Topologies of the Classical World in Children's Fiction: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals (Classical Presences) [Illustrated] 9780198846031, 0198846037

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors  

 . 

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

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Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals

Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey 2019 © Excerpts from Bull by David Elliott. Copyright © 2017 by David Elliott. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941460 ISBN 978–0–19–884603–1 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgments This book has benefited from the assistance and helpful counsel of many people over many years. Amanda Covington was a wonderful research assistant. For advice on work now forming parts of chapters, we are grateful to Karen Coats, Owen Hodkinson, Helen Lovatt, Sheila (Bridget) Murnaghan, Judith Plotz, and Deborah Roberts. The section on Rick Riordan in Chapter 5 comes from our longer article “ ‘A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers’: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Series and America’s Culture Wars,” which first appeared in The Lion and the Unicorn 39.3 (September 2015), and we thank the L&U editorial staff for their help in strengthening this publication. Mara Bernstein at Indiana University Libraries kindly sourced two illustrations, and multiple staff members at Texas A&M University’s Evans Library supplied technological assistance and research texts through TAMU’s Get It for Me service. Financial help from the TAMU Department of English, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Claudius M. Easley, Jr., Faculty Fellowship facilitated travel to conferences where we could try out early versions of many of the textual readings contained in this study and learn from the expertise of fellow conferees too many to name. The “Asterisks and Obelisks: Greece and Rome in Children’s Literature” conference held in Lampeter, Wales, in 2009 was particularly helpful as a forum for exchanging ideas about classically inflected works for young readers. It has been a pleasure to work with editors Charlotte Loveridge and Georgina Leighton at OUP, and we are deeply grateful for the feedback received from Lorna Hardwick and James I. Porter, the editors of the Classical Presences series, and from our superb outside readers.

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Copyright Acknowledgments Excerpts from “Interview with Susan Cooper” by Raymond H. Thompson. Copyright © 1989 by Raymond H. Thompson. Reproduced by permission. Excerpt from one of the illustrated appendices to Julius Zebra: Bundle with the Britons! by Gary Northfield. Copyright © 2016 Gary Northfield. Reproduced by permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5HJ, . Excerpts from “Dedicated to the Demigods: Our Lit Camps” by Topher Bradfield. Copyright © 2013 by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Reproduced by permission. Section 5.5 comes from our longer article “ ‘A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers’: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Series and America’s Culture Wars.” Copyright © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 39, Issue 3, September 2015, pages 235–53. Excerpts from “John Christopher” by John R. Pfeiffer, from British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers, 1918–1960, ed. Darren Harris-Fain. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Copyright © 2002 Gale, a part of Cengage, Inc. Reproduced by permission. Excerpts from “Megan Whalen Turner: Testing the Conventional” by Jennifer M. Brown. Copyright © 2010 ShelfAwareness. Reproduced by permission.

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Contents List of Illustrations

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1. Introduction

1 6 11 14

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

The Models Sample Exception #1: Mirroring in Echo Echo Sample Exception #2: Insides and Outsides in Bull Sample Exception #3: Curves vs. Straight Lines in The Mark of the Horse Lord 1.5 Conclusion

2. HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST 1: The Layers of Ancient Rome in Puck of Pook’s Hill and Its Successors 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

Foundations: Puck of Pook’s Hill Layers for Adults: Three Fantasies Layers for Children: Three Fantasies Beyond Fantasy: Philip Turner’s Yorkshire Palimpsest Conclusion

18 22 23 25 30 42 50 53

3. HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST 2: Time Zones, Scars, and Family in (Mostly) Realistic Works 55 3.1 Magical Rules and Classical Tradition in The Enchanted Castle 58 3.2 Liminality and Mixed Metaphors in Three Novels by Caroline Dale Snedeker 3.3 Trauma, Family, and History in The Bronze Bow 3.4 Wounding in The Eagle of the Ninth 3.5 Conclusion

4. HISTORY IS A MAP 1: Navigating the Underworld 4.1 A Map Text Without a Map: The Story of the Amulet 4.2 Underworlds and (Platonic) Caves in The Silver Chair 4.3 Underworlds and Returns in Mystery at Mycenae and The Roman Mysteries 4.4 Symbolic Underworlds and Shifting Scripts in the Roman Pony Trilogy 4.5 Mapping the Orpheus Myth in the Jack Perdu Books and the Underworlds Series 4.6 Conclusion

64 79 84 91 94 98 105 111 124 131 142

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5. HISTORY IS A MAP 2: Carnivals, Grotesquerie, and the Antic(que) Map Text 5.1 Gryllus the Pig and the Playful Attack on Borders 5.2 Spartapuss the Cat and the Repeating and Consuming of Time 5.3 Julius Zebra and Cognitive Connection through Words, Pictures, and Warthogs 5.4 The Dogs of Pompeii and Popular Culture’s Alliance with the Past 5.5 Percy Jackson and the Apotheosis of the Comic Didactic 5.6 Conclusion

144 148 156 160 165 173 186

6. HISTORY IS FRACTAL: Patterns of Conflict in Contemporary Young Adult Fantasies 187 6.1 Despairing Didacticism: Learning and Misery in Red Shift 192 6.2 Separate Spheres and If Worlds: Culture Clash in the Fireball and Warriors Trilogies 6.3 Panem et Circenses: Countries, Cats, and Conflict in the Hunger Games Trilogy 6.4 Monsters and Masks: Trust and Treachery in the Ember in the Ashes Series 6.5 Secret Keepers: Manipulating Misprision in The Queen’s Thief Sequence 6.6 Conclusion

200 207 218 226 236

7. Conclusion

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Works Cited Index

249 263

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List of Illustrations 2.1 Claude Allin Shepperson, illustration for The Strand’s serialization of Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, June 1906

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3.1 Mary Whitson Haring, frontispiece to Caroline Dale Snedeker’s Theras and His Town, 1924

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4.1 H. R. Millar, illustration for The Strand’s serialization of E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet, November 1905

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4.2 Detail from Egbert L. Viele’s Topographical Map of the City of New York: Showing Original Water Courses and Made Land, 1865

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5.1 First page of “Roman Numerals,” an appendix to Gary Northfield’s Julius Zebra: Bundle with the Britons!, 2016

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6.1 “Prosobranchia,” from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, 1904

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1 Introduction Most researchers working at the intersection of cognitive theory and literary studies accept as a fundamental premise that literature is not just a product but also a cause of human cognition. They contend that literature helps to shape readers’ thought not only by providing information, ideas, and insight but also by influencing the ways in which readers process input from the nonliterary world; as Ellen Spolsky puts it, “Narratives seem to colonize human brains” (37). Groundbreaking work by scholars including George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Metaphors We Live By, 1980, and Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999), Mark Turner (The Literary Mind, 1996), Peter Stockwell (Cognitive Poetics, 2002), Zoltán Kövecses (Language, Mind, and Culture, 2006), and others has directed attention toward literature’s power to provide conceptual metaphors that shape readers’ understanding of the world, cognitive frames or schemas for organizing experience, and scripts or internalized models for how to behave in particular situations. While the cognitive study of literature has many mansions,¹ it is this inquiry into metaphor and its offshoots that concerns us here. Not surprisingly, children’s literature, directed primarily toward an audience that has not yet reached intellectual or emotional maturity and thus is still working to identify the principles by which later decisions may be governed, has proven an especially rich field for cognitively based inquiry, and scholars such as Maria Nikolajeva, Marek Oziewicz, John Stephens, and Roberta Seelinger Trites (to name only a few) have produced important recent work in this area. ¹ Consider, for instance, cognitive rhetoric, which takes a linguistic and behavioral approach to the neuroscience of communication; cognitive narratology, which examines how we process story in both producing and consuming it; and cognitive aesthetics of reception, which considers the visual dimension that we create when we hear a story. Our concern is primarily with cognitive poetics, which Margaret Freeman defines as a “tool for . . . illuminating the structure and content of literary texts” (“Poetry” 254). Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction. Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey, Oxford University Press (2019). © Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846031.001.0001

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      In the book that follows, we seek to add to this dynamic conversation by examining a particular subset of youth literature, namely some of the many books written for older children and adolescents since the dawn of the twentieth century that draw upon the classical world by making use of ancient Greek and Roman settings, figures, and/or narratives. This branch of children’s literature is a sufficiently widespread and important phenomenon to have engendered its own dynamic conversation among critics who do not take a cognitive approach, as valuable recent collections edited by Lisa Maurice (The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Children’s Literature, 2015), Katarzyna Marciniak (Our Mythical Childhood . . . , 2016), Markus Janka and Michael Stierstorfer (Verjüngte Antike: Griechisch-römische Mythologie und Historie in zeitgenössischen Kinder- und Jugendmedien, 2017), and Owen Hodkinson and Helen Lovatt (Classical Reception and Children’s Literature: Greece, Rome and Childhood Transformation, 2018), as well as Sheila Murnaghan and Deborah H. Roberts’s monograph Childhood and the Classics: Britain and America, 1850–1965 (2018) demonstrate.² Yet to write about the past, or to incorporate intertextual references to the past in a work set in the present or future, is to participate in what geographer Barney Warf refers to as the fashioning of “time and space [as] socially created, plastic, mutable institutions that profoundly shape, just as they are shaped by, individual perceptions and social relations” (2). As Warf notes, language (and by extension, literature) “is central to how human beings construct and experience” space and time alike (3). Authors who incorporate the classical world or any other past into their work are not engaging in a neutral act, but modeling—and thus taking part in shaping for readers—a particular understanding of time. Among other things, by asserting the relevance of the distant past to the

² Marciniak’s volume is one outcome of the large and exciting international project by the same name that she leads, which is funded by the European Research Council and involves scholars on continents from Africa to Australia. The project focuses on children’s literature as a significant vector for the transmission of classical tropes. Classicists use the term “classical reception studies” to refer to such investigations, which have taken on increasing importance over the past decades. Feeling the need for an adjectival form, in this study we will sometimes refer to our primary texts as “neoclassical,” a term that we use not to refer to works that attempt to reinstate genuine classical values in a postclassical age (the definition that might come most naturally to a classicist) but rather in the more general sense of the word, to refer to a postclassical adaptation of or riff upon an inspiration from antiquity.

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experience of the contemporary reader, they are endeavoring to lessen what that reader might otherwise be inclined to regard as the classical world’s remoteness: in the perception of the receptive reader, time and space alike are abridged. Even so, just as not all readers will read a given text in the same way (we focus throughout this study on the invitations that we see particular texts proffering, which may always be rejected by individual readers), authors do not perform these abridgments in identical ways or to identical effect. In their survey of myth retellings and neoclassical historical novels produced between 1850 and 1965, for instance, Murnaghan and Roberts offer valuable insights into differences between British and American and between nineteenth- and twentieth-century approaches to the classical world, while noting that the texts that they discuss were all intended to “draw the reader into another period” by lessening the distance between past and present (Childhood 139). They add that even near-contemporaries with similar projects—their examples here are Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Kingsley—may reveal sharply “contrasting visions of the relationship between children and the ancient times” (42). For this reason, we propose that uniting neoclassical works for children with the cognitive study of that literature is a productive way of illuminating both the shifting ways in which children’s authors seek to train their readers to think about the past and the ways in which the classical heritage has been packaged for the young over the last century. In making our preliminary exploration of this intersection, we are perforce omitting much. Influenced by space constraints, by the vast amount of potentially relevant material, and in some cases by lack of adequate expertise, we are not considering the enticing possibilities offered by heavily illustrated texts (picture books such as the retold myths included in Rosemary Wells’s Max and Ruby series, graphic novels such as Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze sequence about the Trojan War, comic books such as the Asterix titles) or by media other than print (classical mythology and classical militarism have been particularly rich sources of inspiration for computer and video games, from the 1984 title Hercules to the ongoing God of War series). We are not looking at works for the very young, aware that “a young brain is different from an adult brain” (Nikolajeva, Reading 15), that “children’s ability to understand different kinds of metaphors” increases significantly between ages six

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      and fourteen (Coats, “Form” 149), and that it is easier to generalize about the cognitive processes invited by a group of texts if all these texts address readers who have achieved a certain level of competence and sophistication. We are also reluctantly ignoring works written outside Britain or the United States and those produced before the twentieth century, although the lively classical tradition in continental Europe and Australasia has resulted from the nineteenth century forward in the publication of many historical novels with classical settings and many repurposings of ancient myths. And finally, we are less interested in relatively straightforward retellings of classical narratives (despite the success and influence achieved by texts such as Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire’s 1962 Book of Greek Myths and Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece: And the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, designated a Newbery Honor book in 1922) than we are in works that play with the classical world in more radical ways. Using a relatively constrained set of texts, then, we are asking the following: how do British and American writers for middle-grade and high-school readers encourage their audience to think about the classical past and their own relationship to it, and how might this experience potentially influence readers’ outlook more generally? (Here we would emphasize the “might” in the previous sentence; as nonscientists, we see our role in the collaboration between humanities scholars and cognitive scientists as what Gregory Currie describes as “developing theories of how we might learn from fiction, especially given that psychological work in this area sometimes suffers from an impoverished view of the explanatory options” [653, orig. emphasis].) We contend that the metaphor with which L. P. Hartley famously begins his 1953 novel The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country,” suggests a vision that is widespread in youth literature, namely that time is most readily comprehended as an aspect of place. In itself, this point is not surprising; Lakoff and Johnson comment that “Most of our fundamental concepts are organized in terms of one or more spatialization metaphors” (17). Indeed, that literary works model particular ways of understanding space is an ancient phenomenon, recently explored by such scholars as Alex C. Purves (Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative, 2010) and William G. Thalmann (Apollonius of Rhodes and the Spaces of Hellenism, 2011). Yet the precise nature of the metaphors that a given author may draw upon in conceptualizing space and time is contingent, not fixed, and popular metaphors—including the

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clusters of related terms that we here organize under three collective headings—can arise in response to, and in turn operate as a mechanism for reinforcing, particular social developments. For example, the possibility of “traveling” in time, an image that equates time with a physical landscape, was popularized for Anglophone readers as late as 1895, with H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine,³ and reached children’s literature only in the twentieth century via Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet, both of which were published in 1906 and, as the earliest texts in our study, are considered at some length in later chapters. The formulation “time travel,” which carries with it implications of the rapid or even instantaneous bridging of gaps via a folding or truncating of significant temporal distance—not only spatiality, that is, but specifically the conquering of spatiality—required a particular social context in order to take hold. Geographers who think about how space is conceptualized have observed the relevance of such developments as telegraphy, photography, radio, and film, which, together with improvements in transportation networks, promoted a general sense that increasingly, there would be no such thing as distance either spatially or temporally. And arguably, one manifestation of the “new ways of thinking about space and time” that Warf identifies as emerging in the nineteenth century and gathering speed in the twentieth (165) was the nineteenth-century invention of the children’s historical novel, a form that depends upon the abrogation of time inasmuch as it resituates the modern reader in a bygone world. Inheriting the Victorian tendency to think of time and space as linked and bridgeable, the twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that we study here conceive of the past as understandable in terms of concrete form, which in turn may affect readers’ approach to both past and present. Accordingly, we are interested in how these texts implicitly or explicitly draw upon a limited and powerful collection of spatial metaphors in order to organize the past. We do not insist that a contemporary author who invokes the classical tradition rather than, say, the medieval

³ Wells was not, of course, the first or best known author to employ the conceit of a character occupying a time not his or her own; his predecessors here include Mark Twain. But Twain’s Connecticut Yankee finds himself in King Arthur’s court not, as he sees it, through travel but as a result of a “transposition of epochs—and bodies” after a blow on the head (7).

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will approach the past through different metaphors than those used by his or her medievalist colleague, although sometimes that may be the case. (As one of the reviewers of our manuscript pointed out, a classicist—and some of our authors were classically trained—could convincingly argue that early versions of the metaphors we examine appear in Greek and Roman epic, a circumstance that increases the likelihood that the metaphors would be picked up and recycled along with other antique content.) Since our own background is in more recent texts, our decision to focus on classical reception in children’s literature is prompted primarily by the desire to examine a body of literature that is at once varied and unified. Nor do we contend that the small set of metaphors on which we focus most of our attention either is directly employed in our texts, as our central metaphors are images that we have developed to describe and organize the phenomena on display in the fiction rather than terms universally used by the authors themselves, or constitutes the entire set available to authors. Indeed, later in this introduction we will offer three representative examples of texts that take nonstandard approaches. Nevertheless, in collecting texts for our study, we were struck by how frequently novelists have drawn upon one (or more than one) of three central conceptual models in representing or mining the past for young readers, and by the extent to which the dominant model on display in a particular text correlates with genre and overall tone.

1.1 The Models We begin our investigation with works that, by invoking images such as carpets, wells, archaeological digs, and so on, present history primarily as a palimpsest. In these works, past and present exist in a many-layered series of deposits. If the work is set in the past, the narrator nods to the perceptions and knowledge of contemporary readers, for example by commenting on the ways in which the classical landscape resembles and/ or differs from its modern counterpart. If the work is set in the author’s present, the past is shown to have a continuing existence as something discernible by the right kind of modern individual, who proves capable of interacting with the past through an informed historical imagination or, as happens in Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle (1907), through magic. Such texts may be framed as fantasies (often time-slip fantasies) or as

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works of realism, but in either case both the classical and the contemporary layer are often only two strata among many. Much as the original excavators of Troy found not “the” Troy but multiple Troys superimposed upon the same geographical location, or as Book 8 of the Aeneid focuses both upon the prehistory of the place that will become Rome and upon images of the future glory of the Roman empire, palimpsest texts frequently establish a single location—in our study, which focuses on British and American texts, this location is characteristically found in Britain—as the site of a chronological core sample. As happens in works such as Kipling’s Puck stories (1906–10), Philip Turner’s Darnley Mills sequence (1964–77), and Joan Aiken’s The Shadow Guests (1980), the reach of this core sample may extend from the prehistoric to the Roman era, the Middle Ages and/or the Tudor period, the eighteenth century, and the twentieth century. By positioning character and reader as occupying one among many equally important temporal strata, palimpsest texts emphasize the physical or social landscape’s continuity but the individual’s impermanence, modeling a modest vision of one’s place in time. The first of our two palimpsest chapters presents Puck of Pook’s Hill as the foundation of a textual palimpsest added to by writers for adults and children alike, while the second explores landscape and trauma in works less overtly influenced by Kipling. In the texts discussed in these two chapters, the metaphors contributing to the palimpsest schema, with its inherent urging of humility and cooperation, are also used to convey messages about citizenship, empire, family, and coping with pain. The second of the popular models that we examine is the map text. In these works, which typically feature maps as important plot elements and/or as illustrations or endpapers, protagonists’ journeys toward knowledge, maturity, and self-discovery—and the reader’s journey toward an improved understanding of the classical world—are presented as physical movement. Like palimpsest texts, map texts may be set in either past or present and span more than one genre. Although we have found it prudent (given the large number of classically inflected map texts found within children’s literature, ranging from the Pan chapter in The Wind in the Willows to retellings of the Odyssey to the latest mythinspired fantasy) to narrow our scope somewhat by investigating underworld stories in our first map chapter and narratives of the grotesque in our second, our discussion nevertheless includes a wide variety of textual

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      types. We classify as map texts works as diverse as K. M. Peyton’s Roman Pony trilogy (2007–9), Roger Lancelyn Green’s and Caroline Lawrence’s mysteries set respectively in Mycenae and in the Roman world (1959 and 2001–9), C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair (1953), and comic sagas including Paul Shipton’s Gryllus the Pig duology (2004–6) and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series (2005–9). All these texts feature quests or other acts of mobile problem-solving, all of which have successful outcomes. Writing of children’s works that include maps as frontispieces or endpapers, Anthony Pavlik argues that the invitation to interact with these maps casts the reader in an “active, participatory role” (35). Similarly, the classically inspired map texts that we examine here highlight—and not just in their endpapers—freedom of action, decision making, and arrival at one’s planned destination. They model an assertive, confident outlook and tend to present the protagonist (with whom the reader is encouraged to identify) as exceptional, a figure upon whom friends’ lives or even the fate of the cosmos may depend. The third and final model that we find in multiple texts in our study, albeit in considerably fewer texts than is the case for either palimpsest texts or map texts, is what we are terming the fractal text. Here, small parts of the narrative are structured in a way that mirrors the structure of the overarching whole, and the problems of the individual are identical to the problems of the larger society. Consider how Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy (2008–10)—based, as Kathryn Strong Hansen has shown, not only on the Theseus myth but also on those of Artemis and Philomela—contains a recurring pattern of betrayal that operates on both micro and macro levels. For instance, a narrative aside in Volume 1, Katniss’s betrayal of the lynx who has trusted her, is a miniature version of the state’s betrayal of its citizens, the ongoing problem that drives the entire trilogy; the lynx also has multiple feline counterparts in other episodes of the trilogy, from Katniss’s sister’s tomcat to human “cats” such as Tigris the Capitol shopkeeper and Katniss/“Catnip” herself, and all these cats similarly raise questions of trust and betrayal.⁴ Fractal texts work by analogy, denying difference between past, present, and future and inviting optimistic readers to conclude that even small social change affects the whole world, while pessimistic readers may

⁴ We discuss this issue in more detail in Chapter 6 of this study.

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discover that meaningful change is impossible. To borrow an insight from David Quint’s Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (1993), Freud’s repetition compulsion, in which “The victim of an earlier trauma may neurotically reenact his victimization over and over again” (51), helps to explain “the obsessive circular return to a traumatic past” that characterizes the (fractal) opening books of the Aeneid (50);⁵ whereas Virgil’s epic changes course as the Trojans turn themselves from “losers” into “winners,” however, contemporary fractal fiction for the young often takes a less optimistic form. For at least where classically inspired adolescent fiction is concerned, the fractal model is closely associated with dystopian narratives. This association is logical inasmuch as the didactic purpose of dystopian fiction is conventionally to prompt readers to see connections between the dystopian world and their own reality; this purpose is furthered when narratives encourage readers to look for similarities in apparently unrelated narrative moments. Thus John Christopher’s Fireball trilogy (1981–6), to invoke another example, begins as what briefly appears to be a conventional domestic novel about a boy resentful about his lack of power within the family setting, as his parents have refused to send him on a school trip to Greece and are instead requiring him to entertain a previously unknown cousin. Almost immediately, the narrative shifts into being what first appears to be a time-slip novel involving Roman Britain and is later revealed to be an alternate-history saga, but neither the hostile dynamic between the cousins nor the feeling of dissatisfaction with the status quo ever reaches a permanent resolution. In other words, readers are instantly provided in miniature with the pattern that will animate both plot and character dynamics across all three installments. But even recognizing this pattern as soon as possible will not protect them from the feelings of disorientation from which the protagonist perennially suffers in this trilogy; rather, the repetition merely underscores the inevitability of this response.

⁵ We thank one of our anonymous manuscript readers for this suggestion and for pointing out the palimpsestic qualities of The Roman Mysteries, an insight that we pursue on the next page. The same reader adds that “the Iliad is arguably fractal, in that Patroclus foreshadows Hector, Hector foreshadows Achilles, and all foreshadow the fall of Troy, which is viewed as inevitable.”

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      Yet combinations of the three models are also possible, and that we have sorted works into chapters according to the class of metaphor that we see as dominant in a given text does not preclude the possibility that a secondary metaphor is also present. For instance, because Lawrence’s Roman Mysteries series is centrally concerned with journeys, we see it primarily as a map text, yet in its emphasis on individual and family pasts, the enduring effects of trauma, and the eruption of Vesuvius, it is simultaneously palimpsestic, if ultimately to a more limited extent—and the contemplative sensibility that is characteristic of the palimpsest text tempers the confidence that is characteristic of the map text. Similarly, Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief series (1996–) is a rare example of a fractal text that is optimistic because the fractal here is combined with the map to form a symmetrical labyrinth. The series’s plot mechanism works by a constant feedback loop of mutual theft and misprision. The fractal nature of the text is visible in the endless repetition of and connections among acts of stealing and failures to judge correctly what others (usually the series protagonist, Eugenides) may be capable of. But because Eugenides is intensely aware of others’ tendency to remain mired in particular patterns, he is able to manipulate this tendency to the advantage of the three kingdoms with which the series is concerned, consistently enabling the weaker element to triumph over apparently stronger forces. Eugenides thus has considerably more agency than is typical for the protagonists of fractal works, so that the thefts and con games—in which readers as well as the characters are implicated—work to bind rather than to separate, and instead of being trapped in the labyrinth, we emerge from it having gained new understanding. As the foregoing point implies, we propose that each of the conceptual metaphors (HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST, HISTORY IS A MAP, HISTORY IS A FRACTAL⁶) upon which we primarily focus in this study urges readers to adopt a particular approach to life. Although, as Jukka Mikkonen points out, authorities disagree over how to interpret the results of experiments designed to test “the cognitive and emotive effects

⁶ Sarah Mohler explains, “When cognitive theorists reference conceptual metaphors, they do so using all capital letters to signify that they are not referencing a single denotive understanding of a word, but the web of cultural references and personal associations linked to that particular word that are activated in the mind of the individual who encounters the metaphor” (442).

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of literary narratives” (276), cognitive research nevertheless suggests that textual prompts can have real effects, however difficult to measure these effects may be, upon how their consumers learn to approach the world. Spolsky, for example, cites neurological findings to argue for a biological basis for story’s appeal, writing that “narratives indeed teach us by managing our neuronal/brain/body responses in all kinds of situations. . . . An achieved narrative can be thought of as a representation or schema that satisfies because it enables prediction” (40). This contention helps to explain not only why the dystopian approach to the fractal model is an innovation of the apocalyptically inclined postmodern era but also why it is so popular with post-9/11 readers: it normalizes, and thus brings under a measure of control, the idea that real progress may not happen. If texts indeed “colonize” readers, potentially affecting not only shortterm phenomena such as mood but also longer-term matters such as children’s understanding of their place in the world and in time, our project may seem to have particular significance in an era when instruction in history is declining. Since for many children leisure reading is the principal mechanism for gaining an acquaintance with the past, the authors of that leisure reading have become, de facto, such children’s principal history teachers. Examining how fiction for children and adolescents organizes the spaces of the past thus has important pedagogical implications: teachers who are aware of the metaphors that students may already use to understand time are equipped to decide whether they want to take advantage of these existing structures in presenting new material or to offer alternative ways of thinking. More generally, if we accept the proposition that the metaphors that authors choose condition the reader’s sense of the world’s coherence and the individual’s agency, examining these metaphors becomes crucial because they have powerful implications for citizenship.

1.2 Sample Exception #1: Mirroring in Echo Echo As noted above, most of this book explores the three spatial models that we see operating across multiple works of youth literature containing classical content. We do not, however, wish to imply that all such works can be classified according to one or more of these models, and to

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      underscore this point, we offer here readings of three representative exceptions: a collection of poetry, a verse novel, and a historical novel. In our first example, Marilyn Singer’s Echo Echo: Reverso Poems about Greek Myths (2016), the reader’s attention is directed forcefully toward form. As the book’s subtitle indicates, all fourteen poems in this collection are what Singer calls “reverso poems,” a genre that she originated. In a prose comment included in the book, she explains that this form involves the publisher in printing two versions side by side; the second is identical to the first in wording, but the order of the lines is inverted. From the standpoint of form, the genre’s purpose is to highlight the radical change in meaning that results from the destabilization of perspective as we move from one speaker (or outlook) to another, a change signaled by the flipping of the order in which the reader encounters the lines (n.pag.). In other words, here the conceptual metaphor governing form is DIFFERENCE IN VIEWPOINT IS A MIRROR, with the idea of the mirror emphasizing both what is identical in the mirror image and what is opposite.⁷ Karen Coats argues that in cognitive terms, the function of children’s poetry is to create “a holding environment in language to help children manage their sensory environments, map and regulate their neurological functions, and contain their existential anxieties” (“Meaning” 140). Using as her examples several poems for adults by Emily Dickinson, cognitive literary theorist Margaret Freeman foregrounds “the general mapping skills that constitute the cognitive ability to create and interpret metaphor” (“Poetry” 254). In Singer’s work, this connection between reading poetry and cognitive mapping receives an unusually specific orientation, up to down and down to up, even while the poems simultaneously suggest that what we identify as “up” or “down” may be arbitrary. Singer has used the reverso form for poems on a wide range of subjects, from cats to fairy tales to Richard Nixon. Yet because Greek myths are associated with a particular long-ago culture in a way that fairy ⁷ Nancy Hadaway and Terrell Young cite as an example one of Singer’s earliest and briefest efforts in this style, which consists in its entirety of six words read first from the top down and subsequently from the bottom up (qtd. 52; see also http://www.librarything.com/ topic/108882). For additional examples from Echo Echo, excerpted or (in one case) reprinted entire, see Maria Russo’s review of the collection, which appeared in the New York Times on 24 February 2016; Nicole Lamy’s Boston Globe review of 23 February 2016 quotes similarly illustrative lines from “Echo and Narcissus” and “Orpheus and Eurydice.”

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tales, say, are not (we can date and place Charles Perrault’s version of “Cinderella,” but its source text is much harder to pin down), the reader of Echo Echo is encouraged to understand not only that the characters in myths have different points of view but also that reading down into the past is different from reading up out of the past. Indeed, the volume’s emphasis on simultaneity implies that “past” and “present” may be misnomers; the characters have their points of view, the narrator and readers theirs, but all exist in the same volume and at least potentially resist prioritization. Thus, for instance, “Demeter and Persephone” contrasts the bereaved mother’s anger with Persephone’s expression of acceptance and optimism; while the goddess of agriculture, harvests, and the seasons implies that regeneration may never come again, her daughter focuses on spring (n.pag.). Mother and daughter’s opposing attitudes toward Persephone’s abductor should pose no particular conceptual challenge for the third- to sixth-grade reader posited by Deborah Stevenson in her review of the collection.⁸ Yet a more sophisticated point being made here arises from the fact that Demeter, Persephone, and the other characters who populate the myths that Singer invokes exist on a different time plane from that of the contemporary reader, as is apparent in the two poems that bookend the collection. Both “An Age of Marvelous Myths”—which is reproduced in its entirety on the author’s website, marilynsinger.net— and “Gods and Mortals” step outside the seemingly timeless world of myth to make time-specific reference to the distant Greek past (in the opening poem) and to readers of today (in the concluding poem, whose illustration shows children in modern dress walking on the same path as a winged horse and interacting with a king, while above them a temple roof turns into the opened pages of a book). That is, in Nikolajeva’s terms, Singer invokes both “eternal, mythic time” and “measurable, linear time” (Mythic 5). This juxtaposition means that the volume as a whole offers a larger version of the contrast in viewpoint apparent in each individual poem. Yet because of the “reverso” effect, the spatial model on display is not that of the fractal, in which order makes no difference to the ultimate ⁸ As is often the case with assessments of children’s books, reviewers’ ideas of the age of the target audience vary, with some positing a significantly younger reader than others. We cite Stevenson because our opinion coincides with hers.

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      meaning. Rather, attention is drawn to the importance of organization, with the opening poem’s emphasis on a combination of disruption and balance turning into the final poem’s emphasis on how myths allow people to find meaning in what they see around them. The job of interpreting implies a commitment to linear time, in which events first occur and are then parsed in memory and whose association with the progress toward maturity Nikolajeva points out throughout From Mythic to Linear. Moreover, because of the passage of time, the conflicts between the outlooks of individual characters, unresolved in the poems themselves, come to closure, since the reader knows how these stories end. Simultaneously, however, that the twelve poems set within the world of myth capture moments before the stories have ended insists upon the myths’ timelessness: for the purposes of this volume, they are not over, however “ancient” they may be. Nikolajeva’s examination of mythic and linear time in children’s fiction addresses “how the narrative structure of children’s novels changes in accordance with the grade of the ‘displacement’ of myth” (Mythic 8); in this collection of poems, Singer creates a system in which neither mythic nor linear time is displaced. Rather, the two exist in productive tension, since on the one hand linear time is granted the privilege of having the first and last word, but on the other hand the myth poems significantly outnumber the historical-time poems that frame them. Like the poems, then, time works in two directions, carrying different meanings depending on which direction is (or happens to be) uppermost. If Coats is correct in contending that children’s poetry helps children to “map . . . their neurological functions,” the implication of the central insight that Singer offers in this collection is that quite a complex network of synapses is being created.

1.3 Sample Exception #2: Insides and Outsides in Bull A second work that both defies and affirms some of the assertions that we are making about complexity and spatial organization is David Elliott’s verse novel Bull (2017). Elliott retells the story of the Minotaur as that of a particularly dysfunctional family victimized through the conflict between two selfish patriarchs, Poseidon and Minos. Each narrator—members of the household, plus Poseidon and Theseus—

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speaks in order to meditate on the wrongs done to him or her, or to justify the wrongs done to others. The center of the work is the psyche of the Minotaur, Asterion, for as long as he remains articulate. Asterion is presented as an outcast adolescent (son to Minos and Pasiphae, halfbrother to Ariadne, victim of Poseidon and Theseus, and so on), the product of his mother’s shameful lust for the perfect white bull sent by Poseidon to Minos. By the end of the narrative, Asterion has been rejected by Minos, neglected by his withdrawn and mentally disturbed mother, and betrayed by his initially loving sister Ariadne, who gives up the secret of the Labyrinth to Theseus. The major principle of spatial organization on display here is the contrast between inside and outside. For example, Asterion’s reality exists within what is effectively an exhibition space curated by Poseidon, which in turn exists within but separated from the reader’s own reality, which is buffered by author-supplied but extradiagetic material in the form of a list of characters at the start and afterwords on the myth and on poetic form. The powerless are swallowed up by more powerful mortals such as Minos, while Minos is in turn constrained by a straitjacket imposed by divine power and even Poseidon, according to Elliott, is product rather than master of the verse form associated with him, since “In a very real way, those forms wrote the book” (184). Meanwhile, the dysfunctional family is defined through the figures that it shouldn’t contain but does (a partially nonhuman son, a vengeful deity) and also through the figures that it should contain but does not (responsible and loving parents, children who share parental regard and care). The inside/ outside design is found formally in complex ways, particularly those that suggest sexual irregularity for the poem’s adolescent readers. Pasiphae must conceal herself inside an artificial cow in order to mate with the bull; she then carries her nonhuman progeny inside her until Asterion’s birth. Asterion’s progress toward the wholly discarded, the wholly nonhuman, is charted through his enforced removal from his mother by stages: he first moves from the center of the palace to a more remote space, then to a barn away from the palace, and finally to the Labyrinth. This inside/outside dichotomy is continued in Ariadne’s fleeting concern for her half-brother. She blackmails Daedalus into creating a hole in the Labyrinth in order that she might speak to Asterion, and she receives the secret to escaping from the Labyrinth that will allow Theseus to enter and exit the space completely associated with the Minotaur.

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      On the level of characterization, the ultimate inside/outside dichotomy is the presence of the sentient, articulate human being inside the bull boy and adolescent. There is a human being inside Asterion, but either the rejection he suffers or his maturation (or both) gradually work to reduce what is human in him to pure rage until his inside and outside appear congruent. Yet the relationship between inside and outside is apparent on other levels as well. As Coats observes, the formal qualities on display in the volume (the book’s “outside,” in the sense that the reader may expect it to exist separate from the narrative layer) comment upon content here, since “the novel makes clever use of typography and book design. . . . The shapes and lineation of Asterion’s ottava rimas and Pasiphae’s randomized syllables chart their descents into meandering instability, while the background color of the pages of Asterion’s poems after entering the labyrinth darken[s] gradually along with his environment and his thoughts” (Review 255–6). As Coats elsewhere explains, nonstandard “ways of arranging line breaks, space, font, and color on the page are examples of visual and sonic allegories of embodied states and processes that facilitate the reader’s understanding of characters and settings in a verse novel”; that is, book design in Bull as in many of its fellows is intended to encourage a particular kind of cognition, directing the reader toward certain insights through its use of space and shape (“Form” 148–9). Somewhat similarly, the multivocality of Bull’s poetic structure is designed to highlight the contest between social insiders and social outsiders by revealing Minos’ self-delusion, Pasiphae’s despair and dissolution as a personality, and Asterion’s reduction to the purely animal. It also reveals Poseidon as vain, self-regarding, and strategically vulgar (his initial greeting to readers is “Whaddup, bitches?” [3]), again allowing the reader access to a psyche that is typically off limits in the context of more conventional versions of Greek myths. Because each major character has his or her own distinct poetic form and speaks in the first person, readers are effectively inside the dysfunctional family and the wounded wife, son, or daughter instead of being held at arm’s length by the remoteness of mythic time. Conversely, the performative masks or personae adopted by such characters as Poseidon and Theseus complicate that empathic effort. In particular, Poseidon’s aggressively modern language functions at first to highlight his likeness to the contemporary reader, but by the end of the text the reader may understand him as the most alien of all the novel’s

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characters because his speech suggests an affect devoid of human feeling, the expression of a power that is wholly disengaged emotionally. In Coats’s reading, “Poseidon is positioned outside of time and place” through his combination of up-to-the-minute diction and ancient godly attributes. The pairing “works like a canted angle in film; it projects a world that is off-balance and unsettled, and replicates the proliferation of sometimes contradictory roles experienced by the adolescent,” a device that furthers what Coats sees as Elliott’s project of turning “poetic form and material presentation [into] physical-psychological metaphors for the developing self” (“Form” 156). Meanwhile, although Ariadne’s voice seems at first to bear a strong resemblance to Poseidon’s in its profane disrespect for others (“Everything’s a fucking mess. / My family is clueless. / . . . Phaedra? She’s a complete whack / job. And a nymphomaniac” [61]), later poems are couched in more formal language and convey considerably greater emotional depth. “Ariadne means ‘holy / one.’ But how could that be me / unless prevarication is sacred?” she asks (116), a question that both directs us to look for the core truth that her defiant demeanor has been concealing and suggests a deep sadness. Ultimately, in strong contrast with Poseidon’s mode of expression, Ariadne’s language is laden with affect and concern for her half-brother. The contest between inside and outside, and the language designed to grant the reader privileged access to individual thoughts and feelings that would otherwise be unavailable, produce the final set of dialogic relations in Bull, that between the biological and the mechanical. Daedalus assists with the creation of Asterion by inventing the device of the false cow in which Pasiphae enfolds herself, but Asterion is a true organic fusion of human and animal. Later, Daedalus approaches the combining of human and animal mechanically, through the production of wings for his doomed flight with Icarus. While the reader might find the affect of gods or animals alien, it is notable that the narrative chronicles repeated human efforts to use machines to achieve union with the divine or the animal. This gesture toward the mechanical makes the rejection of the human within Asterion more painful. It also parallels Poseidon’s detachment from human feeling: the god is distanced from the disasters that ensue from his plans for revenge on Minos, which is structured in such a way as to fall endlessly on his wife and children. The god’s pique thus has its own mechanical working out, emphasized through his detached language.

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      Ultimately, a major implicit contrast of the novel is that between the imperfect and disastrous attempts to achieve fusion with alien beings using mechanical aids and the seamless entry into alien psyches that is enabled by telling and reading their stories. Through poetry and empathy, Elliott suggests, we can achieve what the flawed characters in this text cannot—especially since, as Coats argues, works such as Bull approach structure and metaphor in a way calculated “to not only reflect preadolescent and adolescent experiences of embodiment and affective-cognitive development, but also to scaffold and support those developments” (“Form” 159; orig. emphasis). The emphasis on getting to the heart of the labyrinth constituted by the tormented family and its tragic son cuts across time and space; outsiders by virtue of era, nationality, and status as fully human, the readers are made insiders by language. If the controlling metaphor here is implicitly HISTORY IS A SECRET, one is nonetheless to understand that the way to breach secrets is to articulate them.

1.4 Sample Exception #3: Curves vs. Straight Lines in The Mark of the Horse Lord For our final example of an approach to structuring time that does not readily fall into one of our three principal metaphorical modes, we turn to Rosemary Sutcliff. As a major chronicler of Roman Britain in children’s literature, Sutcliff was an avowed admirer and disciple of Kipling, her predecessor in this endeavor. She identified him as particularly important to her early reading: “of all the writers of my childhood, he made the strongest impact on me, an impact which I have never forgotten” (qtd. Wright 90). Hilary Wright notes, however, that when Sutcliff borrows from Kipling “the kernel of a story or a point of detail . . . she has always developed it in her own way” (98). For Roberts, this “own way” is typically simpler and less interesting than Kipling’s, whose works she judges “both thematically and narratologically more complex than Sutcliff ’s” (“Pasts” 108). While we will return in Chapter 2 to the question of Kipling’s influence, at this point we turn to a discussion of Sutcliff ’s 1965 novel The Mark of the Horse Lord in an effort to ally ourselves with the critics who see her as a writer whose work has its own narratological complexities to offer. Throughout the novel, Sutcliff juxtaposes two recurring spatial images, one linear and the other circular/mythic, to

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suggest the contrast between Roman and ancient British ways of thinking. In the process, she also dramatizes a conflict between linear and mythic time, hinting that the mode of thought that one adopts determines, for good or ill, one’s destiny. The novel’s plot follows Phaedrus, a half-Greek, half-British inhabitant of Britain toward the end of the second century . Originally a slave in his father’s household, Phaedrus is sold as a gladiator upon his father’s death, gains his freedom in the arena, and shortly thereafter finds himself in jail after a night of drunken revelry turns violent. At this juncture, he gains a new identity and leaves the Roman orbit: he has been discovered by members of the Dalriad tribe who see that he bears a striking resemblance to Midir, who should have been their king but was secretly blinded and exiled by his father’s half-sister, Liadhan, in an effort to establish the ascendancy of the Mother-worshiping Epidii over the patriarchal Dalriads. Tutored by Midir (whose mutilation has rendered him ineligible to return to his people and take up the kingship), Phaedrus successfully impersonates his double, ascends to the ruling position of Horse Lord, marries Liadhan’s daughter Murna, and leads the Dalriads to victory in battle over the more numerous Caledones, cultural allies of the Epidii. Liadhan escapes and gains sanctuary with the Romans, who capture Phaedrus and Midir when the latter attempt to infiltrate the Roman garrison and kill her. Midir manages to avenge himself upon the queen-goddess, although doing so costs him his own life; Phaedrus, facing the Roman demand that he buy his freedom by sending a thousand young Dalriads to become Roman auxiliaries, kills himself for the sake of his adopted subjects. As Barbara Talcroft points out, “the sacrificial kingship,” a concept derived from James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, is central to this novel (7); that is, Phaedrus is not only his birth self, an adventurer with a linear history beginning in slavery and ending in kingship, but also one incarnation of a mythic figure who transcends time. In her commentary on The Mark of the Horse Lord, Talcroft details the many mythic elements in the work, noting that Sutcliff ’s use of myth was not allegorical, but very nearly literal. She was not so much attempting to present myth as metaphor as to present myth as reality, and to imagine what effect a pervasive belief in that reality would have had on the actions and destinies of those who believed. . . . Sutcliff ’s use of the kingship themes reflects the intensity of her perception of history as the eternal death and resurrection of the people and the land. (57)

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      But while we agree with Talcroft’s point about the centrality of myth to this narrative, we want to emphasize here the importance of the simultaneity of the mythic and the linear. Sutcliff produces here two stories at once, one an account of the coming of age and identity quest of a protagonist whose original affiliation is with Rome, the other an account of how ancient Celtic myths are to be seen working themselves out over one cycle of a seemingly endless recurring pattern. To ignore either dimension is to overlook the device that generates much of the novel’s complexity—a complexity of character and mood that takes concrete form in Sutcliff ’s repeated contrasting of straight and curved lines. This contrast sometimes occurs in the foreground of the narrative, sometimes in the background. Significantly, the reader may first become aware of it during the scene in which Phaedrus is being recruited to impersonate Midir, when Gault, one of the Dalriad leaders, dips his finger in a puddle of wine “and as though not conscious of what he was doing, [began] to draw patterns on the table-top as he talked. It was a trick that Phaedrus was to come to know well as time went by” (251). The narrator’s vision returns to the doodle throughout the conversation, tracing their progress from a collection of “curved and crosswise lines” (251) to the addition of “a carefully judged flourish” (252) and finally to a smeared “red blur on the table-top” (253); although the doodle serves no plot function and the reader never sees Phaedrus react to it, the narrator’s tracking of it at four separate moments hints at thematic importance for this movement between curved and straight, order and disorder. Readers will next see Gault creating a pattern in Chapter 4, when for the tattooist’s use he draws on Phaedrus’ forehead “the lost pattern . . . those potent, interlocking lines and spirals and double curves of Sun Cross and Stallion Symbol that formed between them a device not unlike a fourpetalled flower”—the titular “Mark of the Horse Lord” that will identify him as the Dalriads’ missing king (260–1). Looking back from this moment at the earlier pattern drawn in wine on the table, one may interpret Gault’s first effort as a rehearsal for Phaedrus’ transformation into Midir’s committed double. But it is also a clue that the “curved and crosswise,” the “interlocking lines and spirals” of the two (or one?) double not just one another but also the novel’s overall plot, in which curves and straight lines are ultimately inseparable. Similarly foregrounded is a remark made to Phaedrus at the end of Chapter 5 by one of Gault’s companions, Sinnoch the trader. Speaking

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of the man who will later command the local Roman garrison and set the ransom that impels Phaedrus’ final sacrifice, Sinnoch commends him as “a bright enough lad . . . good at his job,” but also notes a crucial conceptual weakness: “like most of his kind, his mind works in straight lines. Maybe that is what has made Rome the ruler of the world, but there’s no denying that when it comes to buying or selling a horse, the man who can think in curves has the advantage” (280–1). The metaphorical nature of this comment prompts readers to be alert to instances of “thinking in curves” or in straight lines and to notice when one or the other wins out. For instance, Phaedrus is unexpectedly straightforward when Conory, a cousin and close childhood friend of Midir, challenges him as a counterfeit; Phaedrus promptly admits to the imposture and to his own low status as a non-Dalriad and a former Roman slave, and the truth having been established, Conory becomes his closest ally in the task of keeping the secret as closely held as possible. Here “straight line” thinking serves Phaedrus well, but he is later able to bring about his own death (and thus preserve the autonomy and existence of the tribe) by a final example of “curve” thinking when he stabs himself with the brooch that holds his cloak. It has not occurred to his captors, who have of course disarmed him, to think of this enameled ornament as a weapon, yet “the deadly pin . . . was almost as long as a small dagger” (476)—and as part of the mythic pattern of sacrificial kingship, Phaedrus’ decision to die is itself “as familiar as the folds of an old cloak” (469). Much as Gault’s patterns are composed of both straight lines and curves, then, both forms of thought are presented as potentially advantageous. Over and over, the narration employs the words “pattern,” “curved” (or variants such as “curving”), “straight,” “line,” and “circle,” with other geometric terms such as “angle” and “spiral” entering into the mix as well. In general, these words are employed neutrally, without attached value judgments. And although Sinnoch suggests that curves are Celtic and straight lines Roman (a classification supported to some extent by the contrast between the straight Roman Wall and roads and the meandering paths and watery ways associated with the Dalriads and Caledones), circular spaces such as arenas may be Roman and straight lines have their place in the Dalriad patterns. It seems telling, then, that immediately before killing himself as the Horse Lord, Phaedrus thinks multiple times of his days as a gladiator; his two identities merge and inform each other. Finally, the novel hints that far from being opposites,

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      curves and straight lines are complementary; the real advantage goes to the individual capable of thinking in both modalities, and to the approach to Britain that appreciates Celtic and Roman contributions alike.

