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Where Discourse Meets Discworld: Labyrinths, Humour and the Neo-Baroque in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Stories

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Terry Pratchett's Narrative Worlds

Part of the book series: Critical Approaches to Children's Literature ((CRACL))

Abstract

In this chapter, Thomas Scholz demonstrates that, by fusing the neo-baroque, that is, ‘postmodern’, aspects with humour, Pratchett avoids the suspension of Secondary Belief J. R. R. Tolkien warned against. Applying Arthur Koestler’s explanation of ‘comedy’ as a bisociation to various Discworld novels, Scholz explains how, by introducing the metanarrative as one matrix of bisociation, the novel comments on the source material, its genre conventions, and on its own textuality without endangering the coherence of the secondary world.

‘He can’t stop us. We’re on a mission from Glod.’

Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Fantasy fiction’, in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780192806871.001.0001/acref-9780192806871-e-2688.

  2. 2.

    Daniel Lüthi, ‘Toying with Fantasy: The Postmodern Playground of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Novels’, Mythlore 33.1 (2014): 125–142.

  3. 3.

    J. R. R. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, in The Monsters and the Critics, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 132.

  4. 4.

    Although one could make a case for the Discworld stories being more than pure fantasy fiction, that is, ‘satire’, and one could even more easily claim that the 41 novels are not all of the same making, I deem it feasible, for the sake of my argument in this chapter, to judge them all the same by Pratchett’s definition: ‘I think I write fantasy. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you might as well stick an orange in its bottom and eat it with green peas’ (Terry Pratchett, ‘Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories’, Folklore 111.2 (October 2000): 160). A more differentiating diachronic analysis will most likely show the chronological changes in Pratchett’s use of the mechanisms I am about to explain, but there is only so much I can do in the confines of a single chapter.

  5. 5.

    Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 12–13.

  6. 6.

    Omar Calabrese, Neo-baroque: A Sign of the Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 12.

  7. 7.

    Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  8. 8.

    HyunJoo Yoo, ‘The Neo-Baroque of Our Time: A Reading of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose’, International Journal of Arts and Sciences 3.10 (2010): 266.

  9. 9.

    Eco, The Open Work, 7.

  10. 10.

    Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1993), 3.

  11. 11.

    Angela Ndalianis, Neo-baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 94.

  12. 12.

    Victor Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), 31–36.

  13. 13.

    Salvatore Attardo, ‘A Primer for Linguistics of Humor’, in The Primer of Humor Research, ed. Viktor Raskin (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), 103.

  14. 14.

    Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, 99–139.

  15. 15.

    Attardo and Raskin, ‘Script Theory Revis(it)ed: Joke Similarity and Joke Representation Model’, HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 4.3/4 (1991): 293–347.

  16. 16.

    Arthur Koestler, Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1966).

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 35.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., 33.

  19. 19.

    Thomas Scholz, ‘The Making of a Hilarious Undead: Bisociation in the Novels of Terry Pratchett’, Fastitocalon: Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern 1.2 (2010): 141–152.

  20. 20.

    Terry Pratchett, The Truth (London: Doubleday, 2000), 8.

  21. 21.

    Pratchett, Moving Pictures (London: Victor Gollancz, 1990), 12. His emphasis.

  22. 22.

    Ndalianis, Neo-baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, 105.

  23. 23.

    For the sake of this argument, I would like to presuppose that all of Pratchett’s Discworld stories form a grand narrative. This case could effortlessly be made.

  24. 24.

    Eiji Ōtsuka and Marc Steinberg, ‘World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative’, 109.

  25. 25.

    Scholz, ‘The Making of a Hilarious Undead’, 146–147.

  26. 26.

    Pratchett, Witches Abroad. The Witches Trilogy: A Discworld Omnibus (London: Gollancz, 2001), 422 f.

  27. 27.

    While a punchline indicates the ‘humorous instance at the end of the text’, a jab line indicates such an occurrence everywhere else (Attardo, ‘A Primer for Linguistics of Humor’, 110).

  28. 28.

    Magrat’s question is another source of amusement, as the informed reader knows what Gollum is looking for—the One Ring. Being more clever than someone else, in this case a character in a book, can be amusing. The hostility theories of humour (Attardo, ‘A Primer for Linguistics in Humor’, 103) are best suited for explaining this effect.

