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/names/2017/10/25/daniel-handlerlemony-snicket-explains-why-less-involved-with-unfortunate-eventsnetflix/0ecmEEppx6fUoK7t9CZUFN/story.html (last consulted 15/08/2020). 208 209 61 One element added in the series is the use of music. The first musical number is made by Count Olaf in episode one season one as the children come back from an errand he had them run. The song and performance are realized by Count Olaf and his henchmen. It is an ode to Count Olaf’s acting abilities (which we know are terrible) and to his handsomeness. The song’s name is “It’s the Count” and the refrain goes: «Who else has such robust good looks in such a large amount? I'm handsome and I'm talented and love your bank account». One more musical number is in the last episode of season one and this it is not only Count Olaf the one who sings but also Lemony, Mr. Poe, Violet and Klaus (Sunny is given the whistled part of the song). The lyrics are inspired by one last warning to the reader Lemony Snicket gives in The Bad Beginning before the story ends. Snicket tells the reader they can shut the book right that instant and «spend the rest of your life believing that the Baudelaires triumphed over Count Olaf and lived the rest of their lives in the house and library of Justice Strauss, but that is not how the story goes»211. The song is, in fact, called “That’s not how the story goes”. It is a sad song but also a fitting finale for season one. [Lemony Snicket] You may think that the Baudelaires ought to prevail And be tucked someplace, all safe and sound Count Olaf captured and rotting in jail His henchpeople nowhere around [Olaf] But there's no happy endings Not here and not now This tale is all sorrows and woes You dream that justice and peace win the day But that's not how the story goes. Now, we could go on talking about the tv series for quite a long time more. It is incredibly aware of its own potential and uses it for laughs but also to have viewers truly reflect about what they are watching. It offers a more complete and clearer circle thus losing a bit of the philosophical ending provided by the novels about which we will talk more shortly. Among the other interesting topics we could have covered are for example racial diversity, lgbt+ inclusivity and a subplot about two parents, both alive and on the run, who might or might not be the Baudelaires’ parents212, but sadly we have more pressing matters at hand. We now need to move to the very last stop of this Lemony SNICKET, The Bad Beginning, p. 156. At the end of season one it is revealed that these two characters were in reality the Quagmires’ parents who were trying to go home to their children. Their subplot, which started as a cliffhanger at the end of episode one, served to introduce the Quagmires in the storyline and to entice viewers to move forward believing they were in reality Beatrice and Bertrand Baudelaire. 211 212 62 journey. In the next chapter which concludes our analysis, you will find the end of this dissertation where I analyse The End which is the last novel in A Series Of Unfortunate Events and make some final remarks. 63 Conclusion - The Great Unknown Dear Reader, You are presumably looking at the back of this book, or the end of THE END. The end of THE END is the best place to begin THE END, because if you read THE END from the beginning of the beginning of THE END to the end of the end of THE END, you will arrive at the end of the end of your rope. - Lemony Snicket, The End 5.1 The Recap You are now at the beginning of the last chapter of this thesis where I analyse the beginning, middle and end of the novel The End, the last in A Series Of Unfortunate Events. Even if you have braved the first four chapters of this dissertation I must try and warn you off again for be sure there are more unpleasantries on the way. To name a few, you will here find the same postmodern features we disputed, some dreadful final remarks, a conspicuous lack of answers and the unknown future of our three main characters. With that said, why would you want to read any further? It has been my solemn occupation to complete this thesis and at last I am finished, but you do not need to reach the end. As our narrator tells you in the last Dear Reader epigraph: «You likely have some other occupation, so if I were you I would drop this book at once, so THE END does not finish you». In The End’s incipit Lemony Snicket describes the Baudelaires’ story as an onion and if you insist on reading «every thin, papery layer in A Series of Unfortunate Events, your only reward will be 170 chapters of misery in your library and countless tears in your eyes»213. During the course of this thesis we have tried to peel away each thin papery layer using our own hands and those of postmodern critics in the hopes of succeeding in peeling the Baudelaire onion. Now, before we start our journey towards the end it would be good to take a look at the mess we made on the table and remind ourselves of what came before. A Series Of Unfortunate Events is a children’s saga composed of thirteen novels published between 1999 and 2006 by Daniel Handler with the alias of Lemony Snicket. We have observed how this series is marketed for children but nonetheless contains very mature content which some may not think is appropriate for the targeted audience (this is also the reason why it is very rare to see these novels labelled as Middle-Grade fiction). Most importantly, we have thoroughly explored the series’ features which belong to a particular literary aesthetic called Postmodernism, an aesthetic which puts itself in opposition to Modernism proposing ontological questions in place of 213 Lemony SNICKET, The End, pp. 1-2. 64 epistemological ones. This genre is defined by skepticism, irony and rejects the grand récits. We looked at the novels in A Series Of Unfortunate Events through postmodern lenses and consequently examined the series’ metanarrative devices, narrative fragmentation, inter and extra-textual games, the hazy line between fiction and reality, the even hazier figure of Lemony Snicket who at the same time is the narrator, a character in the story he is telling and the author whose name can be found on the covers even though we very well know the real author is Daniel Handler; we brought forward examples of all the quirky elements the series’ has to offer and we have seen how the postmodern tools were able to evolve and adapt when filtered through other mediums. Along with Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire we have explored the world of A Series Of Unfortunate Events with curiosity and wonder, from its unhappy beginning to its sometimes happier middle. Therefore, we are now prepared to discuss the teary-eyed vague ending where some twists, a utopia with a terrible leader and some unanswered questions await us. 5.2 Before the ending In The Penultimate Peril, the Baudelaire’s next-to-last adventure, the children find themselves at V.F.D.’s last safe place Hotel Denoument. There with the mission given to them by a pregnant Kit Snicket214 the children lose their innocence and finally become part of the treacherous world they live in. By accident, they kill their unofficial guardian Dewey Denoument who had let them work at his hotel and they are put on trial, along with Count Olaf, by the High Court represented by some judges and the Baudelaire’s old acquaintance Justice Strauss215. Trials held by the High Court are incredibly particular: «”Everyone wears blindfolds at a High Court trial,” the manager replied, “except the judges, of course. Haven’t you heard the expression ‘Justice is blind’?”»216. During the trial the Baudelaires suspecting foul play, an expression which here means “yet another unfortunate turn in their lives”, take off their blindfolds and find out that the other two judges are villains: the Man With a Beard But No Hair and the Woman With Hair But No Beard. The children ask everyone to peak and see the truth, but as it always happens adults do not believe them. In the confusion which follows Count Olaf kidnaps Justice Strauss and flees as the Baudelaires go after him. It is revealed that all this time Justice Strauss, fooled once again, was recounting to the two villains and fake judges every place the orphans were brought to by Mr. Poe, and the two villains in turn told everything to Count Olaf permitting him to follow them to every location. Count Olaf has some errands of his own to run: find the sugar bowl, get to the roof, release Who you will remember as a V.F.D. member and also Lemony Snicket’s sister. The mission she gives the children is to disguise themselves as flâneurs, find out whose side the mysterious J.S. is on and send the other members a signal to confirm the safety of their meeting on Thursday. 