1.5 Conclusion These three examples, but also our focus on the topologies of palimpsest, map, and fractal, reveal how frequently writers about the antique deploy simple means for substantial expressivity. The schemas associated with the metaphors that we identify in this study are flexible, even palindromic, in their potential operation. The works that we explore variously insist that the antique world is alien or familiar, or that the contemporary world is alien or familiar based on its resemblance or maintenance of connections to the antique world. The topological metaphors implicitly or explicitly adopted by authors can indicate that the antique world was a “then” or a “there,” or can collapse those efforts to hold at bay the potential strangeness of the mores of the past. In either event, these devices suggest to the child reader that he or she is disposed in time and place potentially arbitrarily but not without agency. To realize these two apparently contradictory features of our relationship to potential community is to begin to appreciate how classically inflected fiction for children rehearses and refines the burdens and responsibilities of adulthood.

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2 HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST 1 The Layers of Ancient Rome in Puck of Pook’s Hill and Its Successors

As critic Sarah Wintle has noted (9–10), Rudyard Kipling’s 1906 volume Puck of Pook’s Hill, in which two Edwardian children are “made free” of British history as figures from the past emerge to bring it to life for them, is in part a meditation on belonging, and specifically on Britishness. That the time travelers—a Roman centurion, a Norman knight, and a Sephardic Jew—are Britons by adoption rather than by blood enables the author, a product of the Raj and the father of children who were half American, to explore what it means to become naturalized, and indeed to comment on how “natural” a process naturalization is. The Puck stories thus present British history as a many-layered saga of invasion and adaptation, told from the viewpoint of the foreigner but stressing the power of the land to change these aliens into Britons. To live in England, Kipling contends, is to be shaped by it, so that the country’s history becomes a palimpsest revealing multiple versions of the same message about citizenship and nation. The palimpsestic nature of the British landscape is established from the outset by the poem that introduces the narrative, which contains the following representative stanzas: And see you, after rain, the trace Of mound and ditch and wall? O that was a Legion’s camping-place, When Caesar sailed from Gaul! And see you marks that show and fade, Like shadows on the Downs? O they are the lines the Flint Men made, To guard their wondrous towns!

Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction. Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey, Oxford University Press (2019). © Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846031.001.0001

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      Just as the prefatory poem is built from images that draw the reader’s attention to half-erased marks that past events have left upon the face of the land, the child protagonists, Dan and Una, are serially introduced to historical events and personages who are then magically eradicated from their waking memory—but who nonetheless function on some deeper level of consciousness to make the children true citizens of England. Although Kipling never uses the word “palimpsest,” that both land and mind are to be understood in these terms is clear throughout. If the implied metaphor HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST functions on a structural level to guide the overarching pattern of the narrative as one episode gives way to another focused on a different era, absorbing this structure and its teachings may also do something to shape the reader. Mary-Anne Shonoda notes that while critical attention has been directed toward “the connotative way techniques such as metaphor work to situate readers,” “narrative techniques” beyond metaphor have received less attention, even though these techniques also “prompt negotiative reading strategies and engage readers in a kind of interpretive play” (81). The palimpsest metaphor demands that the reader accept a notion of the individual’s occupation of time and space as temporary; while traces of the past may remain, its human inhabitants do not. Thus the affect associated with this form often tends toward nostalgia and melancholy, a recognition of losses sustained, or alternatively toward a rejection of memory as a force too potent and potentially destructive for life in the here and now. That is, as Andrew McInnes argues of Arthur Ransome’s use of the (non-Roman) past in the Swallows and Amazons novels, the child protagonists—and, we would add, child readers—“are explorers who are quickly confronted by their secondariness, discovering that [others] already occupy the spaces they attempt to conquer. By meditating on the mechanisms through which his child protagonists learn to cope with coming second, [the author] reconceptualizes the power relationship between adults and children from one of subjugation to one that balances pain, pleasure, and playfulness” (282). While McInnes refers here to Ransome, a similar argument could be made of Puck, and another way to put this point is to suggest that accepting that others have preceded us and still others will follow is to accept a kind of enforced modesty; we are not the conquerors of time but merely a tiny fraction of the casualties that it is constantly in the process of inflicting. Offsetting this pain, however, is the awareness of membership in an enormous community.

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We belong in time, and in the narratives of Kipling and his heirs, we belong in Britain as well, by adoption if not by birth. The idea of the palimpsest has influenced the structure of our investigation in this chapter. Although Kipling grounds Puck and its 1910 sequel, Rewards and Fairies, in British prehistory and thus presents Roman Britain as an early layer in British history but not its foundation, the Roman stories (which Peter Hinchcliffe sees as the “core” of the first volume [158]) nonetheless served as the substratum for an extensive Kipling-indebted literature aimed at adults as well as children and making use of the classical. We thus focus this chapter not only on Puck¹ but also on later texts that resemble it in highlighting the connection between Britain’s Roman past and its present and in focusing on the interplay between invasion and naturalization, an interplay that is inherent in the idea of the palimpsest as a unity composed of multiple layers. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson note that rich metaphors generate lengthy strings of “entailments” or associated concepts (Metaphors 9), and in our use of the metaphor of the palimpsest, we wish to draw particular attention to the dualities that it contains. As physical objects, palimpsests work by oppositions—spatially between the contents of the top layer and those of the bottom, chronologically between the late and the early, and often theologically between the pagan and the Christian. Above all, we have the opposition created by the conflict of wills on the part of warring authors, one of whom has laid down a text that the other then scrapes away and replaces, even while the old text remains at least potentially recoverable. The image of the palimpsest thus speaks to the relationship between a text and its literary sources, but also to those who, like Kipling and his children, are transplants shaped by multiple countries, and to those who, like many characters in the texts that we are examining in this project, must contemplate being invaded by an alien empire.

2.1 Foundations: Puck of Pook’s Hill Hinchcliffe contends that Puck’s overarching message is a warning, “[R] econcile your internal differences so that you may guard yourself from invasion” (160); we suggest that the matter of invasion here is more ¹ Because Rewards and Fairies contains no Roman episodes, we omit it from consideration here, although we are cognizant of strong cases (see, e.g., McCutchan) for the inseparability of the two volumes.

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      complicated than that statement might imply, in part because in Kipling’s text it is never entirely certain who is invading whom and by what means. In one sense, Dan and Una, stand-ins for Kipling’s half-American, halfAnglo-Indian offspring, are the latest in the wave of foreign colonizers who have shaped this part of England. But in another sense, the time travelers are invading Dan and Una’s time and changing it and them for the better by giving the children a sense of the history of their adopted place. Although Puck repeatedly erases the siblings’ ability to remember each visitation unless they are in his presence, thus bringing the potential dangers of nostalgia under control by ensuring that they will not hanker after relationships with the dead, the reader presumes that the experiences nonetheless have lasting didactic value for the children, whose understanding of England will now be palimpsestically grounded in a rich foundation of pastness, so that like the Roman soldiers appearing in the illustration shown in Figure 2.1, they will become rooted in the landscape.

Figure 2.1 Claude Allin Shepperson’s illustration for Rudyard Kipling’s “On the Great Wall” (an installment of Puck of Pook’s Hill published in The Strand vol. 31 issue 186, June 1906, p. 704) depicts the Roman soldiers as a feature of the landscape visually analogous to the hills beyond them. Image courtesy of Indiana University Libraries.

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As Jack Voller observes, “What Puck gives the children is not land, but . . . a complex sense of belonging in what we might call ‘placetime,’ in which the value and meaning of place, and therefore belonging, depend as much on history as geography” (83). What happens to Dan and Una in this regard is itself a metaphor—and consequently a tool— for how young readers may be colonized by the texts they read, just as Puck’s author was himself indebted to an earlier text, Edwin Lester Arnold’s The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician (Briggs, “Amulet” 221). Strikingly, Kipling arranges neither his invasions nor his time travelers in chronological order. He situates the three linked Roman stories, “A Centurion of the Thirtieth,” “On the Great Wall,” and “The Winged Hats,” between two sets of medieval stories, at the heart of Puck of Pook’s Hill. By resisting what Lakoff and Johnson identify as the dominant metaphors involving time, which posit that “time goes past us from front to back” (Metaphors 44), Puck implicitly places emphasis on the Roman stories as chronological rule-breakers. We might, indeed, see such rule-breaking as inherent in the genre of historical fiction. As Lakoff and Johnson note, “[I]n English certain orders of words are more normal than others”; they point out, as one instance of this fact, that the phrase “now and then” is more usual than the phrase “then and now” (132–3). Yet the historical novel as a form may be said to function as a normalization of “then and now,” as it prioritizes the “then” experience of the characters over the “now” experience of the reader. Puck of Pook’s Hill dramatizes this point by giving center stage to the time travelers from the past, while Dan and Una, like the reader, are cast as onlookers. In a letter to an adult fan, Member of Parliament George Wyndham, Kipling wrote, “I swear I didn’t mean to write parables—much—but when situations are so ludicrously, or terribly parallel what can one do?” (qtd. Wintle 24).² The parallel in question was that between Rome’s imperial venture in Britain and Britain’s modern imperial experience. As in his 1897 poem “Recessional,” which likens Britain to vanished

² In contrast, Kipling forthrightly acknowledges of Rewards and Fairies, “I loaded the book up with allegories and allusions” (Something 111). In a chapter on “Kipling and History,” Sue Walsh nonetheless “argue[s] against reading Kipling’s texts as allegorical.” She suggests that the critical tendency to do so arises from Kipling’s focus on “the nature of language as intrinsically arbitrary,” which she sees as having important “implications . . . for notions of ‘history’ through the ‘Puck’ books” (155).

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      powers elsewhen in history, the tone of Puck’s Roman stories, set in the fourth century AD on the eve of Rome’s abandonment of its British possessions, is elegiac. “A Centurion of the Thirtieth” describes the childhood and youth of its Romano-British protagonist, Parnesius, establishing his naïveté through a dismissive comment that he makes about his father: “to listen to him you would have thought Eternal Rome herself was on the edge of destruction, just because a few people had become a little large-minded” (125). The two subsequent stories trace the growth of Parnesius’ awareness, shaped by his experiences as a centurion stationed on Hadrian’s Wall, that the destruction foreseen by his father is inevitable and that it is nonetheless his job to join in staving it off as long as possible, despite his sense of being “a man with a rotten stick standing before a broken fence to turn bulls” (156). The “rotten stick” image mocks the “polished stick” that is the centurion’s badge of office (126), just as the reference to the “broken fence” mocks Hadrian’s Wall; as many critics have observed,³ the history being offered to Dan and Una is a tale not of imperial might and Roman pride but of an impending disaster that the courage and honor of Parnesius and his friend Pertinax are powerless to avert. Yet that it is Parnesius rather than his ambitious general, Maximus, who steps out of time to speak to the children establishes that his virtues, and not the erstwhile glories of Roman conquest, are the best residue of Roman Britain, the foundation upon which the modern children are expected to build. Parable, Mark Turner observes, involves “the projection of story” onto “a much larger abstract narrative, one that applies to our own specific lives, however far our lives are removed from the detail of the story” (7), and in Puck’s Roman stories Kipling invites readers to contemplate and learn from the inevitable waning of imperial power, the gallant hopelessness of the struggle to preserve civilization against the barbarian, and the limited vision of political and military leaders past and, by implication, present. The narratives in Puck explore a complex process of introducing into and removing from England an assortment of goods and people, with only Puck himself remaining unchanged as the one permanent ³ For instance, David J. Bradshaw notes that the tales question the usefulness of betting on the success of the army and suggest that the empire’s confidence in the inevitability of its success is misplaced (1).

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indigene.⁴ So, for example, gold imported to England from Africa with the help of Vikings in early Norman times is removed by Kadmiel the Sephardic Jew during the reign of King John in order to assist the widening of English rights. Roman culture is imported to England in the time of Agricola, so effectively that English-born Roman subjects are more Roman than those, such as Libyans, who have lived in greater proximity to Rome’s might for far longer. England’s Romans are more “Roman” because they have imbibed Rome’s precepts of duty, loyalty, self-control, and self-sacrifice; thus abstract principles are metaphorically identified as among the “goods” that we see imported and exported in the various narratives. Indeed, it appears to be precisely because they are metaphors rather than objects that they have the potential for longer legibility on the Anglo-Roman palimpsest. When in “The Winged Hats” Maximus takes the best legions from the wall to France in his unsuccessful bid to become emperor, Parnesius and Pertinax know that it will only be a matter of time before England is overrun by the barbarians, but they defend it bravely and intelligently nonetheless. Roman culture has been successfully seeded in Albion, even if the Romans themselves do not remain. As A. Michael Matin points out in his well-informed consideration of the Puck tales (which he pairs with Kim and Kipling’s collaborative effort of 1911, A School History of England), these works are shaped by the genre of the invasion scare story. Highly popular from the 1870s through the beginning of the First World War and existing in both fiction and nonfiction form, this largely adult genre depicted Britain’s subjugation by a technologically superior power, often Germany but sometimes France, Russia, or even—as in H. G. Wells’s 1897 novella The War of the Worlds—Mars. Yet in Kipling’s hands the metaphor HISTORY IS INVASION, which for him and some of his successors is entailed by the metaphor HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST, seems colored by his experience as a native of British India, as well as by his more academic interest in Britain’s ventures in Africa.

⁴ Corinne McCutchan considers that “the smuggler group” in Puck consists of only three stories, “Hal o’ the Draft,” “Dymchurch Flit,” and “The Treasure and the Law”; this is because she defines smuggling as requiring something to be removed from rather than imported into England (80). We take a broader view.

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      In examining the representation of Indian, African, and Chinese colonial subjects in British children’s textbooks and magazines at the turn of the twentieth century, Kathryn Castle notes that precolonial India was depicted as chaotically multiracial and multilingual, “ravaged by the constant warfare of constituent states,” afflicted by a disorder so extreme that British rule must be seen as a blessing (13). Textbooks played up the “order and peace” brought by the Raj and “emphasised the stability and strength of the imperial ethos” (15, 24). Puck’s Roman stories thus translate certain common perceptions of India into England’s past: the tribal diversity, the chaos and color, and the colonizers’ uphill struggle to impose and maintain an “order[ly] and peace[ful] civilization” are all present, even while the Englishness of the colonial subjects here allows readers to see empire as temporary. But if these stories are clearly about the waning of empire, they simultaneously present an implicit vision of the modern British Empire as a long-delayed tribute to its Roman model, so that in a sense Rome still endures. Here colonialism thus becomes at once necessary and melancholy, temporary and permanent, impossible and successful—a concept involving and evoking dueling emotions, just as the nation that shaped Kipling’s understanding of colonialism involved dueling ethnic sensibilities. The capaciousness of the historical palimpsest, which must accommodate both many layers of time and many contradictory emotions, models for the reader an approach to ambivalence that does not see reaching a resolution as the inevitable outcome.

2.2 Layers for Adults: Three Fantasies From the beginning, Puck of Pook’s Hill was presented as suitable fare for adults and children alike. Inspired by Kipling’s children John and Elsie, the tales first appeared in magazines whose primary audience was adult: in Britain the Strand (which, in addition to middlebrow adult fare, frequently serialized children’s stories expected to appeal to a wide age range), in the United States Ladies’ Home Journal and McClure’s.⁵ Once collected in book form, they were packaged for younger audiences in handsome volumes illustrated by H. R. Millar in Britain and by Arthur ⁵ For a discussion of how these magazines framed the stories for their separate audiences, see Tomlinson 275–80.

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Rackham in the States. Commenting in his autobiography on Rewards and Fairies, Kipling wrote that “the tales had to be read [first] by children” but “were meant for grown-ups,” and that therefore he had “worked the material in three or four overlaid tints and textures, which might or might not reveal themselves according to the shifting light of sex, youth, and experience” (Something 111). As a consequence of this cross-writing, the stories have had a palpable influence on subsequent writing for both children and adults, particularly in Britain. Literary tributes to both volumes began as early as 1921, when John Buchan published a collection of linked short stories, The Path of the King, that (to quote Martin Green) “clearly derives” from the Puck sequence (183), although it mentions Roman Britain only in passing. In short, our point here is not merely that Kipling’s stories, already imagined by their author as consisting of multiple and only intermittently decipherable strata in those “overlaid tints and textures,” present British history as palimpsest. In addition, they serve as the foundation of a textual palimpsest themselves, of which the various layers are meant for readers of rather different ages and outlooks. Although our study is primarily concerned with youth literature, we find it useful to detour in the present section to examine a handful of Kipling-influenced works for adults because the complicated lineage of the Puck heirs involves influences that disregard questions of audience age; works for adults help to shape works for children, and vice versa, a circumstance that speaks to issues of affiliation that emerge in many of the children’s works that we will analyze later in this study. Affiliation is also important for Kipling. A major part of his project in his Roman stories is to assess empire from a moral standpoint, and while he notes its self-seeking aspects, the pain and hardship that it causes for occupied peoples such as the Picts, and the inevitability of its end, his judgment of Rome (and by implication Edwardian Britain) tends toward the positive. Yet this ratification of empire connects, via the invasion trope, to its opposite, a fear of the un-British that was to become more pronounced in the work of Kipling’s heirs. Critic James Buzard has argued that Edwardian literature often, ironically, represents empire as one of a number of “alien forces” menacing British national identity (440), which in turn, in Mary Poovey’s words, may seem “precarious and imperfect” (qtd. Buzard 442). Puck does not stress what Buzard terms “the motif of imperiled Englishness” (446), although the latter was fed by

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      images of reverse colonization that share certain elements with Kipling’s discussions of naturalized foreigners. Rather, Kipling strikes a positive note on this issue, implicitly assuring his readers that aliens can make as good Britons as any. Some of his literary heirs, though, seem to doubt this point. Thus the later layers of the conglomerate text whose foundation is the Puck stories continue to work toward the defining of Britishness, albeit not always in the same ways. And much as late Victorian folklorists sought, as Buzard puts it, “to reestablish British identity upon the bedrock of comprehensively understood British racial and cultural characteristics” (451), all these texts develop the idea of Britain as a palimpsest upon which identity is inscribed. More specifically, each accepts a vision of the countryside as a geographical and chronological progression in which the past underlies the present in a way that illuminates the meaning of being British. For Kipling’s heirs as for Kipling himself, England contains literal holes through which the past is accessible; more than a mere metaphor or bygone entity, the past is a physical reality that can be reached and experienced, often in a life-changing way. But Kipling’s successors add new binary oppositions as well, notably that between science or technology and sensibility—variously defined, depending on the individual author’s prejudices, as ancient learning, Christianity, mind control, myth, and love. Moreover, each author continually rearranges the binaries that he or she has inherited, so that if one text privileges native above colonizer or technology above sensibility, the next may reverse those priorities. What is constant is the ideal of Britishness itself, along with the tropes of attack/invasion and memory or amnesia. The Puck stories’ political and patriotic dimensions, coupled with the fact that Kipling’s Northern barbarians are Saxons, made them a natural source of inspiration for authors immediately before and after the Second World War who wished to employ fantasy to comment on Fascism. Yet the messages of such stories differ from Kipling’s in many ways. Consider Joseph O’Neill’s 1935 bestseller Land Under England, itself a source text, as Marijane Osborn has pointed out, for C. S. Lewis’s fantasies Perelandra (1943) and The Silver Chair (1953). O’Neill picks up not only on Kipling’s vision of England as a place where history forms geologic strata underlying the modern landscape, but also on the issues of belonging, invasion vs. naturalization, and the struggle between order

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and chaos. Even so, his work is by no means a simple updating of the earlier work. In particular, what has changed is tone, as O’Neill turns the dreamlike quality of Kipling’s stories (in which the narratives fade from Dan’s and Una’s memories upon their completion and the children’s “waking”) into nightmare. More sinned against than sinning in Kipling’s hands, empire in O’Neill’s is decidedly evil. In O’Neill’s dystopian fantasy, the “land under England” is England’s Roman roots: a survival from its past but also a geographical place, a Lost World inhabited by giant spiders, domesticated snakes, and the descendants of inhabitants of Roman Britain who fled underground in response to the Saxon threat. Because “one moment of the so-called time of earth can hold for the individual the whole of eternity” (196), the bottom layer of the palimpsest continues to be a functioning concern: Roman Britain has never come to an end. It has, however, been modified. Terrified by the dangers of their new home, the Romans have evolved a society in which technology has made no advances but psychology, specifically mind control, has substantially outstripped twentieth-century knowledge. The masses have surrendered their individuality to their leaders, who are masters of hypnotism and telepathy. Periodically, men from the surface have found their way down to the underworld; all, it appears, belong to a single family, the Julians, themselves Romano-British in origin. The narrator is Anthony Julian, a man on an obsessive quest to find his father, who disappeared near Hadrian’s Wall some years before the main action takes place. The challenge facing him is to retain mastery over the self despite repeated efforts to invade his mind. Anthony’s battle is partially successful, in that he resists the various mental onslaughts and finds his father’s physical being. But the senior Julian has already been absorbed into the neo-Roman corporate soul, a horrific naturalization made possible, his son concludes, by the older man’s “passionate love for Rome” and “monomania of hatred for the ‘Hun,’ the barbarian that had destroyed Rome” (243). Anthony’s father, in other words, has been caught up in a supercharged nostalgia for a bygone historical moment. He has long identified Rome with civilization and Germany with the forces of darkness, yet, as Anthony recognizes, the irony is that these neo-Romans are in fact the Nazis’ philosophical siblings. Forced underground “under the influence of overwhelming defeat and the panic and hysteria that it brings,” survivors of what Anthony identifies as the “schlacht ohne morgen, the battle without a

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      morrow,” they have “give[n] themselves up to any leader, any system, that could promise relief or refuge from so dreadful a deprivation” (176). That their situation exaggerates that of the Germans after the First World War, while their belief system is an extension of Fascism, is several times directly stated; for instance, Anthony speculates that should the troglodytes break out into the upper world, British Fascists might “[make] common cause with the underearth invaders, because of the similarity of their doctrines” (245).⁶ Anthony’s true challenge thus becomes not locating his father but renouncing him, a challenge that requires abjuring his own obsession with a personal and domestic past by recognizing its unrecoverability and even undesirability. Turning away from what is now punningly identifiable as a German Father-land, he must acknowledge that even in his original form, his father was a hollow man, “bare and merciless and empty,” who “like all thin souls . . . had to fill his emptiness with something, some idea, some stuffing for the emptiness” (267, 270). That is, Julian senior is himself a kind of palimpsest whose psyche mirrors that of the two-layered England: “The person who was following me had always been there, inside my father’s skin. He had always been there, making him different from himself at times, even in the old days—a double personality, not like my mother” (266). Moreover, he is not a naturalized victim of invasion by the “High Ones” or “Masters of Knowledge” but rather an invader on his own account, for “They couldn’t absorb him. It was he, always, who absorbed others. . . . He would have invaded those men below, too, if they had had anything to give him” (268). Accordingly, Anthony’s only hope is to reject his father and cleave instead to his mother. She becomes the real avatar of England, full of “healing sweetness” and “warm security”; significantly, the novel’s last words are “Yes, mother” (296). The narrative thus makes a distinction between the approach to time associated with the underground Rome, invasion, fascistic control, and the father, and that associated with contemporary England, normalcy, individual personality, and the mother. Anthony describes the one as Eternity, the other as Time. Desperate for a glimpse of the surface, he ⁶ Sheila Murnaghan and Deborah Roberts offer Ioreth Evans’s Gadget City (1944) as an example of a work of youth literature in which “Rome stands for the German invader” (Childhood 148).

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expresses his willingness to “come back to the darkness to die, if I could get a day up there. . . . I could live with Eternity, if I could say ‘good-bye’ to Time” (276–7). The Eternity/Time dichotomy recalls Maria Nikolajeva’s “mythic” and “linear” time, discussed in the Introduction to this book, but in O’Neill’s novel the two concepts have political and gendered entailments specific to this work. For O’Neill, the top layer of the palimpsest, where free will reigns, is much to be preferred to the psychological dominance and submission going on at the bottom. It does not do to plumb the myth of Rome too thoroughly. In short, viewed in the context of the Kipling stories, in which each successive wave of invasion is gradually naturalized and made English by the countryside, what may be most striking about O’Neill’s novel is the loss of Englishness—and indeed of humanity—once people retreat into the land. Presented in O’Neill’s text (as in Kipling’s) as older and thus initially more legitimate inhabitants of Britain than the wild Germanic tribesmen, the Romans here have lost that legitimacy as a result of their flight from the invaders and their frantic quest to keep empire alive. Unlike the shades conjured up by Kipling’s Puck, who have entered into the British landscape in a way that enables them to serve as benevolent tutors in national identity for Dan and Una, O’Neill’s Romans herald the dissolution of individuality: not evolution but devolution. Anthony’s twentieth-century technological skill—he calls himself “not merely a competent scientific worker and a good business man, but an inventor” (31)—is presented as a positive philistinism, a normal and wholesome use of mental energy that evokes Victorian claims that Britain’s supremacy resulted from its “wonderful industrial discipline” (qtd. Buzard 439). In contrast, the neo-Romans’ psychological gifts and technological lacks identify them as simultaneously primitive and unnaturally advanced; these survivals from the past form a potential fifth-column menace that turns invasion from a manageable threat into something demonic. Kipling represents Puck’s Saxon pirates as barbaric but also suggests that like Britain’s other colonizers, they will become British in the end; in contrast, O’Neill sees the invasion of Fascist ideas as something that Britain may well not survive. The process of naturalization has become so destructive that countries that wish to maintain their human decency would be well advised to get out of the empire business. Other Kipling-inspired writers for adults continue O’Neill’s antiFascist message, but sometimes use it as the basis for a jingoism

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      considerably more simplistic than anything we find in Kipling’s original. The Man Who Went Back (1940), for instance, a novel by the prolific and very popular Warwick Deeping, borrows a number of Kipling trappings in telling the story of a modern man who, rendered unconscious by a car crash, finds himself occupying the body of the Romano-British Pellias shortly after the Empire has withdrawn its troops from Britain, leaving its erstwhile citizens vulnerable to the depredations of the invading Saxons. The novel (one of several quasi-Arthurian works by this author) is set not only at roughly the same time as Puck’s Roman stories but also in roughly the same corner of Britain—in Deeping’s case Surrey, in Kipling’s Sussex.⁷ The time traveler’s belief that “violence [is] one of life’s necessities. . . . When a civilization becomes too fat and greasy, blood has to be let” (Deeping 93) seems like bastardized Kipling, and the remark that “the fairies have been eliminated” from modern Britain (267) echoes the most folkloric of the Puck tales, “Dymchurch Flit,” which depicts the fairies’ exodus from the country. Meanwhile, the reference to archaeology made in the closing pages of the novel (“Good lord, someone has been busy here! Archæologists? The bracken has been shaved away. There are sandy scars in the soil. Fragments of Roman tile lie scattered about. I find myself looking at a neat, new foundation plan laid out in the natural stone” [379]) looks forward to a trope observable in some of the more recent twentieth-century children’s texts that we will examine in sections 2.3 and 2.4. More significantly for this particular novel, though, the final page refers to the archaeological site as “the foundation pattern” (382), a play on words that overlays the physical space of the Roman temple under excavation with the metaphorical point that the Saxon invasion of Roman Britain should be seen as the bottom layer of a historical action that seemed likely to be repeated in Deeping’s own time. “How like were our two ages!” (266), we are to understand, with the result that they can surely be accessed even if we must read them only from our own time plane instead of traveling from era to era; the narrator-protagonist informs us that “the sense veil is very thin, like gossamer or rice-paper spread over the sensuous world” (380), a simile that suggests a palimpsestic ⁷ As Matin observes, this region has historically been “a choice site for landings of hostile forces”; Kipling’s home from 1902 forward was a mere seven miles from the location of the Battle of Hastings (“Hun” Part One, 318).

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relationship between the page of the written work and the experiences chronicled upon it. As the only Roman Briton in whom the narrator confides his othertimely origins puts it, we occupy “A world above a world . . . a cube within a cube” (216). Time is layered, and the archaeologist who brings a past layer up into the present has more in common with the narrator than might at first be apparent.⁸ Accordingly, the use of the palimpsest metaphor is particularly apparent in the novel’s approach to landscape. The narrator compares the political and social phenomena of 1940 not to their Romano-British counterparts but to the look of the ancestral land, with emphasis falling on the resemblances between the two layers of time: Always, sensationalism, headlines, the nine o’clock news on the wireless. A.R.P. Fear, hatred, worry! That babbling little beast Goebbels! Russia. Chaos hanging over one by a thread! How like was the pattern in this island world into which I had been translated. Beauty, order, peace, crops and herds, farmstead, orchards, and into it spilling this savagery, this wolf spirit, slaying, destroying, fouling. (79)

In contrast, later in the narrative the British forces become features of the landscape themselves, as “This great concourse of horsemen poured down the hill like a moving garden, and the points of steel were like glittering drops of dew” (326). This oneness with the (beautiful, peaceful) natural world signifies this army’s right to occupy the space, a right that the German invaders do not share. Significantly, we encounter the garden and dew similes immediately after an invocation of literary and historical pastness: “I saw a great banner of gold with a red dragon upon it, and I felt as though I had slipped back into Mallory [sic]. So, Arthur and his knights must have ridden over these British hills, splendid in their strength and splendour” (326). Since the events of this novel slightly precede the emergence of Arthur (the novel’s cast of characters includes Aurelius Ambrosius, more commonly known as Ambrosius Aurelianus, who is sometimes identified as Arthur’s uncle), the verb tense in “must have ridden” and the reference to the fifteenth-century Thomas Malory

⁸ Murnaghan and Roberts point out that Freud found archaeology a valuable metaphor for the work of reclaiming repressed childhood emotions and experiences through psychoanalysis (Childhood 218). The references to archaeology made by Deeping and the children’s writers discussed in sections 2.3 and 2.4 similarly suggest a Romantic vision of the individual and general past as associated with a genuineness that may be harder to come by in the modern world.

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      insist upon a point of view developed later than the action being described, creating a palimpsest that blends the history, literature, and landscape of more than one era. Similarly, in attempting to acclimate himself to the past, Deeping’s narrator repeatedly looks at his surroundings in terms of the landmarks that they do or do not share with his twentieth-century experiences of the same places. Charting his way by natural features, roads, buildings, or cities, and commenting upon the various presences and absences, he builds up for the reader a double-layered picture of a landscape at two moments in time, encouraging the Britons of 1940 to perceive that they inhabit a land that has undergone German invasion before. Through this awareness, he implicitly hopes to engender in the reader an appropriately martial spirit—to bring out Britain’s inner Roman, so to speak, in order to adjust to the changing geopolitics of the modern day. As an inhabitant of the twentieth century, he notes, “I had never killed anything but a marauding cat, and mosquitoes and greenfly. And suddenly, I wanted to kill. It was as though the primitive in me had pushed up through the thin, tame crust of custom. I was man” (71). In this metaphor, the narrator presents himself as a landscape undergoing volcanic intrusion from a deeper geological layer; “I was man,” but “I” was also Surrey. Hence, and again like Kipling, Deeping emphasizes the affinities between life in Roman Britain and life in the present; if Kipling’s Roman centurion can sympathize with Dan’s governess troubles and tell stories about his father that strike a chord for Una, Deeping’s time traveler perceives Roman Surrey as “so modern, and so comfortably Victorian . . . that I gaped over it” (97–8). Yet in keeping with these texts’ emphasis on invasion, what the time traveler finds most “comfortably” familiar about his new surroundings is hearing Romans voice phrases such as “Those German swine!” “Here was yet another German menace,” he muses, for “Was the planned violence of Totalitarianism any better than the savagery of these other Teutons?” (12, 49, 79).⁹ Similarly, ⁹ If the Winged Hats of the Puck stories are presented in a reasonably tolerant light as just another military enemy, Kipling was elsewhere as outspoken as Deeping on the subject of the Germans. Matin notes that he was already writing of “the shameless Hun” in a 1902 poem. During the war years, Kipling concluded that “there are only two divisions in the world to-day—human beings and Germans” (qtd. “Hun” Part Two, 433). Meanwhile, the tendency of Deeping and other writers to find resemblances between the German enemies of ancient Rome and the Nazis found a predictable precedent in children’s fiction of the

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if there is a spiritual difference between Britain past and Britain present in The Man Who Went Back, it has to do with the superior energy and warlike spirit of the earlier day, which must be recreated in the face of the Nazi menace. To be sure, Deeping’s Roman Britain does not exhibit a uniformly high standard of fighting spirit and military preparedness; for example, in an instance of the casual anti-Semitism that marks many British texts of this era, he portrays its Jews as wondering whether the Saxon pirates might be bought off rather than fought off (232). The very body that the narrator unintentionally invades is that of a coward. Yet because the past affords golden opportunities to take up arms against the Hun, the narrator can redeem Pellias’ reputation by making the most of them, and battle is lovingly showcased throughout. Kipling’s Romans make strenuous efforts to avoid battle whenever possible; sparing one’s men and eking out the fragile peace are presented as more important than military victories and public triumphs. But to Deeping, champing at the bit during the “phony war,” such Chamberlain-like strategy looks more shameful than prudent. The suspicion of empire and bureaucracy evident in both Deeping’s and O’Neill’s novels also informs the best known of the Kipling-indebted adult palimpsest texts, C. S. Lewis’s 1945 fantasy That Hideous Strength. Recall that Osborn observes that Lewis was an O’Neill fan as well as an admirer of Kipling; she quotes a letter from Lewis to his friend Arthur Greeves dated 23 April 1935, which contains the line “The most interesting story I have read recently is Land Under England by one O’Neill: you should try it” (116). Lewis’s novel shares O’Neill’s interest in sinister evolutionary and psychological moves, since the antagonists are trying to create “what is really a new species—the Chosen Heads who never die” (Strength 197). Present as well, inevitably given the wartime composition of this work, are O’Neill’s and Deeping’s concerns about Nazism. The proliferation of uniformed thugs in a once quiet university town causes one character to remark that “it’s almost as if we’d lost the war”; one of the chief villains, the mannish lesbian Fairy Hardcastle, once belonged to the British Fascist party; and another, a grotesque Italian scientist, voices

First World War and its aftermath. See, for instance, Murnaghan and Roberts’s discussion of R. F. Wells’s With Caesar’s Legions: The Adventures of Two Roman Youths in the Conquest of Gaul (1923), which “draws a parallel between Rome’s actions and aims and America’s role in the First World War” (“Armies” 224; see also Childhood 150–2).

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      eugenist admiration for the inhabitants of the Moon, “A great race, further advanced than we. An inspiration. A pure race. They have cleaned their world” (76, 69, 176). Underneath the references to recent events, however, Kipling is still discernible. Lewis famously admired his predecessor as “a very great writer” while simultaneously taking issue with the meliorist view of invasion apparent in works such as “Below the Mill Dam” (and Puck); in his 1948 talk “Kipling’s World,” he complains that Kipling sometimes suffers from “Americanism,” with the result that “We are expected to rejoice that the native black rat should be superseded by the alien brown rat; that the mill wheel could be yoked to a dynamo and the countryside electrified” (Essays 249, 243). But while That Hideous Strength differs from Puck in doubting that the “alien brown rat” might have positive contributions to make to Englishness, the two novels share a vision of England as having a layered past that may under special circumstances penetrate the present. As in Deeping’s novel, archaeologists receive brief mention (Strength 19, 25), although they are essentially tinkerers at the edges of the past; a true penetration of the present by the past can only be accomplished by supernatural means. Embodied in the Roman Briton Merlin, England’s mythic history has not died, but merely gone to sleep, and the magic of the land is still accessible by those who know how to call it forth. Indeed, Merlin is himself a palimpsest on whom, at moments of stress, earlier texts may be read: “From his horribly opened mouth there came a yell that seemed to Ransom utterly bestial, though it was in fact only the yell of primitive Celtic lamentation. It was horrifying to see that withered and bearded face all blubbered with undisguised tears like a child’s. All the Roman surface in Merlinus had been scraped off. He had become a shameless, archaic monstrosity” (291). In Merlin, Lewis rewrites Kipling’s cheerful conflation of paganism and Christianity, in which Dan and Una hear that Mithraic rituals are just another form of “church” (Puck 138), and reverses O’Neill’s privileging of technology over sensibility. In Lewis’s apocalyptic tale, Merlin is awakened from his underground slumber to help drive out the proponents of unholy scientific experimentation, anti-Christian mysticism, totalitarian power-mongering, and cheap sociology. What will ultimately triumph is the unsophistication of traditional England (represented in Puck by the elderly countryman Hobden), which its enemies condemn as

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“anachronis[tic]” and “backward” but which is nonetheless kindly and comradely (Strength 87). As critic Michael Collings has observed, science and technology per se are not evil in Lewis’s cosmology; indeed, an early casualty of the transnational and trans-Solar System “evil empire” is a likable chemist known as Bill the Blizzard (Collings 131). Lewis himself noted that “What we are obviously up against throughout the story is not scientists but officials” (qtd. Spraycar 26). Yet science is often put to sinister uses, as in the medical experimentation that apparently keeps the severed head of a guillotined murderer alive so that it can be the mouthpiece for invading demons. Conversely, Merlin’s weapon is a positive version of that of O’Neill’s debased neo-Romans, a form of acceptable mind control in the service of an ancient learning that also embraces Christianity. And unlike O’Neill’s Romans, who rarely speak aloud, Lewis insists on language as a thing to be learned, used, and respected, as exact in its way as a science. Consequently, Lewis is much concerned with linguistic play of all kinds, granting to Merlin as the representative of a “two-sided” society (Celt and Roman, pagan and Christian, savage and noble) the triumph of reducing the language of the banquet sponsored by the sociologists, vivisectors, and corporate criminals in fact to what it already is in spirit, utter meaninglessness. In so doing, of course, Merlin re-enacts the story of Babel, which here not only invokes notions of human overreaching (the building of a great tower is paralleled in That Hideous Strength by the attempt to harness cosmic entities) but also states a theme important in all of these texts and to the concept of the palimpsest itself, namely the value of difference in unity. For the question of citizenship is paramount to constructions of empire, and here citizenship is determined by language. Mark, the young sociologist who nearly allows himself to be absorbed by the corporate monsters, finds himself degenerating morally precisely because he believes he can be a technician without needing to respect his technology, language; his planted newspaper articles are masterpieces of apparently plausible meaning with no actual content. In contrast, his wife, Jane, an aspiring if not particularly talented scholar working on John Donne, finds that her love of language and her willingness to tolerate ambiguity attach her to traditions centuries old and to communities that she can otherwise imagine only with difficulty. As both Jane’s unexpected connectedness with unlike Others and, in a different way, Mark’s dangerous success at propagandizing suggest, what

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      all these works condemn in Britain’s foes is the untrustworthiness with which they approach unity. The latter is variously represented in Land Under England as an inhuman and enforced conformity, in The Man Who Went Back as an undifferentiated Hunnish bestiality, in That Hideous Strength as a conspiracy of debased people who loathe each other, and in Puck’s Roman stories as an unstable alliance of resentful colonized Pictish subjects and opportunistic Saxon barbarians. Conversely, each account celebrates a freely consenting cooperation in the service of some productive goal—an entailed metaphor of FREE UNITY IS FRIENDSHIP, if you will. The bonds between Pertinax and Parnesius in Kipling’s work, between Anthony and his mother in O’Neill’s, between the time traveler and his Roman beloved in Deeping’s, and between Mark and Jane (and between Jane’s allies and Christ’s earthly representative) in Lewis’s are all validated, and any attempt at empire or at connecting with history that will not uphold such bonds is shown to be disastrous. The good imperial agent must have the initiative to act, and must not, like O’Neill’s, Deeping’s, and Lewis’s fascistic neoRomans, Huns, and anti-Christians, extinguish the lives or mentalities of the imperial subjects. The dominant layer of the palimpsest cannot entirely eradicate what lies beneath. That Britain triumphs in each narrative results from the fact that this combination of unity and difference—the positive face of both colonialism and naturalization—is continually associated with Britishness.

2.3 Layers for Children: Three Fantasies If adult literary responses to the Puck stories cluster around the Second World War, Kipling-inspired works for young adults cluster around the 1970s, and consequently they exhibit rather different preoccupations. To contrast with the three adult novels just discussed, we turn here to an examination of a group of works for younger readers that retain Kipling’s conception of past as palimpsest. We first explore fantasies by Susan Cooper (The Dark Is Rising [1973] and Silver on the Tree [1977], respectively the second and fifth installments of Cooper’s acclaimed quintet) and Joan Aiken (The Shadow Guests [1980]) before concluding the chapter with a consideration of the most Kiplingesque of the examples of palimpsestic realism that we have found, Philip Turner’s Sea Peril (1968). Like Puck of Pook’s Hill, these texts dwell on place and

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identity in the context of invasion/relocation. But in these later youth texts, such tropes are used to represent the difficulty of coming to terms with the past, especially as regards memory. Like the novels by Deeping and Lewis discussed in Section 2.2, Cooper’s sequence layers the present with a legendary Arthurian past that is said to have occurred immediately after Rome’s abandonment of its British outposts, a departure that pitted the Romanized inhabitants of Britannia against attackers here identified as allied with the forces of the Dark. (That Cooper’s conception of the essential Romanness of Arthur—he wears Roman armor in Silver on the Tree, for instance [238]—resembles Lewis’s may be no accident, as he taught her at Oxford [Goodrich 168].) The quintet’s primary focus is on a spatially complex mythic layering that exists outside of historical time: This where we live is a world of men, ordinary men, and although in it there is the Old Magic of the earth, and the Wild Magic of living things, it is men who control what the world shall be like. . . . But beyond the world is the universe, bound by the law of the High Magic, as every universe must be. And beneath the High Magic are . . . the Dark and the Light. No other power orders them. They merely exist. The Dark seeks by its dark nature to influence men so that in the end, through them, it may control the earth. The Light has the task of stopping that from happening. (Silver 14)

Yet layers of human history are part of the pattern as well. The Dark Is Rising introduces readers to one of the quintet’s central figures, Will, who discovers on his eleventh birthday that he is an Old One, a master of the Light. Silver on the Tree, in which characters briefly time-travel to Wales in the second, fifteenth, and nineteenth centuries, recounts how Will, King Arthur’s son Bran, Merlin (known in the twentieth century as Merriman Lyon), and the three less extraordinary Drew children vanquish the Dark in its final rising, thus giving humankind final control over its own destiny. In broad outline and in tone, this narrative might seem to bear no more resemblance to Kipling’s than an epic does to a historical masque, but in fact there are many shared elements, unsurprisingly given that Cooper has identified Puck of Pook’s Hill as a favorite (Higgins). Just as Kipling’s Puck acclimates Dan and Una to the sequence of historical revenants that they are about to encounter by telling them the story of the Norse divinity Weland, who goes from being “a most important God” to “a white-bearded, bent old blacksmith in a leather apron” when

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      people cease to worship him (Puck 52, 53), in The Dark Is Rising Will’s coming of age as an Old One involves him in an encounter with a being who in the “world of men” has long been known to him as John Smith, one of a number of farmhands working for a neighbor. Because “minds hold more than they know,” however, on this magical birthday Will is surprised to hear himself referring to John as “John Wayland Smith” and identifying him as an ally against the Dark (30), a belated recognition of supernatural authority that occurs also in Puck’s “Weland’s Sword” account. The layering of human and immortal in this figure is in both novels an introduction to the interpenetration of the mundane and the magical that is central to these narratives. Similarly, Will’s magical education in The Dark Is Rising, accomplished by his reading of the Book of Gramarye, resembles Dan and Una’s inasmuch as it focuses not on instruction as such but on placing him “instantly in the midst of whatever experience was involved” (91). This training mirrors an early experience of Cooper’s own; she traces “The struggle between the Light and the Dark in my books . . . [to] the fact that when I was four World War II broke out. England was very nearly invaded by Germany,” adding, “This sense must have stayed with me, and it put me into contact with all the other times that England has been threatened with invasion. We are such mongrels: we have been invaded over and over and over again from Scandinavia, from Ireland, from the Continent” (Thompson).¹⁰ As Will reads, he develops a historical sense of the land strikingly reminiscent of that imparted by Puck: “He saw one race after another come attacking his island country, bringing each time the malevolence of the Dark with them, wave after wave of ships rushing inexorably at the shores. Each wave of men in turn grew peaceful as it grew to know and love the land, so that the Light flourished again” (93). The final sentence here could serve as a summary of the stories told by the revenants in Kipling’s novel.

¹⁰ We thank Raymond Thompson for permission to quote from this interview, which appears on the website The Camelot Project (https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/ text/thompson-taliesins-successors) and also in Susan Cooper’s Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996, 186–97) and Barbara Tepa Lupack’s edited collection Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children: Essays on Arthurian Juvenilia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 161–9); a shortened version may be found in The Writer’s Guide to Fantasy Literature: From Dragon’s Lair to Hero’s Quest, ed. Philip Martin (Waukesha, WI: Kalmbach, 2002, 155–8).

