Enchantment by Novel

Remembering William Goldman's "The Princess Bride" (the book and the movie, but mostly the book).

Tara Penry, the thoughtful author of “Enchanted In America,” challenged her readers to write about a time that a book, poem or story enchanted them. Since such moments are the point of The Middlebrow, her inspirational prompt is appreciated.

So, let’s begin with enchantment and what it means. It’s not just liking something or enjoying it or even liking or enjoying something a lot. Enchantment suggests magical influence and magic is almost always about transformation. So, to be enchanted by a piece of writing, I’d argue, is to not only love reading it, but for the the work to change the way you think and feel. William Goldman’s novel, The Princess Bride, did this for me back in the 1990s. I read it years after having seen the movie version, which Goldman adapted from his novel for its 1987 release.

A quick aside — The Princess Bride is a rare occurrence where the movie and film versions are equally good. The other that immediately jumps to mind is Being There, as I adore both the movie and Jerzy Kosinski’s novel. In both cases, the artists involved new that the story had to be adapted to fit the medium, so you get a unique take on the story, whichever form you choose.

In both the book and the movie, The Princess Bride is told as a story within a story. In the movie, a grandfather visits his sick grandson and reads him a heroic fairytale about Princess Buttercup, a farmhand named Wesley, and The Dread Pirate Roberts. The grandfather skips around a bit as his grandson complains about long exposition and the love story between Buttercup and Wesley. But, this is part of the grandson’s journey — the boy grows up while listening to the story and soon asks his grandfather to stop skipping over the kissing parts. He is enchanted by the tale, you see, and it changes him. Magic!

In the novel, the frame for the story within a story is a little different — the full title is The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The "Good Parts" Version and in the best editions, Goldman’s credit is not “by William Goldman” but “abridged by William Goldman.” So the conceit here is that Goldman has found a classic manuscript of high heroism and romance, but that it was plodding, overly detailed and too dense for a contemporary audience. So, what we read is the scholar’s take on the “classic” text and the effect of it is like reading Don Quijote under the tutelage of a talented professor who has limited their class size to no more than a dozen people (who all had to write qualifying essays to sign up).

A point about Quijote: Written in 1605, Miguel de Cervantes may have been the first novelist to use the “novel within a novel” form, almost a century before Shakespeare made such brilliant use of “the play within a play.” The world has been meta for a very long time. Postmodernism has been with us since, well, classical Greece.

I’d mentioned Don Quijote earlier and, of course, it has that structure, but I read it because I’d read and enjoyed The Princess Bride (and, it’s hard to imagine that Goldman didn’t purposefully borrow Miguel de Cervantes' 1605 innovation for his own novel.)

Another big difference between the book and movie is that the film has a Hollywood style happy ending while the book, which satirizes romantic literature, goes in a completely different and utterly cynical direction. But, somehow, both endings work for their mediums. That was a revelation for me when I read the novel — it did not leave me thinking that the happy ending of the film was a cop out. It really taught me something that the same writer could tell his own story two different ways in two different mediums and be highly successful at both. That is still a transformative enchantment for me as a writer — do not limit yourself because there are many ways to explore a great idea.

The Princess Bride also transformed me as a reader because it opened up a host of other novels written with this kind of frame, including The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Pale Fire. I would say that when a novel inspires you to read other books that explore its form, that the reader has been enchanted. Ever since I read The Princess Bride, the “book within a book” structure has been a surefire way to get me interested in a title. I only read Quijote because of The Princess Bride.

When a book gets you to read other books, when it jogs you to rethink how stories are told and when you remember it fondly years later… that’s enchantment. Thank you, William, for casting such a spell.