215 You might remember that Justice Strauss was the woman who lived opposite Count Olaf’s house and at the end of The Bad Beginning was fooled into legally marrying Violet to Count Olaf. 216 Lemony SNICKET, The Penultimate Peril, p. 267. 214 65 the terrible Medusoid Mycelium and escape from the angry blindfolded mob ready to deliver him to the authorities. The Baudelaires also need to escape, so as not to fall into the clutches of the two terrible villains, and in order to escape from the hotel they now understand they must help Count Olaf. Violet tells Olaf she will invent some parachute device for his boat, and she tells him so because she knows he will take her and her siblings with him. Klaus helps Olaf enter the room where the sugar bowl is supposedly hidden, but he secretly knows that is not the correct hiding place. And finally, Sunny proposes they burn down the hotel, but she only does so to send a coded message to other V.F.D. members. A message which means: «”The last safe place,” she said, “is safe no more”»217. While the group gets into the elevator to reach the rooftop, the Baudelaires press all the buttons remembering a game their father taught them and in this way they are able to stop on every floor and warn as many people as possible. In preparation for The End readers can now say goodbye to the many good and bad characters they encountered throughout the series, for they will not be appearing in the following novel and their destiny will remain unknown. For instance, they find Esmé Squalor (now Count Olaf’s ex-girlfriend) and Carmelita Spats still wearing their blindfolds. The Baudelaires try to warn them about the fire but Olaf says they are just trying to trick them and that they should stay in the hotel. Carmelita tells them to leave her and Esmé alone, the doors close and Lemony Snicket states: «indeed the children never argued with either unpleasant female again»218 (knowing the end of The End, this statement appears to be very odd). The elevator continues its journey up towards the rooftop and the orphans try to warn everyone they meet: Mr. Poe says he cannot leave because he still has to take care of the Baudelaires; Charles and Sir, the partners from Lucky Smells Lumbermill they met in The Miserable Mill, are holding hands; they see Vice Principal Nero wandering the halls while worrying about his violin case and so forth. Among villains and volunteers, some believe the Baudelaires warning about the fire, some believe Count Olaf when he says they are lying. What occurs after to each character is unfathomable to our narrator and so it is unknown whether or not some of them managed to escape from the burning Hotel Denoument. Lemony Snicket speculates about the reader surely having a clearer picture about what happens next to those characters, but as for himself and the Baudelaires, it remains one more mystery. Having reached the rooftop, Klaus and Sunny help Violet build the parachute device for Count Olaf’s boat and reflect about the terrible deeds they had to do. “We killed a man.” “Accident,” Sunny said firmly. “And burned down a hotel,” Klaus said. “Signal,” Sunny said. “We had good reasons,” Violet said, “but we still did bad things.” 217 218 Lemony SNICKET, The Penultimate Peril, p. 344. Lemony SNICKET, The Penultimate Peril, p. 334. 66 “We want to be noble,” Klaus said, “but we’ve had to be treacherous.” “Noble enough,” Sunny said.219 Olaf climbs aboard with the children, but Justice Strauss who does not wish to leave the scene of a crime says the Baudelaires should go with her and explain everything to the authorities, not listening to the children’s arguments about the possible presence of more villains in the authorities ranks. Sunny bits Justice Strauss’ outstretched hand saying farewell to the one person who had always wanted to help them in spite of everything. As they fall from the rooftop (to then open Violet’s parachute device made of dirty sheets) the children watch Justice Strauss tumble to the ground as the building collapses. At last Violet, Klaus, Sunny and Count Olaf find themselves on the same boat, quite literally. Count Olaf finally has the orphans in his clutches. The three orphans think about whether they are still noble volunteers or whether they might become something else. And finally, we prepare to analyse the novel The End. 5.3 The coconut cordial: a utopia The last novel in A Series Of Unfortunate Events takes the children, their villain and also readers as far away as possible from the world described in the first twelve novels, both geographically and thematically. In fact, The End220 is the most reflective novel out of all thirteen books and is set on a remote island. As the unlikely group composed of Violet, Klaus, Sunny, Count Olaf and an helmet containing some spores of the deadly Medusoid Mycelium is still stranded in the sea, the gloomy weather reminds the Baudelaires of their horrific day at Briny Beach when Mr. Poe had told them about their parents’ death and of all the unfortunate days that followed. On the other side of the boat, Count Olaf spends all his time bragging about how he has finally destroyed V.F.D. once and for all and about his newly found wealth finally having the children in his clutches. Adding to the loss of innocence the three children are experiencing, they start thinking about pushing Count Olaf overboard and leave him to the dangers lurking beneath the water. They would have to share the few remaining beans with one person less and then they could invent a compass to help them find Kit Snicket and their friends, the Quagmires, without having to bring along their murderous villain. It could mean the simple end to all their misfortune. At this moment, the narrator intrudes on the situation to say: «the Baudelaires needed a moral compass, which is something inside a person, in the brain or perhaps in the heart, that tells you the proper thing to do in a given situation»221. He then digresses about the differences between navigational compasses Lemony SNICKET, The Penultimate Peril, p. 345. Note how the title The End brings an end not only to the series but also to the alliterative games the author kept up from The Bad Beginning to The Penultimate Peril. 221 Lemony SNICKET, The End, pp. 17-18. 