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The metaphor of the wave resembles that of the palimpsest in positing a single geographical location repeatedly covered over by a particular kind of action, which is then smoothed out preparatory to being covered over by a new layer of action. In a 1989 interview, Cooper uses a more overtly palimpsestic metaphor in tracing her “strong sense of the mythic history of the land” to her childhood in semi-rural Buckinghamshire (the setting for The Dark Is Rising; Silver on the Tree’s Welsh location echoes Cooper’s family heritage). She recalls that “There was an Iron Age fort a couple of fields away. There was a Roman pavement that somebody had found in his field. Windsor Castle I could see from my bedroom window. Things like that give a sense of layers and layers of time, and of the stories that stick to those layers and develop through them” (Thompson). Similarly, in a conversation with his brother Paul and the local rector in The Dark Is Rising, Will uses yet another version of the HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST metaphor: “[There is a] part of all of us, and of all the things we think and believe, that has nothing to do with yesterday or today or tomorrow because it belongs at a different kind of level. Yesterday is still there, on that level. Tomorrow is there too. You can visit either of them” (130). Yet such visitations are in this sequence of novels specifically for Old Ones. Just as Kipling’s Puck continually wipes away the mortal children’s memories of their visitors from the past, in both The Dark Is Rising and Silver on the Tree Will and Merriman are repeatedly responsible for the erasure of memory, including even the memory of the speech that we have just quoted. Examples of this phenomenon in Silver on the Tree run from the beginning of the narrative to its end. At his oldest brother Stephen’s insistence, Will explains his secret status as an Old One within the first few pages of the novel, but immediately thereafter he envelops Stephen in a cloud of plume moths to carry away the memory (15–6). John Rowlands, a mortal ally of the Old Ones, espied many years ago Merriman “riding on the wind” (123), a witnessing that Merriman caused him to believe was a dream. During the climax of Silver on the Tree, John makes the agonizing discovery that his beloved wife is in actuality a Lord of the Dark and that he must participate in her destruction; instead of remembering this truth, he is sent home with a more palatable false memory of a conventional death by accident and a conventionally mortal wife (262). Conversely, Bran elects to embrace his own mortality by shedding a more empowering memory, namely that he is Arthur’s legitimate

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      son and the rightful Pendragon (264). Most sweepingly—and most reminiscent of Kipling’s Dan and Una—the Drew children and Bran lose all knowledge of the many manifestations of the supernatural that they have encountered in the series (268). In each case, the erasure of memory is said to be necessary for the good of the mortal in question. The trope of lost memory has been discussed by various critics of Cooper’s series, who differ on how best to understand it. We suggest that viewing it in the context of Kipling’s stories offers helpful insight by directing the reader to the awareness of Cooper’s own forgetful indebtedness to a literary past. In her 1989 interview with Raymond Thompson, she notes that “I was just writing a series of fantasies which draw on everything I’d ever read, lived through, and absorbed through general cultural osmosis. The Matter of Britain was part of a great mass of stuff in my subconscious” (n.pag.). And the position of the source material in her subconscious rather than her conscious mind is something that Cooper insists upon in this interview: “Once I found I was writing fantasy which was being published for young adults, I thought, it’s very dangerous to read anybody who is writing in this area. So I didn’t.” The “danger” referred to here is presumably that of a too-slavish indebtedness to predecessors in the field, whereas the more distant inspiration afforded by hearkening back to childhood reading experiences that, like John Rowlands’s glimpse of the flying Merriman, have long since been relegated to the category of dream is not danger but productive inspiration. That is, there is no denying that the literary palimpsest exists, just as the end of Silver on the Tree does not deny the existence of the magical. But at the end of Cooper’s saga, the directive offered to the mortal characters (including the now-mortal Bran, who has turned down the opportunity to live forever with his father “at the back of the North Wind,” another literary echo [263]) is not to live in all times at once, as Old Ones can, but to stick to their own layer of time and their own consciousness. The multiple layers of the palimpsest exist, but they should not interact too closely. Critic Peter Goodrich concludes that by insisting upon the necessity of erasing the children’s memories, the end of the sequence identifies the past itself, if we are too aware of it, as one of the many invasions that Cooper represents throughout her narrative: “The marvelous must then be regarded as an intrusion—even though one of long standing—and finally separated from the world in which we should live” (174). Because the reader of the saga is likely to have associated the idea of invasion/

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intrusion with the Dark rather than the Light, Goodrich’s interpretation may initially seem startling. And certainly, as Cooper’s reference in the interview to the Dark’s connection to the Nazi bombing of England suggests, the sequence repeatedly identifies the Dark as an invading force; for instance, Will’s maturing as an Old One involves withstanding multiple attacks, many of them psychological and reminiscent of the one that Mark is conscious of experiencing while in the power of his enemies in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. But the Light too is represented as invasive, a force that interrupts the real pleasures of ordinary life, and as Goodrich is cogently arguing here, in Cooper’s ambivalent storytelling even the heroic and beautiful are ultimately identified as off limits, too powerful for modern human consumption. This point suggests the intimate connection in Cooper’s work of memory, the palimpsest, and nostalgia. Will’s erasure of Stephen’s memory via the plume moths, like his erasure of Paul’s and the rector’s memory after he makes the speech about time in The Dark Is Rising that we quoted earlier, is really more for his own sake than for that of the mortal affected; in both cases he is trying to avert change to relationships established before he knew himself to be an Old One, and thus in effect to hold onto his human childhood. Hence it seems significant that the most purely Roman moment in the series, Will and Merriman’s visit to second-century Caerleon, is prompted by a double layer of nostalgia. The purpose of the visit is to deposit the magical chain of Signs, the object of the quest in The Dark Is Rising, in a place where the Dark cannot find it. Will picks the location at Caerleon because of his childhood fascination with a Victorian engraving of the scene, and specifically with one figure, a centurion whose “face, drawn in clear detail, was grave and rather sad . . . he was gazing out of the picture, into the distance” (31). The centurion proves to have real existence when Will and Merriman come to hide the Signs, and his sadness becomes identifiable as homesickness. What Will perceives as “this moment of simple unprotected longing with a man’s deepest, simplest emotions open and unguarded for strangers to hear and see” (37) is then repeated eighteen centuries on by the homesickness of a young archaeologist from Florida, who is working on the Caerleon dig; Will is able to use the repetition of nostalgia as a bridge, surreptitiously reclaiming the Signs, which are essential to putting down the final Rising of the Dark. Beyond the text, Cooper recalls in the 1989 Thompson interview that the “dreadful

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homesick period” that followed upon her 1963 relocation to the United States was an important spur to her writing of the final four volumes of the quintet; she muses, “Perhaps if I had stayed in England I would have been less focused on things British.” Goodrich addresses this issue by arguing that Cooper is making an artistic error, trying to be backward-looking and forward-looking in the same text. He observes that “While their loss of memory makes Cooper’s humans better suited to function in the present, it also diminishes them by imposing innocence at the very juncture when experience would seem to offer the most promise. By forgetting the past, we too may free ourselves to meet the future, but we risk creating the Dark by our rational means” (174). But in a sequence that pays tribute to various important predecessors of British fantasy, perhaps Cooper’s riff on the desirability of forgetfulness in the face of the power of nostalgia and many-layered time is among other things a nod to Kipling that says rather more than he does about the implications of forgetting. That is, each of the works discussed in this chapter has its own individual values and guidance to communicate to the reader, but because each also functions as part of a larger collectivity, these novels should be understood as revising, writing over, and imperfectly erasing their predecessors. In that sense, part of the guidance that they have to offer lies in helping the reader to construct an understanding of the complexities and contradictions of the present’s relationship to the past. While we have sought to demonstrate that Cooper’s series is written atop a foundation laid in part by Kipling, its structure and tone are very different, so that the Kipling layer takes some uncovering. In contrast, The Shadow Guests, of all the texts here discussed, seems most clearly a tribute to the Puck stories. Indeed, it makes explicit reference to Kipling when Aiken’s protagonist, Cosmo Curtoys, is described as a devotee of the Second Jungle Book and Kim (103–4). Yet The Shadow Guests, too, is no simple updating of its predecessor. Whereas Kipling’s Dan and Una connect with England’s history via luck and playfulness, having unwittingly summoned Puck by “act[ing] Midsummer Night’s Dream three times over, on Midsummer Eve, in the middle of a Ring, and under— right under one of [his] oldest hills in Old England” (45; emphasis orig.), Cosmo’s “shadow guests” come in response to two millennia of family tragedy. For the Curtoys family labors under a hereditary curse, inflicted in Roman times by a British priestess whose acolyte grandson was killed by a Roman soldier who had been “bustling along, tidying things up the

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way the Romans tended to do” to further the Romanizing of the natives (43). The curse requires that each eldest Curtoys son die young in battle, causing in turn his mother’s death from a broken heart. While Cosmo himself has recently lost his mother and his elder brother, there is hope that the curse is ending, in that the two varied the pattern by seeking death from exposure in the Australian outback in an attempt to thwart the family destiny. That Cosmo encounters a trio of doomed forebears— Con, a Roman-British slave and gladiator; Sim, an inept Crusader; and Osmond, a young member of the eighteenth-century Hellfire Club—may thus be an outcome not only of the tension resulting from his bereavement and resettlement in England, but also of the ending of the curse. Written in a post-imperial and postwar moment by an author who was already nearly grown up by the start of the Second World War (born in 1924, the precocious Aiken had a story broadcast on the BBC’s Children’s Hour in 1941 and began working as a librarian for the United Nations Information Committee in 1943), The Shadow Guests seems less interested than its predecessors in the question of invasion and imperial corruption. Britain’s former colonies appear here only as a possible refuge, a forlorn hope that by renouncing Englishness the Curtoyses may elude their family destiny. But like the earlier works, Aiken’s text is concerned with the value of voluntary cooperation by individuals and, conversely, the horrors associated with compulsion and hatred, as well as with the need to establish and accept one’s place in life. Con and Sim are both constrained by human relationships as well as by the paranormal, Con being sent to the arena by his mother’s slave status and Sim to the Crusades by his father’s unpaid debt. When each asks Cosmo for help in training for battle, Cosmo finds in them substitutes for his dead brother, so that the relationships benefit Cosmo at least as much as the doomed revenants. If the fighting itself seems pointless, since these elder sons are already marked for death, the emotional bonds that form—as in Kipling’s text— between the modern and the historical boys are by no means trivial. But Cosmo’s final visitors, the murderous Osmond and his witch mother, come not to befriend but to destroy him, in an effort to save Osmond’s life by disrupting the pattern. This inversion of the tack taken by Cosmo’s own mother and brother, who rebelled against the curse by dying peacefully rather than by inflicting death in other quarters, brings about the final step in Cosmo’s acceptance of his loss, in that it enables him to understand and forgive his dead. As the story ends, Cosmo has recovered from a near-fatal

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      illness, a metaphor for the emotional damage that he has sustained; settled in at school; been reunited with his father; and replaced his three “shadow guests” with living friends who have had their own family traumas to deal with. Like Kipling’s Dan and Una, he has in effect been made free of the land, and in the process he has been set free from darker things. Throughout, then, this narrative suggests that the most strenuous battles may be interior. If the revenants are figments of a real past, and tied somehow to a real place (Cosmo can only see them when he is at the family home), they are also emanations of Cosmo himself. His first name, for instance, seems to have been constructed out of elements taken from his three guests’ names, or vice versa, a move that prompts the reader to muse on identity and continuity. Moreover, the adult cousin with whom he has come to live postulates that the visitors have been called forth by Cosmo’s emotional turmoil, much as poltergeists are thought to be associated with the presence of a troubled adolescent. This theory is given narrative credence not only by Cousin Eunice’s impressive intellectual credentials as a potential Nobel laureate in mathematics but also by the peculiar process associated with Con’s manifestation. He materializes twice as an ectoplasmic or embryonic creature resembling a lizard, subsequently as a small child, and finally as a young adult once he has had the opportunity to eat some chocolate belonging to Cosmo, explaining that consuming Cosmo’s food will ease his entrance into Cosmo’s world. That Con, who becomes Cosmo’s close friend, is initially associated with the unpleasant lizards and the whiny “brat” helps to explain why even the murderous Osmond strikes Cosmo as oddly “familiar”; the “suppressed rage” projected by this figure may frighten Cosmo precisely because on some level it is his own (71, 162, 161). If so, however, his victory over Osmond, reluctant and accidental though it may be, is a victory over his own darker side, thus returning us to that major Kiplingesque virtue, self-mastery. In effect, Cosmo has sifted through his own multilayered character by facing his family’s past.

2.4 Beyond Fantasy: Philip Turner’s Yorkshire Palimpsest In Turner’s Sea Peril, as in all the works that we consider in this chapter, we again find the dominant implied metaphor HISTORY IS A

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PALIMPSEST, associated—as in Puck’s Roman stories and many of the successors examined here—with the waning of empire, the doomed Roman struggle against barbarian hordes, and the richness of English history. Yet perhaps because this author, an Anglican clergyman who spent much of his life in Yorkshire, moved permanently to England (from Canada) as an infant rather than oscillating between two countries in his youth like Kipling, the metaphor here does not get allied with the idea that HISTORY IS INVASION, and consequently the meaning of the palimpsest in the two texts seems rather different. We focus this final section of the chapter primarily on Turner’s novel in comparison to Kipling’s, the better to underscore some of the differences in how these two authors approach a common guiding metaphor: while in our view Turner’s work clearly belongs to the Puck lineage, it is equally clear that lineage does not preclude significant variation. Sea Peril is part of a nine-novel sequence written between 1964 and 1977, the Darnley Mills novels, that also includes Turner’s 1965 Carnegie Medal winner, The Grange at High Force. Although five of these novels, including Sea Peril, follow the adventures of David, Arthur, and Peter as they engage with modern challenges and with uncovering the secrets of the past, the series as a whole is united not by shared characters but by shared place. The time setting of the sequence spans roughly a century in the life of Darnley Mills, a fictitious Yorkshire community, and Turner is consistently preoccupied with how any given era will leave traces of itself in time to come. Whereas Kipling’s concern in the Puck stories is with how the indefinable quality of “Englishness” gradually overtakes newcomers so that an inhabitant of Sussex in any age is ultimately kin to one from any other, Turner’s concern is more with physical artifacts and the human qualities (specifically, courage) to which they testify. Both authors’ approaches are palimpsestic, but not in the same way. David, Arthur, and Peter’s modern challenge in Sea Peril involves building and using a homemade paddle-driven punt, the “Sea Peril” of the title, which they operate in a way that brings them into sustained conflict with the ill-mannered and vindictive driver of a motor launch. At the same time, here as elsewhere in the sequence they also have an archaeological mystery to solve, in this case finding the remains of a Roman signal tower. Their handling of Sea Peril ultimately leads to their discovery of the signal tower, in that in order to rescue the granddaughter of the local aristocrat, Lady Bridgebolton, from drowning they must

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pilot the punt over a weir even though doing so will inflict serious damage on the boat and endanger their own lives. The grateful Lady Bridgebolton, who up to this point has taken a dim view of the boys as insufficiently respectful of her status and property, reveals that she and her family have known all along where the signal tower was. Indeed, her husband’s grandfather, the mad Sir Henry Bridgebolton, turned it into a shrine during his “Roman phase,” excavating assorted artifacts including a bronze cross possibly belonging to Marcus, the centurion who commanded the tower during an attack by British tribesmen and “gave his life that others might live” (215)—a heroic act echoed in miniature by the boys’ willingness to sacrifice Sea Peril for little Lady Jane. Significantly, the signal tower shrine is unknown to all but Lady Bridgebolton because, in a disordering of time reminiscent of Kipling’s placement of the Roman stories between two sets of medieval stories, Sir Henry’s Roman phase gave way to his Egyptian phase: as Lady Bridgebolton pithily phrases it, “he built Egypt on the foundations of Rome” (214). The signal tower was accordingly encased in a “little domed building with Cleopatra’s Needle on top” (213), rendering it invisible except to those invited inside the structure. A similar set of modifications into near-unrecognizability is performed on Sea Peril itself when Lady Bridgebolton has the punt reconstructed by professional boat-builders, a refitting so extensive that the result must be rechristened Sea Peril II. The new punt’s lines are different and its accessories considerably more expensive and elaborate, but it retains “the basic design” (220), the original cabin layout, and the wheel lovingly crafted by David; in other words, it too has become a palimpsest, as did the signal tower and as did Sir Henry himself with his Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and ancient British phases. Fittingly, then, the simultaneity of old and new is the focus of the final paragraphs of the novel, in which the boys take Lady Bridgebolton, who is sitting on a garden chair on the cabin roof, on a sunset punt ride. As David contemplates “Cleopatra’s Needle and a Roman signal tower, and an imperious lady throned like a queen on a royal barge,” he thinks of lines from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, a play “about an imperious queen and a brave Roman, about courage and loyalty, and a beautiful boat on sunset waters,” and finds the reference “a satisfactory comment on the story of Sea Peril” (222–3). Turner, then, draws his readers’ attention to the metaphor HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST, but what is

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at stake here is not the boys’ right to be considered English—this is unquestioned—but rather the past’s right to be appreciated. The Christian and military heroism of the “brave Roman” deserve recognition from his remote heirs, much as Lady Bridgebolton’s imperiousness, which originally seems mere snobbery and willfulness, becomes admirable once, as a new ally of the boys, she can be seen as a successor to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra.

2.5 Conclusion All the works discussed in this chapter imagine that there is a matrix below which there can be no further layering, a ground on which all layers themselves must rest, what we might imagine as an Ur-England. For Turner, as for Kipling, that ground is the landscape itself: it can be altered superficially but not fundamentally changed. Thus both are interested in figures who are particularly close to the land, represented in Turner’s sequence by Arthur (who, as scion of a long line of sheep farmers, regularly struggles with the mists and snows that made Yorkshire inhospitable to the Romans and Picts before him) and in Kipling’s stories by Hobden and his son, the Bee Boy. Cooper, too, participates in this trope through her use of rural sages such as John Rowlands and the Old One Farmer Dawson. The appreciation of the land brings with it the understanding that it must be served. It assimilates those who invade it, provided that they deal justly with inhabitants already there, and it lays upon them the obligation to defend it and the values of its people in turn. Yet because Kipling, Cooper, and Aiken are working from the entailed metaphor HISTORY IS INVASION while Turner is not, the authors come to somewhat different conclusions about what this defense might consist of. In Turner’s view, that HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST is not merely a means to appreciating the past but also the imposition of an obligation to remember and protect it, while Kipling, Cooper, and Aiken present the past as more formidable. In the palimpsest metaphor, then, the land is the bottom layer of history, conditioning the things that will happen on it: invaders may come, but eventually, at least according to Kipling, Cooper, Aiken, and Turner, they will become English. Yet the land itself simultaneously functions on one level as a metaphor for the psyche, inasmuch as this group of texts highlights the link between physical invasion and

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psychological invasion, in some cases highlighting one or the other, in other cases showing the interplay between the two. Such invasions may work in opposite directions, since physical invasion is accomplished by outsiders—Romans, marauding Saxons—who inhabit a layer at least one removed from the land, whereas psychological invasion is often launched from the bottom up, accomplished by the denizens of a lower stratum of the palimpsest or even by the land itself. As Kipling has the Norman speaker reiterate in his poem “Sir Richard’s Song,” “England hath taken me,” a psychological invasion that readers are to accept as benevolent. Yet in other, less benevolent cases, as we see in the works by O’Neill, Lewis, and Cooper, the psychological invasion is associated with the Dark and with primeval terrors that underlie the civilized veneer of modern life. In a cognitive reading, this ambivalence toward the lower levels of the psyche is revealing, a representation in story that is conveying an attitude toward mind itself, its dangers and its magic. That all these narratives emphasize the multilayered quality of the palimpsest and the powers to be found on each level suggests what, perhaps unexpectedly, the reader is encouraged to retrieve and cherish from the imperial legacy, namely the agency of the individual. The palimpsest metaphor that we find present in all these treatments suggests the inadequacy of the simplistic notion of brute domination by a superior civilization of a lesser one. Rather, from Kipling onward, these texts indicate that the imperial subject, the author, and indeed the experiencing reader are necessarily bricoleurs, working their way through a menu of artifacts and devices in which a productive blending (which we have earlier referred to as difference in unity) is the desired outcome. The responsible imperial subject, like the responsible imperial administrator, is one who recognizes choice and selection, rather than obliteration, as the means of cultural propagation. Yet as the twentieth century progresses, authors seem increasingly to suggest that obliteration—and specifically the obliteration of Britishness—is the default setting for empire, to be staved off by measures ranging from immersion in the maternal (O’Neill) to acceptance of God (Lewis) to cosmic conflicts (Cooper). That this insight was a frequent conclusion of writers of Kipling’s era, too, may be the final layer of the palimpsest.

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3 HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST 2 Time Zones, Scars, and Family in (Mostly) Realistic Works

In the preceding chapter we examined a group of texts united by their indebtedness to Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, suggesting that these works not only draw upon the core metaphor HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST (which Kipling articulates in terms of “overlaid tints and textures” and “marks that show and fade,” while subsequent writers invoke archaeological digs, buried worlds, surfaces to be “scraped off,” and so on) but also form a thick palimpsest of their own as a literary collectivity. In the present chapter we seek not to trace connections to or variations upon a shared predecessor text but rather to highlight the frequency of two particular tropes within palimpsestic texts—tropes that are also on display in the works discussed in Chapter 2 but that may usefully be explored in relation to works whose debt to Kipling may not be their most significant characteristic. The literal palimpsest is distinguished by two features, the scraping or deliberate damaging of the original surface in order to make it receptive to new writing and the continuity of a foundational text that under some circumstances remains legible. Making reference to a psychological theory that was developing as the earliest text discussed in this chapter was written, one might identify Freud as a guiding spirit of the palimpsestic approach to the past, with the analyst (or author) functioning as the archaeologist bringing to light a layered and painful past, while the analysand (or fictional character) models for readers how one may be made free through the possession of the knowledge or self-knowledge thus unearthed. The works that we explore here translate those features into narrative in multiple ways, but we wish in particular to highlight the importance that

Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction. Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey, Oxford University Press (2019). © Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846031.001.0001

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      they place on family, which emphasizes the unity over time created by traditions, inherited traits, and affectional bonds, and on the palimpsestic body/mind, altered in significant ways by painful experiences and traumas that continue to have their effect even while subsequent changes in circumstance have contrived a new look for the individual in question. While the physical and psychological scarring described within the texts in this chapter sometimes involves subsidiary characters rather than the protagonist, with whom the reader may most naturally identify, we propose that the existence of these marks nonetheless furnishes for the child reader an explanation of the workings of time upon all of us as we mature. In effect, these texts observe that people are written upon by history. In work developed in her book-length study Empathy and the Novel (2007) and expressed more briefly in her 2010 chapter “Narrative Empathy,” cognitive theorist Suzanne Keen details recent psychological studies of empathy (what it is, how it can be measured physiologically) and argues that texts, when properly structured for this purpose, have the power to arouse empathy even when the figure being identified with has no existence in reality.¹ She cites among other authorities Stephanie Preston and Frans de Waal, who believe “that witnessing or imagining another in an emotional state activates automatic representations of that same state in the onlooker, including responses in the nervous system and the body” (“Empathy” 66, emphasis added). Having these responses to a work of fiction does not, of course, necessarily render the reader kinder or more virtuous; it is important to recognize that any one actual reader’s response “does not invariably correspond with what the author appears to set up or invite” (71), as readers are individuals, not identical units in a larger mass, and authors’ deployment of empathy is not always skilled. Nevertheless, as Keen puts it, in general it appears to be the case that “fiction does disarm readers of some of the protective layers of cautious reasoning that may inhibit empathy in the real world” (69). Temporarily, or in some cases even permanently, what readers encounter in a work of fiction can shape their approach to life. The conclusions of Keen and other researchers working in this area have obvious relevance to all three of the dominant metaphors upon ¹ For additional book-length studies of empathy from a cognitive-theory perspective, see Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006) and Blakey Vermeule’s Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (2010).

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which we focus in this book, namely the palimpsest, the map, and the fractal. That we choose to invoke them in the specific context of the palimpsest does not mean that we find palimpsestic texts naturally more empathy-invoking than texts organized around other kinds of timespace metaphors.² Rather, at this point in our study we find it pertinent to cite Keen’s summary of strategies that promote character identification with particular regard to her thought-provoking observation that “Mapping these ostensibly empathic narrative techniques draws attention to the many aspects of narrative form that have not yet been associated with readers’ empathy, but which ought not to be ruled out without careful consideration” (72, orig. emphasis). Here we propose that it is worth paying attention to the potentially empathic function of descriptions of setting in the palimpsestic text. That landscape is often presented in these works as a palimpsest (in the past, readers are told, a scene looked one way; in the present, it looks different, yet the bones of the past are still discernible many centuries later) is something that appears in Chapter 2 in the recurring motif of the archaeological dig and that shows up again in the present chapter in narrators’ comments on characters’ surroundings. The idea that the landscape changes over time is not one that a reader would normally perceive as likely to stir empathy; for instance, in arguing that “temporal shift” between past and present “immediately creates the heteroglossia and heteroscopia necessary for our engagement with the character,” Maria Nikolajeva is focusing, very reasonably, not on temporal shift involving setting but on that involving accounts of the experiences of human individuals (“Memory” 92). Yet we suggest that reading observations about change in the physical landscape alongside a plot that features the scarring, maiming, or traumatizing of an individual sets up an analogy between the land and the human body, so that the reader is

² Not that it would be impossible to make such an argument. In her discussion of empathy and reading, Amy Coplan presents empathy as a multilayered experience that might be deemed inherently palimpsestic: “When a reader empathizes with a character, she simulates that character’s experience, but at the same time maintains her own separate identity. This self-other differentiation allows the reader to simultaneously simulate the character’s psychological states and experience her own separate psychological states” (148). If empathy is itself a kind of palimpsest, cognitive psychologists might do well to test the hypothesis that a palimpsestic narrative might be particularly likely to encourage feelings of empathy in a reader. To our knowledge, however, no such experiment has yet been constructed.

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asked to empathize with both and thus, potentially, to gain a lengthier perspective than focusing on a portion of a single lifespan might provide. In Literary Conceptualizations of Growth: Metaphors and Cognition in Adolescent Literature, Roberta Trites focuses her first chapter on “embodied metaphors that compare mental growth processes to physical experiences,” analyzing “those metaphors used to describe maturation that emerge from our bodies” (21). Along similar lines, we are proposing that there is value in thinking about the palimpsestic landscape as another kind of metaphor that combines the psychological and the physical in order to tell readers something about growth and its relationship to the past. But, notably, this metaphor may seem less direct and forceful than the metaphor of the journey, which is Trites’s test case in her chapter and which will become integral to chapters 4 and 5 of our book. Landscapes, after all, stay in one place, even while they change over time; they are background for action rather than constituting action themselves; they are not human. Confronting a dramatic alteration in the look of a place may thus be less emotionally jolting to a young person than confronting the idea that the young body—conventionally presumed to be agile and beautiful—will inevitably lose its powers and its charms, yet in the palimpsestic texts that feature in this chapter, the one idea often entails the other. These texts show both landscapes and human bodies continuing past their apogee, often with positive new features emerging as a result of earlier damage and with family bonds shown as surmounting such damage. Implicitly, then, such palimpsestic texts recommend for young readers a particular attitude toward the process of aging, and by extension even toward the inevitability of our own death.

3.1 Magical Rules and Classical Tradition in The Enchanted Castle Chapter 2 focuses primarily upon fantasy, with a discussion of one realistic work offered in order to show how some of the tropes of Kipling’s Puck have survived in another modality. In the present chapter we reverse the pattern by focusing primarily upon realism but beginning our analysis with a discussion of one work of fantasy, The Enchanted Castle (1907), written by Kipling’s contemporary and admirer E. Nesbit. The Enchanted Castle, which recounts the misadventures of siblings

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Gerald, Kathleen, and Jimmy and their friend Mabel (niece of the housekeeper at the local castle) when they come into temporary possession of a magic ring, is set exclusively in Edwardian England; its classical content consists of marble statues of Greek gods, whose presence in the novel, notes Elizabeth Hale, is a tribute to “the Greek statue room at the British Museum which Nesbit enjoyed visiting as a child” (26). These figures’ ability to come to life every night is perceived only by other statues or by the wearer of the ring. While the living statues do not populate every episode in the novel and are not always central to the plot when they do appear, the classical content is nonetheless important to establishing the palimpsestic structure of the novel, in which the past (the personal past of Nesbit and her characters, but also the ancient past more generally) turns out to be considerably more important than either the children or, probably, most readers have initially assumed. The sentient and mobile statues, intended by some bygone landscaper within the world of the novel merely as tasteful and elegant features of the castle gardens, embody the metaphor HISTORY IS LIVING, which becomes in this case an entailment and extension of the metaphor HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST. Simultaneously stone and flesh, the statues form a bridge between setting—in this case a refined and peopled environment elevated by its connection to the classical past—and psyche, an analogy that is highlighted when at the story’s end readers discover that Psyche is the most important of the stone figures. The text’s most obvious invocation of a palimpsestic image comes at a moment when Gerald, wearing the ring, is walking at night in the castle grounds. As the narrator explains, he experiences “the feeling that he was in another world, that had covered up and hidden the old world as a carpet covers a floor. The floor was there all right, underneath, but what he walked on was the carpet that covered it—and that carpet was drenched in magic, as the turf was drenched in dew” (79). This layering of the magical and the nonmagical occurs again and again in the novel with regard to both setting (the jewels in the treasure room are hidden behind sliding panels that can only be opened if the ring is present, and indeed the castle itself turns out to have been constructed partly through normal engineering and partly through wishing) and genre, since as a work of magic realism, The Enchanted Castle depends upon the juxtaposition of the fantastic and the quotidian. At the same moment, and significantly for the text’s thematic purposes, Gerald catches his first glimpse of a statue in

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      motion, “a creature with horns and goat’s legs and the head and arms of a boy” who is clearly Pan, and realizes both that “The statues come alive” and that a neoclassical feature of the castle grounds, the Temple of Flora, appears to be the epicenter of the activity (79). The transformation of an inanimate feature of the castle landscape into something sentient and magical is remarkable, of course, yet the narrator names as “the most wonderful thing of all” the fact that “Gerald was not afraid” (79). This moment thus identifies a number of qualities that will be crucial to the magic. First, although the statues of Greek divinities do not represent the most ancient of the histories invoked in the text (the grounds also contain living stone versions of prehistoric beasts, which the narrator ascribes to the popularity of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and of Sir Joseph Paxton’s models of dinosaurs, unveiled at the Crystal Palace in 1854 and still a tourist attraction as we write), they are nonetheless identified as a particularly important and heroic stratum of the historical palimpsest. The magical denouement at the end of the novel, set in the same secret chamber below the Temple of Flora that has already been associated with the ring’s powers, involves a procession before the various problems of the plot are set right. This pageant-like version of ancient history begins with “gigantic lizards with wings . . . mammoths, strange vast birds” and continues, “not from the garden but from very far away, [with] the stone gods of Egypt and Assyria . . . strange grotesque figures from the towers of cathedrals . . . uncouth idols from Southern palm-fringed islands.” The series, then, begins with the alien past, the “strange,” “grotesque,” and “uncouth,” yet it concludes with “the beautiful marble shapes of the gods and goddesses who had held their festival on the lake-island, and bidden Lord Yalding [the castle’s sympathetic adult owner] and the children to this meeting” (250). Idealized, welcoming, and masters of the magical ceremonies, the living Greek statues are offered to the reader as embodiments of the positive side of the magic and, by extension, of a preoccupation with the past.³ Meanwhile, Gerald’s perception that the magic has “covered up and hidden the old world”—that is, the mundane, nonmagical world of

³ Stephen Prickett’s discussion of The Enchanted Castle highlights its Platonism; he points out that the children’s attendance at this feast of the gods constitutes participation in “a literal symposium” (236).

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England in 1907—constitutes a reversal of standard chronology that we will return to at the end of this section. Second, readers are asked to focus on Gerald’s lack of fear when he encounters the living statue of Pan. While the children are later to discover that all the Greek statues are delightful (Aphrodite Urania, for instance, is “the dearest lady in the world, with a voice like mother’s at those moments when you love her most” [204]), the fearlessness does not come from a perception that Pan—from whose name, of course, our term “panic” derives—is no danger but is instead a function of wearing the ring. Conversely, if one is exposed to manifestations of the magic when not either wearing the ring or under an enchantment cast using its power (for instance, in her guise as the ring-wearer of the moment, Mabel wishes that Gerald and Jimmy be turned into living statues for the night, a fate that Kathleen has already wished upon herself, so that all the children can join unafraid in the statues’ symposium), one is prey to a panic that sometimes seems disproportionate to the experience provoking it. This panic is a recurring and heavily emphasized feature of the narrative, functioning as Nesbit’s version of the trauma that appears in different guises in all the texts discussed in this chapter. A key episode of The Enchanted Castle involves the accidental conferral of sentience and agency upon a collection of “Ugly-Wuglies,” dummies that the children have constructed to swell the audience at a play that they are putting on. “Ugly” rather than classically beautiful, suburban British in manner and garb rather than ancient Greek, and assembled from haphazardly chosen elements such as golf clubs and overcoats rather than from marble, these figures function as an inversion of the statues both aesthetically and historically; far from existing within a palimpsestic continuum that embraces millennia, the Ugly-Wuglies are temporary creations who terrify because they threaten to outlive their (un)natural span, the one-time and brief purpose for which the children originally created them. Thus whereas the statues represent the positive side of the magic, the horrific nature of the Ugly-Wugly episode, in which the dummies are identified as frightening even before their original gentility drops away and their violent side is revealed, concentrates and develops the moments of trauma elsewhere in the novel. Roberta Silva argues that there is an innate cognitive connection between fear and metaphor, in that “The use of metaphors . . . [is] a way of thinking to which people spontaneously turn at times of difficulty,

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as when we confront realities of which we have no experience and that frighten us” (163). Nesbit’s text consistently associates the magic ring with storytelling, as the kind of magical effect that it produces is always dependent upon what the children have said that the magic will be, which often functions as part of a larger narrative that they are producing at the time. Thus the ring’s power to ward off fear of the very circumstances that it has made visible—or created, in the case of the Ugly-Wuglies—is a nicely literal manifestation of the power of less concrete manifestations of the imagination to do the same. Meanwhile, Nesbit biographer Julia Briggs notes the association in Nesbit’s mind between “the terror of the mask” and “her fear of death and mummies,” linking them to early and lasting traumas inflicted upon young Nesbit first by a family game of charades when she was four and later by a visit to the mummies of Bordeaux when she was nine (Woman 4, 13). In The Enchanted Castle as in other late Nesbit fantasies, Briggs finds, these childhood horrors surface, so that “terror, death and loss intrude in a way that they had not done before” (265). The novel becomes in Briggs’s adept reading an exploration of the terrors as well as the delights of imagination and the dream-world, a commentary upon the dangers of the return of the repressed and simultaneously an extended working out of the classical story of Cupid and Psyche and its literary descendant “Beauty and the Beast,” which, not coincidentally, is the play that the children are staging when the UglyWuglies come alive. Both Cupid, in his aspect of Eros described in the narrative as “a really nice boy, as the girls instantly agreed,” and Psyche, “a darling, as any one could see” (205), are prominent in the nighttime symposium hosted by the statues and attended by all the children. And both the romantic/delightful and deathly/horrifying aspects of the myth form the foundation of a literary palimpsest that gets overlaid in Nesbit’s novel with a number of complementary narratives including romantic novels, detective stories, and an assortment of her own childhood memories. So interwoven are trauma and magical beauty, indeed, that to permit trauma to pass out of the text, Nesbit’s narrator makes clear that the magic must end as well, leaving only a love story between Lord Yalding and Kathleen’s French governess that will now be entirely conventional. If one cardinal rule of the magic has to do with how terror will or will not be experienced, another, equally important and inexplicable (in that neither seems naturally connected to the concept of a magic ring), is that

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family members will feel no concern about whoever is wearing the ring. Thus, for instance, when Mabel turns invisible after having announced that the ring will have this magical effect, the children seek to explain her apparent absence to her aunt by claiming that she has been adopted by a passing “lady in a motor-car” (50). Despite the improbability of this tale, the aunt accepts it readily, which Mabel attributes to the fact that her aunt, who has never seemed to care much about her anyway, is “always reading novelettes. I read the books in the big library” (59). Later, however, the aunt’s insouciance is more plausibly identified as a function of the magic: “I’ve always been fond of you,” her aunt tells her, but I didn’t want to spoil you. But yesterday, about half-past three . . . quite suddenly I felt as if you didn’t matter at all. And I felt the same when I got your letter [containing the adoption fabrication] and when those children came. And today in the middle of tea [that is, the moment that Mabel was finally able to take the ring off] I suddenly woke up and realized that you were gone. It was awful. (78)

Nor does the enchantment only affect adults; when the invisible Gerald, who is fond of detective stories and of recounting narratives that cast him as the hero, leaves his siblings to pursue a gang of housebreakers, Kathleen accepts his danger with what he perceives as insulting equanimity. Yet when the magic releases him, Kathleen hugs him passionately, asserting, “I can’t think how I let you go. I didn’t care last night. But when I woke this morning and remembered!” (86). The ring’s ability to dissolve bonds of family affection has an obvious plot function for Nesbit, in that the device furnishes a convenient mechanism allowing the children to go off on solitary adventures without the inconvenient necessity of including siblings or, worse, adult guardians. Yet the same device also speaks to a trope that may be found in much children’s literature, where it frequently fulfills a palimpsestic function: the importance not only of sibling bonds but also of one’s ties to earlier generations. While the parents of Gerald, Kathleen, and Jimmy do not appear in The Enchanted Castle, and Mabel is an orphan, the narrative effectively groups the four children into a single family in which the parents are symbolically represented by Lord Yalding and the French governess. These adults, who serve respectively as protector and caregiver for the children (even if the children often either evade their supervision or seek to reverse matters by trying to nurture Mamselle and shield Lord

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3.2 Liminality and Mixed Metaphors in Three Novels by Caroline Dale Snedeker Nesbit’s interest in the ancient world was fed by her close friendship (perhaps affair) with Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge, to whom she dedicated her 1906 novel The Story of the Amulet in recognition of his help providing plausible details about the social life of Babylon, Egypt, and other past civilizations. In contrast, a younger contemporary of Nesbit’s, Newbery Honor winner Caroline Dale Snedeker, felt a strong interest in history both ancient and modern from early childhood forward. While some of her successful novels for children are set in the American past and make use of her own birthplace of New Harmony, Indiana, and her family history as the great-granddaughter of social reformer Robert Dale Owen, most go considerably further back in time, being set in ancient Greece or Rome; indeed, her career as a published novelist began with The Coward of Thermopylae (1911, reissued for children in 1912 under the title The Spartan). In this section we focus primarily upon Snedeker’s two Roman novels with female protagonists, The Forgotten Daughter (1933) and The White Isle (1940), but we will also invoke a Greek novel about a boy, Theras and

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His Town (1924). All three protagonists find themselves crossing social and geographical borders: the unwilling Theras is taken from Athens to Sparta and eventually makes his way back home, the heroine of The Forgotten Daughter is transformed from slave on her father’s country estate to acknowledged daughter with a legitimate place in Roman society, and the heroine of The White Isle is exiled from Rome to Britain and must similarly come to terms with her new life. In all these cases, we suggest, one function of the spatial disruptions undergone by these protagonists is to model for Snedeker’s child readers the appropriate way to “relocate” imaginatively in the past while simultaneously working through bygone trauma; the chronological dislocation imposed upon the reader of historical fiction is here paired with advice on the best way to deal with pain. Arguably, the child’s relationship to family is the key to both enterprises. In Chapter 4 of this work, we will move from works that present history primarily as a palimpsest to works that present it primarily as mappable terrain. In the three novels that we consider here, Snedeker employs both metaphors. Theras and His Town, The White Isle, and The Forgotten Daughter are all coming-of-age novels that trace journeys emotional and physical on the part of their protagonists; all are also full of moments in which the narrator asks the reader to contemplate the larger passage of time and the layering of history. Since the latter moments are foregrounded from the start of each narrative, we see Snedeker’s novels as predominantly palimpsestic but with the metaphor of the map forming the subdominant. Thus, for instance, The Forgotten Daughter’s opening paragraph remarks of the northern Italian setting, “In later centuries these hills will be crowned with monastery, abbey, castle, and the lower hills with its town, like a nest of turrets within the circling wall, giving the whole scene a meaning, an aspect of thought, of human effort and romance” (1). Similarly, The White Isle’s first paragraph describes how the Palatine Hill changed under each new emperor from Augustus to Hadrian, and Theras and His Town includes narratorial comments such as “even to-day, when it is two thousand five hundred years old, all broken, with no roof, and the lovely statues of the gods all gone, [the Parthenon] is still the most beautiful building in the world, and it still gives that same feeling of happiness to those who look upon it” (51–2). Indeed, the first section of Theras is nearly plot-free, and in place of action, much of it is given over to making Greece familiar via narratorial comment about how the world

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of ancient Athens resembles and differs from the world of the early twentieth-century American reader. At least one contemporaneous reviewer, D. B. in The Elementary English Review, singles out this tendency on Snedeker’s part as a particular virtue of her fiction; writing of The Forgotten Daughter, D. B. comments that “The parallels between the Roman Republic and the United States today are, of course, many and striking. Mrs. Snedeker uses them to vivify the period of which she writes.” By “vivifying,” this reviewer is presumably invoking the way in which reading the past in terms of the present seems designed to stir up emotion, whether a sense of recognition or the link between physical environment and feeling suggested in Theras’ narrator’s claim about the Parthenon’s continued ability to generate happiness in those who look upon it. In either case, the practice is clearly an attempt to evoke readerly empathy. Yet this effort does not elide the difference between past and present by immersing the imagined reader so completely in the bygone era that the present disappears for the duration of the novel; rather, it works in just the opposite way, emphasizing the layering of time and the temporal distance that separates reader from setting. The disruption of focalization, as readers are jolted out of one plane of temporal identification (that of the characters) and reminded that they and the author occupy another plane, creates what cognitive theorist Katja Mellmann calls “a differentiated system,” one that engages dual information systems—verbal and perceptual—within the reader’s brain (128, 130). In other words, Snedeker’s narrative method here (duplicated in the works discussed later in this chapter) involves a self-conscious thickening of temporality to include the simultaneous perception of past and present. Although Mellmann focuses in her chapter “Voice and Perception” on contrasting the “different strategies of information gathering” represented by print texts and films (121), we suggest that the palimpsestic texts that we are studying here might also be considered to involve the kind of narrative complexity that interests Mellmann in her comparative study of media. That is, they engage with readers in a way that differs strategically from the narrative approach on display in works with unobtrusive narrators and unitary temporal settings. In the case of the passages from Snedeker’s works that we have quoted above, the reader’s attention is directed toward the effects of time upon the physical landscape, which mirror the development visible in the protagonists over

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the course of the narratives. And as is also the case with the other works considered in this chapter, that development is largely driven by a process of scarring, physical and/or psychological marking—the “breaking” and denuding of the Parthenon described in Theras, for instance— that links the palimpsestic body to the larger palimpsestic landscape and to the progress of time itself. The narratorial vision of the landscape as composed of an everincreasing number of sedimentary layers reflecting the deposits of era upon era is combined in Snedeker’s works with the concept of the map. Thus one of the central images in The White Isle is the silver traveling cup given to the father of the protagonist, Lavinia, in order to commemorate the journey that the family is about to make from Rome to Britain: “a tall cup shaped like an ornamental milestone and . . . inscribed with the principal stations on the way: Alsium, Pisae, Genua, Forum Julii, Nemausis, Lugudunum [sic]” (30). That the book’s front matter supplies a list of ancient place names and their modern counterparts gives the journey the same kind of multidimensionality as the cup itself; it has duration both in space, where the family’s wanderings can be traced on a map, and in time, since as with any palimpsest a reader may focus on the long interval between the “then” of Lugdunum and the “now” of Lyon. Snedeker’s combining of map and palimpsest is by no means unique, but it does represent a minority practice; of the texts that we have examined for this project, many prefer to use a single spatial metaphor. Perhaps this is because (as we have argued in our Introduction) the nature of the metaphor seems intimately connected to the outlook that these novels work to cultivate in their reader, for in a sense, as Clare Bradford observes, historical fiction is inevitably at least as much about the time in which it is written as it is about the time in which it is set: “Children’s texts,” she writes, “call upon aspects of the past in order to make sense of the present and to imagine the future, not to produce ‘authentic’ versions of past times and cultures” (27). But not all children’s texts imagine past (or present) in the same way, of course. Depicting the ancient world in connection with mappable terrain is often associated with the comic mode. Goals are clear, destinations are reachable, and the young reader is encouraged to conclude that the problems of the individual are both of central importance and susceptible to solution. In contrast, the palimpsestic mode positions character and reader as occupying one among many layers of time; less assertive than the map

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texts, they emphasize the landscape’s continuity but the individual’s evanescence. By employing the two modes simultaneously, the three novels by Snedeker that we discuss here implicitly ask the reader to join their protagonists in occupying a border zone, a liminal space between modesty and confidence, just as these protagonists also move between distinct social classes, national or religious loyalties, and geographical locations. Before moving to a detailed discussion of the two Roman novels, it may be as well to begin with a brief exposition of Theras and His Town, since this early novel (aimed at somewhat younger readers than the other two by Snedeker that we consider here) contains motifs visible not only in The Forgotten Daughter and The White Isle but also in the other works discussed in this chapter. As we have already indicated, we are particularly interested in the palimpsestic landscape and its connection to the traumatized individual on the one hand and the continuity provided by family on the other. The narrative simplicity of Theras makes these features especially prominent. Theras is divided into three sections: “Athens,” “Sparta,” and “A Tough Journey.” The first places the protagonist in terms of his city-state, his family (parents, little sisters, and slaves), his social environment as a child newly going to school, and the relationship of his world to that of the reader. The latter emphasis—apparent in passages such as “The master wrote ‘ABG’ which is the Greek ‘ABC,’ or rather, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, for they did not say their alphabet just as we do” (23) and “[The Athenians] loved to be free, just as we Americans do” (35)—early establishes the novel’s palimpsestic approach. Action is introduced only toward the end of this section, first when Theras is briefly abducted and threatened with slavery before being rescued by his father (a scene depicted in Figure 3.1), and second when, a year later, his father goes to fight for Athens against Samos, loses his fortune, and is reported dead. This turn of events introduces the map as the novel’s subdominant spatial metaphor, in that the loss of his father forces Theras’ relocation to Sparta, where he is adopted by his mother’s cousin Hippias. The second part of the novel thus places the protagonist in a new context, which he resents and dislikes but which nonetheless provides him with valuable training in endurance, eventually enabling the “tough journey” back to Athens as a runaway that is the focus of the narrative’s third part. Yet while the narrator shares Theras’ preference for Athens over Sparta, she also establishes that his unhappiness and growing maturity teach him a

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Figure 3.1 This mock-antique frontispiece by Mary Whitson Haring, which depicts Theras’ rescue by his father in the 1924 Doubleday edition of Caroline Dale Snedeker’s Theras and His Town, offers a visual analogue to the textual metaphor of the palimpsest by emphasizing the multiple layers present within the deliberately flat picture plane.

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      useful coping skill, namely the ability to project himself into a narrative from the past. Thus, for example, facing with Hippias the threat of attack by robbers, Theras “forgot to be tired. He forgot even to wish for Athens. He seemed to be acting in some wonderful story like Theseus himself or Odysseus, who met so many adventures by sea and land” (92). Significantly, the final stage of Theras’ journey is facilitated by a “kind stranger” who turns out to be Herodotos, friend to his father and known today as a pioneering historian (184–5). Herodotos enlivens the end of Theras’ weary journey by telling stories of other lands and of bygone “kings and heroes”; the narrator helpfully informs readers in a footnote that “Herodotos wrote all these stories in a book which is yet with us and which you can read” (187). The effect of the written book, then, is to abrogate time, for just as modern readers can still consume Herodotos’ stories, they can also encounter this historical figure as a vividly realized character—“a tall, gallant man” whose “beard was touched with gray, but how swiftly he moved, as if he could never grow old” (187–8)—in Snedeker’s fiction, where he serves as a human counterpart to the similarly immortal Parthenon. If recalling the heroic stories of Theseus and Odysseus helps Theras cope with the traumatic relocation from Athens to Sparta, encountering Herodotos as a fount of additional heroic stories enables him to complete his repatriation. Yet the real point of this episode appears to be to acquaint the young reader with Herodotos’ work so that twentieth-century children can follow the same strategy of connecting with the classical (not the personal) past in order to bypass unhappiness. The happy ending to Theras’ story is only pages away: from Herodotos, identified here as a stand-in for Theras’ father, the narrative moves to Theras’ real father, who is not dead after all but was merely imprisoned by the Samians, who branded him with an image of an owl in order to make his identity as an Athenian instantly legible. Although the novel’s sustained descriptions of trauma focus on Theras, then, the most obvious use of the palimpsestic body is displaced onto his father, thus establishing a vision of trauma as something that is experienced across the generations but that is simultaneously eased by the connection with canonical history and literature. Snedeker returns to these central ideas in more complex ways in The Forgotten Daughter. This novel tells the story of Chloé, whose dead mother, also named Chloé, was a Greek captured in a raid led by Lævinus, the Roman who subsequently fell in love with and married her.

