“But you knew I was a snake, didn’t you?”: Aesop’s Fable Slithering through Morrison’s Texts
Résumé
Often overlooked by scholars, Who’s Got Game: Poppy or the Snake?, Toni Morrison’s collaboration with her son Slade and Pascal Lemaître, is advertised as a comic book adaptation for children of a fable by Aesop in which a snake bites the person who rescued it. Proceeding from the multiple occurrences of the same storyline throughout Morrison’s literary work, the article approaches the topic of adaptation through the issue of variation. Fluidity inherent to folk culture is manifest through motifs, which shed skin in different places as they keep undulating through written and oral texts. The essay follows their trail throughout all the novels by Morrison. Morrison’s explicit adaptation of the fable in Who’s Got Game: Poppy or the Snake? encourages readers to reconsider the morality of the tale. Morrison’s incursion into children’s literature is thus not a mere adjunct to her other literary works but a major development of her artistic gesture through adaptation.