219 220 67 and moral ones in order to frame the orphans’ emotional turmoil. Three children thinking about murder is as far away from Middle Grade fiction as one can get222 but, as happened many times in their life so far, they do not have to decide because the decision is made for them by an approaching storm: «”We have no idea where it will take us," Klaus said. "We could end up even further from civilization”»223. Here, we can’t help but notice the similarities the beginning of The End shares with William Shakespeare’s last play and testament The Tempest (1610-1611). The play begins with an illusory tempest created by Prospero, sorcerer and rightful Duke of Milan, with the help of the spirit Ariel to have Prospero’s enemies wash up on the island. Much in the same way, although their tempest has nothing magical about it and probably more to do with divine providence, the children and Count Olaf do end up even further from civilization, specifically on a coastal shelf224, and as they walk west they find an island too. On the island the children and Count Olaf meet some strange characters with uncanny names, or at least this is what the inexperienced young reader would think. Someone older and with more experience in the field of literature on the other hand clearly spots the parallels with Shakespeare and other works about castaways. Once again, we notice on the page the double-coding strategy we expressed in Chapter two. The elements presented can appeal in different ways to different kinds of audience. For instance, the first character they stumble upon is a little six-year-old called Friday Caliban. As I have said, young and inexperienced readers wouldn’t think much of it225, but the more experienced ones would spot the inside joke right away. Friday is a reference to Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) where the main character Robinson saves a man about to be sacrificed, gives him the name of Friday (in memory of the day they met) and keeps him as his servant. In the style of a colonizer, Robinson also teaches Friday his language and converts him to Christianity. Conversely, Caliban is in reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and again the character who bears this name is a slave made so by his colonizer who sees him as a savage and a monster. Prospero teaches Caliban his language but what the deformed slave thinks of it is: «my profit on’t/Is I know how to curse»226. The relationship presented It is important to note that the moral dilemma is really brought up to the surface here, whereas in other Middle Grade novels it would never even be an issue. For instance, in the series Percy Jackson & the Olympians by Rick Riordan when the times comes for the main-character Percy to slay monsters, his first-person narration does even show him reflecting about it. Not even when, for example, at the beginning of Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2005) he fights and accidentally vaporizes Mrs. Dodds, his Math teacher, when she suddenly turns into a Fury (the mythological creature from Greek religion and mythology). 223 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 21. 224 “There are places in the sea where the water is suddenly very shallow, usually near land. The storm must have thrown our boat onto the shelf, along with all this other wreckage", The End, p. 29. 225 Although some might surely have seen the many Robinson Crusoe’s adaptations and retellings for children, the most recent one being Robinson Crusoe (Usborne Young Reading) from the story by Daniel Defoe, retold by Angela Wilkes, adapted by Gill Harvey and illustrated by Peter Dennis (2003) or the Belgian-French 2016 Vincent Kesteloot and Ben Stassen’s 3D computer-animated movie called Robinson Crusoe (also known as The Wild Life). 226 William SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest, in La Tempesta introduzione e traduzione di Alessandro Serpieri, p. 68. 222 68 is that of the colonizer who washes up on an unknown location and forcefully thinks they can do whatever they want with it given their superiority and the colonized who is inferior and needs to be taught and subdued. In a parodical mirroring of this situation Snicket uses Count Olaf who, as soon as he steps foot on land, declares: «"I've discovered an island!" Count Olaf cackled. "I'm going to name it Olaf-Land!"»227 and when Violet points out that the island already has people living on it, he answers in his egotistical manner that he will be their king. Count Olaf is now presented as the colonizer and the parodical mirroring goes forward. Friday Caliban is barefoot, wears a white robe and a seashell necklace but also a pair of modern sunglasses (again the out of time and space feel the series always proposes). Violet asks for Friday’s name and then presents herself, her siblings and before she can introduce Count Olaf too, he exclaims: «"I am your king!" Olaf announced in a grand voice. "Bow before me, Friday!"»228. Friday replies: «"No, thank you," Friday said politely. "Our colony is not a monarchy”»229. Count Olaf’s sentiment does not change, he still thinks the islanders to be primitive and what he sees only confirms his opinion. The inhabitants of the island live in tents not houses, Friday explains, and when Count Olaf points his harpoon gun at the young girl threatening to fire it if she does not bow. Friday does not look concerned and tells him no violence is accepted on the island. The Baudelaires are shocked to see Count Olaf scared and also to see someone who’s not bothered nor afraid of his antics. Count Olaf’s dream of colonizing his own island is shattered, everything he knows he can do to get what he wants is taken away from him and he is now turned into something more than just a villain adding nuance to the character. The children see him as human for the first time, they see him as someone who can get scared too and not just be scary. What’s more, in this novel the series’ postmodern features appear to be heightened. Fiction merges with reality in that the island is inhabited by characters whose names reference works coming from the literary world of the reader’s own reality. Friday Caliban is one instance of this, bearing a name of literary importance coming from our world, but also other characters reflect it. Friday’s mother is called Miranda Caliban in reference to Prospero’s daughter from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and there are other characters whose name is taken from the play: Ferdinand whose job on the island is to catch fish, Ariel a sixteen year old girl who was in prison before arriving on the island, Alonso who washed up on the island after a political scandal. References are also biblical like in the name of Jonah Bellamy or come from Greek myths like the character of Calypso who references a nymph from Greek mythology. Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 35. Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 39. 229 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 40. 227 228 69 It would now be very helpful to introduce the concept of utopia, a word you can see in the title of this paragraph, so that the next two characters whose name references literature will better push our analysis forward. In narrative, a utopia is an ideal and perfect non-existent (but still possible) place or community. It is perfect and ideal in that it offers what the real world cannot give and in that it fulfils the desire for a better world. Utopian literature is vast and not the topic of this analysis, therefore what we are really interested in is one of its themes, that of «a simpler life and getting a better balance between the city and country. But all of these have also been presented as being done poorly or to advantage particular individuals or groups (economic, gender, power, and so forth) and producing dystopias»230. This is the case with the island the Baudelaires and Count Olaf shipwreck on: a utopia to the advantage of its figurehead. Giving a clue to the more experienced reader, Lemony Snicket (and consequently Daniel Handler) introduces the old rebellious woman called Erewhon. The woman is not the figurehead we were talking about, but her name (which is the anagram for the word ‘nowhere’) references the Utopian satirical novel Erewhon or Over the Range (1872) by Samuel Butler which presents a utopia that appears to be nowhere near perfect. The main character Higgs embarks on a journey to find a new colony away from his native country and finds the nation of Erewhon. This