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Lævinus’ father, adamantly opposed to the union, engineered the couple’s separation, and other slaves kept young Chloé’s survival a secret from their masters in order to protect her. When we meet her, then, she is a person altogether without social standing, abused and beaten by the farm’s overseer and seemingly permanently cowed. A large part of her trauma stems from her foster-mother Melissa’s iterations of Chloé’s mother’s wrongs, which form the basis of songs or chants performed as the two work. The narrator remarks, “Little did [Melissa] guess what harm she did, drawing up sorrow from old wells of sorrow for the child” (12), a metaphor that—like the palimpsest—renders history as tangible, vertically oriented, and consisting of layers in which the oldest material is on the bottom. But if dwelling on the personal past is problematic, Melissa also acquaints her charge with remembered fragments of Greek drama, which provide the same kind of therapeutic escape for Chloé that tales of Greek heroes furnish for Theras in the earlier novel. Chloé’s journey to health is lengthy, requiring both the cessation of abuse (accomplished via a change in overseers) and the successful development of an improbable romance with Aulus, son of a neighboring patrician, whom she rescues when he has been caught in a trap and injured. This physical maiming replicates the psychic maiming that her upbringing has inflicted upon her and establishes suffering as the common ground out of which their love can develop, since pain, by implication, is an important mechanism in maturation. The final and most essential step in Chloé’s transformation, however, occurs when, having been brought back to the estate after an escape that evidently occupies some weeks, she confronts her father and discovers that he has not, as she had thought, cast her off and enslaved her, but rather has never known of her existence and is overjoyed to find that he has a daughter. This revelation liberates her: “Chloé felt so light, it seemed as if her body had no weight at all, that her feet had no need of the ground to tread on. She was free—not of slavery only, but of that hatred which was part fear, the fear that was all hatred—the hatred of Lævinus. She was suddenly realizing that this had taken an enormous energy to maintain—now that energy flew free in an effortless empyrean” (196). Subsequently, Lævinus models for her what the narrative suggests is a healthy way to deal with bygone regrets. He decrees that father and daughter will unite in religious observances to honor the memory of Chloé’s dead mother and Lævinus’ dead second wife and children, that

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      the events of the past will be well aired, and that having done so, “we will forget this. They are sorrows which even to speak of now are profound pain. You are my legal daughter and have been so all your life” (199). In other words, the palimpsest trope, which directs attention downward to earlier layers, has apparently been replaced through what Sheila Murnaghan and Deborah Roberts persuasively see as a feminist moment depicting “recognition and acceptance by the father: the very individual who at first most powerfully represents and enforces the society’s restrictive customs ultimately comes to appreciate his daughter’s individuality and her kinship to himself ” (Childhood 185). Chloé is no longer required to build on the past, it seems; her new direction is to be upward toward the “effortless empyrean” and forward along the path to her future as honored daughter and beloved wife, a seeming replacement of the metaphor of the palimpsest with that of the map that reflects Chloé’s earlier seizing of agency through her flight when she is threatened with an unwelcome marriage. As Murnaghan and Roberts note, Snedeker’s consistent strategy in her neoclassical novels is to “evade the limitations [of Greek and Roman gender roles] that threaten to confine her heroines,” with one important mechanism for this evasion being travel: the relocation of the girl to a location on the margins where greater freedom is possible (Childhood 183). The implicit message for readers contained in the resolution of Chloé’s turbulent feelings toward Lævinus may thus appear to be that while immersing oneself in one’s classical heritage (in this case Hippolytus) is entirely productive, one cannot stay too long in one’s personal past and remain unburdened by its griefs. Rather, one should acknowledge it, examine it, and then move on with new confidence. Particularly noteworthy here is how the palimpsest represented by family (Chloé is united with the surviving representative of the earlier generation) is presented as the solution to the palimpsest represented by psychic scarring, even while Chloé’s grandfather and, unintentionally, her father were also responsible for that scarring. In Mimesis, writing of the famous episode in the Odyssey in which the hero’s former nurse Eurycleia recognizes him by his scar, Erich Auerbach contends that it is fundamental to the Homeric style “to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed” (6).

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Snedeker both adopts and adapts this approach, inasmuch as the novel’s near-constant focus on Chloé’s emotional life ensures that “nothing [will] remain hidden and unexpressed” even while her scarring is entirely internal; those vestiges of the past that remain “externalized, visible and palpable” are features of the landscape, as in the description of northern Italy that opens the novel, rather than features of Chloé’s body. The recommendation to put away the past recurs in The White Isle, if from a somewhat different angle. This time, our young female protagonist’s initial difficulties have to do not with her birth but with herself. Lavinia is a good and obedient Roman daughter with housewifely skills, but she begins the novel perceived as homely and dull; even her father, Favonius, remarks that “She’s always so stupid” (50). When Favonius displeases the emperor and is assigned to a hardship post in remote Britain, he arranges a marriage for Lavinia that will enable her to stay in Rome and might later permit the family to return there as well, since Lavinia’s prospective new family has influence and power. The betrothed, however, jilts Lavinia at the altar and runs off to Spain to avoid marriage with so unattractive a child. Lavinia is more delighted than shamed, as she never wanted the marriage in the first place. Her response has some resemblance to Chloé’s reaction at the revelation that her father loves her, as Lavinia, too, thinks in terms of liberation: the reader hears that “whatever the hurt, it was completely swallowed up and lost in the joy of escape. She was bird free, she was winged!” Yet “escape” in this case means the ability to hold onto the past rather than to leave it behind, since the next sentence explains, “She was to be forever with the dear familiar ones she loved” (17). The episode appears at the beginning of the novel; in what follows, the narrative will again negotiate the border between the palimpsest model of history and the map model, acknowledging the pleasures of looking downward into layers of the past while simultaneously steering its young female audience toward the selfconfident and optimistic outlook associated with the map. Notably, both works use a culture that is and is not foreign to that of Rome to assist the process of liberating the heroine. In the case of The Forgotten Daughter, Chloé speaks an archaic Greek by virtue of her descent from Greeks of Eresós,⁴ kept alive through her connection with Melissa. ⁴ Our use of diacritical marks in discussing Snedeker’s works follows the practice in the editions of the novels most readily available to us.

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      This Greek is not only the venerable if demotic Æolian Greek of the fisher folk of the island, but also one of the dialects associated with Rome’s own “classical” learning, in this case the works of Sappho. Yet Chloé can also function well (albeit “with an Æolic mistake now and then” [135]) in Attic Greek, reproducing or rapidly learning passages from Euripides’ Hippolytus in order to recite them with her beloved Aulus, and that facility begins to break the spell of her bondage. Both she and Melissa, the local healer, are presented as the possessors of knowledge superior to that of their immediate Roman overlords. Although necessarily imperfect because it is transmitted at a remove rather than being the product of having personally read or seen the works, the literary knowledge that Chloé owns and deploys is particularly important because it enables her to transcend her inferior class position even before her descent from Lævinus and the legitimacy of her parents’ marriage are revealed. This point suggests that Snedeker is concerned not only with the journey toward maturity but simultaneously with the problems constituted by discrepancies in class status. Chloé’s birthright is thus a dual one: from her father, she inherits senatorial rank; from her mother, possession of the wellsprings of classical high culture. Learning, then, also functions palimpsestically, since the more ancient culture is presented as foundational. That much of Chloé’s attractiveness to Aulus derives from her connection to Greek drama complicates what might otherwise seem to be the novel’s preference for the forward-looking map over the downward-looking palimpsest. Simultaneously, in equipping Chloé with contemporary “classical” learning, Snedeker at once explicates and disrupts the borders and hierarchies that shape both the classical and modern worlds for contemporary young readers. A geographical and linguistic border must be acknowledged as one considers the relationship between Greek and Latin literature, just as the border between slave and free is often embodied in the figure of the enslaved Greek pedagogue or secretary, whose function is to assist his Roman master in the acquisition of knowledge that is more than Roman in status and authority, for all that it emanates from a slave.⁵ That Chloé is young and female interestingly

⁵ The White Isle contains such a figure in Angelion, the family’s Greek slave. Born in Rome, Angelion nonetheless embodies an inherited connection with his grandfather’s homeland; when he recites Greek poetry to his owners, Lavinia feels “translated to Delphi with its beetling crags, its Shining Rocks, its multitude of temples and treasures,” and her

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disrupts the more contemporary hierarchy that made classical learning the possession of boys and men and only rarely that of girls and women. What Aulus has had to learn laboriously under Greek pedagogues and in Greece itself, Chloé learns at the loom under Melissa’s tutelage, or indeed always already has as her birthright because of her palimpsestic connection with the landscape (“Centuries of keenness and originality lay behind this child—the life of far-away islands in the Ægean Sea. Even her common words betrayed this. The beauty of the old speech of Sappho and Alkæus was in every sentence” [4]). This learning, notably, is represented as all that labor is not—Melissa’s songs and storytelling are the respite from work and not work itself. If The Forgotten Daughter looks to the Roman past as it crosses borders between Greece and Rome, The White Isle looks to the future of postimperial Rome by imagining how Christianity might empower its heroine. As we suggested initially, the geographical borders crossed are most obviously those met with on the journey from Rome to Britannia, but the novel is also concerned with the movement from paganism to Christianity. To that end, the novel imagines a double lineage for the conversion of the two women in Favonius’ family. Lavinia’s mother reveals that she has been converted to Christianity at Avalonia, the Christian settlement to which the women are taken when they are rescued after Durotrig barbarians have captured them. Lavinia’s conversion occurs independently and later, after she learns of her brother Marcus’ death in battle, an event that functions as the novel’s major trauma. In this double lineage suggesting the special appeal of Christianity to women, Snedeker again unites an ancient and a contemporary understanding of the function of foreign knowledge, in this case through the exploration of the social relations engendered by the new faith. Just as Christianity was imagined in pre-Constantine imperial Rome to appeal especially to slaves of both sexes and high-born women, it was presumed again in the United States of Snedeker’s childhood to be the special province of women, granting them an authority they might not otherwise

mother says, “Angelion, you make me feel as if I were there in Delphi,” to which he responds, “I am there . . . I have always been there . . . Always from father to son we have told each other of our Delphi. We do not forget” (37). That is, here the narrative uses poetry to make a direct equation between landscape and family, but this poetry is associated with Greek rather than Roman learning.

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      have access to (see, e.g., Douglas). Snedeker sets up the power of this twofold conversion by initially representing Christianity as a threat; Lavinia is raised on the stories of the son of a slave, an image maker who claims that Christians “were known to feast in dark caves on the blood of little children, and if Lavinia would not go to sleep like a good child when Ino put her to bed, the Christians would come and get her. Lavinia shuddered as the memory came back clear and full of dread” (19). Thus in both works the young woman becomes the thing she is raised to hate: in The Forgotten Daughter a high-born Roman and in The White Isle a Christian. Both novels suggest that the heroine rightly distrusts or fears marriage, and both novels present their heroine with an initial, undesirable marriage partner—in The Forgotten Daughter the boorish slave Geta; in The White Isle Decimus, who jilts Lavinia. As Murnaghan and Roberts point out, the undesirable marriage more accurately reflects the lived experience of Roman and (still more) Greek girls than does “the anachronistic romantic love” with which these two novels end (Childhood 186). Yet, for our purposes, especially significant in Snedeker’s depiction of romance is that what identifies the acceptable marriage partner is his appreciation and possession of the foreign knowledge that the heroine either already controls (in The Forgotten Daughter) or aspires to (in The White Isle). The White Isle in particular demonstrates how this knowledge is a matter of both mapping and being layered in a palimpsest, suggesting the complexity of the experience of learning within the ancient world and learning about the ancient world as a contemporary child with her own world to grow into. Returning to the trope of the silver traveling cup in The White Isle, recall that by listing cities that the travelers will see en route, it functions as map—but the map takes Lavinia’s journey only as far as the Channel coast of Gaul. As with the initial threat of Christianity, the novel begins by playing up the horror of going to Britannia, which, while ostensibly a Roman province, is so remote as to be hardly earthly. It is on the edge of the known world, beyond which comes “the Deep Gulf of Nothingness” (18). Murnaghan and Roberts argue that The White Isle “clearly identifies Roman Britain with the American frontier” (Childhood 159), and indeed, the geographical unknown is represented as rife with possibility and excitement; as Lavinia’s family prepares to leave Rome, the narrator asks, “What is more important than a city gate at dawn—a symbol of all beginnings, a rush of life like a stream breaking through a dam?” (28).

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Counter to expectation, then, Lavinia loves Britain immediately because it is a place of greater freedom and responsibility; she grows more attractive and more powerful there, away from the limitations of her potential life as a Roman matron confined to her home. And just as there are two conversions to Christianity, there are two cups in the novel, one of them a map and the other a palimpsest. While Lavinia, her family, and their cup-asmap travel overland to Britannia until they reach the Channel, the new faith has its own route of transmission, arriving in Britain separately and earlier through the offices of Joseph of Arimathea, who founds the community of Avalonia and leaves with it the Holy Grail. The latter cup is also a palimpsest, inasmuch as the communion ritual of Avalonia commemorates both the consumption of wine in the Last Supper and Christ’s blood sacrifice with the rubric of “do this in remembrance of me.” Both map and palimpsest, then, are presented as spatial forms of great power that renew and reshape the protagonist who experiences them, albeit in different ways. The cup imagery permits readers to see the spatial analogy that Snedeker is constructing between Britannia and the afterlife. Lavinia is devastated by her brother’s death, a loss that is particularly poignant because he has been instrumental in securing more freedom for her by urging that she be given a pony to ride on their journey. If Britannia is initially imagined as unknown, hostile, dangerous, a place of eternal darkness, it is ultimately revealed as a place of light, love, and delight. So, too, Govan, Lavinia’s Christian lover, suggests that she understand that Marcus is in yet another new place: “Marcus is not in the dark. If you could see his morning and his sunlight, you would sing for joy” (196). This heaven is accessible to Lavinia through her acceptance of Christianity and her participation in the ritual of communion. Yet even before her conversion, upon her very arrival in the country Lavinia understands Britannia to be the site of a new kind of life: Why was this earth of Britain pure white as though it were the lily among lands? The love in her brimmed over . . . A great tenderness from her heart went out to it. This land that had saved her. It was receiving her now and it was white, clean in the sunshine after rain, fresh, cold, and clear. Could it be that this young Roman girl was the first among the multitude of those who were to love this land as their very soul? (93)

The imagery of whiteness, purity, and lilies, the evocation of salvation and souls, again connects physical setting to emotional or spiritual experience, while simultaneously the passage reminds readers of the

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      layered passage of time via Lavinia’s location in what for us is the remote past; she may be the very first to love Britannia in this special, quasireligious way.⁶ The Forgotten Daughter has no concrete trope as tidy or as powerful as the cup that is variously map and palimpsest, but it shares and even deepens The White Isle’s understanding of language as predisposing its user to particular attitudes and experiences—so that for both texts, language itself may partake of both map and palimpsest modes. Chloé is not only imbued with Greek learning even though as a slave she is lower than a peasant, she also embodies features of Greek myth. During her servitude, her task is to weave; when Aulus falls into a pit designed to entrap a stag, Chloé liberates him by dexterously working the ropes that bind him. This act has many classical resonances, most obviously the likeness to Penelope, who holds her suitors at bay by weaving and unraveling, a trope that Chloé reverses inasmuch as it is in this fashion that she gains her suitor’s attention. She also resembles, in her freedom to move about the landscape of the latifundium, one of Artemis’s devotees, although again her rescue of Aulus has a happier outcome than that of Actaeon and his hounds. One might also see in Chloé a reference to Horace’s Ode 1.23, in which another Chloe’s movement through a sylvan landscape reflects her passage from maidenhood to sexual maturity. Moreover, in both Chloé’s mastery of Greek literature and her embodiment of it, the novel imagines a dialectic of control over and within language. Chloé causes Aulus to fall in love with her through her control of language in her impersonation of various parts in Hippolytus such as Theseus and Artemis, one a king and the other a goddess. This detail suggests that the play completely liberates her from her status as a slave girl, just as Aulus, afflicted by nightmares in which he is still in the pit, dreams that “the girl was freeing him from prisonhoods of thought, strange conditions which he could not explain” (135)—presumably his belief in the primacy of social caste, the deconstruction of which is a preoccupation extending throughout Snedeker’s oeuvre. Thus Chloé’s

⁶ Murnaghan and Roberts observe that the narrator of The White Isle, a novel published in 1940 as the phony war became all too real, “evokes the white cliffs of Dover, Jane Austen’s Bath, and the stories of King Arthur” (Childhood 159; the latter two references may be found in White Isle 153, 158), thus adding further layers to the palimpsest of English history.

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ability to rewrite myth through her rescue of Aulus suggests that she is not merely a speaker of the words of the past but also an agent in the present. Indeed, all three novels propose that ancient language and formulas (such as the communion service in The White Isle, the memorized poetry in The Forgotten Daughter, and the patterns of heroic myth in Theras and His Town) endure and are sources of power precisely because they make even young children such as the prepubescent Theras and socially powerless girls such as Lavinia and, still more, Chloé speakers and agents in the present. The relationship of map to palimpsest in these works, then, is ultimately cooperative rather than competitive. For Snedeker, it appears, both modes are necessary if her protagonists are to move across the border that separates object from agent. Although trauma is written on the bodies and minds of characters in all three novels, and although in each case sights such as the ruined Parthenon in Theras or, in The White Isle, the notion of a Rome who will be outlasted “by a thousand years” by her roads (33) remind the reader that even the noblest earthly creation is not immortal, Snedeker consistently offers readers strategies for coping with the inevitability of pain and loss.

3.3 Trauma, Family, and History in The Bronze Bow Elizabeth George Speare’s second Newbery Award winner, The Bronze Bow (1961), is similarly concerned with how one may best process suffering, and indeed the novel comes to a conclusion that closely resembles Snedeker’s answer to this question in The White Isle. The Bronze Bow might be described as a kind of rewriting of Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur for younger readers, as it is the story of an orphaned teenager in Roman Palestine who is torn between his responsibility for his emotionally scarred sister, Leah, and his passionate desire to cleanse his homeland of Roman occupation by taking up arms against the invader. Beginning the novel as a member of a gang of outlaws ambivalently poised between freedom fighters and bandits, Daniel gradually reintegrates into village society as he tries both to support Leah by blacksmithing and to recruit likely boys to the cause; by the end of the narrative, he has himself been recruited to the new outlook on life preached by Jesus of Nazareth. The novel thus functions predictably in terms of plot and

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      didactic message, and it adheres as well to what Norman Vance has identified as a tradition established in the nineteenth century, that of critiquing imperial Rome for its “dependence on military violence and oppression” (255).⁷ It is this very tendency to hew to a familiar line, however, that attracts our interest here, since the forces that propel the plot to its inevitable conclusion are trauma and family, both of which are presented in the context of a palimpsestic approach to history. As an early critic of The Bronze Bow, Jason Epstein, observed not long after the novel won its Newbery, Daniel seems representative of a type that was inspiring considerable anxiety at the time, namely the adolescent rebel against authority whose place in society is uneasy and whose conscience does not rule out bloodshed. Daniel’s burgeoning romance with the novel’s heroine, Thacia, the daughter of a wealthy scribe, thus holds out the hope that the love of a nice girl whose social status is secure will tame the delinquent (Epstein 114). The question might then be why Speare chose to set this reassuring tale in Roman Palestine rather than in contemporary New York City or Tulsa, and an obvious answer is that even while Speare was writing out of her belief that “the divided and turbulent society of Palestine [had] many parallels in our own day” (qtd. Apseloff 65), this historical setting permits the Christian content to be represented as coming entirely new and fresh to the protagonist. That is, the story implicitly claims that it is not a retelling of 1950s/60s youth angst, since Daniel is part of the first generation of Christian converts, someone experiencing Christ’s teachings as an eyewitness and original congregant rather than someone who must have this material recounted at second hand. At the same time, the reader (presumed to be a Christian rather than a potential convert; Speare noted that she originally intended the novel as “a Sunday-school supplement” [qtd. Apseloff 64]) is directed back toward the past, asked to see youthful rebelliousness as a phenomenon of very long standing that may be alleviated or productively ⁷ This attitude is apparent, for instance, in a work discussed in Chapter 2, Land Under England, and to a lesser extent in Ioreth Evans’s 1944 novel Gadget City. In the latter novel (which is primarily interested in describing the technological developments on display in Roman-era Alexandria), the protagonist, Morgan, is uprooted from his native “West Britain” by the Roman “blitzkrieg” and put temporarily in a “concentration camp” for slaves who have not yet been processed before he is sent to Alexandria. Despite the highly charged language just quoted, however, Morgan is ultimately considerably better off than twentiethcentury bombing victims or concentration-camp inmates, finding productive work and training in Alexandria and eventually making his way back to Britain a free man.

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directed by recourse to venerable spiritual practices. There is no need for new solutions, since Christian belief continues to hold out answers for the modern teen. We have already suggested that the palimpsestic form urges readers to assume a modest understanding of their place in the grand scheme of things. From society’s standpoint, that outlook seems desirable for the “rebel without a cause” type to which Daniel belongs. Consistently, whether the voice of wisdom in the narrative belongs to Jesus or to other characters positioned as senior to Daniel, such as the slightly older blacksmith Simon (a Christian convert) or Thacia’s observant Jewish father, Hezron, it provides him with a perspective that denies the validity of revenge as a goal. Hezron, for instance, counsels quiet in the face of the subjugation of their people: “In his heart every Jew grieves at our captivity. We have need of patriotism like yours. But we have need also of patience. We must not say we cannot endure what God in his judgement has visited upon us” (58–9). For Hezron, then, Daniel’s hotheadedness is above all the sign of a religious failure. Yet, significantly, the difference in perspective between Daniel and Hezron is also fundamentally a difference in their understandings of history. Daniel is distressed and angry that his countrymen seem to have “forgotten” the original brutalities of the Roman conquest and the humiliation of the present (58). Hezron counters with his knowledge of recent military history and of the lengthy Jewish past: The Zealots have thrown themselves against the conquerors time and time again, and what have they to show for it? Rows of crosses, and burning villages, and heavier taxes. They see a few Romans marching, a cohort, and the Roman power seems slight and open to attack. They do not think that behind these few there are others, another cohort, a legion, countless legions, on and on as far as the mind can reach, all armed, all perfected in the art of killing . . . Israel has one great strength, mightier than all the power of Rome. It is the Law, given to Moses and our fathers. When the last Roman emperor has vanished from the earth, the Law will still endure. It is to the Law that our loyalty must be devoted. (59)

Faced with this vision of Rome as but one layer in an enduring palimpsest of Jewish history, Daniel is “[t]horoughly silenced, too confused even to attempt a courteous leave-taking” (59)—a response that signals that he has just sustained an attack on something foundational to his current worldview. If the heroic individual freedom fighter can have no effect on Roman might, what course of action can Daniel pursue? The answer, of

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      course, turns out at novel’s end to be fitting himself for Christ’s eternal kingdom, a solution arising from the teachings of a native Palestinian and yet permitting peace not only for Jews but for Romans as well. Hezron’s lecture to Daniel is implicitly less inclusive and optimistic than this rendering of the Christian message. He frames trauma as something endured by all Jews under Roman rule, whether they are crucified Zealots or ordinary village people paying punitive taxes. While Daniel has no quarrel with this vision of collective victimhood, he is understandably more interested in the personal victimhood experienced by his own family—his father and uncle, crucified in retaliation for an act of resistance; his mother, dead of some respiratory illness after standing in the cold and damp next to their crosses for two days; his sister, Leah, so devastated at age five by the spectacle of her father’s torment that she has been haunted by “demons” ever since (71). As the only surviving member of his family other than his grandmother (who dies a few chapters into the novel), Leah embodies for Daniel the trauma of the whole clan and indeed of the Jewish people. While he initially believes that she is so scarred mentally that “she has forgotten everything” (71), he gradually discovers that in fact she retains her memory and her intelligence, even while her damage is such that she cannot always draw upon these faculties; for instance, after their grandmother’s death she can take over the housekeeping because she “remembered accurately almost everything she had watched her grandmother do” (107). The principal palimpsestic body in this text—or more accurately, the palimpsestic mind—is thus Leah’s, marked by layers of trauma overlaid by but still interpenetrating other forms of experience. Although Daniel ultimately cannot accomplish the heroic acts that he has assigned himself in his fantasies about liberating his country, the narrative makes it clear that it lies within his power to help Leah move beyond at least some of her trauma and enjoy at least some of the pleasures of normal life. Even here, however, Daniel must accept that Leah’s reclamation is not solely up to him. Her blossoming owes something to her friendship with Thacia, of which Daniel approves, and something to her quasi-romance with a Romano-German soldier, to which Daniel objects so violently that she nearly dies. The novel thus ends not with Daniel proposing marriage to Thacia (an event that does not occur within the narrative, although the reader may choose to believe that it will occur in future) but rather with Daniel inviting the enemy

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soldier into the house to speak to Leah after Jesus accomplishes both her cure and his conversion. The invitation is a tacit acknowledgment that Daniel’s preferences and prejudices cannot be the governing principle of Leah’s life, or even perhaps of his own. To reach health, he must accept his own secondary place, his subservience to a new form of the Law invoked by Hezron. The “Sunday-school” text clearly seeks to train the twentieth-century reader in a corresponding spirit of humility, a humility that we argue is fundamental to the palimpsestic project. In its employment of family and trauma, then, The Bronze Bow looks not only backward at past wrongs but also forward to a future in which a Christian world view dominates, both for Daniel and Leah and for the implied reader. Yet, as with Snedeker’s works, even while the novel suggests that it would be as well for Daniel not to dwell on his family’s tragedy, it simultaneously indicates that an awareness of the history of his people—which is also the history of his faith—is a legitimate source of strength for him. Not only does the title come from a line in the Psalms (“[God] trains my hands for war, / so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze” [qtd. 74, 75]), but Daniel, Thacia, and Thacia’s twin brother, Joel, repeatedly invoke heroes of the Jewish past such as Esther, Deborah, and the Maccabees (72–3). Moreover, and significantly for our purposes given that it is a point of resemblance to other texts in our sample, this history is tied to the physical landscape. When Daniel encounters Thacia and Joel in the first chapter, for instance, he looks out across the vista below them, described by the narrator in brilliant colors (“the grey-green olive orchards and the fresh, clear green fields of grain, banded by purple iris and shining yellow daffodils. To the south lay the lake, intensely blue. To the north, beyond the line of hills, through the shimmering, misty green of the valley, the silver thread of the Jordan wound up to the shining little jewel that was the Lake of Merom” [14]). To this beauty of place, he adds the glory of time: “ ‘There,’ he pointed out. ‘On that plain. Horses and chariots drawn up against him, and a great host of men like the sands of the shore. And Joshua fell on them and drove them as far as the Great Sea’ ” (14). Much as Snedeker’s Theras derives strength from thinking of Theseus and his ilk, the example provided by historical Jewish heroes remains important to Daniel, even while his tales of Judas Maccabeus gradually come to be overlaid by his accounts of Jesus’s latest miracle. Over much of the novel, Daniel thus reads the landscape as the scene of past Jewish military glories that can be brought to the surface once

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      again by the right leader, and this reading is clearly a product of the trauma that he, his family, and his people have sustained as a result of the Roman invasion and its forcible overlaying of the older Jewish cultural stratum. Yet while family is the chief experiencer of trauma, it is simultaneously the source of what the text presents as a better way of dealing with pain than the one that Daniel originally comes up with. Ultimately, readers are asked to agree that family ties trump military ties, inasmuch as Daniel chooses Leah over his fellow guerrillas. Whereas Daniel wants to see his group of outlaws as a metaphorical family, a band of brothers united by a shared commitment to resuscitating a glorious national past, he must gradually recognize that personal relationships matter more than politics. Even within the outlaw group, the most meaningful of his emotional bonds is not his admiration for the amoral leader but the love that he receives from a freed slave, a mute giant who eventually sacrifices his own life to help Daniel. The latter episode seems intended to illustrate Christ’s precept in John 15:13, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” here with an emphasis on the personal tie implied by the term “friend.” Real brotherhood, then, is implicitly to be found not in violent action but in sacrifice, and Daniel’s initially reluctant decision to return home to care for Leah proves to be the avenue by which his spiritual reclamation is eventually achieved.

3.4 Wounding in The Eagle of the Ninth In the Introduction to the present study, we discussed Rosemary Sutcliff ’s The Mark of the Horse Lord in terms of the cognitive distinction made in that narrative between curves and straight lines. Sutcliff ’s acclaimed 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth employs the same contrast, again associating curves with indigenous British culture and straight lines with the Roman invaders. In what Margery Hourihan identifies as “a key passage” (42), protagonist Marcus’ British friend Esca comments on how the differences in ornamentation between a symmetrically decorated Roman dagger-sheath and a British shield-boss epitomize differences in thought and outlook between the two cultures: You [Romans] are . . . the makers of straight roads and ordered justice and disciplined troops . . . and when we rise against you, we see our hosts break

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against the discipline of your troops, as the sea breaks against a rock. And we do not understand, because all these things are of the ordered pattern, and only the free curves of the shield-boss are real to us . . . And when the time comes that we begin to understand your world, too often we lose the understanding of our own. (Sutcliff, Eagle 93–4)

As Hourihan notes, this passage communicates “a perception of human history as a process of inevitable change, with inevitable loss accompanying whatever might be defined as gain” (43), although in her view British loss is played down while Roman gain is presented as a happy outcome for civilization; for Hourihan, the novel coaxes the reader into accepting “an image of natural selection, the unavoidable dominance of reason, order and efficiency over the unmoderated flux of life, no matter how poetic” (44). In other words, Sutcliff ’s narratorial decisions regarding imagery, focalization, and characterization shape readers’ views on a matter of vital significance to 1950s British politics, namely the value of empire. Without arguing against Hourihan’s observations, we seek to expand the scope of the examination of imagery in order to show how The Eagle of the Ninth, for all its interest in the conflict between curves and straight lines, might more appropriately be considered a palimpsest novel, and why this classification matters. Catherine Butler and Hallie O’Donovan, who also look at the passage about the shield-boss and the dagger-sheath, observe that the reader is not presented here with a “simplistic dichotomy,” inasmuch as “Sutcliff shades the contrast, both through Marcus and Esca’s discovery of the values they share behind differing modes of expression, and also by demonstrating the diversity hidden in the homogenizing terms ‘Roman’ and ‘Briton’ ” (30). As they read the novel, that is, Sutcliff is not memorializing the eradication of indigenous culture but suggesting how at least some of its values can continue to exist under Roman rule—a palimpsestic model rather than a model of erasure. In an insight consistent with our suggestion at the beginning of this chapter that the palimpsestic text for young readers is fundamentally a narrative illustrating aspects of maturing/aging that the child has not yet personally encountered, Butler and O’Donovan consider that The Eagle of the Ninth offers “an extended examination of the ways in which identities are formed, changed and revealed in new lights by lived experience” (31). Here again, trauma and family are essential components. Sutcliff ’s novel traces the efforts of Marcus Flavius Aquila, son of a commander of the First Cohort of the Ninth Legion, to retrieve the eagle

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      standard of that lost body of men and in the process uncover the history of whatever disaster befell the legion, ideally re-establishing the honor of a father whom he presumes (correctly, it turns out) to be dead. Marcus turns his energies to this task of reclaiming artifacts of the past because his own military career has been ended, shortly after his longed-for promotion to centurion, by a serious injury in battle; now unfit for the parade ground, he decides to serve country and family by taking on an undercover expedition beyond Hadrian’s Wall, accompanied only by the freedman Esca. After various narrow escapes, he returns home with the Eagle, his father’s signet ring, and an eyewitness account of the legion’s fate and his father’s death. Closure achieved, he can marry Cottia, the Romano-British girl next door, and remain in Britain on a full military pension. Sutcliff was to chronicle the adventures of later generations in Marcus’ family in four additional novels, each of which features the recovered signet ring. Roberts writes that Sutcliff ’s production of further installments of the saga “suggests not only the repetitions of history but also the status of each of her books as a kind of retelling” (117). Another way to put this point might be to observe that the persistence of certain objects from the past, such as the ring, offers a vision of the present as something underlain by a past that can at any moment intrude in palimpsestic fashion. Marcus’ own perceptions as focalized in The Eagle of the Ninth direct the reader from the outset to understand the physical world, in particular, as recording a history that involves the repeated depositing of new layers over old. The novel provides multiple descriptions that highlight the changes to which setting is subject, of which we will quote here only two. Marcus moves in with his Uncle Aquila, who lived on the extreme edge of Calleva [an appendix identifies this community as the future Silchester]. One reached his house down a narrow side-street that turned off not far from the East Gate, leaving behind the forum and the temples, and coming to a quiet angle of the old British earthworks—for Calleva had been a British dun before it was a Roman city—where hawthorn and hazel still grew and the shyer woodland birds sometimes came. It was much like the other houses of Calleva, timbered and red-roofed and comfortable, built round three sides of a tiny courtyard that was smoothly turfed and set about with imported roses and gum-cistus growing in tall stone jars. But it had one peculiarity: a squat, square, flat-roofed tower rising from one corner; for Uncle Aquila, having lived most of his life in the shadow of watch-towers from Memphis to Segedunum, could not be comfortable without one. (54)

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The length and specificity of this description—which, like its counterparts in the pages of Snedeker and Speare, contributes nothing to plot and little to characterization—suggest thematic importance, arising both from the depiction of Roman Calleva as sharing location and some physical features with the earlier British dun and from the suggestion that the architecture of Aquila’s house is dictated by his personal past. Somewhat similarly, looking at Isca Dumnoniorum (Exeter) earlier in the narrative, Marcus sees that “Little that was Roman was here as yet, despite the stone-built forum. One day there would be straight streets, he supposed, and temples and bath-houses and a Roman way of life. But as yet it was a place where two worlds met without mingling” (10). This description highlights process while simultaneously suggesting an understanding of Roman Britain (“a place where two worlds met without mingling”) that much of the rest of the novel will go some distance toward undercutting. What is elided in the example just quoted is any sense of deep emotion; although the imposition of “a Roman way of life” upon an indigenous town cannot come without pain, at this early stage of the novel Marcus is not yet attuned to such feeling. This awareness, however, is not long in coming. By the end of the second chapter, Marcus is being introduced to an evocative object that has parallels to the eagle standard and the signet ring that will loom so large later in the novel: his local British guide and hunting companion, Cradoc, shows off his father’s war spear, which “‘was in his hand when he died—up yonder under our old ramparts where the fortress walls stand now. See, the mark is still upon it . . . his own blood, and the blood of his enemy.’ He parted the heron’s feathers to show the neck of the shaft blackened by an old stain” (29, ellipsis orig.). History, particularly painful personal history, is not something to be washed away, even if old ramparts have been replaced by new fortress walls, and Marcus quickly perceives that the peace that seems to reign in the community, the apparent and even genuine friendship between himself and Cradoc, “was only a film . . . and that underneath, something very different was stirring” (29). The next chapter recounts the tribal uprising and the hand-to-hand combat between Marcus and Cradoc that will leave Cradoc dead and Marcus permanently maimed. Later, wandering through what is now the Scottish Lowlands, Marcus encounters a ruined Roman fort and is pained by the contrast between what he imagines to have been the scene thirty years earlier, when “there

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      had been many horses in the stables, cavalry manoeuvres on the gentle southern slope below the ramparts, with the riders crested with tossing yellow plumes, the usual baths and wine-shops and the turf bothies of the women’s quarters; and over all, the crested sentries marching to and fro,” and the present scene of desolation, when “grass covered the cobbles of the streets, timber roofs had fallen in, and the red sandstone walls stood gaunt and empty to the sky” (148). The juxtaposition of Roman authority and its dissolution mirrors what Sutcliff ’s readers are experiencing in being confronted simultaneously with a story in which Imperial Rome still flourishes and their own knowledge of its demise. (Recall here Snedeker’s achievement of a similar contrast via her obtrusive modern narrator.) Esca, who joins Marcus in pitching camp in the ruined fort, draws attention to the uncanniness inherent in sites where the layering of time is overly apparent; he reports being made to feel “cold between my shoulders” at perceiving here “the ghosts of a lost Legion” (149). The legate who gives Marcus his undercover mission in Chapter 10 expresses his own version of this anxiety: “Sometimes at Eburacum [York] it seems to me that the foundations of that old building lie uneasy beneath the new . . . Eburacum is a little ghost-ridden by the Ninth Legion . . . lying, as it were, like a sediment under the new wine of another Legion” (122–3). The layered liquidity of the images of wine and, earlier, film implies the readiness with which the past may rise up to confront the present and shape the future. As Marcus’ injury and the haunting of Eburacum by the doomed Ninth Legion suggest, trauma functions in Sutcliff ’s novel as the engine that typically drives the past’s intrusions into the present and the present’s efforts to resuscitate the past. Although trauma might be presumed to be something better avoided, for Sutcliff as for Snedeker its aftereffects are as likely as not to be positive. The narrative provides vivid descriptions of the agony caused to Marcus by his wound, its aftermath, and the surgical interventions that it necessitates. (Sutcliff, who used a wheelchair as the result of severe juvenile-onset rheumatoid arthritis, was no stranger to pain and disability, and her novels frequently feature physically damaged characters [Eccleshare].) Yet the story also makes plain that damage, whether physical or psychological, is ultimately to be understood as one among a number of factors shaping identity, and thus may be built upon in good ways by a strong character. Upon the successful conclusion of their mission, Marcus responds to Esca’s feelings of

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ambivalence about being back in the Roman world, “You don’t like being a freed-man, do you? Well, I don’t like being lame. That makes two of us, and the only thing we can do about it, you and I, is to learn to carry the scars lightly” (272). The advice comes from Marcus’ hard-won understanding that the past is always palpable beneath the present: “You could give a slave his freedom, but nothing could undo the fact that he had been a slave” (272). That Esca accepts the advice—as he takes it in, “his head went up, and his eyes wore the dancing look they always wore in action” (273)—seems largely a recognition of the bond that their shared experience of trauma has created between him and his former owner, and of the implicit acknowledgment on Marcus’ part that the “two of us . . . you and I” have been made brothers thereby rather than representatives of different ends of a hierarchical social order. Yet another important figure in this novel who is the possessor of a traumatic history that has left him with a layered identity, his past coming to the fore at moments of unexpected crisis, is Guern the Hunter, a tribesman whom Marcus and Esca encounter on their push beyond the Wall. After Guern provides a night’s hospitality and Marcus watches him shave in the morning, “Marcus saw that just under the point of his jaw, the skin . . . had a thickened look, almost like the scar of an old gall. It was very faint, but still to be seen: the mark made by the chin-strap of a Roman helmet, through many years of wearing it” (62). After questioning him and hearing some of his story, Marcus looks “for any trace that might be left under the painted hunter of the Roman Centurion of twelve years ago; and presently he thought he had found it” in a scar on Guern’s forehead, which marks him—like Marcus himself—as an initiate into the cult of Mithras (164). This evidence of religious brotherhood, along with the revelation that Marcus’ father was Guern’s cohort commander, brings into the open the long-buried secret of what happened to the Ninth Legion, a story of shame and failure that has left Guern with much deeper scars than the visible marks of his Roman life discerned by Marcus. Yet this intrusion of past into present enables Guern to begin to come to terms with his former self, ultimately paying off the debt that he feels is owed to his old commander by aiding that commander’s son. Ties of family, in this novel as in the others discussed in this chapter, are often indistinguishable from ties of history. For a second fortuitous encounter with Guern enables Marcus and Esca to evade the pursuers who seek to reclaim the Eagle and kill those

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    

who have absconded with their war trophy (to which the tribesmen ascribe divine powers). Although Guern rejects Marcus’ impulsive invitation to accompany them back to Roman territory and appears on the surface like any other “half-naked, wild-haired tribesman,” Marcus perceives that “[in] the wide, well-drilled movement of his arm as he raised it in greeting and farewell was all Rome. It was the parade-ground and the clipped voice of trumpets, the iron discipline and the pride. In that instance Marcus seemed to see, not the barbarian hunter, but the young Centurion, proud in his first command, before ever the shadow of the doomed Legion fell on him” (243). Overlaid by British tribal life the centurion may be, but the Roman foundation still exists and helps to dictate Guern’s actions. Thanks to him, the Eagle can come home to Calleva, where it is laid to rest in a subterranean cavity that Aquila has earlier had constructed beneath the floor of his household shrine (276), effectively being returned to the bottom layer of the palimpsest. At the interment, which features valedictory remarks by Aquila’s friend the Legate, Marcus perceives the presence of two ghosts from the past: his father, “a slight, dark man, with an eager face beneath the tall crest of a First Cohort Commander; and a shock-headed tribesman in a saffron kilt. Yet when [Marcus] looked at the tribesman, he was gone, and in his place the young Centurion he had once been” (277). Guern’s imagined presence in two temporal guises again draws readers’ attention to time’s ability to impose change. This instruction on personal growth takes place during a mystical moment that might be considered the low-key counterpart of The Enchanted Castle’s reference to what Stephen Prickett identifies as “the consummation of space and time in the contemplation of the ‘Light Eternal’ at the end of Dante’s Paradiso” (238). Sutcliff ’s novel thus brings together key characteristics of the palimpsestic texts that we are examining in this chapter. Evident here is the narrative linkage made between physical environment (here, ghostridden and full of contrast between past and present) and personal experience. Trauma is central, presented as impetus for change, the pathway through which one can access the past, and a mechanism by which close personal relationships may be forged. Family thus consists of both the elective family—the brotherhood between Marcus and Esca or the friendship and eventual romance between Marcus and Cottia—and the heritage left by earlier generations, here made concrete in the signet ring once belonging to Marcus’ father and passed down through all five

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volumes in this sequence of novels organized around blood descent. It is noteworthy, however, that heritage in these texts is not a matter of unquestioned right, but rather something that has to be claimed, often at considerable effort. Much as the children in The Enchanted Castle must experience fear and exercise ingenuity and agency to tame the magic ring and learn its history, Snedeker’s Chloé must suffer abuse and danger before being recognized as her father’s legitimate heir, and Daniel in The Bronze Bow must undergo painful soul-searching and attitude adjustment if he is to come to terms with his role as brother and enter into Christ’s kingdom, Marcus must risk his life in order to prove himself the worthy son of a worthy father. This pattern of herculean endeavor in the reclamation of heritage (also evident in some of the texts discussed in the previous chapter, where lost fathers or ancestors or ancient workers of magic feature as well) suggests that the child reader’s relationship to history is often not perceived as easy or natural. Simultaneously, the texts containing this pattern suggest as well that a connection to history is a treasure of great symbolic value.

3.5 Conclusion Readers of this book may observe that our palimpsestic texts skew toward older works: our examples of the palimpsest modality come from the period 1906–80, with no twenty-first-century entries. Yet readers will also notice that we are not much concerned with the specific historical moments in which individual texts appeared, focusing instead on the likenesses that become apparent when one juxtaposes novels—even novels written decades apart—that share a commitment to this metaphor. We recognize that this approach ignores information worth contemplating. For instance, in considering The Enchanted Castle Hale reads the children’s encounters with the gods as a nod to a late Victorian/Edwardian convention associating childhood with the pastoral and the pagan as a sign of its specialness and superiority to adulthood (25), and she profitably reads Nesbit’s use of Pan alongside such contemporaneous appearances of this figure as J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Dickon in The Secret Garden, and the god’s cameo appearance as protector of a strayed baby otter in The Wind in the Willows in order to identify and describe a turn-of-the-century sensibility and attitude toward childhood. Nevertheless, the shared employment of a particular classical deity does not require that these texts

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    

make use of the same underlying structural metaphor, and we argue that foundational differences of this kind—our principal focus throughout this study—have important consequences. Nesbit’s invocation of the idea HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST leads to a different kind of cognitive relationship with the reader, and a different tone, than is found in the other texts that Hale cites. Yet our choice of emphasis does not mean that in looking at the larger arc of palimpsestic texts over three-quarters of a century, we deny the impact of historical change during that period. To invoke one example: in an examination of children’s books about Roman Britain from the 1950s and the 2000s, Butler has documented a shift from a pro-Roman outlook that takes Rome as the representative of civilization and order to a Brito-centric view (“Eagle”). This shift clearly responds to the repudiation of imperialism that became widespread among Western intellectuals in the late twentieth century, and in that repudiation one may find one possible explanation for the decline in popularity of the palimpsest metaphor. If trauma becomes too widespread, so that readers are no longer thinking about individual pain but about the near-eradication of a colonized civilization, the implicit authorial recommendation—present in all the texts featured in this chapter—that this trauma be used to good and productive ends in the quest for greater maturity may seem a glib diminishment of a people’s tragedy. It remains possible to tell stories about the Roman occupation of Britain (or of Greece or Palestine), but it becomes harder to base them on the metaphor of the palimpsest, precisely because that metaphor takes damage as a given rather than as something that must needs be mourned. Trites observes that “At its most basic level, cognitive narratology affords us the opportunity to interrogate how the metaphors we employ manipulate our epistemologies” (“Growth” 67). In this chapter we have sought to show how the structural metaphor HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST has generated a shared epistemology on the part of the authors who employ it, sufficient that readers see particular narrative patterns repeated again and again. Yet as Trites also points out, “In cognitive narratology, scripts [internalized expectations that enable readers to recognize and predict what might happen at a given narrative juncture] gain significance both in how they rely on stereotypical conceptual knowledge and how they vary that pattern” (“Growth” 69): these authors may be said to be telling the same story of pain and renewal and

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the workings of time, but they are not all telling it in the same way. The variations matter because, as Nikolajeva puts it, deviation from scripts demands from readers “attention and memory that allow adjustment and restructuring” (Reading 4). In other words, it is in variation that readers learn to grapple with the models offered to them, expanding their sense of what is essential and what is optional, the better to understand how these models might apply to readers’ own experience and perhaps, John Stephens suggests, to transform the world thereby (15).

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4 HISTORY IS A MAP 1 Navigating the Underworld

Literature for children and young adults contains a great many map texts, works that use the metaphor of the mappable physical journey to represent a protagonist’s process of maturing while gaining knowledge of the self and/or the world. Whereas the palimpsest text tends to keep the protagonist within a relatively confined geographical space (unless, as we have noted of The White Isle and as might also be argued of The Eagle of the Ninth, it is a blend of palimpsest and map modalities), map texts typically feature considerable mobility, so much so that literal maps often appear as illustrations, endpapers, and/or significant aspects of the plot to provide a visual representation of the terrain covered.¹ Other texts may contain only what Janet Grafton calls “verbal map[s], directions to an unfamiliar place” (65) or, we suggest, an unfamiliar state of being. To be sure, as Grafton adds, in a sense all “stories are maps” inasmuch as “they pinpoint (what to) treasure; they provide coordinates to the past; they are a means of bridging the literary and the literal” (72, orig. emphasis). Yet we employ here a more specific definition: we are looking particularly at texts that in evoking the past incorporate detailed descriptions of protagonists’ physical journeys over unfamiliar terrain and that accordingly privilege the metaphor HISTORY IS A MAP.