  29. 29.

    Tolkien, The Hobbit (London: Harper Collins, 1993), 76–77.

  30. 30.

    Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), 274–278.

  31. 31.

    Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 61–63.

  32. 32.

    Ndalianis, Neo-baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, 80.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 105.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., 93.

  35. 35.

    Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 2.

  36. 36.

    Pratchett, Soul Music. Death Trilogy: A Discworld Omnibus (London: Gollancz, 1998), 563.

  37. 37.

    Dan Aykroyd and John Landis, Blues Brothers (Directed by John Landis. 1980. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures).

  38. 38.

    Pratchett, The Wee Free Men: A Story of Discworld (London: Doubleday, 2003), 29.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 55.

  40. 40.

    Katharine Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 242.

  41. 41.

    In contrast to Katharine Briggs’ 1970s assumption, there is a gender equality in creating monsters through fairy tales in Pratchett’s stories. Tiffany’s father is equally involved. Fantasy fiction isn’t as blimpish as some critics might take it to be.

  42. 42.

    Yoo, ‘The Neo-Baroque of Our Time: A Reading of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose’, 269.

  43. 43.

    Pratchett, The Wee Free Men, 31.

  44. 44.

    Pratchett, Witches Abroad, 410.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., 480.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., 410.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 481.

  48. 48.

    L. Frank Baum et al., The Wizard of Oz (Directed by Victor Fleming. 1939. Beverly Hills, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), 2013.

  49. 49.

    Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2000), 25.

  50. 50.

    Pratchett, Witches Abroad, 481–483. I apologise for cutting the scene decisively for the sake of continuing my argument. It is a lot more complex than this trimmed excerpt suggests.

  51. 51.

    Pratchett, Guards! Guards! City Watch Trilogy. A Discworld Omnibus (London: Gollancz, 1999), 18 and various others.

  52. 52.

    Pratchett, Witches Abroad, 415–419.

  53. 53.

    Baum et al., The Wizard of Oz (Directed by Victor Fleming. 1939. Beverly Hills, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer).

  54. 54.

    Ted Sears et al., Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Directed by David Hand et al. 1937. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios), 2009.

  55. 55.

    Pratchett, Witches Abroad, 484.

  56. 56.

    Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998), 156–157.

  57. 57.

    ‘Genetic’ is an anachronism in generic heroic fantasy fiction, but on the Discworld, it is not. When the king of the dwarfs tries to break it gently to his six-foot-six son that he is adopted, he refers to ‘genetics business’ without hesitation (Pratchett, Guards! Guards!, 18), even though there is no scientific basis on the Discworld for this knowledge to be available. The characters do not bother, no critique has pointed out these anachronisms as flaws, nor has Secondary Belief dwindled away. It can take a soft punch or two, it seems.

  58. 58.

    Pratchett, Guards! Guards!, 120.

  59. 59.

    Pratchett, Witches Abroad, 425.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 462.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., 466.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., 531.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., 565.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., 561.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., 568.

  66. 66.

    Hopefully, Gideon Haberkorn means to be ironic when he states that ‘Pratchett clearly draws attention to the way things are supposed to happen in stories and makes the implicit argument that they do not happen like this here, because this is after all no story. This is real’ (Haberkorn, ‘Debugging the Mind: the Rhetoric of Humor and the Poetics of Fantasy’, 180). This is, of course, also a story, one folding onto itself.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., 571.

  68. 68.

    Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum, 256.

  69. 69.

    Pratchett, ‘The Troll Bridge’, in The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy, ed. Mike Ashley (London: Robinson Publishing, 1998), 108–118.

  70. 70.

    Pratchett, Guards! Guards!, 237–238.

  71. 71.

    Pratchett, Witches Abroad, 462.

  72. 72.

    Pratchett, The Wee Free Men, 48.

  73. 73.

    Ndalianis, 72.

  74. 74.

    Pratchett, ‘Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories’, 159.

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  1. Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Thomas Scholz

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  1. Interjuli, Lorch, Germany

    Marion Rana

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Scholz, T. (2018). Where Discourse Meets Discworld: Labyrinths, Humour and the Neo-Baroque in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Stories. In: Rana, M. (eds) Terry Pratchett's Narrative Worlds. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67298-4_13

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