utopian community treats crime as illness and people who are ill, or poor or simply misfortunate are treated as criminals. Moreover, Erewhonian people live without machines which are considered to be dangerous due to a prophecy about machines being able to develop consciousness. Just as this utopia hides a menacing side, so does the one in The End. All the inhabitants shipwrecked on the island and decided to stay finding it to be a perfect and peaceful place away from the treachery of the world they came from, but the reality is much more sinister. The island’s leader is an old man who has been on the island longer than any of the current inhabitants and his name is Ishmael: «"Call me Ish," said Ishmael»231. I’m sure you have caught the inside joke already. The name Ishmael references the narrator in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick (1851) and the character’s line mirrors and parodies Moby Dick’s renowned incipit which goes: «Call me Ishmael». Ishmael is the island’s facilitator meaning: «"someone who helps other people make decisions"»232 but we could also go as far as to define him the main antagonist, ousting Count Olaf. Ishmael’s utopia is based on the argumentum ad antiquitatem which is the «argument that some policy, behaviour, or practice is right or acceptable because "it's always been done that way"»233. For instance, when Ishmael explains the island’s way to the Baudelaires he also makes a comment to Friday: «”our custom is to wear nothing Lyman Tower SARGENT, Utopianism: A very short introduction, p. 22. Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 55. 232 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 49. 233 CSUN, Logical Fallacies and the Art of Debate: http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/fallacies.html (last consulted: 15/08/2020). 230 231 70 but white, to match the sand of the islands, the healing clay of the pool, and the wool of the wild sheep. Friday, I'm surprised you are choosing to break with tradition"»234. Here he refers to Friday wearing a pair of sunglasses she found in the wreckage. When the little girl gives her apologies and says she thought they might be useful, Ishmael answers: «"I won't force you," Ishmael said calmly, "but it seems to me you might prefer to dress according to custom, rather than showing off your new eyewear"»235. The sentence “I won’t force you” is frequently used by Ishmael and always manages to achieve the same reaction in those who it is addressed to, a reaction of obedience. One item all the islanders wear due to custom other than white robes is the seashell necklace we previously mentioned Friday wearing. This necklace carries the only thing the islanders drink, which is coconut cordial. This beverage is not particularly to the Baudelaires’ taste, but Ishmael never stops offering it to them. The Baudelaires later find out that everything the islanders are allowed to eat is ceviche (a recipe made of raw fish) and all they can drink is coconut cordial, an opiate: «"An opiate is something that makes people drowsy and inactive," Klaus said, "or even forgetful"»236. Using Sunny’s jargon, Snicket calls it “Lethe” in reference to the Greek mythology river in the Hades, the river of forgetfulness. Ishamel uses the coconut cordial to keep the inhabitants docile so as to avoid the rise of any possible conflict and preserve his utopian dream. Sadly, this utopia colours itself with authoritarian nuances. Ishmael forbids the inhabitants from venturing to the other side of the island and also forbids them from keeping what washes up on the coastal shelf. For instance, Ariel finds what she thinks is a dagger, Ishmael with his authoritative tone says they do not allow weapons on the island, but Klaus explains it only is a tool used to cut book’s pages. "That's interesting," Ariel remarked. "It depends on how you look at it," Ishmael said. "I fail to see how it could be of use here. We've never had a single book wash ashore— the storms simply tear the pages apart" […] "Well, I'm not going to force you, Ariel," he said, "but if I were you I would toss that silly thing onto the sleigh." "I'm sure you're right," Ariel said.237 Not one of Ishmael’s decisions is questioned, no matter how useful the islanders’ suggestions or objects found could be. Nothing can ever change on the island, even though also the children try to propose the construction of tools which would make life on it easier. Violet suggests they build a fan to keep them cool on hot days, but Ishmael says that a fan would only bring arguments about who should use it. Alonso, one of the Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 56. Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 57. 236 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 223. 237 Lemony SNICKET, The End, pp. 74-75. 234 235 71 islanders we mentioned earlier, says they could take turns. But given that anything arriving from the world beyond the island is seen by Ishmael as corrupt, he is once again ready with his “I won’t force you” sentence which settles all matters. It is fair to say that while the old man does force his opinion on the inhabitants, none of them is forced to stay on the island. Once a year, the islanders celebrate Decision Day as Friday explains to the Baudelaires. The tides turn in this part of the ocean, and the coastal shelf is completely covered in water. It's the one time a year that it's deep enough to sail away from the island. All year long we build an enormous outrigger, which is a type of canoe, and the day the tides turn we have a feast and a talent show. Then anyone who wishes to leave our colony indicates their decision by taking a bite of bitter apple238 and spitting it onto the ground before boarding the outrigger and bidding us farewell.239 Therefore, we can understand that those who live on the island, much as they are drugged with coconut cordial and have to respect many rules, do maintain some sort of free will. Simply, Ishmael’s opinion is that by providing safety and preventing conflict he can avoid any future schism, and this can only be achieved if everyone abides by his rules. He goes as far as to propose to the Baudelaires to leave behind their talents of invention, reading and cooking which makes them who they are in exchange for a simple and safe life on the island. A proposal they refuse because they wish for their complicated lives and want Ishmael to stop lying to the islanders about the harmfulness of the worlds’ items, documents and varied diets. Certainly, you must find the word schism to be familiar for it is what happened to the secret society V.F.D. In fact, Ishmael was a member of V.F.D. and knew the Baudelaires parents who were the previous Island’s facilitators. He also knew about the three children, something he lets slip one time when he says: « Let's drink a toast to the Baudelaire orphans!"»240. What the three orphans found very strange is that he couldn’t have known about their parents’ death since they hadn’t told him their whole story. It is revealed that the children’s parents used to improve life on the island with their inventions once, but then one day they decided they wanted to dig a passageway to a near research center. The idea provoked a schism: some islanders thought it would be good, others thought it would only endanger the island and Ishmael «walked into the middle of this story»241 convincing the islanders to abandon the Baudelaires parents. The research center mentioned was destroyed in a fire and if the passageway had been built, this fire would have reached the island. What is more interesting is that the The bitter apple here foreshadows something the Baudelaires will find in chapter twelve of The End. Lemony SNICKET, The End, pp. 50-51. 240 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 90. 241 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 221. 