¹ We are primarily concerned with verbal matters, but this is for reasons of space rather than out of any belief that the visual qualities of maps used to illustrate children’s texts might not be relevant to our point. For a discussion of those qualities, see especially Anthony Pavlik’s “ ‘A Special Kind of Reading Game,’ ” a valuable discussion of ways in which these documents share qualities, such as “shifting perspectives” and multiple, openended possibilities for travel, with the works that they accompany. Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction. Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey, Oxford University Press (2019). © Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846031.001.0001

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In map texts² incorporating the classical world, the terrain being mapped is necessarily a manifestation of the long-ago. For realistic historical fiction, this terrain may be the fictional world’s recent past or its Greco-Roman present, but if the work involves transporting characters from something approximating our conventional reality to some other form of experience, the terrain may be the novel’s more fantastic dimension. In either case, the gradual uncovering of the secrets of the map as characters follow prompts to reach a designated goal simultaneously solves a specific problem posed within the narrative and tracks the same characters’ acquisition of mastery and status. As developmental psychologist Lynn Liben observes, “Maps are valuable precisely because even as they offer information about the world, they also offer something different from the world as is” (19); this combination of knowledge and new perspective is what at least one character within a given map text can expect to achieve over the course of the narrative. The process models for the reader what Liben identifies as a common goal of the map itself: to “provoke readers to see new visions, ask new questions, and expand or change previously held beliefs” (22). Authors of neoclassical (and other) map texts, then, share a viewpoint that Anna Juan Cantavella discusses with particular reference to Peter Sís, whose picture books often feature maps, namely “an understanding that the exploration of identity is intimately linked with the exploration of the spaces in which that identity is formed” (40). Youth literature contains far too many map texts to discuss in a single study, even when one winnows the sample by demanding that the texts contain a neoclassical element.³ Our two chapters on this topological ² To quote Pavlik’s summary of a distinction made by Michel de Certeau, a narrative that begins on its endpaper or frontispiece with a map showing the places visited within the text typically ends after having become what de Certeau calls a “tour,” as “the rhetoric of the ‘tour’ contains within it attention to the effects of the tour, its goals and potentials, its limitations and its obligations” (Pavlik 33). As Pavlik notes, however, the term “tour” is hardly standard; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use “tracing” to refer to the purely imitative qualities of the map and “mapping” to refer to the performative aspects (33). It is the latter issue in which we are particularly interested, although we have chosen the term “map text” to refer to works that combine the two. ³ Thanks in part to the success of Rick Riordan’s various mythology-based series, there is currently a large array of neoclassical juvenile fantasy fiction available, much of which might be classifiable as map texts. Librarian Nicole Crowson, for instance, provides a 2016 booklist including the following works (among others): Peter Lerangis’s Seven Wonders series (2013–16, 5 vols., ages 8–14); Joanne Harris’s Runemarks (2008, ages 10 and up);

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      trope thus focus on two subtypes, and even here we take a selective approach in choosing works for discussion. One, the subject of Chapter 5 of the present work, is the grotesque or antic map text. The other, to which we now turn our attention, is the map text in which the journey includes a symbolic or actual visit to the underworld, a negotiation of sorts with death. Roberta Seelinger Trites has observed that “Adolescent literature depends on these embodied metaphors [exemplified by the journey or voyage] so often that one of the frequent assumptions readers bring to the genre is their belief that protagonists will arrive successfully at their metaphorical destination and grow, not die” (“Growth” 77). We agree with her about the essential optimism of the map text as a form, which makes the frequency with which neoclassical children’s map texts draw upon the myths of Orpheus and/or Persephone, or otherwise direct readers’ attention toward death as represented by the underworld, an especially interesting phenomenon. Even in association with the entailed metaphor THE PAST IS DEAD, the metaphor HISTORY IS A MAP implies that using this map to arrive at a destination that is desired and not simply feared is possible. In making that suggestion, writers of books for children and adolescents simultaneously explain and train their audience. Trites elsewhere comments that from the standpoint of cognitive theory, authors’ “tendency to structure growth, and especially psychological growth, in embodied terms serves at least two purposes: authors can use discourse—that is, language itself—to help readers perceive psychological growth by supplying physical images that readers readily understand.” She continues, “Even more important, these embodied metaphors reveal the interconnections between mind and body” (Conceptualizations 21), a point similar to one made by Guillemette Bolens, who cites neuroscientific studies indicating that “the brain . . . simulates perceptual and motor actions when they are signified verbally” (11; see also Nikolajeva, Reading 8). These studies refer to simple actions—for instance, imagining oneself writing has been shown to cause the blood in the brain to flow in patterns Lucy Coats’s Beasts of Olympus series (2015–, presently 8 vols., ages 7–10); Joan Holub’s Heroes in Training series (2012–6, subsequently continued by Tracey West, 18 vols. projected, ages 7–10); Holub and Suzanne Williams’s Goddess Girls series (2010–, presently 24 vols., ages 8–12); Carolyn Hennesy’s Mythic Misadventures series (2007–13, 7 vols., ages 9–12); Kate O’Hearn’s Pegasus series (2011–7, 6 vols., ages 8–12); and Michelle Paver’s Gods and Warriors series (2012–5, 5 vols., ages 10–14).

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that resemble those formed when one actually moves pen across paper (Bolens 11)—but the longstanding didactic element in children’s literature reveals a conceptually related conviction on the part of the didactic writer that reading about desirable deeds, even of a complex sort, is good cognitive training for performing similar deeds in the future. Building on this perception, we suggest that the preoccupation with the underworld variously manifested in palimpsest texts’ references to archaeological digs, buried chambers, literal underworlds such as that described in Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England, and the bottom layers of the palimpsestic landscape, and in the references to underworlds and engulfed realms found in map texts discussed in this chapter and the next, may reflect a wish to lead the reader toward accepting that both growth and existence have their inevitable end— that death is part of life. Yet the recognition of death does not require a loss of pleasure in life, and map texts in particular celebrate protagonists’ acquisition of agency as a real and lasting achievement capable of resulting in real and lasting good. In other words, the implicit or explicit acknowledgment of death in these works does not make them melancholy; rather, it is an important mechanism for furthering the emphasis on “positive growth” that, as Trites notes, literary critics have so often associated with the Bildungsroman (Conceptualizations 22). To this end, a number of the texts examined in this chapter contain a significant religious dimension. Chapter 3 sketched the association of family with the physical and psychological traumas depicted in the palimpsest texts that we discussed. The present chapter sees family as a crucial part of the pattern established by map texts as well, but with the important difference that family is typically represented less as the site or record of past trauma (consider, for instance, the wounded family members in The Bronze Bow, Theras and His Town, and other texts, or the intergenerational strife in The Forgotten Daughter) than as an area for the young person’s exercise of agency. Protagonists in this chapter find that their quests include constituting or reuniting family, usually as a way of healing past wounds, but also as a testament to the ability to share responsibility that is one signifier of maturity. Family, that is, may be presented as the solution to or opposite of death, implying as it does a sense of continuance and of ongoing connection. If Persephone can be removed from the underworld by her mother for only half the year after Hades abducts her, and

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Eurydice cannot be removed at all when Orpheus breaks the rules of the compact made for his dead wife’s reclamation, these failures to triumph over death nevertheless do not mean the dissolution of the family bonds involved in each myth. In the map texts that we discuss here, which include classic fantasies by E. Nesbit and C. S. Lewis, mysteries by Roger Lancelyn Green and Caroline Lawrence, horse stories by K. M. Peyton, and contemporary fantasies by Katherine Marsh and Tony Abbott, gaining understanding of the connection and continuance represented by family—both what it can do and what it cannot—proves important to navigating death.

4.1 A Map Text Without a Map: The Story of the Amulet Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906) is both the oldest map text discussed in this chapter and the one that most deviates from the script established by these texts—partly because the child characters’ frequent brushes with death do not (quite) take them into the underworld, and partly because their forays into the past are represented as more or less random, an inadequately guided search for a needle in a haystack consisting of thousands of years of history. As such, the novel offers an instructive comparison to later examples of the “children visit the underworld” script, since among the missing elements standard in the later works is the concept of Bildung. While by the end of the tale Nesbit’s children are slightly older and considerably more experienced in the ways of magic than they were at the start of the first volume (Five Children and It, published in book form in 1902) of the trilogy that The Story of the Amulet concludes, they are not noticeably more mature in their interactions with one another, despite the awe-inspiring sights and events to which the narrative exposes them. Although, as Joanna Paul observes, the witnessing of “some kind of mysterious rite or sacred ceremony” is an important part of the pattern established by the children’s excursions into the past (35), they seem little impressed by these encounters with the ineffable; the occasion on which they make good resolutions about improving their behavior is after they visit a future London run on the Fabian Socialist principles that Nesbit and her husband espoused. It is an adult who most obviously gains the

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“knowledge and new perspective” that we identified above as a hallmark of what the map text offers its characters. In other words, a reader might conclude that their brushes with death frighten the children but do not instruct them, a circumstance that (from an adult perspective) seems related to the absence of the kind of linear guidance metaphorically represented in other texts by maps.⁴ While the children’s quest meets with the success that readers of such tales have learned to expect of such enterprises, the solution to their problem—“the simplest thing in the world! And yet none of them had ever thought of it” (Nesbit, Amulet 270)—is not a product of their own ingenuity but is provided by an adult confidant. That this figure, a scholar of the ancient world who is known to the children as the “learned gentleman” and “Jimmy,” is presented as both prematurely aged and childlike might be presumed to make him the ideal guide for them, yet because they never admit him to full understanding of the reality of the magic, his ability to offer guidance and indeed to behave in a commonsensical fashion on magical occasions is limited. Agency, then, is unevenly distributed throughout the narrative, and no child or adult ever seems to have enough; even by the end of the narrative, only the amulet itself is fully potent. To be sure, the children’s deepest wish is not for agency but rather for the reconstitution of family. The novel’s first chapter establishes that Father, a war correspondent, is away covering the conflict in Manchuria, while Mother and the toddler known as “the Lamb” have gone to Madeira for Mother’s health (12–13). “Wretched” as paying guests in the London boarding-house run by their former nanny, Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane cheer up when they liberate from a pet store the Psammead, the sand-fairy who had unwillingly provided magic wishes in Five Children and It. Although the Psammead cannot grant them additional wishes because a rule preventing him from doing so was established at the end of the first volume, he informs them that they

⁴ Noting that “the Psammead does not act as the children’s guide in Nesbit’s trilogy,” Michelle Smith argues that this role is essentially filled by Anthea as the “eldest child” and surrogate mother (299). In fact, however, in Five Children and It Anthea describes herself as “next eldest” to Cyril (52), thus establishing that in the children’s own pecking order (though matters are clearly otherwise as far as the narrator is concerned) she is not first in line for the authority that they associate with age and gender. And indeed, as Smith points out, in The Story of the Amulet it is often the case that “Anthea’s strategies do not prove useful” in dealing with the inhabitants of other eras and locations (304).

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can buy from a nearby junk shop an amulet capable of granting their heart’s desire. The amulet turns out to be only partly functional, having lost half of itself at some never-identified moment “in the Past,” where the children accordingly go to search for the complete talisman and their heart’s desire (52). Their destinations, most of which involve them in mortal danger, include predynastic Egypt, Babylon, Atlantis, Britain on the eve of Julius Caesar’s invasion, pharaonic Egypt, Tyre, and the Britain of the future (on the mistaken theory that from that vantage point they will remember where they found the object of their quest). Finally, Jimmy— who has accompanied them to Atlantis and ancient Britain, and who will soon, as a consequence of his longing for knowledge of the ancient world, host in his own body the spirit of an ancient Egyptian priest, Rekh-marā—cuts the Gordian knot by suggesting that they ask to enter the past at a moment when the complete amulet is unguarded so that they can steal it. Once attained, “the perfect and ultimate Charm” provides heart’s desires for all, including the Psammead, who wants only to retreat into the past for a nice long sleep (275–80), and Rekh-marā, who wants to stay in the present to learn of its marvels but can only do so by giving up his body and his imperfections in order to merge with Jimmy.⁵ This denouement suggests that the two ancient beings, the Psammead and Rekh-marā, find their happiness in symbolic death. They could be said to have completed their journeys, whereas the four children will presumably develop other heart’s desires in future beyond the Lacanian wish to be inseparable from the parent. Yet an interpretation of this novel that frames the children’s immaturity as inadequacy may be missing the point. Reading Nesbit’s trilogy against a dominant critical perspective that sees it as minimally engaged with spirituality, Naomi Wood argues that critics have overlooked the presence of “a spirituality not divorced from the body but intimately connected with it”—an embodied spirituality specifically associated not only with childhood but also with a death that “cannot be so clearly distinguished” from life or from dreams (90, 101).

⁵ In Deborah Thomas’s reading of the novel as an imperialist text, “The message is that, however ineffectual Jimmy has been, this British scholar of the present is morally superior to an Egyptian priest of the past, and a young British male can rightly destroy alien evil” (906). Naomi Wood, in contrast, sees both Jimmy and Rekh-marā participating in “the union of death” (101).

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Considering Wood’s insights in the light of cognitive literary theory, one might hypothesize that the children’s many near-death experiences train the reader in spiritual understandings conveyed here in deliberately down-to-earth terms: that death is a close neighbor to children as well as to the aged; that it is associated with the imagination; that it is a sort of dream. (On a biographical level, Nesbit’s deeply felt traumas included her father’s death when she was three years old, the encounter with the mummies of Bordeaux that she later wrote gave rise to “nights and nights of anguish and horror, long years of bitterest fear and dread” [Long Ago 64], and the postoperative death in 1900 of her fifteen-year-old son Fabian. Each of these events informed her imaginative fiction, which can sometimes be seen reliving or reversing their fictional counterparts [see, e.g., Briggs, Woman 275, 1].) Citing work by Daniel Punday, Bolens writes that “A narrative conveys a specific way of thinking the body[,] and this particular conceptualization of corporeality has an impact on the shaping of the narrative—on the protagonists’ characterization, the plot, and the narrative spatiotemporal framing. A narrative thus results in part from the type of corporeality it conveys” (25, orig. emphasis). The corporeal spirituality that Wood perceives in The Story of the Amulet may be seen, then, as “thinking the body” simultaneously of the novel, the characters, and the reader as Nesbit works through her own relationship to the past and to death in order to present her findings to readers through story. The two Greco-Roman episodes in this work, namely the visit to Atlantis and the events culminating in the encounter with Julius Caesar, provide particularly good demonstrations of the relationship of corporeality and imagination, death and the return to life, that is at the center of the novel overall. The children are inspired to ask the amulet to take them to Atlantis when they overhear an exchange between Jimmy and a friend of his, based on Nesbit’s friend Ernest Wallis Budge (Briggs, “Amulet” 222), during which Jimmy wishes that he could go there. Since he has wished it, the children know that “he’s got to go some time”⁶ (Nesbit, Amulet 158); yet as the chapter opens with Cyril and Robert imitating the poses of statues from Greek antiquity (the Venus de Milo and the Discobolus are the ones mentioned), one might conclude

⁶ Anthea is here speaking literally, but of course this phrase is often used metaphorically to refer to death.

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that it is the children’s imaginative play rather than Jimmy’s scholarly wish that shapes the episode’s fantastic setting. Form follows fancy as the children and Jimmy receive a tour of the Atlantean capital, viewing the golden temple of Poseidon and the city walls covered with brass, tin, and oricalchum described in Plato’s Timaeus. Terrifyingly, Plato’s account in the Critias of Atlantis’s destruction by earthquake and flood also proves accurate, and the island vanishes under “a waste of waters, with above it the peak of the terrible mountain with fire raging from it” (Nesbit, Amulet 174). That the children see this much—and nearly perish with Atlantis’s inhabitants—is due to Jimmy’s stubborn insistence that he “will see the end of the dream” (173, orig. emphasis), an insistence that reflects his conviction that magic is not reality. His companions know otherwise: “You’ll never see anything else if you do,” said Cyril. “Oh, Jimmy!” appealed Anthea. “I’ll never bring you out again!” “You’ll never have the chance if you don’t go soon,” said the Psammead. (173, orig. emphasis)

“Dreams,” or imagined experiences, or magical happenings, then, are compatible with the destruction of real bodies, while simultaneously the moment of death is here what the imagination gravitates toward; presumably because both the Timaeus and the Critias, her sources, dwell on the disappearance of Athens’s ancient predecessor, Nesbit’s chapter finds its temporal setting not during the period of the flourishing of Plato’s fictional civilization but at the time of its demise. Atlantis’s engulfing, its downward movement from mountainous island to undersea lost continent, is delicately hinted at in the downward trajectory of the illustration reproduced as Figure 4.1 and forms the novel’s closest approximation of the “children visit the underworld” script. Engulfing will reappear in more positive, though still death-related, terms when Rekh-marā’s consciousness is swallowed up in Jimmy’s body, the present literally embodying the past. Meanwhile, the narrative’s episodic structure, in which random references dictate the setting of the adventure of the moment (Jane’s singing of “How many miles to Babylon?” inspires the children’s Babylonian stay, for example), recapitulates this emphasis on evanescence or temporariness—a condition that, as the children’s visit to the socialist-utopian London of the future indicates, will eventually characterize their own familiar environment as well.

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Figure 4.1 In this illustration by H. R. Millar for the Atlantean installment of The Strand’s serialization of E. Nesbit’s “The Amulet” (vol. 30 issue 179, Nov. 1905, p. 593), “What do you call this country?”, the Psammead, Anthea, and Jane, as well as the folds of their interlocutor’s Grecian draperies and the shading on the wall, face left, in illustration often a convention indicating movement toward the past; the Psammead’s gesture downward hints at Atlantis’s coming destruction and the preoccupation with underworlds shared by many neoclassical map texts. Image courtesy of Indiana University Libraries.

Yet the ancient British episode, placed immediately after the excursion to Atlantis, suggests that death can be undone by moving backward in time; if THE PAST IS DEAD, it seems also that THE PAST IS LIVING. This chapter is distinctive inasmuch as the children visit the past not in an effort to complete the amulet but as the result of Jimmy’s wish, made in the presence of the Psammead, that Imogen, an orphaned working-class girl whom Anthea has found crying in the park, might find a home where she is wanted. It turns out that this home is in the tribal

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British world of 55 BC, where a local queen, “her thin face lighted up with a radiance like sunrise,” recognizes her as her lost child eaten by wolves, and Imogen in turn sees that “it is mother—it is!” (186, orig. emphasis). When the four children ask the Psammead whether the two are “really” mother and daughter, it responds, “Who knows? . . . but each one fills the empty place in the other’s heart,” and Jimmy wishes that “the child might stay in the dream” (187). The episode thus reverses the Persephone myth, inasmuch as the solution to bereavement is not for the living member of the mother– child dyad to try to extract the beloved from death, but rather for both members to find a welcoming haven in the past. That the past is associated with death has already been established, most dramatically by the destruction of Atlantis, but here the association is restated more mildly through the children’s awareness that Julius Caesar is about to invade Imogen’s new home and that the ensuing conflict will end in the British tribes’ defeat. At another wish from Jimmy, the Psammead takes him and the four children into Caesar’s presence, where they explain their identity, describe the Edwardian future, and plead with him not to follow through with his plans to conquer Britain. Although after their departure Caesar believes himself to have been dreaming, the encounter is enough to persuade him that Britain is well worth Rome’s attention, so in Nesbit’s account the havoc to be wreaked among the ancient Britons—the death of a civilization, indeed—may be laid at the children’s door.⁷ But despite this impending doom, the reader is instructed to see Imogen’s placement with the tribal queen as “a good dream,” in Jimmy’s words (187). The tableau of mother and child, who, in an image recalling the boys’ play at the beginning of the chapter, cling together “so closely, so strongly that they stood an instant like a statue carved in stone” (186), is presented, through the static associations of the “statue” simile, as what is most important and enduring about the episode. One of many ⁷ A hero of Nesbit’s, Julius Caesar makes brief appearances in two of her later fantasies, The Magic City (1910) and Wet Magic (1913), as a champion of the child protagonists of those texts, driving away the forces of chaos and nastiness who have emerged from books to make war on the forces of good. Paul notes that Caesar’s ability in The Magic City to force the erupting Gaulish tribesmen back into the pages of the military chronicle from which they have illicitly emerged “underscores the authority of written history by implying that what is written cannot be easily undone” (48–9); another way to put this point might be to say that the pre-existing text by Caesar functions as a map that both provides Nesbit with her rebellious Gauls and establishes where they should be located.

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moments of emotionally supercharged reunion between parent and child to be found in the fatherless Nesbit’s works (particularly after the death of her mother in 1902), it prefigures the reunion of the four children with their missing family members that will take place on the novel’s final page. Indeed, the four children’s father’s absence in Manchuria and mother’s absence in Madeira are themselves symbolic deaths, which result in intense mourning at the beginning of the narrative and obsessive forays into the past thereafter, excursions that the plot explicitly identifies as the solution to the children’s bereavement. The past here— the source of statues, in this narrative—is the site of completion, the place where one may find whole families as well as whole amulets, perfect knowledge of the ancient world (for Jimmy), and, significantly for our point, eternal sleep (for the Psammead). While the children’s quest does not lead them to stay in the past themselves, then, its success provides the reader with emotional guidance that suggests that the narrative itself functions as the kind of map—helpful in crises, usable in later life—that its own plot does not contain.

4.2 Underworlds and (Platonic) Caves in The Silver Chair Each of the seven volumes in Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (1950–6) qualifies as a map text, since each deploys maps, instructions, and/or the plotting of territory in sending its protagonist(s) on a quest, typically designed to save the country from rule by malign foreign and/or supernatural forces.⁸ Indeed, Lewis’s description of the geography of Narnia and its neighbors is sufficiently detailed that multiple maps of Narnia have been drawn, beginning with that produced in 1972 by the Chronicles’ illustrator Pauline Baynes (“putting into practice,” Anthony Pavlik and Hazel Sheeky Bird note, “the map-making skills she learnt in the Women’s Voluntary Service during the Second World War” [2–3]). Each volume of the saga is also influenced by the classical world, inasmuch as Narnia—so named, ⁸ The one exception is The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), in which the motivation for the quest is primarily the love of exploration (the desire to create a map, if you will), though nominally King Caspian is searching for allies sent into exile by his usurping uncle, Miraz. Here the central characters are asked along the way to save themselves from rule by their besetting sins, a trope suggesting similarity between Narnia and the individual psyche.

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according to Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, after a town that Lewis had discovered in the pages of Murray’s Small Classical Atlas (306)— is populated by centaurs, fauns, dryads, and river-gods, alongside creatures taken from Norse myth or invented by the author. Lewis reports in “It All Began with a Picture . . . ” that Narnia had its genesis in “a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it’” (79–80). While the classical aspects of Narnia are often overshadowed by the Chronicles’ Christian content, then, it is worth bearing in mind that the classical aspects are the seed from which the stories developed.⁹ For reasons of space and because it is the installment of the series that fits best into the particular subset of classically inflected map texts with which this chapter is concerned, we focus here on The Silver Chair (1953). The plot of this novel (the fourth of the seven volumes in terms of publication order, the sixth in terms of the chronology within the series) centers on two human children, Jill and Eustace, summoned out of postwar England into Narnia by the Christlike Aslan the Lion to fulfill his bidding by rescuing the captive Prince Rilian. The latter disappeared ten Narnian years earlier while in pursuit of a great green snake and a beautiful lady, who, Jill instantly and correctly theorizes, may have been one and the same (Chair 52). The children are furnished with a Narnian protector, Puddleglum the Marsh-Wiggle, and with four Signs or predictions from Aslan, which serve as verbal landmarks or mapped features on their journey. After a series of dangers and an encounter, although they do not recognize it as such at the time, with both the snake/lady/ Witch and the enchanted Rilian (Puddleglum posits that the silent knight accompanying the beautiful lady may in fact be dead, a “skeleton” [78]), the three travelers locate Rilian in an underground realm, which the Witch has been using as her base for a planned invasion and enslavement of Narnia. As someone who has been abducted by the ruler of the underworld and who must be restored to the light to put an end to the mourning of his parent, the bereaved and moribund King Caspian, Rilian functions as a male Persephone figure (Slater 180), with

⁹ For representative recent commentary on the Chronicles’ borrowings from the classical, see Slater.

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the most effectual of his rescuers, Puddleglum, as an unlikely agent for Demeter.¹⁰ Yet if Jill and Eustace must accept Puddleglum’s lead in the saving of the Prince, their journey to the underworld nonetheless endows them with enough agency and confidence to reform their faddish and poorly governed school upon their return to England. One reason that we place our discussion of The Silver Chair at this point in the chapter is that in his 1955 account of his early life, Surprised by Joy, Lewis recounts his childhood fondness for Nesbit’s Psammead trilogy, and especially The Story of the Amulet, which “first opened my eyes to antiquity, the ‘dark backward and abysm of time’ ” (15).¹¹ The “abysm” metaphor (taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest) is particularly suggestive in the context of The Silver Chair, which contains two underworlds: the lightless and dreary “Shallow Lands” ruled by a Witch who, like her counterparts in O’Neill’s Land Under England, controls her subjects’ thoughts and actions by the force of her mind, and the “Really Deep Land” of Bism, with its enticing “river of fire . . . fields and groves of an unbearable, hot brilliance . . . . blues, reds, greens, and whites all jumbled together,” and its “rich, sharp, exciting” smell (Chair 177, 180). The Shallow Lands have evidently contained their population of subjugated gnomes for only a little over a decade, since readers are given no reason to assume that the Witch’s dominion over her underworld has long preceded her kidnapping and enchanting of Prince Rilian. The Witch’s realm of living death is thus primarily presented in connection with the recent past, although it is physically linked to a vast cavern (not used by either Witch or gnomes) in which primordial creatures sleep and to a smaller cave, “about the shape and size of a cathedral,” that contains the equally somnolent Father Time (126). In contrast, the Land of Bism, original home of the gnomes, is both an older and a more joyous place. Once restored to his memory and his proper self, Prince Rilian decides not to accept the invitation to visit it because he could not then hope to see his father before the latter’s death; ¹⁰ Puddleglum is often presented in the text as a comic figure, exaggeratedly pessimistic and fond of drink. Yet he is also heroic in multiple ways: brave, full of common sense, and the most likely one of the trio of questers to follow Aslan’s Signs. The narrative repeatedly associates him with the earth (the Witch calls him “mud-filth,” for instance [158]), which may enhance his association with Demeter. ¹¹ Lewis’s debt to Nesbit, and particularly to The Story of the Amulet, has received substantial critical attention; see, for instance, Nicholson.

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as in The Story of the Amulet, family takes precedence. Nevertheless, he says “with a deep sigh” that “I have left half of my heart in the land of Bism” (183). If Bism is associated with something other than conventional Narnian mortal life, it is thus not with the ongoing sleep, loss of self, and gloom of the Shallow Lands but rather with an afterlife that Rilian sees as equivalent to Caspian’s effort to reach “Aslan’s country” in the previous year’s installment of the Chronicles, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Chair 182). The last of the events predicted in Aslan’s Signs takes place in the Shallow Lands, whereas Bism is evidently unmappable. The Shallow Lands are also associated with a materialism framed in such a way that the child reader knows immediately to distrust it. As Marijane Osborn points out in discussing Lewis’s indebtedness to Land Under England, a major regard in which The Silver Chair differs from its predecessor is that Lewis “turns the underground world into a spiritual proving-ground” by making Plato’s famous myth of the cave “crucial to the novel’s philosophy” (116, 118).¹² The debt to Plato is most apparent in the scene in which the Witch, who has just discovered that Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum have liberated Prince Rilian from his enchantment, seeks to control all four by using magic fumes, hypnotic music, and soothingly uttered claims to a superior knowledge that she associates with adult reason. Claiming that the surface world exists only in their imaginations, she tells them, “You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You’ve seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it’s to [be] called a lion . . . . And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world” (157, orig. emphasis). Puddleglum, however, exposes the Witch as evil by attacking her magic and proclaiming his allegiance to the brighter and better realm beyond the cave, at which she tacitly acknowledges the limits of materialism by shape-shifting into an enormous serpent. Rilian promptly severs the snake’s head from its body, thus modeling for the child reader the appropriate response to denials of the spiritual realm.

¹² Lewis may also have had in mind “The History of Photogen and Nycteris” (1882), a fantasy by George MacDonald (one of his spiritual and literary masters) that similarly draws upon Plato’s parable for Christian purposes and uses a shape-shifting, compulsively controlling witch to do so. For a discussion of Plato’s importance to the Chronicles as a whole, and of Lewis’s departures from Plato, see Johnson and Houtman.

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In this context, and in line with the entire saga’s preoccupation with resurrections and afterlives, that the appeal and indeed the liveliness of the Land of Bism coexist with an association with death is hardly surprising. Jill, phobic about underground spaces and the only one of the companions who has no previous experience of Narnia, is blind to Bism’s allure, even when a friendly gnome presents his country as superior to the companions’ world in ways that recall the superiority of Plato’s larger world to his cave. For instance, says the gnome, in surfacedwellers’ mines “you get dead gold, dead silver, dead gems. Down in Bism we have them alive and growing. There I’ll pick you bunches of rubies that you can eat and squeeze you a cup full of diamond-juice. You won’t care much about fingering the cold, dead treasures of your shallow mines after you have tasted the live ones of Bism” (182). To Jill’s dismay, the gnome’s descriptions of Bism’s wonders attract even Eustace, who, though inclined by nature and upbringing to a utilitarian view of the world, is now “look[ing] much more like the Prince than like the old [Eustace] Scrubb at Experiment House [the pair’s dreadful school in England]. For all his adventures, and the days when he had sailed with King Caspian, were coming back to him” (181). That is, Eustace’s exposure to heroism, miraculous events, and other aspects of Narnian life that he would once have dismissed as impractical or impossible has awakened him to a spirituality that enables him to see Bism’s beauty rather than simply dismissing it (as Jill seems inclined to do) as frightening. That death, if associated with Aslan rather than with evil, is not the end is made unmistakable in the final pages of the story, which take Jill and Eustace to a mountain in Aslan’s country and allow them to witness the beginning of the dead Caspian’s afterlife before they return, temporarily accompanied by Caspian, to England in order to reform their school in a symbolic assertion of their new maturity. For The Silver Chair employs three different levels of setting: Experiment House, where the novel opens and closes; the Mountain of Aslan, Jill and Eustace’s point of entry into and exit from Narnia but not a site accessible to living Narnians; and Narnia, the wastelands on its northern border, and the space(s) below, all of which may be traversed on foot by any Narnian traveler willing to brave the northern giants. In other words, Aslan’s Mountain, presented here as a heaven-equivalent, mediates in this text between the reader’s world and Narnia; it is not (yet) the final destination that will figure in The Last Battle (1956), but rather the

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location in which Aslan provides Jill with the Signs that will serve as the companions’ map and that will ultimately enable them to identify and rescue Rilian. This structure freights the map itself, much more than the territory over which it guides the questers, with religious significance made all the greater by the fact that the map is never committed to paper but remains throughout a thing of the Word, to be memorized, frequently recited, and lived by because “Aslan’s instructions always work; there are no exceptions” (104). That from Jill and Eustace’s viewpoint Narnia and its inhabitants (centaurs, dwarfs, talking owls) evoke the childhood world of Greek myth and fairy tale does not detract from the urgency of following the Signs and retrieving their inevitable errors in doing so. On the contrary, it is the modern British world of “radio-sets, cinemas, cars, aeroplanes, ration-books, queues” that seems “dim and far away” to Jill (153), not merely when she is undergoing the Witch’s hypnotic attack but throughout the rest of her time in Narnia as well. At the end of the narrative, then, the three levels of setting are associated with three levels of “home.” First is the end of the companions’ journey, as they turn away from Bism, search for a way out of the Shallow Lands, and discover a hole that turns out to lead not merely to the “Upper World” but to the very “heart of Narnia,” where, interrupting a dance involving “trim little fauns, and dryads with leaf-crowned hair floating behind them” (192), they are fed, rested, given shelter, and celebrated as saviors of Narnia. As Juliette Harrisson observes, “there is great satisfaction for the reader, on reaching this scene, in feeling that finally we are back in the beautiful, magical land where we started. This passage confirms Narnia’s place within the reader’s imagination as ‘home’ . . . and it does so by utilizing Classical mythological creatures,” which “come to represent all that is comforting and homelike for the reader” (9). For Jill in particular if not for the reader, however, Narnia is a home that she cannot occupy permanently, so when Aslan arrives, she asks, “May we go home now?” Aslan’s answer—“Yes. I have come to bring you Home” (210)—makes clear through its use of the capital letter that the destination to which he will first take them, the Mountain, is home in a more important way than England, the final stop on this stage of their life-journey, can be; as John D. Cox notes, “The return to Aslan’s Land at the end is a way of affirming that it is a [more] definitive or ‘larger’ reality than the two it ‘encloses’ ” (166). The rapid movement from the

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classically inflected Narnian home to the spiritual Home to the prosaic English home does not only put an end (or rather, three ends) to Jill and Eustace’s quest. It also, through juxtaposition, re-creates the multidimensionality suggested by Plato’s allegory of the cave and by the revelation that Bism, the Shallow Lands, and Narnia form a stack whose layers may be coterminous but nonetheless occupy strikingly different planes in a spiritual as well as a physical sense; the physical separation of these layers lessens what might otherwise suggest a palimpsest. The configuration of the novel’s ending, which is closely allied with its approach to physical setting, thus emphasizes once again the overall work’s moral/ didactic message about how best to understand death. Inseparable from metaphor, space thereby maps the agency and wisdom that are to enable the final return Home at the end of the reader’s own story.

4.3 Underworlds and Returns in Mystery at Mycenae and The Roman Mysteries Turning from Lewis to the genre of children’s mysteries with classical settings requires less of a leap than one might think, since our representative mysteries with underworld components—Lancelyn Green’s Mystery at Mycenae: An Adventure Story of Ancient Greece (1957) and Lawrence’s Roman Mysteries series (2001–9)—both contain religious elements as well. Like Lewis, Lawrence is a popular Christian writer; Helen Lovatt remarks that as a consequence, “conversions to Christianity, drawing on the traditions of nineteenth-century conversion literature, form key nodes in the development of the series” (415). As for Lancelyn Green, he was a former student of Lewis’s and a fellow member of the Inklings whose novel’s title is in part a pun on the Eleusinian Mysteries, a significant factor in the plot. Again important in the novels discussed in this section is a reunification and reconstitution of family; the gravity of this undertaking, and its consequent connection to the young person’s agency, is emphasized in part through the invoking of the underworld. Mysticism aside, it makes sense that children’s mysteries should be map texts, for the structure of works in this genre, in which detectives typically follow a trail of clues in which one piece of information leads sequentially (and perhaps temporally as well) to another to enable the deciphering of an event that has taken place in the past, is a congenial

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home for the idea that history not only can be mapped but is itself a map leading to correct solutions to important questions. This focus on accuracy in solving a fictional crime also makes for a good blend with the genre of the historical novel, in which didacticism of an informational stripe looms large. Writers such as Lancelyn Green and Lawrence, who employ classical texts in researching their fiction—Lawrence, for instance, draws on sources including accounts by Josephus and Pliny the Younger, authors who also appear among her characters—use documents from the past as maps aiding in plot construction, a device that assists in making their mysteries instructive: the young reader who consumes them is not merely being entertained but also gaining knowledge of ancient history and literature. Especially in Lawrence’s case, this information, much of which is focused on issues relating to diversity, family relationships, and gender, seems calculated to shape readers’ perceptions of and goals for the modern world as well. In solving the mysteries, the fictional detectives in both Lancelyn Green’s and Lawrence’s works are granted a stake in policymaking within the world of the fiction, with the implication being that readers who accept these detectives as their models may be able to make the same gains. Children’s mysteries set in the ancient world enjoyed a modest popularity in the 1940s and 1950s. Lancelyn Green’s novel follows, among other examples of the form, Jay Williams’s The Stolen Oracle (1943), The Counterfeit African (1945), and The Roman Moon Mystery (1948); Elizabeth Gale’s Junior Literary Guild selection Julia Valeria: A Story of Ancient Rome (1951), whose heroine must solve the (not particularly mysterious) problem of who might have forged her father’s seal to change the contents of a letter with vital import for her own future; and Henry Winterfeld’s Detectives in Togas (1953, translated into English 1956), a comic story about a group of schoolboys who must discover who defaced a temple by painting on it “Caius is a dumbbell” in order to frame one of their classmates.¹³ Lancelyn Green’s adoption of the form

¹³ Winterfeld’s novel, originally published in German as Caius ist ein Dummkopf, was the first in a trilogy that would continue with Caius geht ein Licht auf (1969), translated as Mystery of the Roman Ransom in 1971, and Caius in der Klemme (Caius in a Bind, 1976, no English version). All three were written in the United States, where Winterfeld, a German Jewish war refugee, gained citizenship in 1946.

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came two years after he produced Two Satyr Plays: Euripides’ Cyclops and Sophocles’ Ichneutai for an adult audience and the year before his publication of three retellings, Tales of the Greek Heroes: Retold From the Ancient Authors,¹⁴ Old Greek Fairy Tales, and The Tale of Troy: Retold from the Ancient Authors; it slightly precedes another of his novels set in the classical world, The Luck of Troy (1961). Like Lawrence, who studied classics and archaeology at Berkeley and Cambridge and subsequently taught Latin, Lancelyn Green was writing from a substantial commitment to the culture in which his novel takes place. He was also writing from a commitment to the concept of retelling. Mystery at Mycenae ends with a lengthy textual note (132–6) that not only explains that Lancelyn Green derives his plot from Apollodoros and Plutarch (with corroboration by Herodotos, Strabo, Diodoros of Sicily, Pausanias, Tzetzes, Hyginus, and scholia) but also provides translations of relevant passages, complete with bibliographical information; commentary on when “some slightly different reading[s] of my own” have been interjected; references to additional relevant sources ancient and modern; and a guide to pronunciation. Together with the family trees that appear on the volume’s final page and the dedication “To my mother in grateful memory of our visits to the scenes of this story with ‘The Hellenic Travellers’ Club,’ ” these pieces of information constitute an unusually detailed verbal map that promises to be both a reasonably accurate plotting of events and character onto existing literary, historical, and geographical knowledge and a guide that will allow readers, should they so desire, to replicate Lancelyn Green’s own research journey. That the story that he has produced is likely to be unfamiliar to young readers, who may well know the outlines of the Iliad and Odyssey without being aware of Apollodoros, itself functions as a teaser designed to awaken interest in a secondary canon of classical literature. The mystery that Lancelyn Green constructs out of his classical sources involves the kidnapping of the thirteen-year-old Helen (not yet “of Troy”) from her father’s house shortly before he is to announce his decision as to which of the suitors gathered for this purpose will become her husband. The detective is sixteen-year-old Odysseus, a claimant not to Helen’s hand (he can see that her excessive beauty will only lead to

¹⁴ For a discussion of this work, see Murnaghan and Roberts, Childhood 125–9.

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trouble) but to that of her cousin Penelope. Eager to further his own marital ambitions and those of his friends Menelaos and Agamemnon, he employs logic like an Iron Age Sherlock Holmes to determine that those responsible for Helen’s abduction and for the related murders of a palace guard and a priest are the middle-aged Theseus, no longer “the stainless hero of old days,” and his evil friend and advisor Pirithoös (126). Thus Odysseus here wins his spurs, becoming accepted as a legitimate source of advice to the king. It is in crediting Helen’s rescue to Odysseus rather than to her brothers Castor and Pollux that Lancelyn Green deviates most substantially from the plot outline inherited from his ancient sources. In this rendering, that Odysseus succeeds in following a series of clues that only he can decipher is due partly to his skill at making logical deductions and partly to the special knowledge conferred by being an initiate in the cult of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The young detective eventually discovers that Theseus has stashed Helen with the priests and priestesses at Eleusis, where, according to the rules of the cult, she is to remain for one year to represent Persephone (Korē) in the divine rites, with only the king of Athens (Theseus) authorized to reclaim her and then only if a single year has elapsed. Fortunately if illicitly in a religious sense, Odysseus is able to substitute a disguised Menelaos for the imprisoned Helen; still more fortunately, Menelaos narrowly escapes being executed for the impiety, and Helen is able to use her remarkable gift of mimicry (attested to in the Iliad, Lancelyn Green points out in his concluding note) to impersonate Menelaos when Theseus stops them on the road. Odysseus eventually determines that Theseus has committed the crime with both the help and the urging of Pirithoös: the two have agreed that both will marry daughters of Zeus, and should this first abduction succeed, the plan is that they will follow it up by going to the underworld and absconding with Persephone herself as a bride for Pirithoös. In place of this denouement, however, a different set of nuptials has been arranged, as Odysseus’ ingenuity is such that he can talk Helen’s father into agreeing to all three of the marriages that Odysseus is promoting, despite the diplomatic awkwardness involved. Not only is a family reunited at the end of the text when Helen is restored to her father, then, but the ratification of adolescent agency involved in assigning this achievement to Odysseus also gives the younger generation the power to form new families, a trope present in Lawrence’s series as well.

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The text’s maplike qualities are on full display throughout. First, setting is handled in such a way as to suggest to the reader that the narrator is referring frequently to maps, photographs, archaeological models, or similar sources (for example, “They may have passed Corinth before I got there, but the mountain road by Oenoe over Gereneia and Cithaeron is so bad that I doubt if a chariot could use it. And the only other road is along the coast by Megara. The turning north is at Eleusis” [76]; “Odysseus cried aloud to the horses, and they went swaying and rattling away down the narrow street, and out on to the wide road which led right up the valley from the port of Gythion on the south coast, past Sparta and into the mountains of Arcadia where it branched away to the east in the direction of Mycenae, Corinth and Athens” [21–2]). The pedantic precision with which relative locations, travel conditions, and (often) distances are described implies that the past is above all a place, so that to describe it adequately mandates mapping it. By way of contrast, Lancelyn Green evidently feels no compulsion to strive for accuracy in attempting to render Iron Age conversation; his characters speak a mid-twentieth-century argot that includes lines such as “Sarpedon, the young King of Corinth, is . . . a thorough milksop, who’d never approve of carrying off a princess. He hasn’t the guts to thrash his own wife!” (92) and “I bet it’s that howid [sic] Diomedes who took Helen. Just the sort of beastly thing that type would do” (69; orig. emphasis). Second, the discussion of detection in this novel involves the employment of spatial language in showing the relationship of one clue to another. Consider Odysseus’ early explication to Menelaos of his reasoning process: “Firstly,” he said, “we were not meant to find either Permenes or Philemon—and the guard outside the temple [from which Helen was abducted] was supposed to be dead. You follow?” Menelaos nodded, and Odysseus continued: “Well . . . . they made a slip at once: there were only the marks of one chariot waiting—and they would have needed two. But there are ways around even that . . . . The obvious direction to seek them was towards the sea-coast: Gythion is the only reasonable port, and the road leads straight to it . . . . Granting all this, then, our next point is that Clytemnestra either lied—or spoke the truth.” (58)

In this characteristic passage, readers encounter in rapid succession words suggesting that to optimize logical thought, information is to be

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organized not only in terms of time (“Firstly”) but also, and more importantly, in terms of space (“You follow?”, “ways around,” “our next point”)—and moreover, that there are linguistically no barriers between the description of the process of reasoning and the description of physical location (“The obvious direction to seek them was towards the sea-coast”). Extending her observations from fiction to literary criticism, Trites shows that critics often use language evoking “the physical and embodied process of taking a trip of some sort” when they describe narratives of Bildung (“Growth” 66). In the above passage from Mystery at Mycenae, Odysseus is recapitulating the “building” of his case by logical deductions, whose ground he specifically identifies as spatial. According to the metaphor that dominates Lancelyn Green’s mystery, LOGIC MOVES, and if it moves it can be mapped. For the purposes of this chapter, this text’s multiple invocations of the Persephone myth are inseparable from its preoccupation with progress and mapping. Helen’s assignment to the role of Korē is prefigured by a chapter ending that takes place on the road during Odysseus and Menelaos’ search for the abducted princess. As Menelaos prepares for sleep, “Two bright stars glimmered over the nearest mountain crest, and as sleep stole over him . . . he seemed to hear Helen’s voice chanting a rich refrain to Persephone across the bare hills, and the two stars were her eyes gazing down at him” (66). While Menelaos does not yet know where Helen is to be found, this passage identifies her as what the Priestess of Demeter at Eleusis will later term “the mortal impersonation of the Divine Maiden, Persephone” (93) by what he perceives as her identity with the environment: she is “gazing down” from the heavens, which in turn are close by, “over the nearest mountain crest,” and she is simultaneously a worshipper of the queen of the underworld. It is thus a foreshadowing, couched in symbolic terms, of the circumstances in which Odysseus and Menelaos will later find her—a shortcut on the map, so to speak. In line with this point, while Lancelyn Green’s mystery presents itself as a work of realism whose readers are not required to suspend disbelief in order to accept happenings not consistent with everyday understanding of the world, it describes a society whose denizens clearly do not see insurmountable barriers between the mundane and the mystical. Indeed, the narrator shares this viewpoint, for example describing the great tower at Tiryns as the place where “King Acrisios had imprisoned Danae until Zeus came to her in a shower of

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gold” (69), an instance in which the interpenetration of the divine with aspects of the physical setting is presented not as a matter of subjective perception (as is the case in Menelaos’ sleepy awareness of a starry Helen) but as fact. Thus the first page of the novel identifies Helen as officially the child of the earthly monarch King Tyndareus of Sparta, but it is crucial to the plot that Theseus believes her to be a daughter of Zeus—and believes also that it is possible for mortals with sufficient daring and enterprise to travel physically to the underworld and carry off that other daughter of Zeus, Persephone herself. Moreover, over her three days at Eleusis, Helen comes to feel “in some mysterious way that she was indeed Persephone” (95), a process of identification that involves her in a new way of mapping her own existence: “For the first time she seemed to touch the veil separating her from the world of the spirit—and the veil grew thin beneath her touch. The strange superstitions, the strange tales of the gods of Olympos, all fell into their real places as she drew nearer to the heart of the Great Mystery” (94). Although she does not want to be the priestess of Persephone, she nonetheless comes here to accept the idea that this identity or placement is in some way more “real” than her desired future as the wife of Menelaos. The repeated symbolic blurring of the difference between Helen and Persephone that culminates with the requirement that Helen enact the part of Korē (who is reputedly her half-sister, of course) testifies to the central role of religious faith in the life of the novel’s villain Theseus, while a corresponding centrality of faith for its hero is established in the seriousness with which Odysseus takes his status as initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Crucially, this faith functions as a map enabling both villain and hero to plan risky courses of action, and perhaps even accounts for the downfall of the former. When Pirithoös refers to the Mysteries as “a lot of nonsense” involving “the divine mummery of the maiden of royal birth who pretends to be Persephone,” Theseus chastises him, saying presciently, “You go too far! I know you have no reverence for the gods, nor for the divine Mysteries of the Mother and Daughter of Eleusis—but others have . . . . And I fear that this plain-spokenness of yours may end in trouble—both here and hereafter!” (76–7). The use of spatial language here (“go too far,” “may end in trouble”) communicates a sense that the impiety in which Pirithoös’ counsel has now implicated Theseus involves a metaphorical loss of direction.

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Moreover, because Eleusis’s symbolic connection with the underworld creates a real link between the two, Odysseus and Menelaos’ successful quest for Helen/Korē suggests that Theseus and Pirithoös’ planned quest for Persephone might indeed have succeeded. Simultaneously, in multiple ways (including Odysseus and Menelaos’ quest) the text re-enacts the goddess Demeter’s search for her lost daughter. A staging of the latter culminating in a dramatic sighting of Helen as Korē is described in vivid detail as central to the Eleusinian Mysteries (103), while a mundane version subsequently takes place at the fortress of Aphidna when the true identities of Menelaos and Helen, who have been disguised as each other, are revealed and, at long last, the two embrace (120–1). Thus the resolution of Lancelyn Green’s mystery requires an understanding of the mapping of divine and human spaces that acknowledges that they are parallel, that events in one may be re-enacted or recapitulated in a symbolic way in the other. The resolution of the central continuing issues in the seventeen volumes of Lawrence’s popular Roman Mysteries series similarly requires an engagement with loss in which the divine has its part to play, although in Lawrence’s works the presence of the ineffable is considerably more subtle. Nonetheless, the series becomes increasingly interested in the rise of Christianity, with major characters coming to embrace the new religion. The Roman Mysteries star two girls and two boys (Lupus, whose tongue was cut out by his uncle in an effort to conceal fratricide, and the neurotic Jewish-Christian Jonathan) who solve mysteries under the leadership of one of the girls, the aristocratic Flavia Gemina, erstwhile owner of the final member of the quartet, the freed slave Nubia. Each volume begins with one or more maps, usually positioned as frontispieces rather than as diegetic elements of the narratives. These maps are sometimes coupled with building plans or visual representations of aspects of Roman culture that will figure in the mystery, but that the map is the consistent element instantly draws the reader’s attention to the mobility enjoyed by Flavia and her comrades—a mobility that enables them to travel widely within the Empire, from Africa to Asia, and that is incompatible with the life of a Roman matron. (Of the adult women in the series, only Jonathan’s mother, Susannah, eventually gains the freedom to leave the house after many years of imprisonment, and she draws her husband’s criticism for “never spend[ing] time at home” [Sirens 4].) Many installments refer to ways in which Flavia is not

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“behaving like a proper Roman girl,” “has been allowed to run wild in the most disgraceful fashion,” and will have to “behave with more decorum when [she becomes a] wife” (Sirens 3, 225, 36); although she sometimes rebels against the prospect, Flavia shares these expectations, noting that her plan is to “be a good Roman matron . . . have lots of babies . . . . [and] never try to solve another mystery” (Prophet 4). The maps thus suggest both the children’s physical journeying and the metaphorical journey from girlhood to womanhood made by Flavia and Nubia, both of whom marry at the end of the series. The maps are also present in narrative form, since stories from myth and history repeatedly function as signposts that direct Flavia to the next step in a given problem. (Volume 6, The Twelve Tasks of Flavia Gemina, uses this structure most overtly by the title’s reference to the tasks of Hercules, which Flavia takes as clues in her effort to save her father from a romantic entanglement that she believes likely to end in disaster.) Initially, the series suggests that Flavia and Jonathan have significant advantages in agency over the other children not simply for reasons of relative social status but more specifically because they are literate and in command of the narratives of the classical world. Flavia in particular might be viewed as the author’s surrogate within the text, with Nubia, who is always asking for definitions or snippets of myth, serving as the stand-in for the child reader. Eventually, however, Nubia and Lupus reveal their own increasing command of classical learning, reciting poetry or, in Lupus’ case, enacting the story of Midas (Prophet 106–7), and the series suggests that the mastery of such artifacts of the past is healing to the children within the tales and potentially to the child reader as well. For example, in The Prophet of Ephesus Lawrence uses the fate of trafficked children to suggest why classical learning is vital by having Aristo, Flavia’s former tutor and Nubia’s future husband, join the girls in trying to comfort the children. Aristo narrates the story of Persephone with the aid of dolls, a source of pride to Nubia, who observes to herself that “he was so good at this. These damaged children, who had been beaten and abused, were enthralled as he related the Greek myth” (148). The reference to Persephone echoes one of the recurring motifs of the overall series, the efforts of three of the children to reconnect with family members initially believed dead. Nubia has seen her family slaughtered, as she thinks, before her eyes at the time of her capture and enslavement, but it turns out in Volume 5, The Dolphins of Laurentum, that one of her

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brothers has also survived; the discovery, like her reunion with the man who had once been her intended husband, requires Nubia to choose between her family of origin and the new family constituted by Jonathan, Lupus, Flavia, and eventually Aristo. She opts for the latter, choosing forward movement over looking back, and in doing so she avoids the error made by Orpheus. Thus her revisiting of past trauma has none but positive results, as it enables her to understand the journey that she has made toward a new self and new life. One might compare Nubia’s situation here with that of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, who in the 2007 final volume of Rowling’s series drops the magical Hallow that has enabled him to commune with dead family members, preferring to focus on the imminent confrontation with Voldemort. Immediately thereafter, finding himself in an underworld-equivalent that resembles King’s Cross Station, Harry opts to return to the world of the living rather than “board[ing] a train” that would take him “on” to the afterlife (722), and the saga presents this choice as correct.¹⁵ Lupus, too, has believed his mother dead, but in The Colossus of Rhodes, he returns to his birthplace, the Greek island of Symi, where he finds his great-grandmother and learns that his mother is still alive. Indeed, he encounters her in the next volume, but a lasting reunion is impossible because she is now the Pythia. In Lovatt’s shrewd reading, This family romance requires that children leave behind fantasies of parental rescue, and instead rely on their own self-sufficiency. Lupus never needs to come to terms with the human frailties of his mother, because she has been assimilated to the divine, and made unavailable by events. Lupus finds a place eventually as a Christian and as an acrobat with a travelling troupe of entertainers. His own beliefs and abilities have taken the place of his yearning to be protected. (419)

Lupus, then, has a closer brush with the divine mysteries than does Nubia, and his brief return to the past—here symbolized by his mother’s embrace—contributes to his finding the strength to begin a new life, a commitment that he has indeed already made when, at the end of The Colossus of Rhodes, he chooses like Harry Potter to help his friends rather ¹⁵ Like the other books in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows incorporates classical elements, which have been discussed at length elsewhere; see, for instance, Richard A. Spencer’s book on this topic. The combination of neoclassicism, the quest for the Horcruxes in the final two volumes, and the depiction of the King’s Cross waystation to the afterlife clearly makes Deathly Hallows pertinent here; that we do not discuss it at any length has to do with the enormous volume of Harry Potter criticism already extant.

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than to reunite with his mother. Significantly, the opportunity for a new life is not offered to the mother, who cannot desert the god’s service; if Lancelyn Green’s Odysseus is able to reclaim Helen from a similar position, Lawrence’s Apollo will no more release his priestesses than Hades will release his bride or his dead. Just as there is no possibility of restoring Lupus’ amputated tongue, his mother’s voice, too, has been erased by the religious mandate that she serve as the conduit for Apollo’s words. Like Nubia, Lupus must therefore learn to look forward rather than backward, finding new ways to express himself and coming to identify as Roman rather than Greek. In contrast, Jonathan’s engagement with myths about returns from the underworld is more complex, inasmuch as he succeeds in resurrecting and restoring to the family the supposedly dead mother, but at the cost of considerable pain to all concerned. Susannah, he discovers in Volume 4, The Assassins of Rome, was not killed but captured at the time of Rome’s sack of Jerusalem ten years earlier. She has become the companion of the emperor Titus, a dangerous position: jealous, Titus’ former lover Berenice has ordered her assassination. Reclaiming her from Titus and reintegrating her into the family turns out to be possible but arduous; over multiple installments of the series, Jonathan is branded, enslaved, whipped, and psychologically tortured, resulting, in Volume 7, The Enemies of Jupiter, in his flirting with terrorism and inadvertently causing a fire that kills some twenty thousand Romans and leaves him scarred by nearly unbearable guilt. The Assassins of Rome emphasizes the connection that all the works in this chapter make between the exploration of physical spaces and the exploration of the past. The narrative features two frontispieces, a map of Rome (where the children must travel from their home in Ostia in order to do their detecting) and a plan of Nero’s Golden House, where Susannah and other captive Jewish women live and where Jonathan is taken after having been enslaved and branded when Titus’ brother Domitian decides that he is the accomplice of a would-be assassin of the emperor. The Golden House has many secret passages, which the children find it possible to navigate once they separately gain access to the building plan, the architect, and Rizpah, a child informant who has spent her life there. By crawling through a wet tunnel, Jonathan and Rizpah reach a womblike space, “a large vaulted room designed to resemble a cave” (Assassins 131), where Jonathan is confronted with a

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primal scene: an embrace between his mother and Titus. The sight also requires him to confront and reassess the past, understanding in new ways Titus’ movements on earlier occasions and Berenice’s desire to have Susannah assassinated, which Jonathan concludes must be motivated by Berenice’s longing to re-establish the past: “Titus would be sad for a while, but then he would send for her and things would be the way they were again” (141). This trajectory through sadness to reclaimed contentment via the restoration of a destroyed relationship is, of course, the journey that Jonathan himself seeks to make, but as Lovatt explains, for Jonathan the journey is more complicated than he might expect. In her summary, after they are reunited in The Assassins of Rome, the family cannot yet be restored; subsequently, “when he meets his mother at the beginning of The Enemies of Jupiter, the relationship is awkward, and . . . . his plans to bring his parents back together fall apart,” a plot twist that is followed by the fire and Jonathan’s responsibility for it. By the end of that novel, “his parents are reunited, but without him there to see it,” and when at last he and his parents are living in the same house, his sister dies. At this point, “Jonathan and his father both seem to suffer from depression; his mother becomes a pale shadow of her former self, and no longer has the same significance in his life. Instead, he finishes the books still looking unsuccessfully for his kidnapped nephew.” As a result, Lovatt concludes, “Jonathan never really finds himself, neither in the East nor the West, but represents the ongoing battle for acceptance of those who struggle to live with themselves” (424). The bittersweet aspects of his reclamation of his mother may be understood as a consequence of Jonathan’s backward-facing orientation; that his symbolic visit to the underworld/ return to the womb represented by the cavelike space in the Golden House lacks the positive outcomes of Nubia’s and Lupus’ temporary returns to their birth families is a function of his greater difficulty letting go of the past. In Lawrence’s series, the past is something to be mapped, visited, understood, and assimilated, but it is not something that can or should be permanently reclaimed. Jonathan’s, Nubia’s, and Lupus’ family dramas make clear that, like the Chronicles of Narnia and Mystery at Mycenae, the Roman Mysteries are fascinated by the idea of resurrection, and if Jonathan’s travails indicate that Lawrence is not entirely comfortable with resurrection’s implications for the maturing process, other plot threads in the series suggest that it

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may nonetheless be possible to combine resurrection and even death with forward motion. Because they have offended the emperor Domitian, Flavia and Nubia will spend their marriages in exile, away from the center of the Empire; the final volume, The Man from Pomegranate Street, associates Flavia’s marriage in particular with death, since her husband, Flaccus (known as Floppy), must feign death in order to leave the court and join her in Ephesus, the place of her exile. For many child readers, the girls’ exile may seem the happiest ending possible, as it involves love matches, an enormous villa in which the group and their friends can live communally, and socially productive work rescuing displaced children. It is moreover implied that both Flavia’s detection and her travels will continue, since the volume concludes with a tantalizing reference to a mystery to be solved on Samos. Other readers, however, may find it suggestive that throughout the series, Lawrence has associated adult femininity with death. Flavia’s mother and Jonathan’s sister both die in childbirth, losses that Flavia finds deeply traumatic (at one point she dedicates herself to the goddess Diana so that she can live in perpetual virginity); Flavia’s prospective stepmother dies in an epidemic shortly before her planned marriage to Flavia’s father; other adult women seem to have been emotionally destroyed by married life. In this context, Flavia’s and Nubia’s marriages signify less their entry into maturity than the death of their girlhood and the termination of their very existence from the reader’s perspective, since the series must now end. The problem with girlhood, then, is implicitly that it is temporary; the problem with womanhood is that it seems exceptionally difficult to put into practice the combination of tough-mindedness and virtue that the series associates with legendary matrons such as Octavia. Yet Octavia, Diana, and even less reputable female icons such as Cleopatra, unreachable points on the metaphorical map though they may be, nonetheless are important to Flavia’s journey through girlhood. In “Girls Reconstructing Gender: Agency, Hybridity and Transformations of ‘Femininity,’ ” Jessica Willis uses the term “hybrid-girlhood” to discuss “the dissonance between ideological constructs of gender that communicate the notion of unlimited possibilities in tension with girls’ on-the-ground experiences in their physical bodies” (104). Analyzing interviews with contemporary girls, Willis finds that “The regular occurrence of girls’ talking about instances of assertive female agency as located within an imaginary realm . . . draws attention to spaces in which girls prominently interact

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with discourses of femininity that present alternate perspectives on gender and subjectivity” (106). The “on-the-ground experiences” of Flavia and her friends constantly bring them face to face with a deathlike confinement, whether in the form of slavery and imprisonment or in the more humdrum existence of married women such as Polla Argentaria, whose daughter notes, “All she ever does is sleep and read and sit in her chair staring out at that mountain” (Sirens 44). Nonetheless, the script that the series establishes postulates that here too a return from the underworld is possible. It turns out that Polla’s reading is giving her access to an agency that, although risky, eventually enables her to revitalize her marriage. And similarly, Flavia’s ability to navigate iconic texts, to imagine herself as Octavia, Diana, or other heroic women or as adult male poets such as Virgil, enables her, like Willis’s girl interviewees, “to challenge classical constructs of ‘femininity’ ” and to negotiate “power dynamics within institutions and daily social relations. Agency in the context of the imaginary serves as a strategic resource” (107). This is a strategic resource—a use for the map, if you will—that Lawrence is implicitly providing to her girl readers as well. While Willis’s findings suggest that girl readers of fantasy and science fiction are more likely to “challenge conventional gender norms” than readers of other genres (109), Lawrence’s series points to ways in which realistic historical novels may offer girls similar guidance toward agency, in part by helping them manage their relationship to the past and to death.

4.4 Symbolic Underworlds and Shifting Scripts in the Roman Pony Trilogy Genre, then, matters, and accordingly we now move from the mystery to another form of genre fiction, the pony story. While the combination of pony story with historical novel is not unknown (Marguerite Henry wrote some particularly successful examples of this hybrid form), the trilogy composed of K. M. Peyton’s Minna’s Quest (2007), No Turning Back (2008), and Far from Home (2009) is to our knowledge the only pony story set in Roman Britain. The sequence commences as an example of what Jenny Kendrick calls the “ ‘rescue, rehabilitation and recognition’ form of pony story” (186), inasmuch as the relationship between

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protagonist Minna and horse Silva begins when the newborn foal is left to die (as inconveniently fragile) by his owner, the Roman officer Theo, and Minna nurses him not merely back to health but into beauty and desirability. At this point in the narrative, Theo reclaims his property, thus involving Minna (his social inferior, as she is not a Roman citizen) in two forms of unsatisfied longing: for Silva and for Theo himself. Over the course of the three volumes, Minna must demonstrate her competence not only as horsewoman but also as contravener of feminine norms, scouting for the army, running away from home to be with Theo, journeying to territory far from the Romanized south of Britain. The end of the trilogy leaves Minna with control over Silva but not over Theo, who, after bestowing the horse upon her and giving her a passionate but quick goodbye kiss, marches off at the head of his troops into a northern district so wild that she cannot continue to accompany him. Kendrick is by no means the only critic to observe that the pony story relies on an assortment of formulas. Of course, these formulas vary depending in part on national origin and intended readership; Christine Doyle, for instance, focuses on American horse books about boys, in which the horses “blend two genres together by serving both as a symbol of the mythic American West and as friend, lover, and developmental catalyst to the boy hero” (300). Moreover, no single narrative will include the full range of tropes associated with the genre, and authors also differ in what they do with these tropes; there is no single script for the pony story, even if certain elements (most obviously the horse) are indispensable. It is nonetheless worth noting that the conventions common to many pony stories for girl readers help the consumer of Peyton’s Roman Pony trilogy to identify from the outset the twin goals of Minna’s journey, the presumed endpoints of the lines traced on the maps at the back of each volume—and thus to understand it as remarkable that Minna does not end up with Theo but rather with the prospect of marrying her fellow tribesman Stuf, for whom she has long felt a sisterly but not a romantic attachment. We suggest that the trilogy’s repeated symbolic use of underworlds, here closely connected to concepts of family and agency, plays an important role in reconciling both Minna and the ideal reader to this denouement. Kendrick remarks that pony stories are intimately concerned with family roles. The story in which a human protagonist raises a foal to maturity “allow[s] the child [reader] to identify with both giver and

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receiver of care,” thus connecting the narrative to parent–child relationships (189). Simultaneously, a number of the Canadian examples of the form that Kendrick analyzes also function as romances, and she quotes Alison Haymonds to the effect that “it has become a cliché that the horse or pony replaces the male in books as sex object” (qtd. 190). For Kendrick, the chance to play mother implies a significant degree of agency, enabling the protagonists of the books for younger readers that she examines to gain “a creditable level of freedom, capability, and independence,” whereas her examples of works for older readers, which are more focused on romance, “not only feminize and domesticate their heroines, but also depict them as caught in an endless fantasy of longing for the heroic and controlling male” (200). In Peyton’s trilogy, however, both motherhood (or sisterhood) and romance are important, and these elements are mediated or tempered by invocations of the underworld. By coming to a better understanding of death, Minna becomes willing to accept the notion that Theo, her romantic ideal, may not be an appropriate life partner for her and thus that she should recalibrate her goals to prioritize nurturing and motherhood/sisterhood over sexual desire. The pony story/romance nexus is very clearly on display in Peyton’s trilogy, in which not only are horse and heroine symbolically interchangeable (both are misprized and heroic, in the first volume saving the Roman fort at Othona in what is now Essex from Saxon pirates), but horse and hero are as well. Silva and Theo are both described as products of the spread of the Roman Empire into North Africa, as Silva is the product of an encounter between his dam and a stallion who was part of “a shipment of Barbary horses” that transited through Othona, and Theo’s background is a matter for discussion by Minna’s mother, who asks, “[W]ell, what is he? An Egyptian? His mother was a Roman but that father of his was no more a Roman than you are” (Quest 31, 22). The text makes clear that in both cases the mixture of bloodlines makes for more attractive offspring, and indeed horse and man are judged by much the same standards. Silva, “dark steel grey” in color, boasts a “head [that] had the lovely shape of the hot-blooded Arab, wide between the eyes and with a delicate muzzle and large nostrils. Its eyes were large and enquiring. There was no more handsome animal in the fort” (Quest 35). Theo, who “had the nose of an Arab, the silky brown skin of an Egyptian, the black laughing eyes of a Roman girl and the poise of a Greek god” (Quest 13), is vastly more appealing to Minna (“How splendid he looked!”) than her

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intended husband Esca, who has a “flat cheerful face” and “took after his dreary Gallic mother” (Turning 14, 41, 42). But social standing is certainly a significant factor in Theo’s attractiveness as well, and his status in Minna’s world derives not simply from his Roman citizenship and comparative affluence but also, indeed primarily, from his association with the Roman army. The narrator repeatedly presents him in his guise as leader of men, making strategic decisions, sustaining wounds, and inspiring devotion in his subordinates; conversely, while Silva has status as a fast, beautiful, and intelligent mount who will naturally be ridden by the highest-ranking officer, he is army property to be commanded rather than a free agent able to command on his own account. The end of the trilogy thus produces divergent fates for horse and man: Theo tells Minna that “I’ve retired [Silva] from the army. He’s yours,” while Theo himself remains at the head of the “army [that] marched past her, looking magnificent” (Home 183, 184). This denouement re-establishes the likeness between horse and heroine, as “Minna held him hard and cried to him, ‘You must lose him too, Silva, like me! They’ve got to go!’ ” (Home 184). Significantly, it is the inability to be/remain in the army that here accounts for Silva being “like” Minna. She has done her utmost to be part of the Roman military herself—she has spent almost all of Volume 3 as a camp follower, though without the sexual duties often connoted by this term—but has finally accepted Stuf ’s point that Theo “cannot offer [her] anything . . . . Only battles, and who wants more of that? Only Theo” (Home 176–7). The army, then, is ultimately the source of both Theo’s attractiveness and his unavailability. For the purposes of our chapter, this point is significant because of the obvious association between armies and death. The trilogy interweaves this schema with multiple symbolic references to the underworld, presented in connection with three characters (and their animals) in particular: Minna, Theo, and Minna’s brother, Cerdic. Minna, it turns out, can be reclaimed from death and reclaim others from it; Cerdic and, ultimately, Theo cannot. Recognizing that Theo has “only battles” to offer moves Minna away from occupying the kind of pony book that validates a traditionalist form of heterosexual romance in which, as Kendrick puts it in a line quoted above, the heroine is endlessly in thrall to a “controlling male.” Instead, her symbolic visits to the underworld result in her own rescue (as the trilogy implicitly casts the matter) from

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romance, her reorientation toward the “freedom, capability, and independence” that Kendrick associates with pony books for younger readers that identify the heroine’s mothering of the horse as a sign or source of her strength. The journey metaphorically represented by Minna’s physical travels from Essex to the Peak District and carefully mapped by diagrams and lists of place name equivalents, it would seem, is most importantly a journey between scripts. A similar shift is established over the course of the trilogy as neardeath experiences turn into resurrections—and then, abruptly, turn instead into death. The first volume focuses this script on animals. Rescued from the encroaching tide and the waiting crows, the dying newborn Silva is taken by Cerdic at Minna’s behest to a hut associated with their family’s past, “built in the old style, half sunk in the ground. . . . their long-time family base, from the days when their great, great and more great grandparents eked a living selling farm produce to the garrison,” sometime before their family became “a part of the fort as much as the soldiers themselves” (Quest 9). The text gives readers detailed directions to the hut, explaining its physical positioning in relation to the fort and thus establishing that it is not (quite) part of the military complex but rather a liminal space between fort and wilderness, present and past, surface and subterranean. In this not-quiteunderworld, Minna nurses Silva into vigor, assisted by the fact that Silva’s dam, crazed Demeter-like with bereaved maternity, gets loose and goes searching for her foal, whereupon Minna and Stuf abduct her (the narrator calls them “her captors”) and smuggle her into the hut to suckle the baby (Quest 15). Whereas Demeter gets six months with her child, the mare gets only three, Theo having cut in half Minna’s initial demand. Nonetheless, the time is long enough to ensure Silva’s good health. A similar reclamation from death occurs at the end of the volume and involves Cerdic’s dog, Fortis. That the resurrections bracket the rest of the action in this installment creates a pattern that implicitly instructs readers to take it as a script of the novels. Fortis has already been identified as an analog to Silva, in that he and Cerdic have the same intensely close relationship that Minna and Silva enjoy. As a gifted and well trained hunting dog, Fortis confers status on his master in much the same way that the possession of the best horse underscores the status of the ranking officer. Moreover, when Theo sends Cerdic, now an

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army recruit, on a dangerous scouting mission, both Silva and Fortis accompany him—Silva because Theo has lent him to Cerdic for this purpose, Fortis as an uninvited volunteer. Less sure of himself than Minna (“How will I know I’m going in the right direction?” [Quest 93]), Cerdic abandons his mission out of fear for himself and his dog when Fortis enters the river after him. Having made his way back to the shelter of the same ancestral hut to mourn the imminent end of his career, Cerdic redeems himself by stealing the pirates’ boat, thus cutting off their retreat. A pursuing pirate makes a murderous attack on Fortis, who is swimming after the boat, and Cerdic has to come to terms with the idea that his dog is dead. Against all odds, however, Minna finds the moribund animal in a tangle of reeds on the shore, a discovery that mirrors the initial discovery of Silva. She and Cerdic bring Fortis home, and watching the scene of nurturing that ensues as Fortis, like Silva before him, is given warm milk, Theo “felt suddenly that he was back in his childhood with his old playmates, in the warmth of a real house— no ceremony, no fawning slaves, no cold seclusion. He was momentarily back in a family, a state he had almost forgotten” (Quest 183). Significantly, then, the volume ends by pairing the dog’s return from death with an invocation of childhood as a blissful time of presexual love, a concept whose relevance becomes clear at the trilogy’s end. At the conclusion of Minna’s Quest, however, both Theo and Cerdic enjoy the sense of having returned to a moment before they joined the army, while the last paragraph of the novel finds Minna cuddling not with Theo—she has followed him home, “drawn as by a magnet”—but with Silva. Although readers are told that “The soldiers slept with their horses, and she knew now that she would too,” the text simultaneously moves away from the army motif by establishing Minna’s awareness that “there was no place for her there [in Theo’s quarters]” and reiterating the resemblance between Silva and Fortis rather than that between Silva and Theo: “Like Fortis, he offered his love with a soft nosing at her hand” (Quest 185, 186). Falling asleep on the horse’s flank, Minna shows her acceptance and valuing of that form of love. The effort to reclaim beloved individuals from death continues in the second and third volumes, now directed primarily at humans rather than at animals. Volume 2 shows Minna, now of marriageable age, sexually fixated on Theo and repeating on multiple occasions that she “can’t live without [him],” “might as well be dead” or “might as well die” if they are

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separated, and “would kill herself, and join Theo in the afterlife” should he perish (Turning 6, 34, 48, 152), sentiments that direct readers’ attention toward her mortality. While Theo is involved in some risky handto-hand combat over the course of the narrative, Minna is thus situated as the figure more in need of reclamation from the beyond. And indeed, she is taken hostage by a leader of the local anti-Roman resistance, who imprisons her in a “windowless storeroom with huge bars across the outside,” a “pitch-dark” space reminiscent of a tomb (Turning 132). Her time of powerlessness and captivity ends with Theo killing her abductor, liberating her, and gaining the loyalty of the outlaw’s son Draco, who affiliates with the Romans in order to be with his new idol. Since Draco’s father owns his own part-Arab stallion, which Theo eventually captures and rides, Draco functions in the narrative as a male double to Minna, sharing her most salient characteristics: adoration of Theo and love for a horse of which Theo is now technically the owner. Draco and Minna are rivals but also kindred spirits, so that when in Volume 3 Draco is mortally wounded defending Theo, his demise functions as a substitute for Minna’s own and also for Silva’s, since the horse, too, is seriously wounded and is at the point of death as Draco’s life ebbs away. Significantly, Draco has earlier deserted from Rome’s and Theo’s service, so his return and self-sacrifice are to be viewed (at least from the Roman point of view) as a redemption, not in spite of but because of the fact that the event involves his death. Cerdic achieves a similar redemption, overcoming his natural cowardice and dying in battle. In contrast, Minna’s own visit to the underworld in this novel is purely symbolic. She and Theo find their way into a secret silver mine, which has strong associations in her mind with death: “The farther they went in, the more she hated it. It was like being inside a tomb, cold as death. But Theo did not think of turning back . . . . Her whole body shook. They were under the mountain, under the earth, like being dead” (Home 101–2). Since they must extinguish their torches to avoid discovery by their enemies, finding the way out is difficult. Nevertheless, Theo’s guidance enables them to make a metaphorical return from death that affirms the script of rescue established in Peyton’s first two volumes. Yet the deaths of two men particularly important to Minna, Cerdic and Draco, change that pattern. Although at the beginning of Volume 3 she already perceives that “Theo didn’t want marriage . . . . He was wedded to ambition, his army, the prospect of battle” (Home 26), it takes these

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examples of death’s permanency to get her to acknowledge that Theo’s departure, too, is likely to last forever. Despite her remarkable success in attracting his interest and slipping the bonds of her society’s expectations, Minna must recognize “that loving Theo was only a dream, and there was no future in it” (Home 180). Her future instead will evidently lie with Stuf, whom she loves “in a brotherly way; he had always been as a brother to her, right from childhood” (Home 180). Stuf ’s utter lack of interest in matters martial, his lighthearted response of “Never mind. I am” to her confession that she is not a good cook (Home 180), suggest that what is validated at the end of “Minna’s quest” is a new kind of family based on sexual equality and a commitment to life, which emerge as ideals at the expense of a more traditional form of masculinity and the patriarchal family that it implies. To make this exchange, however, Minna must confront not only the possibility of her own death (with her multiple visits to symbolic tombs) but also the fact of the deaths of others. It is when she is fixated on a man associated with death that her resemblance to Persephone is most apparent, yet the doubts about growing up that all the major human characters in the trilogy share—doubts that, in critic Holly Blackford’s view, are the other crucial element of the Persephone story—lead her, at least, to an un-Persephone-like solution.

4.5 Mapping the Orpheus Myth in the Jack Perdu Books and the Underworlds Series As Minna’s example suggests, the Persephone script, and the underworld schema of which it is a part, are not immutable. For one thing, the retrieval of the dead from Hades can be narrated either as a tale of generational difference (as when Demeter seeks to reclaim her daughter, Persephone) or as a tale of agemates (as when Orpheus seeks to rescue his wife, Eurydice). In both cases, to be sure, the underworld figures as a place of familial separation, so that Greek mythology creates the circumstances under which such separation can be mapped. And it is specifically because of its family associations that Blackford sees the Persephone myth as foundational in stories of female development for young readers, informing works as various as The Secret Garden, Coraline, Twilight, Little Women, Peter and Wendy, and Charlotte’s Web. In her view, the Persephone story, “a powerful evocation of child development,”

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“traditionally expresses ambivalence about growing up female; the girl is destined to reach for the narcissus to escape her mother’s life, but she loses life in doing so and is consequently subsumed by a patriarchal kingdom” (33, 207). While we concur that children’s and adolescent literature has found the Persephone myth a rich source for reworking, in this section we seek to complement Blackford’s work. For just as Persephone figures are not always female (as Lewis’s Prince Rilian shows), and journeys taken to the underworld do not always end in the realm of the patriarch (as Peyton’s trilogy suggests, and indeed as Blackford acknowledges), children’s underworlds are not only about Persephone. A recent exploration by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, who has identified “more than fifteen” titles in support of her point (292), reminds us that it does not do to forget Orpheus. In pairing the duology composed of Marsh’s The Night Tourist (2007) and The Twilight Prisoner (2009) with Abbott’s Underworlds quartet for younger children (2011–2), we are looking at two sets of map texts that invoke the Orpheus story while emphasizing multiple levels of space, some of them superimposed upon others. Marsh’s novels take place primarily in New York City, but her underworld is made up not only of subway tunnels contrasted with street-level areas but also of airspace (since her ghosts can fly) and of the nineteenth-century urban spaces that continue to haunt the city of today. Abbott’s novels posit a small-town American elementary school situated atop an entrance to Hades, through which the intrepid group of children led by Owen Brown can venture to rescue their kidnapped friend, Dana, and subsequently to combine with figures from the Norse, Babylonian, and Egyptian underworlds in an effort to save the quotidian world. In both cases, the protagonists’ ultimate mastery of these multiple levels signals the ability to control or redeem family.¹⁶ Jack’s and Owen’s function is to connect the disparate parts of the space being mapped, and, in doing so, to bring the elements that threaten family unity or even family existence into some kind of resolution.

¹⁶ Technically, Owen and Dana are not family, being too young to form a meaningful romantic connection. Kümmerling-Meibauer, however, argues that their “deep feelings for one another . . . might be interpreted as a foreshadowing of their possible future love” (298). Additionally, Dana—who is staying with Owen’s family while her own parents are in Iceland—seems to function as a stand-in for Owen’s sister, from whom he is separated by the exigencies of his quest but whom he often thinks about with love and concern.

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The Night Tourist won an Edgar Award as the best juvenile mystery of 2007. As in the works by Lewis, Lancelyn Green, and Lawrence discussed earlier in this chapter, the main characters follow advice and clues, most importantly a nineteenth-century map, as they search for the object of their quest (Jack’s dead mother) and attempt their escape from the underworld. Since they are simultaneously pursued by Cerberus and the guardians of Hades, they often move through New York in a fashion that resembles the sudden progress or reverses of being sent to new spaces in a board game through the draw of a card or the throw of dice. In contrast, Abbott’s Underworlds series is best described as a kind of literary computer game. Where the spatiality of Marsh’s duology is primarily horizontal, Abbott’s work uses vertical levels, one per culture,¹⁷ as the defining spatial metaphor; this structure is replicated on a smaller scale in the third volume, in which the children must progress from the bottom to the top of an enchanted tower in the Babylonian underworld. The heroes move through four levels over the course of the series, aided by the possession of objects of power, most importantly the Lyre of Orpheus, and by the textual map represented by a heavily annotated copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology. That their relationship to space is predicated on the idea of continuous ascent makes it different from that of Marsh’s characters, who are moreover hedged about with the many rules governing her underworld. This difference (which reflects the common spatial metaphor UPWARD IS PROGRESS) helps to explain why Owen can retrieve Dana and save the world while Jack must be contented with a more conventional reward, namely a gain in maturity. But although Abbott’s series may be structured in an inherently sunnier way, Jack nonetheless does make progress of a significant kind. As Kümmerling-Meibauer notes, he traverses “three stages [that] emphasise seminal steps in [his] cognitive, emotional, and social development. After he succeeds in solving all riddles and passing several trials in the Underworld, Jack changes from a bashful boy into a self-confident teenager,” learning in the process “to undertake responsibility and to care for other people’s feelings” (302). Cognitively, then, Jack is a model for the young reader.

¹⁷ Volume 2 takes place in the human world, not in the Egyptian underworld; the latter nonetheless contributes an army to the overthrow of the villain in Volume 4.

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At the start of the first novel, however, Jack is still mourning his dead mother and feeling self-conscious about his difference from his peers as a precocious Latinist already capable of helping a classics professor with her translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. After a series of unusual events, his father sends him for counseling in Manhattan. There his relationship to the fantastic accelerates when he meets Euri, a girl who seems especially knowledgeable about poetry and old New York. Only after he has acceded to her desire to show him some interesting features of Grand Central Station does he realize that she has seduced him into entering the underworld, perhaps to contrive her rescue from Hades, where she regrets having consigned herself in a suicide pact gone wrong. Jack himself has a preternaturally close relationship with the world of the dead; while the guardians of the underworld are alert to and prepared to repel living interlopers, he can pass exceptionally well for a boy still alive. It turns out that this ability probably derives from his inheritance as the son of a woman who was herself temporarily rescued from the underworld by her romance with his father. Jack’s longing for his mother, his intensive study of a “dead” language, and his “dead” parentage all connect him to the ghostly realm. As in Blackford’s accounts of Persephones already prepared to enter and even to desire the underworld, Jack’s seduction by Euri is not unwelcome, although he is startled by her readiness to expose him to the dangers posed by elements of the living world such as a subway train that nearly hits him when he is walking on the tracks at her guidance. Indeed, the near betrayal of a living being to the world of Hades is an act that Jack replicates in the sequel when, showing off, he tricks two schoolmates into accompanying him there, an act with potentially fatal consequences for all three children. Like Orpheus, Jack looks back at Euri at a crucial moment during their effort to escape and thus dooms her to remain in the underworld—but their friendship nonetheless assists her own maturing process. Although she is inclined in both volumes to envy the living and to express a bitter and vengeful side,¹⁸ she goes to considerable trouble and risk in keeping him safe and helping him to escape the Hades that underlies and overlays New York City. Eventually, her interactions with Jack and her efforts on ¹⁸ In The Twilight Prisoner, she becomes a poltergeist harassing the living ex-boyfriend who broke their suicide pact. Among other petty vengeances, she stocks his apartment with exotic cockroaches.

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his behalf bring her to the self-knowledge that her suicide reveals her as having lacked in life. Euri cannot return to the living as Jack can, but their relationship begins a process of redemption that will allow her to put aside self-deception and anger in the second volume. In this way, both Euri and Jack are simultaneously Persephone and Hades, Eurydice and Orpheus; each has some desire for the underworld, and each must make a commitment to a new life—Euri by preparing herself to move on to the next phase of the afterlife and Jack by returning to the land of the living. Euri’s name is the most obvious invoking of the Orpheus myth, which is retold at the start of The Night Tourist and identified as Jack’s “favorite” part of the Metamorphoses (Tourist 5). Yet The Twilight Prisoner also highlights the story of Persephone, linking her situation to that of Jack’s friend Cora (Kore), abducted by someone who, “if he hadn’t had a crush . . . wouldn’t have dragged his Kore into the underworld just as Jack had done” (Prisoner 102, orig. emphasis). Like the Rick Riordan books to be discussed in Chapter 5, which make frequent reference to the Labyrinth created by Daedalus and said in Riordan’s series to consist of a gigantic and now self-propagating underground space accessible from multiple cities, The Night Tourist and The Twilight Prisoner employ the notion of a fantastic classical space located underneath a familiar, modern urban zone. Marsh’s novels offer what might be described as two tiers of mappable “classical” space. The first consists of the notion of the underworld derived from classical mythology, which functions in these novels as the site of family reproduction. Jack’s mother is a Eurydice figure; Jack’s own first romantic object is another Eurydice; his second romantic interest is in a Persephone figure whose Latin is superior even to his own. The Metamorphoses, so frequently invoked in these texts, are stories of both transformation and romance, and the mapping of Marsh’s texts onto Ovid’s original creates a world in which the family is the locus for both. Meanwhile, the second “classical” tier is that of a bygone New York peopled by figures such as Dylan Thomas and W. H. Auden, African American residents ousted from what will become Central Park, hasbeen show-business personalities of the nineteenth century, and the like. These figures belong to the world of history rather than that of myth, and the child reader is thus confronted by the imbrication of the world of myth with an arguably less familiar but more real New York. At the raw geographic level, subway stops, fountains, the New York Public Library

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at 42nd Street, and so on are all invoked as spaces used by both the dead and the living. And if the classical world is the site of family reproduction, old New York is the site for working out the problems that the family encounters: Euri’s emotional difficulties and conflicted feelings about her parents, Cora’s desire to return to her invalid mother, Jack’s shift away from the problem of motherlessness to the problem of having no girlfriend. Like the living’s relationship to the historical past, the living’s relationship to poetry becomes a matter of life and death, just as the dead continue to foregather in theaters and at libraries to use the resources of the past. Poetry and history connect the dead to the living, not only figuratively in the sense that the living have access to the experience of the dead thereby, but also in that the literature, language, and places of the past are often how the dead and the living find each other. In the Whispering Gallery of Grand Central Station, for instance, Jack recites the beginning of John Donne’s “Go and Catch a Falling Star,” which Euri completes for him in their first encounter. And in The Twilight Prisoner, the dead Auden rewrites a line from his poem “September 1, 1939” to provide what seems to function as the overarching moral lesson of the duology: “We must love one another and die” (101, orig. emphasis), a line that suggests the training purpose of confronting the young reader so extensively with death. Accordingly, the children’s command of myth, literature, and the history of New York City becomes a unified mastery of narrative and its rules, permitting Jack to remain in and then escape from the underworld in the compass of three days. Narrative is layered over space—where the children enter and exit the underworld determines what they can do there, and Marsh invokes Egbert Viele’s actual 1865 temporally layered map of New York City’s watercourses (part of which appears as Figure 4.2) as a central constraint on the plot of the first volume. That the two novels are deliberately repetitive in structure and constrained in space heightens the resemblance to the workings of a board game, in which the children’s progress through the three-night sojourn in the underworld works as rule-bound movement through a limited zone to mixed success. Unlike Abbott’s hero Owen, who uses his knowledge of the Orpheus story to prevent himself from looking back at Dana before he has rescued her, Jack discovers that mythology itself is a rule book, and that he will thus be unable to accomplish what Orpheus before him has been unable to do. Jack enters the underworld with a subway

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Figure 4.2 Detail from Egbert L. Viele’s Topographical Map of the City of New York: Showing Original Water Courses and Made Land (New York: Ferd. Mayer & Co., 1865), which plays a major part in the plot of Katherine Marsh’s The Night Tourist; the map combines historical strata by superimposing earlier geographical features such as streams atop a mid-nineteenth-century street grid that has buried many of these features. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, .

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token (the Golden Bough, essentially the initial game counter¹⁹); the Viele map represents all of the space the children have at their disposal (Manhattan, since they cannot fly across water), although they occupy buildings not yet represented on it, such as Grand Central; play is limited in duration (three nights, or Jack perishes); and they receive a rule book from Euri’s ghostly tutor, Professor Schmitt (The Unofficial Guide to the New York Underworld). Indeed, Jack’s ability to navigate the underworld depends on his cultural capital—he exchanges Latin proverbs with Professor Schmitt to demonstrate his bona fides not as a fellow member of the tribe of the dead but as a fellow lover of a dead language. Jack insists that he “[is] a, was a, Latin scholar . . . . I was translating the Metamorphoses before I died. But tempus edax rerum. Time devours all things,” he said, translating the phrase for Euri. “Omnia tempus revelat,” said Professor Schmitt. Time reveals all things. Did the professor know he was alive?

(Tourist 84)

Significantly, “Time reveals all things” appears to be a rule crucial to the navigating of Marsh’s underworld. That both father and son use Viele’s map to retrieve (in Professor Perdu’s case) or to see (in Jack’s) the wife/ mother suggests that New York’s physical properties must be experienced both spatially and historically before the family can be constructed or resolved. The plot of The Night Tourist specifies that time as well as space must be properly accounted for: Jack, who has learned that his mother haunts the City Hall subway station, is initially unable to find her because he has been looking in the modern station rather than in the disused one of the same name. Similarly, the sequel retreats from the implication that a command of Latin alone is enough to solve Jack’s problems; clues essential to his quest’s success, Epiphany and Seneca, turn out to refer not to their Greek and Roman namesakes but to a nineteenth-century New York person and place, so that knowledge of “classical” New York City is as important as knowledge of the ancient world. If HISTORY IS A MAP, Marsh’s novels wittily suggest that only a historical map can be one’s guide.

¹⁹ In another reference to the Persephone story, the token allowing entrance to the underworld in the sequel is a spray of narcissus, the flower that Persephone plucks, inadvertently exposing a passage that Hades uses in abducting her.

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The Night Tourist uses sections of Viele’s map (printed as ghostly green lines on a black background) as its endpapers; Abbott’s series is illustrated with frequent sketches by Antonio Javier Caparo depicting characters, plot elements, and places. Of these sketches, many are maps or floor plans providing detail about relative locations. For instance, Chapter 6 of The Battle Begins sends Owen, Jon, and Sydney to the local museum (on the advice of the Valkyries, who moonlight as the “lunch ladies” at Pinewood Bluffs Elementary) to collect Orpheus’ lyre, which is temporarily on exhibit there. As the text describes Owen staring at the instrument, a diagram is inserted to enable the reader to visualize the room. Both forms of description are spatially very detailed. The lyre is “a wooden horseshoe a foot square and painted gold, though most of its paint had flecked off. A crossbar connected the two arms of the U, with seven strings stretched between it and the bottom of the U”; the neatly executed floor plan shows the positions of glass cases (with some indication of contents), the room’s architectural elements, the lyre itself, two sets of guards, a “mysterious figure” revealed at the end of the saga to be Orpheus himself, and Owen, Jon, and Sydney (loc 377). In terms of the plot, much of this information is extraneous: what is remarkable about the lyre is not what it looks like but its power to compel or persuade by sound, and the positions of objects and people in the exhibition space matter less than the fact that the children are able to reach the lyre’s case unimpeded. The principal function of this diagram thus seems to be to encourage readers to think about space and to insert themselves imaginatively into the realm being mapped and described. Compounding this focus on readers’ mental processes, subsequent maps are positioned in such a way as to precede information provided in the verbal text, thus implicitly urging readers to take over the author’s job by imagining what is about to happen. One example of this device occurs in Chapter 7 of The Battle Begins. As the first-person narrator, Owen, describes the journey across the Styx on Charon’s boat and Charon’s request for payment, the text provides a map titled “The Greek Underworld.” The presence of a prominent label for a space in the upper left corner (“Boiler Room”) initially draws the reader’s eye to that corner, after which the Western reader’s natural tendency will be to read the map down and to the right. “River Styx” is the next labeled spot encountered during that process, but by that point a comparatively small proportion of the map has been covered. What remains (“Marshes,”

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“Arena,” “Hades’ Throne,” and some sketches of architectural features and blasted trees) is all material that has yet to be described in either setting or plot terms. Although this information will be encountered very soon, the reader who lingers on the map rather than skipping past it to read what is about to happen is given a space in which to speculate about future events, thus feeling the same suspense and anxiety that Owen and his friends must experience. The text provides its own version of such a speculative space, emphasizing the idea of mapping the not-yet-experienced. Once Owen, Jon, and Sydney enter the architectural feature at the bottom of the map just described, which turns out to be the tower in which Dana is imprisoned, Owen fends off the attacking Myrmidons by a clever ploy with the lyre. At that, the children suddenly glimpse what lies beyond the tower: “a faraway land of ice-capped volcanoes and whirling snow. Past that were deserts piled with carved white monuments. Beyond that, a land of hanging gardens and palaces of blue and amber stone” (loc 639–51). These lands are, of course, different underworlds, future levels of the game that the four children must master if they are to be victorious in their effort to save the world. To drive home the point that the battle is only at its beginning, the narrative ends with “And we were right in the middle of it,” but the visual text continues a step further by providing a two-element “Map of the Underworlds.” One pictured page shows the Greek and Norse underworlds (the Greek one somewhat more complete than its counterpart discussed above), the other the Egyptian and Babylonian versions (loc 693–8); the device impels the reader not merely into the next volume but beyond it as well.²⁰ The series’s structural likeness to a video game for young users is enhanced by the consistent script established for each volume. In each case readers encounter a new location, a new problem (such as “How do we save Dana?” or “How do we remove the marauding Cyclopes from Pinewood Bluffs?”), and one or more new tokens of power (Orpheus’ lyre in Volume 1, a runestone and Loki’s silver glove in Volume 2, the Tablets of Destiny and the Lost Chord in Volume 3, and in Volume 4 the Crystal Rune that enables the children to save Asgard). Capturing ²⁰ At the very end of Volume 1 (and subsequent volumes) is a glossary consisting largely of the names of mythological characters encountered thus far—essentially, a map to plot terrain already traversed. Nevertheless, the narrative’s overall thrust is forward.