238 239 72 research center was carrying some studies on a deadly fungus, the Medusoid Mycelium we so often spoke about. Now, before entering the next section to find out how the spores of the fungus are released, how Ishmael’s utopian dream fails and how the three orphans’ story concludes, we must briefly introduce the concept of the mise en abyme, French for “into the abyss”. Monika Fludernik in her essay An Introduction to Narratology explains that: «In narrative, one can speak of mise-en-abyme if an embedded story shares plot elements, structural features or themes with the main story and thus makes it possible to correlate plot and subplot»242. According to Brian McHale, the mise en abyme is a tool which many postmodern novels utilize243, and he states that: «it also complicates and destabilizes the world of the novel in which it appears»244. We find ourselves into the abyss every time an art product (be it a literary work, painting and so forth) duplicates in itself a sequence of events or a particular trait similar to something else presented in the story. In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (1600-1602) the main character Hamlet organizes a play called The murder of Gonzago to find out if his uncle King Claudius really killed his father King Hamlet. We are here witnessing an instance of a play within a play. Moreover, in art we have the painting Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez which features the painter as he is painting. The work presents within itself a scale replica of itself. This is also the case with Snicket’s The End. While in the arboretum (the place where everything that washes up the island is stored), located in the prohibited far side of the island, the three orphans find a commonplace book (which you will remember we have talked about in chapter three and is a V.F.D.’s members requirement) titled A Series Of Unfortunate Events. The book contains notes and entries from each and every island’s leader and the most recent one reveal to the Baudelaires Ishmael’s lies. When a pregnant Kit Snicket washed up on the island along with the Incredibly Deadly Viper, Uncle Monty’s snake which you will remember is absolutely harmless, Ishmael pretended not to know the unconscious woman, but as the three children read the newest entry in the commonplace book, they find the truth. 'Yet another figure from the shadowy past has washed ashore— Kit Snicket (see page 667). Convinced the others to abandon her, and the Baudelaires, who have already rocked the boat far too much, I fear. Also managed to have Count Olaf locked in a cage. Note to self: Why won't anyone call me Ish?' The commonplace book A Series Of Unfortunate Events probably is what inspired Monika FLUDERNIK, An introduction to narratology, p. 168. The following are some of the postmodern novels he mentions: «David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000)», MCHALE, p. 76. 244 Brian MCHALE, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism, p. 76. 242 243 73 Lemony Snicket to call his thirteen novels series with the same name. You must recall the series is told to us in retrospect, Snicket is investigating when the Baudelaires have already left the places where he looks for clues to put the story together. Certainly, he must have found the commonplace book after the Baudelaires together with Kit Snicket’s infant daughter sailed away from the island in the last novel. With all this said, Ishmael’s utopia shows the contradiction inside this genre of fiction about the impossibility of the existence of a perfect place with no leader and no authoritarian drift. The Baudelaires appear to not have sailed too far away from the treacherous nightmarish world they came from. Now we can finally move on to our ambiguous ending and towards the great unknown, an expression here used to mean “the unknown future of the Baudelaire orphans”. 5.4 The sense of a non-ending Endings come in many different forms. We have talked about cliffhangers, a literary tool which leaves you hanging at the end of a chapter in a novel or at the end of the novel itself and desperate to know what happens next. Endings can be of the “and they lived happily ever after” type, they can surprise you, leave you with food for thought, they can disappoint you or they can bring you right back to the beginning with a feeling of nostalgia. Sadly, you have been reading the analysis of A Series Of Unfortunate Events where both the ‘real’ author of the novels and the student who is discoursing about them have warned you about the lack of happy beginnings, about the very few happy things in the middle and about the inexistence of a happy ending. The literary genre in which I tried to insert this series also brought about the end of many things. Ag Apolloni, editor-in-chief of cultural magazine “Symbol”, wrote an article where he stated that postmodernism brought about the end of seriousness: «Even when dealing with serious topics, postmodernism processes them in complex structures, and filters them through ironic discourse»245; the end of the métarécit given its incredulity towards it; the end of the novel246 and the end of postmodernism itself. We now find ourselves in another era, one that does not yet have a name. Perchance we are too close to it to define it although many have tried. Cultural theorist Eric Gans calls it post-millennialism, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker call it metamodernism. With new technologies and our new way of living, it is certain that: «we are on the verge of something new, or perhaps we are already there, and it is going to have everything to do with the digital technologies and new social media that are now part Ag APOLLONI, The end of the era of endings, EUROZINE: https://www.eurozine.com/the-end-of-the-era-ofendings/ (last consulted 15/08/2020). 246 «In postmodernism, the novel is considered the dominant literary form. Yet, with poetry, drama, scientific, religious, political and other texts introduced within this form, the very nature of the novel is questioned», idem. 245 74 of our lives»247. In this case, the ending of The End not only provides the ambiguous finality of a series’ conclusion (in the spirit of postmodern ambiguity) but also the start of a possible new cycle. Erewhon, the rebellious old woman I told you about earlier, along with other rebels help Count Olaf escape from the bird cage in which he had been put. Ishmael and Count Olaf know each other, the first villain considers the latter to be his arch-nemesis due to the fact that he believes Count Olaf to have once burnt his home. Their confrontation escalates quickly, Count Olaf denies having set fire to Ishmael’s home, but the old man does not believe him. Ishmael takes a harpoon gun and fires it at Count Olaf’s belly. To everyone’s but the children surprise, under Count Olaf’s clothes in front of his belly lay hidden the helmet containing the deadly fungus spores: «and the Medusoid Mycelium, with its own secret history of treachery and violence, was free at last to circulate in the air, even in this safe place so far from the world»248. The new schism that was about to be created among those who wanted to change things on the island and those who didn’t is made void. Ishmael’s utopian dream is shattered «because everyone in this place —including, of course, the Baudelaire orphans— was suddenly part of the same unfortunate event»249. Once again, the three children are thrown back in the world where adults do not listen to youngsters. The Baudelaires know the solution to save everyone from imminent death250, but Ishmael tells the islanders they are just liars and they believe him without question. The children run back to the arboretum and find the answer to their problem by reading the commonplace book which their parents also contributed to writing. The entries in the book alternated between the handwriting of the Baudelaire father and the handwriting of the Baudelaire mother, and the children could imagine their parents sitting in these same chairs, reading out loud what they had written and suggesting things to add to the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind that comprised A Series of Unfortunate Events.251 It is interesting to note that the name of the commonplace book, which is the same as the series’ name, provides some ironic metanarrative instances for the reader. As the Baudelaires read further the narrator says: «the children hoped they would have the opportunity to reread A Series of Unfortunate Events on a less frantic occasion»252. Anyhow, the children discover that their parents were developing a botanical hybrid Linda HUTCHEON, “Beyond Postmodernity”, Symbol, No. 1, 2013, p. 11. Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 255. 249 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 255. 250 You recall the previously stated rhyme: A single spore has such grim power / That you may die within the hour. 251 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 273. 252 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 275. 247 248 75 and it is the apple tree in the arboretum, whose apples are bitter because they contain horseradish, the cure for the Medusoid Mycelium. The children are too sick and dizzy to reach the tree but fortunately, a word which does not often go along well with the Baudelaires, the Incredibly Deadly Viper in a biblical reference to the Genesis and the garden of Eden, slithers down from the tree offering them an apple. In the last chapter, chapter thirteen, the Baudelaires see the poisoned islanders leaving the island and the narrator stops the narration to address the reader once more. What Snicket explains in the following is that The End in the Baudelaires story is not really the end of their story, just like The Bad Beginning was not really the beginning. "The end" is a phrase which refers to the completion of a story, or the final moment of some accomplishment, such as a secret errand, or a great deal of research, and indeed this thirteenth volume marks the completion of my investigation into the Baudelaire case, which required much research, a great many secret errands, and the accomplishments of a number of my comrades, from a trolley driver to a botanical hybridization expert, with many, many typewriter repairpeople in between. But it cannot be said that The End contains the end of the Baudelaires' story, any more than The Bad Beginning contained its beginning.253 The Baudelaires’ story began when they were born, but also long before that when their parents met, when V.F.D. errands where being run and long before that again. Snicket says stories have neither endings nor beginnings because «the world is always in medias res — a Latin phrase which means "in the midst of things" or "in the middle of a narrative"»254 and this might well be the reason why no mystery can ever be solved. He then foreshadows, a term and tool we have discussed in chapter three, the end of a villain and the arrival of a baby at the end of the chapter. The narrative picks up again and the Baudelaires reach the coastal shelf where the poisoned islanders are leaving the island thinking it is no longer safe, Ishmael is with them promising to take them to the nearest horseradish factory and Kit Snicket is in labour. Ishmael bids farewell to the Baudelaires and commands the colonists to start rowing as his authoritarian utopia continues on an outrigger directed back to the treacherous world it so wished to stay away from. The Baudelaires cry one last try to their friend Friday: "Friday!" Sunny cried. "Take apple!" "Don't succumb to peer pressure," Violet begged. […] Klaus quickly grabbed an apple from the stock- pot, and the young girl leaned out of the boat to touch his hand. "I'm sorry to leave you behind, Baudelaires," she said, "but I must go with my family. I’ve already lost my father, and I couldn't stand to lose anyone else"255 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 255. Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 289. 255 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 296. 253 254 76 The narrator tells readers something the Baudelaires themselves would not notice for some time after. The Incredibly Deadly Viper followed the boat with an apple, yet he is not able to tell whether the islanders survived or not leaving their fate unknown. The Baudelaires move on to help Kit. The woman cannot eat the apple because it would hurt her baby and proceeds to tell the Baudelaire about the incidents that made her, the Quagmire triplets and the members of the Queepeg256 all castaways. We can now introduce The Great Unknown from our title: «From the depths of the sea a mysterious figure approached — almost like a question mark, rising out of the water […] My brother used to call it ‘The Great Unknown’»257. The nature of this figure is unknown, the Baudelaires first meet it in The Grim Grotto where on the Queepeg’s radar they see the question mark approaching. The Great Unknown is something that even Count Olaf fears and is described as shadow-like and menacing258. This figure carries with it great symbolism which we will talk about more in the following and final section. Count Olaf finally reappears as Kit is struggling to give birth to her child with her last strengths. Violet asks Count Olaf to help them and as they argue Klaus accuses Count Olaf of having killed their parents. In the spirit of ambiguity and of the world always being in medias res so that no mysteries can ever be solved, Count Olaf neither confirms the statement nor denies it. "You don't know anything," Count Olaf said. "You three children are the same as when I first laid eyes on you. You think you can triumph in this world with nothing more than a keen mind, a pile of books, and the occasional gourmet meal." He poured one last gulp of cordial into his poisoned mouth before throwing the seashell into the sand. "You're just like your parents"259. When the children then ask him to help Kit Snicket, Count Olaf eats the apple and proceeds to go help the woman we find out was once his one true love. Kit recites some words from Francis William Bourdillon’s poem The Night Has A Thousand Eyes (date unknown) which Count Olaf says are the words of their V.F.D. associates. Before he dies from the harpoon wound, Count Olaf answers Kit with words from This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin: The V.F.D. submarine from The Grim Grotto. Lemony SNICKET, The End, pp. 303-304. 258 It is wildly believed among fans (and later confirmed by the tv series, although we have said already that the officiality of its canon in the novels’ fictional world is uncertain) that this question mark figure corresponds to the mythical Bombinating Beast from the All The Wrong Questions series, a sea monster lurking in the waters of the town Stain'd-by-the-Sea and said to eat humans. 259 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 314. 256 257 77 “’Man hands on misery to man,’" the villain said. "'It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can—'" Here he coughed, a ghastly sound, and his hands clutched his chest. "'And don't have any kids yourself'”260. Thus, ends the story of our main villain. Kit Snicket gives birth to an infant girl, asks the children to name her baby after their mother and dies. The Baudelaires become the girl’s parents and make the island a safe place for her by planting the bitter apple’s seeds all over. In the year that follows, they make soft foods for her, they read to her from the commonplace A Series Of Unfortunate Events book and they add to it their own notes and stories. Sometimes they visit the tombs of Kit and Count Olaf and with the following excerpt the narrator concludes the story. Like Violet, like Klaus, and like Sunny, I visit certain graves, and often spend my mornings standing on a brae, staring out at the same sea. It is not the whole story, of course, but it is enough. Under the circumstances, it is the best for which you can hope. 260 Lemony SNICKET, The End, p. 318. 78 5.5 Chapter 5 To My Kind Editor: The end of THE END can be found at the end of THE END, With all due respect, Lemony Snicket - Lemony Snicket, Chapter Fourteen Dear reader, Much as an unreliable narrator I have lied to you. Were you to turn the many last pages of The End you would find the above epigraph to Snickets’ editor, some pictures by illustrator Brett Helquist and then the last instalment in A Series Of Unfortunate Events entitled Chapter Fourteen. At the end of paragraph 5.3 I have speculated about Snicket finding the common place book after the Baudelaires and Kit Snicket’s daughter sail away from the island. This one is the very end of the novel The End. Our long journey brought us to see the thirteen novels in this series, which we now know are actually fourteen, as a postmodern work in an era where many critics believe Postmodernism to be over and done with, to have been replaced by something new. In the course of this thesis I have tried to show the way Postmodernism as a literary genre has adapted itself to new mediums such as the screen of a cinema, a videogame, the episodic narration of a tv series or to more recent literary genres such as the middle grade. Postmodernism, as we have examined up to now, can in fact be explained to children and offer them too a new way of looking at the world and pose themselves questions about it. A Series Of Unfortunate Events can be a great introduction for young readers to this many-sided genre so that they can then grow up to enjoy more complex works like John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) or The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) by Thomas Pynchon. Before we conclude our journey, we can once more recap what makes this series a postmodern work by applying some of our analysis to this very last novel contained in The End. In The Sense Of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967), Frank Kermode explains the concept of peripeteia meaning a sudden change in the plot which «depends on our confidence of the end; it is a disconfirmation followed by a consonance; the interest of having our expectations falsified is obviously related to our wish to reach the discovery or recognition by an unexpected and instructive route»261. Lemony Snicket’s final peripeteia is represented by the moment he ends the story and then suddenly presents a further second ending which here comes in the form of a thirteen-pages hidden and additional instalment. Furthermore, as described by 261 Frank KERMODE, The Sense Of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, p. 19. 79 Kermode, we will see how the latter ending respects the reader’s sense of reality262 but also keeps the series’ distinctive features. As for inter-textual games, the novels’ title Chapter Fourteen breaks the thirteenchapters structure of the novels and also, probably, the misfortune the number thirteen is believed to bring. Moreover, we also find one more dedication to Beatrice: « For Beatrice— We are like boats passing in the night, particularly you» which is this time more ironic than morose given that it foreshadows the name of the boat in which the Baudelaires will sail away with Kit Snicket’s daughter. This name is at the same time the infant’s name, the last word of the novel and the confirmation of the Baudelaires mother’s identity: Beatrice. As regards more instances of metanarration and more irony, at the start of this last novel the three children now a little more grown up, make fun of and laugh at the name Lemony which you will remember is our narrator. As they read the last entry of their parents in the commonplace book titled A Series Of Unfortunate Events they find out that their parents would have called their first child Lemony if it were a boy263. "Lemony?" Violet repeated. "They would have named me Lemony? Where did they get that idea?" "From someone who died, presumably," Klaus said. "Remember the family custom?" "Lemony Baudelaire," Sunny tried, and the baby laughed again.264 The Baudelaires understand that just like their parents, they won’t be able to shelter Kit Snicket’s daughter from the world’s treachery forever, so they decide to sail back to the City. The Great Unknown we talked about in the previous section here applies to the Baudelaires’ future. The narrators says that many speculate about them having died at sea, others that they are still alive and busy on V.F.D. missions. Yet, when Kit’s daughter utters her first word while standing in front of the boat’s name, he tells us: «The Baudelaire orphans gasped when they heard it, but they could not say for sure whether she was reading the word out loud or merely stating her own name, and indeed they never learned this»265. We can here finally see that Lemony Snicket is an unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator contradicts itself, violates the reader/author contract and gives prejudicial testimony266. «and the more certainly we shall feel that the fiction under consideration is one of those which, by upsetting the ordinary balance of our naive expectations, is finding something out for us, something real», idem. 263 The family’s tradition is to name newborns after someone who died. At the time she was pregnant with Violet and along with Bertrand they were on the island, Beatrice believed Lemony Snicket to be dead. Given that she later names her male son Klaus, we can guess that at some point in time she must have known Lemony was in reality still alive. 264 Lemony SNICKET, Chapter Fourteen, p. 2. 265 Lemony SNICKET, Chapter Fourteen, p. 12. 266 James N. FREY, How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II: Advanced Techniques for Dramatic Storytelling, pp. 107-108. 262 80 In chapter three we have seen instances of foreshadowing where Snicket would tell us about the characters’ future. He appears to know with certainty that Violet will never meet a man named C. M. Kornbluth as you recall, that Klaus years later would regret not having called back the taxidriver who had brought Count Olaf back into their lives in The Reptile Room. In chapter three I also foreshadowed the revelation about Sunny’s future which can be found in The Beatrice Letters where we learn from a letter written to Lemony Snicket by Kit Snicket’s daughter, that Sunny will discuss her recipes on the radio. Yet, Lemony Snicket leaves the children’s fate to the great unknown of the future but also to The Great Unknown which lurks beneath the waters and which question mark shape we can see on the sea in one of the final illustrations. Umberto Eco argues in Opera aperta (1962) that: «nessuna opera d'arte è in effetti "chiusa", bensì ciascuna racchiude, nella sua esteriore definitezza, una infinità di " letture" possibili»267. The ending of the novel The End subverts and does not meet readers’ expectations whereas the series’ companion novel provides the reader with a seemingly new beginning which they have to create and decide themselves. What lies in the character’s future is up to the reader’s interpretation and wishes, especially since the narrator’s unreliability cannot be trusted to provide a definite answer. The same case is presented in the postmodern novel we so often referred to, The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles where the narrator gives the reader three different endings all unfolding with different narrative ploys. The first one, the conventional Victorian ending, is presented as the main character Charles Smithson’s dream of being able to go back home to his future wife Ernestina