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these items demands cunning and courage, while learning to wield them enhances the power of the child who possesses the object. Meanwhile, their antagonist has a similar challenge; in Revenge of the Scorpion King, Loki must ascend the Great Tower, each level of which houses a different monster, and “subdue each beast to pass from one level to the next” and collect the Tablets of Destiny (loc 219). The children are thus in direct competition with Loki, and the victory will go to the faster and more skillful gamer; Loki’s taunt “You won’t win this race” (Revenge loc 432) underscores the metaphor of play. So do the remarks of the adults in When Monsters Escape, suddenly oblivious after Owen plays the lyre to assuage panic, at which point Everyone in the room began chatting as if nothing was wrong. As if there were no monsters in their school. As if Loki was just a mythological being. As if it was all just a game. “Good kids!” the crowd cheered. “You go and play!” (loc 606)

But throughout the series, direction and mappability remain of particular importance. Repeatedly, the children are put in the position of looking down at the landscape—or field of play—from a height, as if consulting a map, while the reader is asked to share this vantage point by illustrations that often seem to be drawn from above. Similarly, the text may emphasize direction, as in the following representative example: “ ‘Hades plans to stop us in the north,’ Loki continued, choking with laughter, ‘but alas, Fenrir, we travel . . . east. To the land of the twin rivers’” (Monsters loc 669). The mappability of the terrain conditions the children’s understanding of future events; thus when Loki reclaims his glove in the third volume, bringing his magic power to its height, Sydney’s response is “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen” (loc 505). Sydney is here thinking twodimensionally, believing that what’s “supposed to happen” is the simple defeat of evil by good. But Owen, expanding his perception in a manner that he reports as “I suddenly became a genius,” saves the day by recognizing that the landscape that they are traversing is not a separate problem but part of the unity of the underworlds: “It all made sense! Each level of the tower had its own tone, its own musical note,” and by playing these notes on the lyre, he can resurrect the Babylonian god’s dead son and ally the children with the god himself (loc 531). Similarly, while the underworlds have been presented as separate game levels, the settings for four separate volumes, the ultimate solution to the problem

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requires them to work together as parts of a whole, much as the lyre’s strings can combine with the earth itself to create the Lost Chord. The same emphasis on unity extends to the family: Owen’s father saves the children at a difficult moment in Revenge of the Scorpion King, while Dana must rescue her parents from Niflheim in The Ice Dragon. In multiple ways, then, the map is the message. The Orpheus story premises that a map should point in only one direction: forward. Yet both the original myth and its neoclassical retellings acknowledge that humans want to look back into the past and claim agency over death, in these cases specifically to reunite the family. Arguably, the Orpheus narrative is a kind of fort/da narrative in which loss is first enacted without the hero’s agency (when Eurydice dies of snakebite) and subsequently as a cause of his action when he looks back at her before she has exited Hades. Marsh’s and Abbott’s novels take different approaches to the seemingly irresistible and even commendable impulse to see the inhabitants of the underworld that drives the living into Hades in the first place. Abbott allows Owen to rescue Dana (identified as abducted rather than dead, although Owen is linked with Orpheus rather than Demeter), while Marsh requires Jack—and through him the reader—to acknowledge “the inevitability of death,” the impossibility of reunion with dead loved ones in the living world (Kümmerling-Meibauer 301). We argue that these different messages are intimately connected with the spatial properties of the two sets of works.

4.6 Conclusion Spatial properties matter in the other texts examined in this chapter as well; while Nesbit and Peyton, say, approach space (and time) very differently, all the authors discussed here focus on the journeys taken by their protagonists and perceptively invoke an assortment of ingenious strategies for making these journeys both concrete and metaphorically significant for young readers. In contemplating texts that use maps as illustrations, Pavlik finds that “there is the potential for an experiential relationship between map-reader and map” (38). Somewhat similarly, Maria Nikolajeva and Liz Taylor use as case studies three children’s texts that include seemingly extradiegetic maps, arguing that map illustrations may be “deployed in subtle ways to produce complex narratives of space-

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time” (200). In this chapter, we have looked primarily at text rather than illustration, but we come to conclusions similar to those of these critics: texts that bring young characters into real or figurative underworlds, confronting them with death and inviting them to weigh possibilities for coping with it, serve as maps that offer guidance of a potentially profound sort. Navigating the borders of life and death, family and the individual, the future and the past is no easy task, but doing so is part of the human condition. In their different ways, the works discussed here all seek to point their readers toward success in this endeavor.

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5 HISTORY IS A MAP 2 Carnivals, Grotesquerie, and the Antic(que) Map Text

In making a case for applying cognitive theory to the study of Spanish comedia in the early modern period, Catherine Connor notes that “cognitive studies provide a means of uncovering the overlap between structure and disruptive play—between deterministic stability, or coherence, and polysemic difference . . . . the contributions of cognitive research in this regard give rise to profound questions about how much humans are neurologically and metaphorically structured to enact play in the world” (37). Citing in particular the work of Antonio Damasio “on the co-dependence of reason and emotion in humans,” she observes that cognitive research indicates that “our minds regularly need to connect ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’ cerebral activities in order to function in any ‘normal’ way” (39–40). The insights provided by the cognitive research highlighted in Connor’s roundup shed an interesting light on an argument that John Fiske makes in a cultural-studies context. Fiske points out that “ ‘distance’ is a key marker of difference between high and low culture,” inasmuch as high culture, privileging the aesthetic and the cerebral, “encourages reverence or respect” for its objects of study, which are seen to be “endowed with authenticity and requiring preservation.” Such objects are typically kept under glass or in no-go spaces in museums, separate from the viewer and certainly from that viewer’s quotidian existence. Thus “ ‘Distance’ may also function to create a difference between the experience of the art work and everyday life” and to enforce “a distance from the bodily sensations, for it is our bodies that finally bind us to our historical and social specificities. As the mundanities of our social conditions are set

Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction. Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey, Oxford University Press (2019). © Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846031.001.0001

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aside, or distanced, by this view of art, so, too, are the so-called sensuous, cheap, and easy pleasures of the body distanced from the more contemplative, aesthetic pleasures of the mind” (154). In Connor’s terms, the embodied metaphor CULTURE IS DISTANT is potentially damaging or at least unhelpful; if, as cognitive studies such as Damasio’s indicate, mind and body, reason and emotion, are part of a single continuous loop in healthy cognition, texts that combat the idea that CULTURE IS DISTANT would seem to serve a valuable function in encouraging readers to create internal maps that reflect a more integrated, holistic view of the relationship of “high” and “low.” Reverence for the classical past affords a fine example of Fiskean “distance.” Not only is the era far away from us in time, it is also treated with reverence as the foundation of Western art, philosophy, literature, science, and civic institutions. The purveyors of children’s literature tend to share this regard for Greek and Roman culture. Retellings of classical myths from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and its sequel, Tanglewood Tales (1853), to Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire’s influential d’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths (1962) have been presented to generations of children by adults who in many cases have been less concerned with entertaining the young than with imparting cultural capital. At the same time, these texts undeniably are entertaining, as children’s literature has also long been interested in lessening the culturally imposed “distance” between the classical past and the child reader’s present. This strategy is already on display in the earliest works discussed in our study, those by Rudyard Kipling and E. Nesbit, who, like Hawthorne and other predecessors writing for children in the nineteenth century, employ down-to-earth language and other devices designed to normalize antique subject matter for the modern reader.¹ In the present chapter, however, we look at contemporary map texts that mount an especially aggressive attack on “distance” by invoking low culture—in Fiske’s terms, the “so-called . . . cheap and easy”—in a more extended, ¹ Sheila Murnaghan and Deborah Roberts cite a biographer’s claim that “[Charles] Kingsley found Hawthorne’s works ‘distressingly vulgar’ ”; in writing The Heroes (1856) he saw himself undertaking a similar project to Hawthorne “but in a ‘more classical fashion’ ” (Childhood 25). That is, the tension over what constitutes appropriate distance (or inappropriate closeness) from the classical foundation has animated neoclassical children’s literature from its beginnings.

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assertive way than that visible in the pages of Nesbit, Kipling, or for that matter many of the more recent works discussed elsewhere in this study. Indeed, most of the texts analyzed in this chapter signal their affinity for the body by employing animal protagonists. We nevertheless contend that the substantial corpus of children’s books represented by these antic, playful works functions not to undermine the cultural capital represented by knowledge of the antique but to enhance it, thus exemplifying the same cooperation between mind and body that they may assist readers in mapping cognitively. This chapter discusses antic map texts by Rick Riordan and the writing team of British-born Vaughan Edwards and Australian-born Barry Creyton, set in versions of our present-day world. It also discusses a group of works that purport to be set in the ancient world: Paul Shipton’s Gryllus the Pig duology, Gary Northfield’s Julius Zebra series, and Robin Price’s Spartapuss saga (though Price’s Rome occupies a world that has never contained humans). These novels share significant traits with more serious map texts—for instance, all involve characters in journeys with stated objectives, whose completion suggests the acquisition of greater maturity or wisdom—but they also identify history less as something to learn or to learn from than as something to play with and parody, much as Lewis Carroll’s Alice books play with the didactic verse of an earlier era. While antic works with classical content serve the occasional educational function, as in Northfield’s inclusion of appendices that explain Roman numerals or Edwards and Creyton’s of a glossary of Italian words and phrases, theirs is not the brand of didacticism found in the traditional historical novel for children, which promises a painless but trustworthy way of learning names, dates, and other information liable to appear on tests. (The reader so trusting as to use the Julius Zebra series and its ilk as a source of reliable data on Roman local color will regret this decision.) Rather, in having fun with adult conventions, such parodic history “leads the way towards the empowerment of the child,” as Peter Hunt puts it in discussing Joan Aiken, whose Dido Twite series in particular marks her as another author who plays games (27). We suggest that parodic or playful history accomplishes this aim in part by employing the grotesque. As many critics have pointed out, not all grotesques are created equal. The founding theorists of the grotesque are Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin, whose approaches to their subject are emotionally opposite.

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For Kayser, the grotesque is “something ominous and sinister in the face of a world totally different from the familiar one” (21), while for Bakhtin—for us the more pertinent of these two theorists—it is ludic, fluid, and regenerative, fundamental to a carnivalesque pleasure in play and in remaking the world in a way that privileges openness. In the words of critic Sarah Gleeson-White, Bakhtin’s grotesque “unnerves the world of classic identity and knowledge. . . . it is transgressive because it challenges normative forms of representation and behavior . . . it is always in a state of becoming. The carnivalesque grotesque, then, is a strategy of resistance” (110)—but a joyous resistance, a resistance to a system that in its rigidity and predictability has something more than a little dead about it. In connecting the grotesque and the carnivalesque, Bakhtin defines a carnivalesque text as one permitting “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it mark[s] the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival. . . . was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed” (10)—which, in the formulation of the antic neoclassical text, includes canonical history. Yet the adjective “temporary” is important, inasmuch as it establishes that the opposition between the high and the low may be viewed as in some sense a matter of ritual only, a synergistic push–pull engaged in for productive purposes. The texts examined in this chapter play with status in multiple ways, but especially by creating dialogues between the highstatus forms of history and Greco-Roman culture on the one hand and, on the other, the low-status forms of comedy, melodrama, parody, and children’s literature. For the events of these narratives, like Bakhtin’s discourse on carnival, suggest that the high-status and the low-status are both at odds and oddly compatible, a point important to our readings of these tales and to our contention that the antic map text works along carnivalesque lines to negate Fiskean “distance” by mapping a link between high and low. The recurring low-culture motifs that we identify in the works explored here, such as consumption and the bodily grotesque, give way in these narratives to ideals of courage, unity, community, and love. Discussing the grotesque in works by Carson McCullers, GleesonWhite examines tropes also found in the novels that we consider in this chapter: the affinity between the grotesque’s transgressive energy and the “dynamism and active potential” of the adolescent protagonist (112); the connection between images of flight (or, we suggest, travel

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more generally) and the “challenge [to] those normative demands for identity which seek to constrain the promise of adolescence” (120). This line of inquiry would appear to lead primarily to a consideration of these texts’ commentary on childhood and youth. But we propose that it is also useful to take a more abstract approach by viewing what Gleeson-White calls the expanded “possibilities for representation and knowledge” offered by the grotesque (109) in the context not of characterization but of our authors’ approach to—or mapping of—history. Their warning (both inside and outside of the world of the novels) that one not trust overmuch to received wisdom, their playful mocking of narrative neatness, their assignment of creativity and ingenuity not to the people about whom classroom history is typically written but to the “lower orders” represented by children and animals, all call into question not only the history and mythology to which they provide alternatives but also the dominant standards that hold that history and mythology, as products of high culture, should be treated with reverence. In short, we find that what Craig Brandist writes of Bakhtin holds true for the neoclassical historical grotesque as well: “The carnivalesque becomes a set of image-borne strategies for destabilising the official worldview” (13). Yet this destabilization, like carnival itself, is also asked in these texts to serve as a renewal and a support for the classical past.

5.1 Gryllus the Pig and the Playful Attack on Borders We begin our examination of this point with Shipton’s The Pig Scrolls (2005) and The Pig Who Saved the World (2006). Like other works discussed in this chapter, both volumes invoke and deconstruct highculture tales of heroes, inasmuch as their narrator is Gryllus the Pig, a figure borrowed from Plutarch. Once one of Odysseus’ crew, Gryllus rejected the chance to regain human form after Circe turned the group into swine. As he explains, the motives behind his decision were unheroic. Unlike men, pigs find it easy to live in the moment, and while there are disadvantages to their lot (one, as he puts it, is being “a walking lump of potential pork-based foodstuffs” [Scrolls 10, orig. emphasis]), pigs have the luxury of focusing on what really matters in life, namely eating and sleeping. That is, Gryllus has consciously decided

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to go “off the map,” so to speak; he has no desire to travel, no need for movement since the only things that he claims to want are readily available. But to his dismay, his priorities are repeatedly disrupted by the need to take part in challenges requiring a heroism never asked of him in the Trojan War—most of which he spent peeling potatoes. In both volumes, a reluctant Gryllus must go on long and hazardous quests to avert catastrophe, in The Pig Scrolls by repairing the cosmos after a plutonium-powered toaster detonates and in The Pig Who Saved the World by rescuing the gods from the mad supervillain Sisyphus. The “map” that is the frontispiece to The Pig Scrolls is not a depiction of a place but a butcher’s diagram of the cuts of meat on a pig, and for the first part of the novel Gryllus is less a participant in the quest than one of its objects: he figures in the prophecy that provides the map for the plot, so that finding him is the first step on another character’s travels. Yet eventually he seizes agency and the title “hero.” A central strategy of the duology is to meld the eschatological with the scatological, undermining the novels’ claim to seriousness even as they record the preservation of human culture and indeed of all life. Accordingly, what we focus on here is the paradoxical connection that Shipton makes between the uplifting, from efforts to save the world to efforts to socialize child readers, and the mundane, which these novels associate with the body. Gryllus’ body—its animality, its weight (although he considers discussions of this point “frankly hurtful” [Scrolls 7]), its difficulty climbing ladders, its edibility, its aches and pains—is on nearconstant display throughout, keeping the mundane ever before the reader’s eyes. Yet the denouements of both novels also present it as a body that can perform heroic actions such as challenging Thanatos in order to win back a friend from death, or driving the Chariot of the Sun into a rip in the cosmos in order to destroy Chaos and put the world back together. Gryllus is a cynic, among other things, and he has a tendency to suspect the motives of those who surround him—which are indeed often crassly commercial, as when a tavern keeper in The Pig Scrolls hopes to make money off the novelty of a talking pig doing standup comedy. Even so, his lack of idealism is counterbalanced by the dogged commitment of his questing companions, the teenaged Pythia-in-training Sybil and the future poet Homer, to doing the right thing by the world. Shipton, that is, both puts the eschatological and the scatological into conflict and makes them allies, much as Bakhtin describes the

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carnivalesque works of Rabelais as typified by the “oxymoronic combination” that makes twins of the old and the new, life and death (206). Thus the Gryllus books depend to a great extent on examples of aggressively lowbrow culture such as Gryllus’ bad limericks and flatulence jokes, but this material exists not only to undermine classical high culture but also to advance it. Indeed, one of the duology’s conceits is that Homer appears as a pimply teenager who hears about Odysseus’ exploits from Gryllus’ accounts, so that readers are to understand that the epics later produced by the mature poet are cleaned-up and romanticized versions of the untrustworthy utterances of a pig whose type specimen of great art is an ethnic joke about dumb Boeotians. Yet readers are also to understand Homer’s development into a master-artist of high culture as a good thing and to see that the spiritual achievements of high art may thus depend upon a transfiguring of the mundane body. Exploding atomic toasters and cowardly talking pigs are the stuff of farce, yet Shipton covertly turns the farce, a form of authorial play, to serious ends—ends to which bodies are central. Significantly, The Pig Who Saved the World riffs on a famous moment in The Odyssey, namely Odysseus’ tricking of the Cyclops into believing that the man who has blinded him is named “Nobody,” thus preventing other Cyclopes from coming to his aid.² A key plot point in Shipton’s story is the prediction that “nobody can save the universe.” Just as Odysseus gives the concept of “Nobody” agency by making the word a name rather than a nothingness, Sybil insists on interpreting the prophecy in a hopeful way rather than taking it at its doom-laden face value. The narrative asks readers to speculate on whether the central figure in this prediction is Gryllus, who is a nobody if considered within a human-centric value system; the sentient severed head of Orpheus, which has no body; or Proteus, who as a shape-shifter has no one body. The question, playfully posed and never definitively answered inasmuch as all three have a role in the saving of the cosmos, recalls an argument made by Johann Huizinga in his classic work Homo Ludens, paraphrased by Willem Otterspeer as the

² The “Nobody” episode is also a factor in the plot of Tony Abbott’s When Monsters Escape, a work discussed in Chapter 4 of this study. Abbott’s series fits the template for the present chapter, while Shipton’s novels, conversely, fit that for the preceding one inasmuch as they contain visits to the underworld and extended references to Orpheus—a reminder that the patterns that we examine are seldom mutually exclusive.

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idea that “The heart of culture is sought in play. . . . Culture is born as play and in play” (Otterspeer 49). In listing play’s “main characteristics,” Huizinga stresses the following: First, play is “free, is in fact freedom” (8). Second, play is situated “quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly” (13). Third, play is “connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it” (13). Fourth, play is “seclude[d]” and “limite[d]”; it “is ‘played out’ within certain limits of time and place” (9). Fifth, “Play creates order, is order. . . . Play demands order absolute and supreme” (10). And finally, play “promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means” (13)—a trait that they share with high culture as Fiske defines it. Huizinga’s insights are valuable tools in forming a reading of Shipton’s works that explains their implicit point that play is not the opposite of seriousness but its protector, an agent of cooperation in the same sense that reason and emotion work together in healthy cognition. Notable in Huizinga’s typology of play are the tensions that it observes between freedom and confinement, ordinary life and the play-world, monetary profit and pleasure, order and disorder, and the in-group and the “common world.” Clearly, in relinquishing his claim to human form by hiding when Circe turns the rest of Odysseus’ crew back into men, Gryllus has declared his allegiance to the play-world. What plainer statement of being absorbed “intensely and utterly” by the life of play could there be but a new body, and what plainer rejection of profit in favor of simpler pleasures than moving from the human to the animal world? Yet that Gryllus is not a real pig but a pretend pig is simultaneously made apparent by his retention of human language and memories, his occasional desire to return to his original body, and his continued ability to form equal relationships with selected humans such as Sibyl and Homer. Theirs, of course, is a social grouping marked not only by its closeness and exclusivity (all its members are outsiders) but also by disguises of various types: Sibyl’s hooded cloak, Homer’s awkward adolescence contrasted with his later identity as great poet, and Gryllus’ pig body. Allies and companions on a quest, Sibyl, Homer, and Gryllus are simultaneously playfellows. Recall that Huizinga also sees play as an activity that “creates order, is order. . . . Play demands order absolute and supreme.” Significantly, he

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makes a connection between children’s play and ancient Greek religious rituals involving ritual, song, and dance, arguing that such ritual still retains the formal characteristics of play in every respect. It is played or performed within a playground that is literally “staked out,” and played moreover as a feast, i.e. in mirth and freedom. A sacred space, a temporarily real world of its own, has been expressly hedged off for it. But with the end of the play its effect is not lost; rather it continues to shed its radiance on the ordinary world outside, a wholesome influence working security, order and prosperity for the whole community. (14)

The health conferred by the radiant play-space resembles that provided by the synergy of reason and emotion as studied in Damasio’s cognitive research. Within Shipton’s novels, however, the companions’ endeavor to achieve “security, order and prosperity for the whole community” via their quests is explicitly linked to religion, inasmuch as threats to the gods are in both cases fundamental to the chaos that Sibyl, and in her wake Gryllus and Homer as well, are trying to address. “Order absolute and supreme” has broken down, and only the quests can restore it. One might argue that for Gryllus, the quests pose an over-serious interruption to the play represented by porcine leisure; he does not see quests as play, precisely because their ability to restore order to the cosmos is so profound and important. Yet the contemporary reader, lacking the questers’ belief in the Greek gods and more aware than Gryllus of the comic aspects of the narrative mode employed here, understands the novels as playful even while appreciating the ways in which Gryllus emerges as heroic at the end of a long chain of unheroic or anti-heroic deeds. The splitting apart of religious ritual and play, something that Huizinga identifies as a characteristic of postclassical civilization, seems to demand that because one sees Shipton’s books as play, one not see them as religious. Nevertheless, these novels reveal a concern with ethics of a humanist, indeed self-sacrificial Christian type that they seem to present as at odds with the body but toward which bodies in fact serve to direct our attention. In this connection, Otterspeer notes that for Huizinga, “the entire world of the imagination is predicated on [the] transcendental quality” of the movement from “struggle and competition,” in the games associated with religious ritual in ancient Greece, to what Huizinga calls “the overarching notion of a community, which recognized its members as ‘humanity,’ with rights and claims to be treated as ‘human beings’” (Otterspeer 120). Shipton’s novels explicitly address this question of

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community and universal brotherhood, and significantly, the mechanism by which they emphasize its importance is the invoking of the body. Consider here two representative examples from the texts. First, early in The Pig Scrolls, Gryllus is moved to contemplate the institution of slavery, which, he notes, no one in his society questions: Of course, there were slaves everywhere, and yet, and yet . . . I felt a Very Important Thought rise in my mind like a suspicious air bubble in a mud bath. Wasn’t there a better, fairer way? I mean, what if humans simply realized that they were all just the sa— “WAAARGH!” The rope yanked on my neck and the Very Important Thought popped and was lost to the ether, as I was forced to concentrate on more immediate concerns (like, for example, making sure I could still breathe). (14)

Second, consider the “Legal Disclaimer” printed at the head of The Pig Who Saved the World: “Inside this book you may find the ultimate meaning of life. The publisher and translator can accept no responsibility for head injuries caused by the sudden rush of ancient secret wisdom into unprepared modern brain stems” (n.pag.). In both cases, the texts appear to interrupt the reader’s contemplation of something profound (the “Very Important Thought”) with the invocation of physical discomfort, yet in both cases the interruption also serves to highlight the importance of actually having, and following through on, that thought. Characteristically, however, the text is self-interrupting in other ways, suggesting (or cognitively enforcing) the difficulty in maintaining the border between what is essential and what is ostensibly frivolous. Among the distinctive features of the duology are its many footnotes. As a kind of parodic scholarly apparatus, footnotes designed to amplify or correct Gryllus’ account of his experiences defy our understanding of the conventions of “tween” fiction, which usually unfolds without the aid of an additional authorial voice correcting the first-person narrator. Footnotes, of course, also assault our understanding of antique epics; there are no footnotes in Homer, only in scholarly editions of Homer. Footnotes are consequently the mark of the mock epic, making the work less serious rather than more by borrowing the techniques of academic containment and control. And if the text goes “high” by invoking a scholarly apparatus, it also goes “low” at a moment of suspense, for instance by interrupting the narrative of The Pig Who Saved the World with two pages of

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illustrated advertisements for monster kebabs, “Medusa’s Snake Oil Shampoo and Dandruff Treatment,” a correspondence school in entrail reading, and a philosophy course complete with “free booklet illustrating 15 facial expressions that indicate deep thought,” all consumables pertinent to the narrative in various ways (122–3). Topologically, then, the play that Shipton offers in both novels is often devoted to mapping, exploring, and ultimately undermining the distinction between periphery and center, or inside and outside. Gryllus is in more famous accounts of the adventures of Odysseus only a peripheral character, but he is central in these two volumes, to the point of usurping and playing with the expressive function elsewhere allocated to Homer as author and Odysseus as hero. Gryllus even reduces Homeric epithets to the status of children’s game when, in The Pig Who Saved the World, he plays “I Spy” with the head of Orpheus, who is thoroughly disgusted when Gryllus repeatedly spies the “wine-dark sea” when they are adrift on a raft (114). The footnotes likewise express uncertainty about what belongs inside or outside of the main text, suggesting a mise en abyme of the apparently trivial that could, on another iteration, become the central. Gryllus’ pig nature is itself something that exposes the permeability of borders, inasmuch as he is constantly at risk of being ingested by some other character, even at moments when he is not threatened with a dagger “so close that it would soon be on the wrong side of my skin, which is to say the inside” (Scrolls 8, orig. emphasis). In other words, for an epic hero, Gryllus suffers to an unusual degree from the threat of being engulfed by some other textual element, rather than remaining at liberty as hero and narrator. While The Odyssey raises this specter briefly in the section devoted to the Cyclopes, which Gryllus identifies in The Pig Scrolls as an occasion of such horror that it has caused him to prefer life as a placid pig to life as a traumatized man, that episode is exceptional. Readers understand that Homeric heroes are often threatened with death but are rarely at risk of being eaten, whereas Gryllus has to face the latter possibility as well as the former. And indeed, the “map”/frontispiece to the second volume, again a butcher’s diagram but this time with a human rather than a pig as its subject, suggests that in Shipton’s works, if not always in Homer’s, being eaten is all too likely an outcome, since the borders of taboo are as subject to transgression as any others. That Gryllus is both hero (at least to himself ) and food (to practically everyone else) is part of the endless collapse of high and low and play with borders.

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Borderlessness is also where play in the form of the Bakhtinian grotesque becomes useful, especially in the context of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s point that “Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities” (3). To privilege the grotesque, that is, can have cognitive consequences. As Kathleen Rowe notes in her account of the carnivalesque as it infuses American comedy, the grotesque body “exaggerates its processes, bulges, and orifices, whereas the static, monumental ‘classical . . . body’ conceals them. The grotesque body breaks down the boundaries between itself and the world outside it, while the classical body, consistent with the ideology of the bourgeois individual, shores them up” (33). If the classical body is about what Fiske defines as distance, the grotesque body is about proximity, and embracing one or the other view helps to guide one’s approach to the world. This account suggests that one of Gryllus’ functions may be to protect the novels’ heroine, Sibyl, from being seen as unruly, matter out of place. Sibyl too is a character who ought not to be part of this narrative if seen from the vantage point of authentic Homer. A young, unmarried woman, she arrogates to herself power unimaginable to women in the ancient Greek world, even to a Pythia in training. Yet in another move from the peripheral to the central, Sybil is presented as essential to the enterprise of heroism: she is a combination of prophetess and ninja, who is often androgynous in her appearance (cloaked, or appearing in armor). She is indeed the only character who is heroic in both deed and intention. What she is not is the unruly female body, out of control, inviting laughter. That is Gryllus’ function, just as it is the adolescent Homer’s function to be largely peripheral to this narrative, bringing up the rear. Gryllus often remarks upon Sibyl’s physical and mental competence, as when he observes that the crooked priest Hieros “looked down into Sibyl’s grimly determined, top-tier-temple-educated face and knew he didn’t stand a chance” (World 165). Homer, in contrast, is described as miserably seasick. Play and the carnivalesque, in other words, have the effect of reversing the expected hierarchies of competence and heroic qualities, so that the pecking order appears to run woman, pig, man, or, if one takes Gryllus at his own evaluation, pig, woman, man. That play with high and low as cultural categories should introduce elements such as flatulence to the epic should not, perhaps, surprise one.

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These inversions are common devices for the delight of the tween audience, as the texts discussed in this chapter illustrate. But Shipton’s work suggests that once one set of cultural hierarchies is reversed, or its stability threatened inventively, others come under examination. The effect of this play with and within categories is to present femininity as sober, heroic, and competent, in a world in which if pigs don’t fly, at least they are acceptable Homeric heroes. Classical learning is spoofed through a comedic reversal of hierarchies, but the duology simultaneously invites the child reader to enter into the classical world—thus consuming the temptingly edible Gryllus in a new sense of the word.

5.2 Spartapuss the Cat and the Repeating and Consuming of Time The grotesque consumption schema, punningly foregrounded by Shipton’s use of butcher’s diagrams and Gryllus’ many brushes with being eaten, presents the classical as easy of access and open to casual and less than respectful contact. A similar attitude is on display in Robin Price’s Spartapuss series, another first-person (or first-animal) narration obsessively detailing encounters with food both appetizing and revolting. The series as originally published consists of five titles, I Am Spartapuss (2004), Catligula (2005), Die Clawdius (2006), Boudicat! (2008), and Cleocatra’s Kushion (2010); the last has two narrators, Spartapuss and his son, Son of Spartapuss or S.O.S.³ Together these volumes recount the saga of a bathhouse slave turned gladiator turned real-estate entrepreneur whose upward climb involves him in travel around the Feline Empire.⁴ The reiteration of classical lore apparent in Shipton’s coopting of Homeric epic is also on display in Price’s quintet, which rehearses familiar episodes in Roman history but reassigns the human roles to cats. Such works launch an unmistakable attack on the idea that the classical should be seen as static and untouchable, preserved in the literary equivalent of a glass case. Rather, associating the classical with

³ A spinoff series for younger readers that features Spartapuss’s son, The Olympuss Games, began publication in 2014 and presently consists of four titles. ⁴ A map of Spartapuss’s empire and its environs is available at .

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parody and consumption justifies new modes of presentation and the organization of space. Spartapuss’s diary quickly establishes his preoccupation with eating, as even the first page of his narration in each volume makes at least one food reference: “ ‘All you can eat’ fish bowls” as served by the spa that employs the protagonist in Spartapuss (9), roasted chicken with vinegar sauce and “Black Dumplings of the Forest Worker. . . . I’ve been eating grass all day” in Catligula (9), “a sea as flat as a rabbit pancake” in Die Clawdius (9), a poorly cooked dinner made from the “pigeons of East Londump” in Boudicat! (15), and the fish served on board ship in Cleocatra’s Kushion (16). In each case food is carefully tied to location; this pattern is repeated throughout the saga, with food or its elimination often furnishing important plot points, as in the first volume when Spartapuss is imprisoned and forced into gladiatorial combat after having been falsely accused of an impiety committed in a vomitorium. The implication is that to the feline mind, a reasonable way of mapping location and experience is by chronicling eating and its aftermath. While this insight will strike most cat owners as plausible, in Anglo-American human society food—particularly that consumed by animals—is associated with low culture, and mentions of vomiting or defecating are generally considered impolite, thus linking the series to what Bakhtin refers to as the bodily grotesque. Fiske’s reference (quoted earlier in this chapter) to the “pleasures of the body” indicates that these pleasures are often divorced from high culture, including chronicles involving Roman history; the prominence given in Price’s saga to food and what happens after eating works to train the reader to see the bodily grotesque and the classical past as compatible. But food is not the only means by which the Spartapuss series organizes space. The texts are also devoted to various ways of representing and emphasizing repetition and mirroring, a concept expressed on the largest level by the wordplay through which the Feline Empire recapitulates the more familiar Roman Empire. (Thus, for instance, Catligula runs afoul of the Spraetorian Guard when he insists on elevating his pet, Rattus Rattus, to the Senate; Boudicat, queen of the Micini tribe in the Land of the Kitons, leads a rebellion against the Empire’s rule; and so on through the volumes.) Catligula in particular offers multiple examples of mirroring, inasmuch as the plot depends upon the fact that Spartapuss has been tricked into wearing a collar identical to that of the emperor, who is thus

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able to spy on certain of his subjects because he can see anything taking place within visual range of the coin that is suspended from Spartapuss’s neck. Catligula and Spartapuss necessarily move in parallel, then, a sinister thickening of the line that might normally be used to depict Spartapuss’s solo progress through the palace. The same volume makes much of “the symbol of the Moracle,” described by Spartapuss as “a great white snake coiled in a circle—swallowing its own tail in a rather disgusting manner” and immediately glossed by a more sophisticated observer, the mysterious Fleagyptian Tefnut, as “The most potent charm you can buy. The Great Snake that eats his own tail. He forms a circle that symbolises the Wheel of Time. The Wheel that turns forever as each of us dies and is reborn” (46). This image efficiently combines the concepts of repetition, time, consumption, and the grotesque. But it is also important to note that it provides a mystical gloss to images (including images of eating) that in Spartapuss’s diary-keeping have earlier been presented in more prosaic ways. Humor is thus presented as not the enemy but the precursor to seriousness. This phenomenon becomes still more pronounced in the saga’s final volume, Cleocatra’s Kushion. This installment, too, emphasizes mirroring, this time not through a discrete plot element such as the magic coin but through the structure of the narrative itself. Cleocatra’s Kushion is the only book in the series to have two narrators, Spartapuss and his son, and over the course of the story it gradually becomes clear that even though the two are almost always in different places and experiencing different events, the substance of their plot trajectories is identical. Indeed, Price makes it impossible for even the novice reader to overlook this point. When father and son are finally reunited, they bicker over who has had the more distressing time of it, and S.O.S. complains to Spartapuss “in a lecturing tone which some say sounds a little like my own”: “You don’t know what it’s like for the young,” he sulked. “I was imprisoned by the Emperor.” “So was I,” I answered. “I escaped from Rome’s worst prison.” “So did I.” “I’ve sailed across the Mare at the most dangerous time. The sailors call it ‘The Closed Sea.’ ” “So have I.” “I’ve saved a half-blind companion from death.”

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“So have I.” “I’ve spun a magical pot and seen visions.” “So have I.” “I’ve risked my life trying to find a frog.” “So have I,” I said, holding up Jebel as the proof. “My frog can talk,” I added. “I’ve been chased through the desert by Nomats.” “So have I.” “I’ve fought as a gladiator in an arena.” “So have I.” “I’ve risked my life for the one I love[.]” “So have I,” I hissed. He paused for a moment. Had he come to the end of his list? “For mother?” he asked. “For you my son!” I answered. (164–5)

The abrupt shift from competition over the ludicrously improbable (“My frog can talk”) to sentiment ends the conversation on a note suggesting that perhaps the reason that the twin plots resemble each other so closely is that children are somehow programmed to retrace the trajectories taken by their parents, or vice versa. While humor may infuse love, love is the dominant force here, and the paths of one generation lay down the map for the next. This point has indeed already been hinted at earlier in the narrative, as both Spartapuss and S.O.S. pursue their quests by following clues associated with the past. For example, Spartapuss and his companions find that spinning a pot of mysterious provenance acquired earlier on his quest results in the projection of moving pictures, evidently of the past (“ancient tombs,” as well as other visions [138]); the pictures then turn into a “map” showing the group “where to sail” (139). Similarly, S.O.S.’s comrade Spitulus suggests that the answer to their own quest may be found by “going back,” since “Perhaps we may find the answer inside that Purramid” (147); S.O.S. subsequently discovers that a statue at the Purramid is pointing at a secret door long buried in the sand, which leads them into the tomb and to another gesturing statue. In both cases, taking guidance not from the Feline Empire but from manifestations of the bygone civilizations of Catage (the pot) and independent Fleagypt (the Purramid and associated artifacts) leads to the rescue and reunion of father and son. In turn, this rescue results in the revelations that Spartapuss’s mentor and benefactor Tefnut—never presented as a comic figure—has herself come out of the past, sent by “the ancients” to help him (182), and

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that S.O.S.’s beloved has been turned into a statue, an ending that requires that the son’s emotional energies be directed back at his family of origin. The two halves of the mirrored narrative thus end up looking inward at one another rather than outward toward new adventures or potential romantic partners, and the saga must therefore conclude—in effect, having eaten its own tail. Surveying the field of cognitive criticism, Maria Nikolajeva concludes that “Our engagement with fiction is not transcendental; it is firmly anchored in the body, both within the body and in the body’s position in space and time” (Reading 10). Fiction of the bodily grotesque, and perhaps especially fiction that asks readers to project themselves into bodies that are not human but nonetheless contain humanlike consciousness, disrupts literary conventions and readerly expectations. In a sense, it maps uncharted territory and offers its audience a new way of understanding the relationship of the contemporary child’s body to its physical and temporal surroundings. Yet at the same time, Price’s series uses wordplay and embodiment to anchor child readers to our own world while also permitting them to navigate a world resembling ancient Rome: readers insufficiently knowledgeable about history to see the humor in deformations such as “Catligula” or “Boudicat” will still be able to appreciate the physical humor of towns called “Londump” and “Gnaw-Itch,” wandering cat tribes of “Nomats,” and even (if they are the owners of male pets) a military unit known as the “Spraetorian Guards.” This grotesque terminology anchors the reader in a sense that while discrete historical events are transitory, they too—like the reader’s own time—are anchored in the body and are thus knowable on an intimate level. Through this lowest common denominator, readers are then equipped to explore less familiar, or more high-culture, historical terrain via a plot that quietly turns toward the ineffable.

5.3 Julius Zebra and Cognitive Connection through Words, Pictures, and Warthogs Gary Northfield’s Julius Zebra books for primary-school readers number three as we write this chapter: Julius Zebra: Rumble with the Romans! (2015), Julius Zebra: Bundle with the Britons! (2016), and Julius Zebra: Entangled with the Egyptians! (2017). The first volume follows its title

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character from his African birthplace to Rome’s Colosseum, where he and other exotic animals—all of whom have humanlike personalities and linguistic abilities—are slated to be sword and trident fodder in a warmup act preceding human-on-human combat. Instead, Julius picks up some fallen weapons and engages the foe, becoming an instant audience sensation and gaining the attention of the emperor Hadrian. The subsequent books, each set in a different part of the Roman world, trace Julius’ efforts to gain freedom for himself, his multispecies group of animalgladiator friends, and potentially all exploited animals and subject peoples within the Roman Empire, beginning with the Britons— liberated through his efforts in the second volume. The series has been praised for its antic humor; as is also the case with other texts discussed in this chapter, this quality ultimately functions not to divide high culture from low but to use the latter as a point of entry into the former. The series nonetheless has its distinctive qualities, particularly notable in its handling of the visual. Northfield, who holds a degree in illustration, is primarily a cartoonist, and the cartoonlike illustrations in the Julius Zebra books are not only an important element in establishing the books’ humorous tone and their emphasis on the grotesque body (cartoons, like carnival masks, rely on exaggeration of physical characteristics) but also the sole site of a considerable amount of dialogue, conveying plot information that does not appear in the printed text. In other words, in consuming the series it is not possible for a reader who is not visually oriented to skip over the pictures while still absorbing the full complement of available information about what is being said and done within the story world. Dialogue reported within quotation marks in what most readers would normally consider the “main” part of the text intersects seamlessly with dialogue reported in speech balloons; as Figure 5.1 exemplifies, this strategy works to train the reader to understand text and illustrations not as separate elements that may be in competition, but rather as a unified whole. The process of cognitive connection that Connor understands as essential where mind and body, reason and emotion are concerned is here presented in terms of words and pictures. Simultaneously, Northfield indicates to his child readers that no obstacles exist to prevent warm friendships between zebras and warthogs, crocodiles, lions, mice, and so on through an extensive menagerie composed of animals big and small, herbivorous and carnivorous. The emphasis throughout is thus on unity

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Figure 5.1 The opening page of one of the appendices to Gary Northfield’s Julius Zebra: Bundle with the Britons!, which characteristically combines instruction with humor. Copyright © 2016 Gary Northfield. Reproduced by permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5HJ, .

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rather than difference, a lesson that is presented comically but seems to point to a serious social message. Similarly, Julius and his friends share traits that one can take seriously, such as the desire for home and for freedom, even though the principal quality used to bind together the oddly assorted cast of characters and the improbable plots is silliness. Running gags such as loopy escape plots, together with incongruities such as the depiction of gladiators engaging in “pinky swear[s]” (Romans CXXI), help to ensure that earnestness will seem at most a minor element here. Yet the series’s playfulness is itself interpretable as a socializing force. In an article that places current attitudes toward children’s play in the context of the late nineteenthcentury Anglo-American “play movement,” Michelle Beissel Heath shows the perdurability of the understanding that play has important cognitive benefits for the young. In the words of a 2000 report by the National Playing Fields Association in Britain entitled Best Play: What Play Provision Should Do for Children, play should be considered a key part of “developing adults who are creative and effective in the social and economic sphere” (qtd. Beissel Heath 114); as Beissel Heath notes, contemporary psychologists warn of the serious consequences that may result from “play deprivation” (110), a concern that they share with their predecessors at the turn of the twentieth century. In this concern, play is valued for serious reasons, many of them connected to building good future citizens—recalling the “overlap” that Connor identifies as existing between the apparent subversiveness of play and the continuity represented by structure. Children reading the Julius Zebra books are probably not simultaneously engaged in active physical play of the sort that the members of the National Playing Fields Association presumably have in mind. Yet the representations of play offered in this series allow vicarious participation in both slapstick (for instance, in Rumble with the Romans! a rival team of gladiators covers Julius and his friends with biting ants, which must then be washed off with buckets of cold water [CLIII]) and wild creativity, as when Lucia the crocodile makes fish disguises for the group (shortsightedly, she uses chainmail for this purpose) so that they can attempt a getaway from the ship carrying them to Britain (Britons LXXVII–LXXXII). The effect is to privilege a sensibility of play: readers are urged to identify with the childlike Julius and his friends and thus to imagine themselves experiencing what these characters experience, and

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comedy here dominates over tragedy. Although the animals frequently appear to be in imminent danger of death, the series implies that their more significant problems are those shared with many human children, such as trouble adjusting to authority figures (the gladiatorial trainer is an exaggerated version of a demanding gym teacher), sibling rivalry (Julius’ initial departure from home is motivated in part by the desire to get away from his tiresome older brother, with whom he is reunited in Volume 2), and, as in the Spartapuss series, unpleasant institutional food. That all of these problems, whether of consumption or of interpersonal relationships, are played for their comic effect paradoxically boosts the power of the potential didactic message by modeling the idea that laughing at troubles will diminish them. The comedy here is inextricable from the Bakhtinian grotesque and the carnivalesque, inasmuch as Northfield is simultaneously undermining conventional knowledge and challenging hierarchies. Cartoons, historically a low-status form, are offered as a major source of knowledge about plot and dialogue; animals talk and wield weapons; slaves attempt to seize power. In Entangled with the Egyptians!, Julius is even crowned pharaoh after he is recognized as the incarnation of the horse god Heter; this plot twist, which adopts a genuine ancient Egyptian word for “horse” to denote a god who seems to be Northfield’s invention, functions as the apotheosis of an ongoing joke about the species confusion that repeatedly causes him to be identified as a “striped horse.” The ludicrousness of the religious error that prompts this elevation implicitly calls into question sacred matters such as prophecy and the special qualities of the divine. But the Egyptian episode pays tribute to learning even while mocking it, much as Bakhtin sees the “tradition of the grotesque” (still surviving, he notes, in “the lower canonical genres,” among which one might number cartoons and heavily illustrated novels for children) as allowing the coexistence of seriousness and parody (101, 97). During their tour of the “huge, gleaming temples and great statues lining the road as far as the eye could see” (LXXIII), Julius may be confused about terminology—he refers to hieroglyphics as “hypergluesticks” (LXXIV)—but he is nonetheless impressed rather than being inclined to make fun of what he is encountering. His more bookish friend Cornelius the warthog already knows “interesting facts” about the land that they are visiting, for example that the lighthouse at Alexandria “uses a mirror to reflect the sun’s rays during the day and a fire is lit on top during the night”

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(LXXIV). When the Egyptian commander inquires about the source of his knowledge, Cornelius responds “modestly, ‘I’ve read the odd parchment,’ ” to which the commander replies, “Then, my little friend, you are going to LOVE our library!” (LXXV). Cornelius’ excited reaction, a tribute to “The greatest library the world has ever KNOWN! . . . Centuries of knowledge and wisdom from all over the world, stored here for everybody to read on scrolls and parchments” (LXXVIII, orig. emphasis), makes clear both that the Egyptian civilization is great rather than laughable (even if they can’t tell a zebra from a horse god) and that libraries and their contents merit the utmost respect. Like the Spartapuss series, then, Northfield’s Julius Zebra books map the Roman empire in a fashion that links the seemingly unrelatable—zebras and warthogs, hieroglyphs and gluesticks, irreverence and respect. In her chapter “A Subtle Cartography: Navigating the Past in Children’s Fiction,” Janet Grafton argues that this emphasis on “interconnectedness” is essential to children’s acquisition of “geographic literacy,” since such literacy depends upon both “[u]nderstanding how the past connects to the present” and developing “[t]he ability to make connections” more generally (61, 62). This ability, suggests developmental psychologist Lynn Liben, can be fostered and developed in children by exposure to maps, which she describes as “representations that—like prose—can communicate the creator’s (cartographer’s or author’s) visions, and that—again, like prose— can provoke readers to see new visions, ask new questions, and expand or change previously held beliefs” (22). Shaking up expectations via use of the grotesque and the absurd, requiring readers to navigate rapidly between text located in “word space” and text located in “picture space,” pivoting rapidly from the ridiculous to the reverent, Northfield facilitates the development of such new vision by uniting play and socialization.

5.4 The Dogs of Pompeii and Popular Culture’s Alliance with the Past Somewhat less broad in its humor than Northfield’s and Price’s works, Edwards and Creyton’s comic thriller The Dogs of Pompeii (2006)⁵ is an ⁵ The sequel, Nero Goes to Rome, revolves around the theft of a Renaissance jeweler’s masterpiece (which Nero is forced to wear as a collar) rather than around a more ancient artifact. While the sequel also contains classical material, as when Nero and his friend Rufus

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example for slightly older readers of how the carnivalesque and the grotesque can be pressed into the service of high culture. Narrated alternately by a member of modern Pompeii’s large population of homeless dogs, Nero, and by a fifteen-year-old American named Caroline who is visiting her archaeologist uncle for the summer, the text gets its voices and its narrative energy from members of two groups that the past would only infrequently recognize as entitled to discourse upon it, namely animals and women. This question of recognition and misprision is established at the outset by the fact that Nero has narrated a full chapter before the reader is informed that he is not human; it is continued throughout the narrative by the importance given to plot points such as the villains’ initial ignorance that Caroline, whom they have kidnapped, speaks fluent Italian. The plot hinges on attempts to find a bronze statue of Achilles’ wife, Deidamia. The image’s whereabouts are originally known only to Nero, who has excavated its hand while searching for a lost tennis ball. After Nero shows the archaeologists where to find the statue, it is subsequently stolen by the criminal gang—not because they hope to cash in on this priceless antiquity but because they want to melt it down, erasing the evidence that the site where the discovery was made is a place of archaeological interest so that they can erect a 700-room hotel and entertainment complex on the property. The planned hotel, described as “unit[ing] the wonderful world of antiquity with twenty-first century know-how,” will include a colosseum “three times the size of the original and fully air-conditioned” for the staging of “bloodless gladiatorial combats and world-class animal acts alternating with rock concerts,” as well as a restaurant, “DEIDAMIA’S BAR AND GRILL[,] featuring an authentic twelve-course ROMAN BANQUET (non-alcoholic beverages gratis) followed by ‘POMPEII—THE MUSICAL’[:] Passion! Greed! Lust! Revenge! On stage nightly—Vesuvius erupts! 100 singers and 100 dancers (use of cameras and recording devices strictly forbidden)” (35–6, orig. emphasis). As this description makes plain, the novel’s chief villain, the fabulously wealthy developer Signor Macchiato, does not respect the “distance” are passed off as “direct descendants of ancient Roman hunting dogs” for a tourist event held in the Colosseum (88), we focus here only on the first volume as a purer example of the neoclassical.