Freeman, confess his sin to her, repress his feelings towards Sarah Woodruff and live the rest of his life as the Victorian society’s rules command. The second ending lines up to the conventional ‘happy ending’ and his given as the second by the narrator’s toss of a coin. The narrator brings the narration back to before Charles’ dream and has him take a different decision leading him to reunite with Sarah and, surprisingly, their daughter in the end in what becomes an unconventional family to the eyes of the Victorian age. The third and last ending can be defined the ‘existentialist’ ending. The narrator, once again present inside the story he created, adjusts the hands of his watch and brings the narration back to Sarah and Charles’ fight but this time Charles decides to leave her. Charles is now aware of his experience, has obtained the consciousness of self and can finally grow, adapt and survive just as explained by Darwin’s evolution theory. To decide which one is the best ending is up to readers and their personal taste. We expect endings to deliver some great meaning, some sense of completeness but, as I have said before, The End and its additional ‘chapter’ respect the reader’s reality. In life we do not always find answers to all our questions and the same happens to the three children. 267 Umberto ECO, Opera aperta. Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee, p. 65. 81 In order to be told, stories need a beginning. The Baudeliares’ story started with a terrible news one gloomy day on Briny Beach. It ends as they set sails towards the great unknown represented both by the sea with its perils and their uncertain future. In addition, Chapter Fourteen presents as an epigraph a quote from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal: Ô Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l'ancre! Ce pays nous ennuie, ô Mort! Appareillous! Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l'encre. Nos coeurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons! Given that as we have stated before epigraphs at times offer a key to the reading of the text, should we, in light of these lines about death, take the novel’s ending as the probable death of the three Baudelaires and disregard every foreshadowing the series offered? In The Beatrice Letters we also learn that little Beatrice has been separated by the Baudelaires for some unknown reason and is now trying to find them again. Should we take this as one more confirmation of the existence of Murphy’s law within the series? Probably, there is no end to a series of unfortunate events and the cycle has now started once again with little Beatrice, yet one more orphan looking for answers in a treacherous world which offers none. But then again, that is also what Postmodernism asks: what is the truth, how can we learn it, is there only one? In the fictional world of A Series Of Unfortunate Events, the only certainty given the fact that no answers to the series mysteries nor to the characters’ fate are provided, seems to be the following line from the 2004 movie adaptation which we could also go as far as to define the moral of this story, much as Handler and Snicket would both refuse such a statement: At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough. And what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey268. 268 Brad SILBERLING, Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, 00:15:28-00:15:13. 82 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Much like these three years at university, writing is never a solitaire job therefore a round of “thank you” is always in order each and every time one finishes such a project. First, I’d like to say thank you to you my reader for having stubbornly read through these harrowing pages despite my many warnings not to. You deserve some recognition. Now, you should probably go find yourself some nicer and more interesting acknowledgements’ page rather than the tedious following list of names of people you do not know nor care about. Since I do care about them and in some way or another they have all been part of the making of this dissertation or these last three years and life in general, I need to distribute some more recognition. My kind rapporteur, professor Simona Micali, needs a big thank you for her guidance and corrections but also for putting up with me although she would have certainly preferred a much quieter and less distressing summer. Thank you to my parents, Antonietta Cozzolino and Salvatore Di Palma without whom I wouldn’t even have studied at University in the first place. Thank you to my sisters Assunta and Maria Di Palma much as they have been more a distraction than a source of help. Thank you to the very important Lorenzo Vagionakis, who knowingly and unknowingly gave me endless support and endorsement and does not wish to be mentioned but obviously his wishes have been ignored. Thank you to Giacomo Chimenti and Elena Marini who in my freshman’s year shared their knowledge about the university’s way of doing things, but mostly to Elena for her first rule in what I call “Elena’s University Survival Guide” which I religiously followed throughout these three years: “Fate sempre il primo appello, anche se non sapete nulla”. Thank you to Sabrina Di Buono, we share our very own never-ending series of unfortunate events experienced first-hand but in misfortune you have been the best partner I could ask for. Thank you to Roberta Ceraldi, eight years (and counting) of acquaintance, a series of unfortunate events does happen to anyone and you know it best, seeing you fall hurts me but watching you rise up again no matter what inspires me. Thank you to Francesca Colla, eight years (and counting) of tolerance, for standing by me always and never telling me she’s had enough of my many complaints and dreadful adventures, be it night or day. Lastly, thank you to Lemony Snicket, still on the run, and to Beatrice Baudelaire, long gone but never forgotten. 83 BIBLIOGRAPHY Novels by Daniel Handler: HANDLER, DANIEL, The Basic Eight, New York, Thomas Dunne Books, 1st ed., 1999. Lemony Snicket, A Series Of Unfortunate Events (1999-2006): SNICKET, LEMONY, The Bad Beginning, New York, HarperCollins, 1999. SNICKET, LEMONY, The Reptile Room, New York, HarperCollins, 1999. SNICKET, LEMONY, The Wide Window, New York, HarperCollins, 2000. SNICKET, LEMONY, The Miserable Mill, New York, HarperCollins, 2000. SNICKET, LEMONY, The Austere Academy, New York, HarperCollins, 2000. SNICKET, LEMONY, The Ersatz Elevator, New York, HarperCollins, 2001. SNICKET, LEMONY, The Vile Village, New York, HarperCollins, 2001. SNICKET, LEMONY, The Hostile Hospital, New York, HarperCollins, 2001. SNICKET, LEMONY, The Carnivorous Carnival, New York, HarperCollins, 2002. SNICKET, LEMONY, The Slippery Slope, New York, HarperCollins, 2003. 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ECO, UMBERTO, Il nome della rosa: Nuova edizione con i disegni e gli appunti preparatori dell’autore, Kindle version, Milano, La Nave di Teseo, 2020. ECO, UMBERTO, Opera aperta. Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee, Milano, Bompiani, 1962. FLUDERNIK, MONIKA, An introduction to narratology, Routledge, 2009. 85 FORSTER, EDWARD MORGAN, What I Believe, London, Hogarth Press, 1939. FOWLES, JOHN, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (with reading guide), New York, Little Brown and Company, 1969, re-published 2010. FREY, JAMES N., How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II: Advanced Techniques for Dramatic Storytelling, St. Martins Press, 1994. HUTCHEON, LINDA, (with Siobhan O’Flynn), A Theory of Adaptation: second edition, New York, Routledge, 2013. HUTCHEON, LINDA, “Beyond Postmodernity”, Symbol, No. 1, 2013. HUTCHEON, LINDA, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980. 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