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that, in Fiske’s aperçu, became a feature of the high-culture classical past after “[t]he exalted genres of classicism [were] freed from the influence of the grotesque tradition of laughter” (Bakhtin 101). Boundaries, accordingly, are a key issue within the plot, inasmuch as “Whereas the Villa Deidamia site is outside the walls of Pompeii, it does not fall under the laws governing excavations within the city of Pompeii” (37). In the conventional (post-Rabelaisian, in Bakhtin’s terms) sense, then, the problem is that the border of the park that contains Pompeii has been drawn too narrowly; since the Villa Deidamia site is indeed a place of high culture and art, the Pompeian borders should be extended to include it so that the villa and the artifacts within it may be scientifically excavated, properly preserved, and respected, an exercise that will not include rock music or American-style historical spectaculars. In the carnivalesque sense, however, the agency and voice given to Caroline and Nero warn against attempts to close off the past and to render it rigid and static. The archaeological zone that is Pompeii protects, but it also limits and defines, and it is important for all to recognize that the past actually exceeds the space that has been allotted to it. Significantly, Caroline and Nero, positioned in this novel as the past’s most effective defenders, have at first very little command over its details. Learning from her uncle that he is excavating the Villa Deidamia and that the site is named for Achilles’ wife, Caroline writes in her diary, “[N]ot wanting to sound like a total moron, I said, ‘I thought Achilles was a confirmed bachelor.’ Uncle Tad laughed a lot at that and said he was glad I knew my Greek mythology. Fact is, I only know about Achilles because Didi and I saw ‘Troy’ three times (Didi was going through an Eric Bana phase) but I didn’t tell Uncle Tad that” (11). Similarly, after impressing her dinner companions with a (misquoted) line from George Santayana, Caroline tells her uncle grandly that “I do occasionally listen in class,” but confesses to her diary, “(Actually, I think I heard it on ‘Jeopardy’)” (45–6). To Caroline, Pliny the Younger, Tad’s source of information about the villa, is “some ancient Roman guy” (10); to Nero, although he is well versed in the history of the dogs of Pompeii, Pliny is a still vaguer figure, a name to be followed with the phrase “whoever he is” and the observation, “The professor’s always talking about Pliny the Younger and how he wishes he’d written more letters. Maybe he would if the professor wrote back once in a while. To tell the truth I don’t understand archaeology. They never seem to find anything useful and even if they

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do find a bone, there’s no meat on it” (23–4). The success of Caroline’s and Nero’s efforts, then, suggests that while they need to expand their knowledge, it is also the case that an important function of the twin protagonists is to widen what constitutes culture so that additional sources—big-screen Hollywood epics about the ancient world, Jeopardy!, canine tradition, and implicitly Edwards and Creyton’s novel—may be given their due as contributing to the global retention of the past. Passages such as those quoted above thus suggest that in the novel’s scheme of values, popular culture is at least potentially an ally rather than an enemy of the good. Nero, readers learn, is an aficionado less of classical Rome than of classical Hollywood cinema, having been befriended by a local cook who is a devoted viewer of such fare; Nero’s discourse is larded with references to Casablanca in particular, and his efforts to model his own behavior on that of Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of Rick advance rather than competing with or undermining his efforts to help Caroline and the archaeologists. Hence Macchiato’s real crime is not his ability to “unite the wonderful world of antiquity with twenty-first century know-how” by supersizing and air-conditioning his replica Colosseum and conceiving of “Pompeii—The Musical,” but rather the fact that the motive for this popularizing of the past is shortterm personal gain. Like Shipton’s Gryllus books, The Dogs of Pompeii expresses particular anxiety about consumption, here presented as a force that threatens to devour all that the novel is instructing readers to prize. For paired with the dual narrators are dual suspense plots. One, already mentioned, involves the attempt to melt down the statue of Deidamia in order to enable the hotel project; this is the plot that requires the kidnapping of Caroline. The statue’s theft leads to a melodramatic denouement worthy of early film serials of the Perils of Pauline variety, inasmuch as the artifact has been taken to a foundry and is slowly being lowered into the furnace, an effort frustrated when Caroline, her archaeology-student boyfriend Gianni, and Nero all leap onto the counterweight to prevent further downward movement. The image of Deidamia suspended over the fire simultaneously recalls the eruption of Vesuvius—Caroline makes the parallel unmistakable by thinking of “Flames pouring out of the crater; the treasures of Pompeii about to be consumed!” (218)—and critiques a modern Italy prepared to destroy its own past in the process of monetizing it.

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The other suspense plot has to do with Macchiato’s effort to rid the site of the future hotel of its pack of canine inhabitants. Over the course of the novel, the dog population mysteriously shrinks, and at about the time that the statue’s current whereabouts are discovered, Nero also realizes that the dogs who have been rounded up by the bumbling rent-a-thugs Iachimo and Bottiglione are slated to be butchered and turned into dog food. Using as an oratorical platform the prone body of Bottiglione, who has been knocked flat by the stampede of two hundred suddenly freed dogs, Nero persuades his canine comrades to join him in saving the statue, which he has learned to appreciate as “a treasure, a part of our home, our beloved Pompeii” (224). What Nero is preventing (and what the novel is implicitly condemning), then, is a serious problem, a manifestation of a literally “dog-eat-dog world” (156) in which animals unwittingly feed on their own kind while unscrupulous men become richer. The happy ending requires that neither statue nor dogs be consumed, while simultaneously it becomes apparent that the dogs, too, are cultural monuments and the keepers of a culture. As they rush to the foundry to defend “our beloved Pompeii” and to “show these humans we are . . . not just any dogs,” they achieve a degree of community surpassing any that they have previously exhibited, barking in chorus, “WE’RE THE DOGS, THE DOGS, THE DOGS! WE’RE THE DOGS, THE DOGS OF POMPEII!” (225). The moment gives a new voice to the canine ancestors who witnessed the eruption. Their history is frequently recounted in solemn tones by the dogs’ leader and historian, Augustus, whose life’s work it has been to teach generations of puppies how, “as the earth trembled ominously beneath them, the dogs said farewell to Pompeii, filing silently out through Porta di Sarno past the bronze statue of Deidamia, her hand raised in frozen farewell to brave Achilles as he left for war” (129). The reference to Deidamia here is one of many that establish her as the linchpin connecting the human and canine plots, a nod to the unity of high and low, canonical and noncanonical. Throughout the novel, both high and low threads are prominent. For instance, Iachimo and Bottliglione are figures from slapstick comedy of the Laurel and Hardy variety, their humorous value depending on Iachimo’s inability to tell the metaphorical from the literal. In one characteristic passage, Bottiglione looks forward to the next day, when the “mangy dogs” will “all be mincemeat, and we’ll be rollin’ in it”; after

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Iachimo wonders, “Why would you wanna roll in mincemeat?” he gets “swiped . . . across the head” (199–200). In another, Bottiglione complains, “Wouldn’t ya know the boss would choose today to torch the old broad [Deidamia], right when we got other fish to fry,” and when the perennially clueless Iachimo responds, “We’re havin’ fish? . . . But it ain’t Friday,” his accomplice “swat[s] him over the head with a salami” and explains the concept of “rhetorical embellishment” (197–8). Such jokes may highlight the importance of metaphor, but their more obvious function is to provide amusement. Given the duo’s threatening role as the would-be eradicators of the canine population of Pompeii, as the dognappers of Nero’s comrades, as brutes motivated entirely by the desire for money even though their mathematical skills are such that it is probably “costin’ [them] more than [the fifteen Euros per dog bounty] to keep’ em alive” (156), the comedy also serves a second purpose. Bakhtin writes of the prevalence of “fear and weakness” among the low-status denizens of medieval Europe, and the corresponding importance of “[f]reedom granted by laughter”: “It was understood that fear never lurks behind laughter (which does not build stakes) and that hypocrisy and lies never laugh but wear a serious mask. Laughter created no dogmas and could not become authoritarian; it did not convey fear but a feeling of strength” (95). Young readers of The Dogs of Pompeii who identify with Nero might be inclined to feel apprehension about Iachimo and Bottiglione, but by affiliating the pair with slapstick and with pop-culture predecessors such as that other pair of incompetent dognappers, the Baddun brothers in Dodie Smith’s 1956 novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians and its filmic successors, Edwards and Creyton urge such readers into a more confident outlook. The mapping of landscape here, and its association with change and growth, works somewhat similarly. Unlike Shipton’s “maps” (the butcher’s diagrams of porcine and human bodies that are the frontispieces of the two Gryllus books), or the online map created to accompany Price’s Spartapuss series (which shows a “Roman” empire made up of feline names and, in some cases, shapes, so that Hisspania resembles a cat’s head, while Rome is located on a peninsula shaped not like a boot but like a clawed foot), the frontispiece to The Dogs of Pompeii does not suggest comic purpose. Labeled “Maps of Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast by Dylan J. Hay Chapman,” it provides between the two images four of

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the five standard features that today’s schoolchildren are taught to look for in a map: title, compass rose, key, and scale.⁶ There is no hint in the sober cartographic style that the story to follow will feature a linguistically adept dog whose sensibility was formed by Casablanca. Similarly, Caroline’s account of her introduction to the Amalfi coast is couched in terms evoking the Romantic sublime, the fearful rather than the comic; she speaks of her awe upon experiencing “that first heart-stopping vista of cliff, sky and the unbelievably deep blue of the bays and the Mediterranean beyond,” the way in which “sparkling white houses, hotels and rich villas seemed to hang in clusters from the cliffs, which rose to dizzying heights above us and dropped away perilously to the sea hundreds of metres below” (74). Caroline’s day out along the Amalfi coast is prompted by her uncle, who presses her to take some time away from the dig with Gianni. At this point in the narrative, neither teenager likes the other, but a day spent touring together on Gianni’s Vespa creates a bond even before that bond is strengthened by shared danger. In other words, the simple act of moving along the map provided as part of the frontispiece engenders mutual understanding, a new alignment of apparent opposites that is presented as the beginning of Caroline’s maturing process. As Roberta Seelinger Trites notes, the concept of the journey is a major “embodied metaphor for growth in adolescent literature” (“Growth” 66), and Edwards and Creyton here treat both concept and metaphor seriously. Nero shares Caroline’s journey, not only joining her in riding pillion on the Vespa but also moving from a position of ignorance about archaeology to an understanding of why the geeks are so driven. It’s not just about digging up old junk that no one else wants; it’s about humans and their history and their legends. I started to see what was so important about Augustus’s lessons—just as we dogs should never forget our heritage, neither should humans. I think if more people did a bit of digging, they might learn more about themselves. And about dogs. How’s that for some deep thinking? (143)

This passage, with its punning play on “deep,” offers a metaphor used elsewhere by Freud (EXCAVATING THE PAST IS SELF-DISCOVERY)

⁶ The missing element, the grid, might be said to receive a nod via Pompeii’s orderly pattern of streets.

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that serves as both a companion to the more standard THE JOURNEY IS GROWTH and a central didactic lesson for this novel. Like Shipton’s capitalization of “Very Important Thought,” the identification of Nero’s musings as “deep thinking” is simultaneously playful considering the source (humans do not usually credit pigs and dogs with important or profound ideas), ironic given the relationship to the implied reader (evidently the meaningful needs to be signposted if it is not to be confused with the trivial), and serious (Edwards and Creyton genuinely seem to want young readers to adopt the values expressed here). Just as Nero is given the privileged position of voicing the moral of the tale, he also makes a journey toward maturity that is still more impressive than Caroline’s, a difference that may reflect dogs’ more compressed lifespan. Over the course of the narrative, Caroline acquires a boyfriend, manifests courage and cleverness, and replaces the question “[W]hat use is some old statue if you’re too dead to enjoy it?” (92) with the awareness that beautiful things from the past are worth risking one’s life for. Nero, however, moves beyond the teenager-appropriate milestone of the (puppy) love at first sight that he directs at Caroline at the beginning of the narrative. He takes on a parental role, initially toward Drusilla’s young family when her mate, Nero’s friend Rufus, is dognapped by Iachimo and Bottiglione; subsequently toward his own brood after he acquires a mate, Rufus’ cousin Olivia; and finally toward the entire population of Pompeian dogs, becoming leader of the pack by acclamation after the death of Augustus. Significantly, he learns that he is not only Augustus’ heir but also his biological son, never acknowledged as such because Augustus was so devastated at the death of his mate that he felt unable to act as father to his offspring. This denouement is grotesque only inasmuch as qualities that readers may define as uniquely human are being attributed to dogs. As would be unremarkable in more standard Bildungsromane, Nero’s discovery of his heritage and identity, together with his acceptance of the role of teacher of the young, his union with Olivia, their experience of parenthood, and the general acknowledgment that “You saved Deidamia, you saved the Dogs, you saved Pompeii” (251–2), signal that he has achieved full maturity and entered into his heritage. As he muses in the novel’s final paragraph, after Caroline has returned to New Jersey without (as was formerly her plan) bringing him with her in the dependent role of pet, “I’m Nero Augustus, Leader of the Pack, family man and respected

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member of society. Sometimes I wish Caroline was around to see how much I’ve matured, but things are probably best the way they are. And sometimes when the wind is in the west and it carries the scent of Fabrizio’s Cannelloni alla Marinara on the air, I say to myself, we’ll always have Pompeii” (252). The novel’s concluding sentence’s melding of classical Rome and classical Hollywood, of sentiment and (via the pasta reference) the body, of sincerity and parody, encapsulates the ways in which the historical grotesque can be used to map for serious purposes the unity of high and low, the “distant” and the familiar.

5.5 Percy Jackson and the Apotheosis of the Comic Didactic In somewhat the same spirit as Edwards and Creyton unite pop culture with archaeology, in his Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (2005–9) Rick Riordan offers children Greek myth in a contemporary American setting.⁷ The series posits that the gods perennially migrate to whatever society serves its era as “the great power of the West” (Lightning 73), so that Olympus is currently moored somewhere over the Empire State Building and its denizens may appear garbed as beachcombers (Poseidon) or bikers (Ares). Moreover, because they retain their ancient practice of, as the 2010 film adaptation of the first volume puts it, “hooking up” with attractive mortals, they continue to spawn an evergrowing race of demigods. The latter group includes the eponymous protagonist, whose status as son of one of the “Big Three” positions him as the central figure in a multiquest effort to save the world from a resurgent Kronos’ effort to overturn the gods’ successful revolution against him. That the über-villain is a primordial patriarch and both gods and teenage demigods resent their parents’ absenteeism, covet their power, and seek to prove themselves by opposing their elders emphasizes that although the old is immortal, potent, and relevant, its coexistence with the new is at best uneasy. This uneasiness gives rise to missions of cosmic importance, mapped for Percy and his fellow questers by means of prophecies that, when properly interpreted, identify landmark events ⁷ We discuss Riordan’s series at greater length in Morey and Nelson, “ ‘A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers’: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Series and America’s Culture Wars,” upon which this section of the present chapter is based.

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that will occur during the quest and provide some idea of the geographical terrain to be traversed. The quests furnish the structure for the novels’ plots, which are framed from the outset as serious matters (in contrast to the threat posed by the plutonium-powered toaster in Shipton’s Gryllus books, for instance, which puts the potential destruction of the planet in a ludicrous light) and are embroidered with educational material in the form of what is often highly arcane mythological information; consumers of these books are enabled to speak knowledgeably about such figures as telkhines and empousae. At the same time, however, like the works of Shipton, Price, and Northfield, the series is heavily invested in the “disruptive play” of which Connor writes in a passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Broad humor, satirical remarks targeting adult attitudes and practices, and other practices calculated to overturn high-culture hierarchies are much on display throughout. In what follows, we seek to contextualize Riordan’s American series in terms of a twentieth-century cultural and pedagogical discourse that has its relevance even to the British and Australian works with which the present chapter is otherwise concerned. Riordan is clearly offering not a retelling of traditional myths in modern language but an effort to continue within today’s world the tradition represented by the ancient tales. Sheila Murnaghan notes of Hawthorne, the originator of the children’s myth book, that his “decision to make children the audience of the classics leads him to a redefinition of the classics as a form of popular culture and to a brief for the superior value of the popular over the canonical. . . . [As] he points out, ancient writers had the same freedom to remake myths that he is claiming for himself” (343). Riordan’s series similarly asserts the value of metamorphosis as a means of adapting to a changing world—of decreasing the Fiskean “distance” now associated with the classical world. Kronos and some of his allies are known for stopping time and freezing action, whereas the gods’ chief virtue is their continued ability to fit into modern ways; such flexibility, metatextually embodied in the series’ desire to create anew rather than merely to recapitulate the old, is represented as crucial to the saving of Western society. In this regard, and like other works discussed in this chapter, the series is situated athwart a larger debate about culture and consumption that took its present shape approximately a century ago. The central question in this debate has been that of the extent to which high culture and the

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classical tradition (embracing not only the ancient world but also, say, Old Master paintings and classical music) may successfully be transmitted to the masses. Granting, as most participants in the debate historically have, that the tradition must be adapted in order to be so transmitted, some have argued for the importance of limiting the amount of adaptation that is to be tolerated, contending that because “distance” must be maintained, too much popularizing makes the effort counterproductive. If, like Riordan, one determines that catering to a mass audience means indicating that satyrs eat Cheetos, some readers will consider that the process of metamorphosis has extended so far as to become antithetical to the very tradition that it seeks to continue, much as Theodor Adorno suggested that when offered to the masses via a popularizer’s arrangement, “The minuet from Mozart’s E Flat Major Symphony, played without the other movements, loses its symphonic cohesion and is turned by the performance into an artisan-type genre piece that has more to do with the ‘Stephanie Gavotte’ [a piece of popular salon music composed in 1880 by bandmaster Alphons Czibulka] than with the sort of classicism it is supposed to advertise” (299). Yet for others, Riordan’s success in communicating Greek mythology to contemporary tweens as a living narrative pleasure entirely justifies his deviation from classical purity. The placing of classics on the contemporary and popular plane is complicated further by the tripartite quality of “Rick Riordan” as an authorial persona. First, the books as physical objects communicate that Riordan is an author, a creator of cultural artifacts in his own right. Second, Riordan’s website emphasizes his role as former middle school teacher, a preserver of cultural artifacts generated by others; in the Resources section, visitors may download teachers’ guides and curricular materials, while students visiting the Biography section are admonished in teacherly tones, “If you are doing a school report and need information about Rick Riordan, this is the best site to use. Remember you need to paraphrase everything! Put it in your own words. Don’t just copy and paste!” (Riordan, “Biography”). Third, the popularity of the series means that observers may view Riordan also as a franchising phenomenon who has transformed the original five books not only into international bestsellers but also into film adaptations (two at the time of this writing), merchandise (T-shirts, posters, replica swords, Nintendo games), day camps run by independent bookstores from Texas to Georgia to Brooklyn,

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and four related book series to date: the Kane Chronicles (Egyptian, three volumes, 2010–12), the Heroes of Olympus (Roman and Greek, five volumes, 2010–14), Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard (Norse, three volumes, 2015–17), and the Trials of Apollo (Greek, five volumes projected, 2016–). In short, the emphasis on consumption foregrounded in the Gryllus, Spartapuss, and Dogs of Pompeii sagas has here metastasized; his works are immediately also legible as commercial properties, and Riordan himself is legible not only as a generator and guardian of cultural products but also as their highly successful advertiser.⁸ This tripartite persona points to the heart of the enigma that is culture in an age permeated and undergirded by consumerism and advertising. Our reading of the Percy Jackson series traces Riordan’s indebtedness to John Dewey, who emphasized the importance of constructing a curriculum relevant to the child’s experience and of integrating the educational with knowledge of one’s immediate environment. The division between Riordan’s teacherly and other personas may be read in terms of Dewey’s deep ambivalence toward persuasive social rhetoric. At the same time, one thing that unites the national monuments that Riordan’s saga uses as mappable points on Percy’s quest, which covers thousands of miles and many iconic American sites beloved of tourists, is a sensibility of impudence that reproduces in little the impudent humor of the overall series. Not only are these structures not paying tribute to the classical past, they are also rejecting the status quo in another sense. Thus (to consider some of the stops along Percy’s route) the Air and Space Museum celebrates the refusal to be bound by laws of gravity and planetary origin; the Hoover Dam resists the “natural” inclination of the surrounding land to be arid and resistant to mass settlement; the Gateway Arch memorializes a colonialist triumph and the corresponding defeat of indigenous ways of life; and the Empire State Building touts itself (among other things, through eight illuminated panels in its lobby) as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” challenging the primacy of the ancient world’s original seven. All these structures are advertisements for modern progress, which by definition posits the inadequacy of the past. Yet advertising of this sort not only memorializes but also substitutes for experience. Just as visitors to the Gateway Arch are not pioneers ⁸ In 2015, one website estimated Riordan’s net worth at $35 million (Celebrity Net Worth).

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and most visitors to the Air and Space Museum are not astronauts, a hackneyed advertising tag (validated by some cognitive research, as we have noted) is “We’ve done [fill in the blank] so that you don’t have to.” Dewey notes in his discussion of the “map” represented by the well-chosen curriculum that “[t]hrough the map every new traveler may get for his own journey the benefits of the results of others’ explorations without the waste of energy and loss of time involved in their wanderings” (Child 20–1); similarly, advertising suggests that consumers take advantage of advertisers’ knowledge as to what constitutes a superior product rather than trying out potentially unsatisfactory products for themselves. Reading, too, offers audiences the pleasure of the vicarious. Percy takes on the travails involved in keeping the flame of the West alive; the reader remains comfortably seated. It is precisely insofar as Percy’s experiential learning is extreme that the series’s adherence to this Deweyan precept is undercut. Apparent ambivalence and contradiction, then, are intrinsic to Riordan’s project of adding to the child’s cultural capital by displaying irreverence toward what might elsewhere be presented as sacred, “distant,” and therefore dull. Murnaghan observes that “[m]any writers currently presenting the classics for children share [a] somewhat tortured agenda: to present classical material as fun while also using it to educate, constrained by an anxious sense that children do not consider the educational fun, that what is fun, contemporary, and popular stands on the other side of a divide from what is educational, historical, and unpopular” (347). Thus, on the one hand, Riordan’s address to young readers, like that of Shipton, Price, and Northfield, suggests that the tastes of the twelve-year-old should be paramount—and these tastes are implicitly recognized as lowbrow and anti-adult. Chapter titles such as “I Become Supreme Lord of the Bathroom” suggest a style of humor that is also on display in books of the Captain Underpants ilk, which appeal to children in part by alienating prim adults and eschewing overt didacticism. Authority figures from stepparents to camp directors to substitute teachers are often presented as villainous, and conventional education’s uselessness to Percy is underscored; since his brain is hardwired for ancient Greek and he has heightened reflexes and senses, he has been diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD and is difficult to contain in a standard classroom, where “of course the teachers want [him] medicated. Most of them are monsters. They don’t want [demigods] seeing them for what they are” (Lightning 88). On the other hand, in his persona as longtime middle-school teacher, Riordan has

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created on his American website a parallel, Dewey-inflected discourse addressing parents and teachers, whose tastes are implicitly recognized as earnest, improvement-oriented, and more deserving than children’s. Although Percy might blench to hear it, the website suggests that the series’s ultimate end is didactic. The parallel discourse of Riordan’s website treats Greek myth not as a forerunner of superhero comic books (the outlook on display in the address to children) but as cultural capital essential to contemporary education’s efforts to adapt traditional material to a “whole learning” approach. Alongside the teacher’s guide, the website offers readers’ theater and ideas for series-based classroom activities as well as a “curriculum rationale, based on NCTE [National Council of Teachers of English] models, for those teachers considering Percy Jackson for classroom use.” The latter frames the series in terms of the developmental theories of Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson and advises teachers “[t]o compare and contrast the Greek myths with the way those myths are referenced, modernized, and reinterpreted in the novel[s],” “[t]o examine both positive and negative elements of ‘Western Civilization’ as depicted in the novel and personified by the Greek gods,” “[to encourage] students to explore the Classical heritage of Greece as it applies to modern civilization; to analyze the elements of the hero’s quest rendered in a modern-day story with a first-person narrator to whom students can easily relate; and to discuss such relevant issues as learning disabilities, the nature of family, and themes of loyalty, friendship and faith” (Riordan, “Rationale”). Similarly, one real-life day-camp version of Camp HalfBlood, created with Riordan’s blessing by an independent bookstore in what was at the time Riordan’s home region of central Texas, announces that its mission is “to keep kids interested in reading,” a task that, in full Deweyan mode, is evidently best managed not by handing out books but through physical activities. Meanwhile, from the adult standpoint, the secret purpose of those activities, “sword training, chariot racing, archery, lava wall climbing, and phalanx training,” is not pleasure but the fostering of “critical lateral problem solving skills,” “a whole learning approach to the camp experience,” and “meaningful connections between history, mythology, literature, art, science, sports, current events, language and rampant creativity” (Bradfield). In other words, in the adult realm, implicitly marketed to its consumers as the realm of maturity and high culture, instruction is key and delight

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merely the hook via which the child is persuaded to swallow information and skills training, much as the champions of children’s playgrounds cited by Beissel Heath tout play’s role in creating desirable citizens for the polity. This principle recalls Dewey’s view that “the question of education is the question of taking hold of [the child’s] activities, of giving them direction. Through direction, through organized use, they tend toward valuable results, instead of scattering or being left to merely impulsive expression” (School 53–4). Leisure, including recreational reading, thus becomes a useful field on which to impose that “direction,” a manifestation of what Beissel Heath refers to as “our tremendous [adult] desire for control” (109). In the child realm, first and second principles are reversed, so that the promise of learning something about classical mythology (“valuable results”) may be the means by which the child secures the adult’s approval of fun. As Georgia bookstore owner Diane Capriola puts it, “Parents like the idea of a literary camp because it is educational. . . . Kids like it because it doesn’t seem educational” (qtd. Nawotka 18). Implicit in “giving [the child] direction” is the idea of manipulation, of steering the child in a particular cognitive pathway via participation in activities whose social potential the adult teacher deems valuable. For most teachers, “learning by doing” might well include handcrafts, but it would reject instruction in such skills as smoking. Yet while Alex Molnar insists that “in every aspect advertising ideology is the enemy of Dewey’s philosophy” (634), and while the aims of Deweyan pedagogy are not identical to the aims of advertising, both Deweyan pedagogy and advertising emphasize behavior modification and social guidance. Indeed, biographer Jay Martin notes that Dewey’s father, a grocery-store owner, “had an absolute genius for advertising” (16), and that according to Dewey’s wife Roberta, “[h]e invariably insisted . . . that his ‘father was a greater influence [on him] than his mother’ ” (19). Carrying on the family tradition, Dewey’s daughter Evelyn, to whom he was particularly close, had multiple careers as social worker, teacher, and successful copywriter at J. Walter Thompson (Martin 155).⁹ Dewey himself numbers among the psychologists whom A. Michal McMahon names as fundamental to the rise of advertising in the Progressive Era (10).

⁹ Similarly, Dewey’s student John B. Watson moved from an academic career as the founder of behaviorism to an ad agency vice-presidency, again at J. Walter Thompson.

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In The Hidden Persuaders, written in the immediate post-Dewey generation, Vance Packard notes, “Certainly a good deal can be said on the positive side for the socially constructive results that have come from the explorations into human behavior arising from the persuader’s endeavors,” even while he adds that “a good many of the peoplemanipulating activities of persuaders raise profoundly disturbing questions about the kind of society they are seeking to build for us” (232, 233). That is, just as marketing and Dewey have important affinities, marketing—like the antic element in grotesque texts of the Gryllus the Pig or Julius Zebra variety—may function as high culture’s booster as well as its saboteur. Hence Murnaghan sees Riordan as “calculating that if he enters robustly into an anti-elitist, low-cultural view of the classics, he can somehow promote the more elitist, high cultural values with which they are also identified; that by agreeing that school is boring, he can make kids want to learn; that by denying that myths are metaphors requiring interpretation, he can get kids to benefit from the fact that they are” (352). Murnaghan’s mention of “promot[ion]” invokes Riordan in his persona as advertiser, in this case of the classical tradition in general rather than of his own works in particular. To be sure, what Molnar identifies as a Deweyan anxiety about commerce, propaganda, and advertising extends to Riordan’s series as well. The novels are extensively concerned with manipulation and trickery; to invoke but two examples, consider the frequency with which apparently loyal campers turn out to be double agents working against the good of the demigod polity, or the importance to the plausibility of the series of the concept of the Mist, a means by which humans and demigods alike are deceived into believing the untrue. In this connection, it seems significant that monsters are not infrequently represented as shopkeepers (in establishments such as Aunty Em’s [Medusa’s] Garden Gnome Emporium and Crusty’s [Procrustes’] Water Bed Palace), that readers learn that franchise stores’ rapid multiplication occurs “because all their locations are magically linked to the life force of a monster” (Sea 143), and that commercial enterprises often turn out to be traps, as in the case of the Lotus Casino in The Lightning Thief, which shares with Kronos the power of stopping time, thus threatening to divert Percy from productive to wholly unproductive endeavor. The very name of Aunty Em’s Garden Gnome Emporium is of course a reference to yet another predecessor text concerned with advertising and its tendency toward fraud, L. Frank

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Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).¹⁰ In his presentation (in a highly commercial work) of the monstrous side of commerce and manipulation, Riordan may be dramatizing the importance to demigods and mortal children alike of the ability to resist blandishment. The competing discourses of high and low culture thus coexist here in a mutual suspicion that resembles the ambivalence that the gods and half-bloods share, wherein young heroes find their divine parents frightening, threatening, or at the very least difficult to fathom, while the gods repeatedly discuss whether it might not be prudent to kill their children. Dionysus’ comment in the final volume, “I will deny I ever said this, of course, but the gods need heroes. They always have. Otherwise we would not keep you annoying little brats around,” and Percy’s response, “I feel so wanted. Thanks” (Olympian 269), usefully express the intergenerational hostility at play. And although the series ends by affirming the power of the hearth and the need for family loyalty, Percy chooses justice for demigods and romance with Annabeth over becoming a god and moving into the realm of immortal adults, while his longtime foe Luke, who has made an opposite choice by giving over his body to Kronos, redeems himself at the last minute by defining his “family” not in terms of the patriarchy but rather as his peer group. Finally, on the adultoriented portion of his website, Riordan goes so far as to deny the reality of the basic premises of his fictional world: whereas the series invites its child audience to see classical monsters as real, Riordan insists in his “Teacher’s Guide to The Lightning Thief ” that the monsters are metaphors, “external manifestations of the internal conflicts Percy must win to achieve his coming of age,” so that “The fight with Medusa is symbolic of the tension between Percy and Annabeth. The gorgon is the age-old grudge between their parents which [sic] the two children must put behind them. Facing the Chimera in the St. Louis Arch is really about Percy facing his own fears of inadequacy” (“Rationale”). The glibness of such explanations, wherein the series is revealed to adult eyes (but, presumptively, adult eyes only) as allegory of, perhaps, an unsatisfactorily facile variety, is itself reminiscent of teacherly strategies

¹⁰ Noting that Baum produced The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows simultaneously with the first Oz book, Stuart Culver describes the latter as “the curious by-product of Baum’s effort to promote this new advertising technology by cataloging strategies for provoking and manipulating the window shopper’s desire” (97).

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that elsewhere in the series draw criticism. The Battle of the Labyrinth, for instance, contains an episode in which Percy, Annabeth, Grover, and Tyson confront a Sphinx representing the worst of contemporary education: [S]he kind of reminded me of my third-grade choir teacher. She had a blue ribbon badge pinned to her chest that took me a moment to read: THIS MONSTER HAS BEEN RATED EXEMPLARY! . . . “Welcome, Annabeth Chase!” the monster cried. . . . “Are you ready for your test?” “Yes,” [Annabeth] said. “Ask your riddle.” “Twenty riddles, actually!” the Sphinx said gleefully. . . . “[W]e’ve raised our standards! To pass, you must show proficiency in all twenty. Isn’t that great? . . . Make sure you bubble each answer clearly and stay inside the circle. . . . If you have to erase, erase completely or the machine will not be able to read your answers.” (180–1)

The “riddles,” however, turn out to be designed to elicit “just a bunch of dumb, random facts,” as Annabeth complains, not evidence that the Sphinx’s victim can reason; terming the examination “an insult to my intelligence,” she declares, “I won’t answer these questions” (184). Although the Sphinx warns that a child who refuses to answer will fail, “And since we can’t allow any children to be held back, you’ll be EATEN,” the heroes foil her by destroying her grading machine, leaving her distracted and mourning that “I can’t be exemplary without my test scores!” (184–5). As Riordan’s monsters go, the Sphinx seems particularly ineffectual. Yet throughout the series, teachers turn out to be more prone even than shopkeepers to be monsters. In The Lightning Thief, math teacher and field-trip chaperone Mrs. Dodds is revealed to be a Fury, “a shriveled hag with bat wings and claws and a mouth full of yellow fangs” (12);¹¹ in The Titan’s Curse, a vice-principal named Dr. Thorn is a manticore in disguise. Similarly, schools are often the sites of confrontations between Percy and monsters masquerading as cheerleaders or dodgeball teams, with grave consequences for school property and with the result that Percy is frequently expelled. Whereas on one level schools will attract monsters simply because monsters must follow Percy to his usual haunts if they are to succeed in killing him, on another level the series implies that his schools may be inherently monstrous: “This isn’t the right place for you,” Percy’s Latin teacher, Mr. Brunner, later revealed to be Chiron ¹¹ The film adaptation makes Mrs. Dodds a substitute English teacher, suggesting that the viewer may find reading and writing even more horrific than arithmetic.

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the centaur, tells him (Lightning 21). Thus, for example, the school in Volume 2, Meriwether College Prep, is “this ‘progressive’ school in downtown Manhattan, which means we sit on beanbag chairs instead of at desks, and we don’t get grades, and the teachers wear jeans and rock concert T-shirts to work” (Sea 8). Not wisely but too well, Meriwether embraces Dewey’s emphasis on experiential learning, so that final exams in English consist of permitting bullies to re-enact The Lord of the Flies, and chemistry tests of “mix[ing] chemicals until we succeeded in making something explode” (11).¹² By this standard, the Sphinx’s claim to be “exemplary” does not seem far-fetched, and Annabeth’s tendency (which she shares with J. K. Rowling’s Hermione Granger) to seek guidance from scrolls suggests that reliance upon book learning is useless: “Percy, I was kidding myself,” Annabeth admits in Volume 4: “All that planning and reading, I don’t have a clue where we’re going” (Battle 126). The phrase seems an admission that schools may in fact not offer the child maps adequate to all circumstances. The multivocality of the child-oriented series and the adult-oriented paratext is a quality shared by mass culture, with its myriad forms and levels of sophistication, and by the educational discourse, which emphasizes diversity and “the child’s present experience” (Dewey, Child 11). Since at least the 1930s, American public education has sought to harness popular culture’s charisma to further the formation of tastes that move beyond the popular (Morey 160). Riordan’s work may appear to stage a war between the cultural heights (the classical heritage) and their antithesis as represented by settings such as the Camp Half-Blood lavatory, but his address to both children and teachers hearkens back to 1930s attempts to bring together high and low in order to preserve the one and refine the other, just as Dionysus’ summary of “Western civilization” celebrates not only “art, law, wine tastings, music” but also “video games, silk shirts, black velvet paintings—all the things that make life worth living” (Olympian 268). The means of Riordan’s authorial merger of high and low might be described as a prizing of experience over abstraction. Percy does not initially understand that the instruction offered by Mr. Brunner/Chiron

¹² Meriwether apparently values activity for its own sake and thus falls into the error of privileging instant gratification, as Dewey predicts: “Overemphasis upon activity as an end, instead of upon intelligent activity, leads to identification of freedom with immediate execution of impulses and desires” (Experience 81).

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has the potential to save his life, a view first stated by one of his unlikeable classmates in order to ridicule it: “Like we’re going to use this in real life. Like it’s going to say on our job application, ‘Please explain why Kronos ate his kids’ ” (Lightning 6). Yet Mr. Brunner’s claim that “What you learn from me . . . is vitally important” (Lightning 7) turns out to be correct. Percy learns again and again the importance of paying attention to narratives whose relevance to his life is at first obscure to him. Percy’s own experiences (and the allure of Camp HalfBlood for mere mortals) are the working out of “book learning” on or with the body of the child, a strategy that demonstrates Riordan’s affiliation with currents within American education going back to Dewey, who emphasized the importance of learning that integrated the real, the material, and the practical into the curriculum. A Deweyan lesson about wool and cotton, for instance, was taught “ ‘from the standpoint of their adaptation to the uses to which they may be put’ through handling the actual materials . . . and considering the practical advantages and limitations of one material over the other, without regard to convention. Dewey reported that his students ‘worked this out for themselves with the actual material, aided by questions and suggestions from the teacher’ ” (Morey 156). Similarly, Percy’s adventures are staged as quests that follow the elliptical “guidance” provided by the mummified Oracle kept in an attic at Camp Half-Blood. Only at particularly dire moments do Percy and his friends invoke the aid of the adult gods, although when they do so, such aid is typically, if briefly, available. The replacement of the original riddle of the sphinx, which incorporated self-knowledge into a narrative of the individual’s progress from one generation to the next, with “random” facts encapsulates the defects of a contemporary education that does not consider relevance; an agglomeration of unrelated factoids does not result in culture or self-knowledge, although it may produce exemplary monsters. Annabeth, of course, is equally deluded in her expectation that the riddle can be re-asked in an utterly changed context. Although the simple repetition of ancient lore is impossible because the children’s experience is not that of Oedipus, through its emphasis on tales of cruelties and threats exchanged between parents and children, the series suggests the continuing relevance of the Greek myths. Or, as Dewey puts it in a discussion of the ideal curriculum as map: The map is not a substitute for a personal experience. The map does not take the place of an actual journey. . . . But the map, a summary, an arranged and orderly

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view of previous experiences, serves as a guide to future experience; it gives direction; it facilitates control; it economizes effort, preventing useless wandering, and pointing out the paths which lead most quickly and most certainly to a desired result. (Child 20)

The very existence of the “map,” which in Riordan’s series takes the form not only of prophecy and mythological lore but also of Camp Half-Blood as a training center characterized simultaneously by adults’ desire to protect young demigods and by the same adults’ hostility toward their charges, highlights the contradictions of family/tradition and the lessons that family may be used to teach. Annabeth wrongly finds her father hostile, while Percy’s awareness of his stepfather’s remarkable selfishness argues for applying the myths’ generational messages to the non-mythic aspects of his life. Rachel Dare, the clear-sighted mortal girl who takes charge of the unraveling of the labyrinth in Volume 4 and becomes the successor to the Delphic Oracle in Volume 5 because she can see behind the Mist, must deal with a parent who is a wrecker of all that she holds dear, since her father is a successful property developer partly responsible for the destruction of the realm of Pan. And at the end of the series Percy has gained enough power that he can require even the gods to face up to their family responsibilities and their pasts by acknowledging their forgotten children. In all these cases, the (seriously construed) task of the child is to see himself or herself as a being separate from his or her parent yet integrated into a familial fabric in which individual wants must occasionally be subordinated to a larger social entity. In this sense, Riordan’s series, together with his own understanding of how to market it, demonstrates the liberal arts’ uses while simultaneously taking a carnivalesque approach in questioning their social authority. Selfknowledge and self-mastery have historically been the project of the liberal arts, and it was the relatively impractical nature of classical subjects that made them the ideal playground for the development of control over the personality. Through the eternal return of generational hostility, the series emphasizes the need to know the self, which metamorphoses as it ages, complicating and making more urgent the project of self-discovery. While the series lampoons a notion of education based on demands for upto-the-minute relevance and instrumentality, Riordan uses psychological shibboleths to sell his product’s practical functions to parents concerned about the problem of the non-reading middle-class child, a lack that might be redeemed through the proper kind of experience.

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5.6 Conclusion All the works discussed in this chapter propose that the ancient past engaged in acts of consumption that can be burlesqued, as when the narrative of Gryllus’ quest is interrupted by commercials for products. Even the narrative that appears most detached from valorizing acts of consumption, that of Julius Zebra (which repeatedly focuses on Julius’ disgust at “stinky water” and bug-filled biscuits), nonetheless deploys the desire for consumption as a trope when Felix steals a gem from a tomb, with the consequence that Julius’ sojourn as pharaoh is undermined by a curse. Consumption at first might appear the quintessential mode of signaling a soulless present, a world from which the numinous has been evacuated, and a pursuit worthy only of ridicule in its mindless and too easy twenty-first-century modes. Locating acts of consumption within the ancient world certainly suggests continuities over vast chronological gaps, thus suggesting to the contemporary child reader a kinship with his or her ancient forebears. Of course, this device also suggests that the past is itself an object of consumption, that embedding it within artifacts of contemporary pop culture might make the mastery of history, myth, and ancient literature essentially painless as a form of mindless “eating” of broccoli mistaken for Cheetos. But it is striking how many of these narratives, all of which are dependent upon humor to a considerable extent, suggest that the past is admirable because it offers a model of the hero as a figure to be consumed in a ritual of self-sacrifice. Gryllus, Spartapuss, Julius, Nero, Caroline, and Percy all finally emerge as noble figures because they are prepared to surrender self-interest for the good of a larger community, be it the family as for Spartapuss and Caroline, the population of enslaved animals as for Julius and Nero, or the cosmos as for Gryllus and Percy. The numinous has not been banished from the worlds inhabited by these comic grotesque figures. Rather, the grotesquerie works to insulate them in their contact with the gods and to puncture the pretensions that might undo genuinely heroic efforts through vanity. Thus it comes as no surprise that the conclusion of the Riordan series suggests that Percy comes closest to the divine when he rejects the bestowal of immortality on terms that ratify injustice and neglect.

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6 HISTORY IS FRACTAL Patterns of Conflict in Contemporary Young Adult Fantasies “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote philosopher George Santayana in 1905 (284). This familiar line expresses a sentiment closely allied, in its emphasis on repetition of an implicitly doom-laden kind, with the final topological metaphor that we examine in the present volume, HISTORY IS FRACTAL. We use this term to invoke the idea of the irregular geometric shape in which each part is a scaled-down version of the whole, identical to it save in size. (Examples of fractals in nature include snowflakes, broccoli, networks of blood vessels, and the seashells included in the illustration to Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur reproduced as Figure 6.1.) In fractal texts, what is true at the smallest scale is also true at the largest, so that such narratives are characterized by a pattern of mirroring that extends from the micro level to the macro. To invoke a relatively simple example by way of illustration: the characters in Diana Wynne Jones’s classically inflected fractal novel The Game (2007) have both human and mythic forms, oscillating between a mundane level of quasi-mortal existence (protagonist Hayley has been in her grandparents’ care for what she vaguely perceives to have been a number of years, which turn out to have been centuries) and another level that is divine, heroic, and/or astronomical. After discovering the pleasures of being a comet, Hayley is able to elude her uncle’s power by forcing him to transform into his guise as the planet Jupiter. She can then free her parents, Merope and Sisyphus, from eternal punishment at his hands, with the result that “We can all do what we want to do. At last!”—and, apparently, forevermore (176). The novel

Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction. Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey, Oxford University Press (2019). © Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846031.001.0001

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Figure 6.1 Plate 53, “Prosobranchia,” from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1904), an example of natural fractal shapes with their characteristic repeated irregularities and symmetry across scalar difference. Retrieved from Wikimedia, .

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ends with an appendix that guides readers through the mythological and astronomical correspondences; for instance, “The aunts are the PLEIADES, often known as the Seven Sisters, a star cluster in the general region of the Great Bear. . . . In Ancient Greece, the Pleiades seemed to mingle freely with both mortals and gods” (177). We move, that is, from small to large with no alteration in essential identity, a movement that is inseparable from The Game’s reliance upon Greek myth. A fundamental premise of our study is that how narratives represent time and space—that is, which metaphor they implicitly make dominant— provides information that can influence young readers’ world view; as Robyn McCallum puts it in Bakhtinian terms, “The ideological force of a chronotope can . . . be programmatic for contemporary patterns of behavior” (200).¹ In this chapter we posit that the typical (though not inevitable) ideological cause and consequence of the fractal structure is a jaundiced view of progress: if characters, and by implication readers, lack leverage over the past or themselves because humankind is mired in an infinite series of repetitions, and if institutions or societies share the individual’s faults, hope for improvement seems slight. To cite a relatively cheerful example, Jones’s Hayley appears to have achieved a happy ending, but the reader may nonetheless feel some concern that one cosmic entity able to “do what [he] want[s] to do” has simply been replaced by others with the same ambition. Not surprisingly, then, the young adult fantasies examined in this chapter are preoccupied by war, and indeed often by civil war; the fractal structure requires that if a central character is experiencing inner conflict, this turmoil will extend to conflict within his or her family and/or to conflict within the polity. Our core texts are also preoccupied by the need to understand the individual’s relationship to the past. Unsurprisingly, the latter need is evident to greater or lesser degree in all the neoclassical works with which we are familiar, since grounding a story in Greek or Roman antiquity surely implies that the

¹ Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, invoked by both McCallum and Maria Nikolajeva in their discussions of Alan Garner’s Red Shift, resembles our approach in this study. McCallum explains, “The term literally means ‘time-space’ and refers, in its most general sense, to the ‘intrinsic interconnectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.’ . . . According to Bakhtin, particular narrative genres are characterized by specific formal combinations of time and place (or ‘chronotopes’) which structure a novel” (184).

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past is important. But the fractal text seems especially likely to conclude that while the pleasures of the past are irretrievable (Jones’s Merope advises her husband against trying to move the reunited family back to Greece, which “will have changed quite a lot since you were last there” [175]), its horrors are insurmountable. Memory, whether expressed as personal recollection or as academic knowledge, is thus often central to the fractal text’s exploration of war. There is cognitive research to suggest why this linkage should exist. Consider the neuropsychological work cited by Patrick Colm Hogan, who reports that “a central function of the anterior cingulate cortex is to monitor contradictions in task performance. When there is a contradiction, the anterior cingulate cortex activates the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which addresses the conflict through attentional orientation and ‘top-down’ regulation” (232). Faced with a situation that requires a decision, Hogan explains, an individual feels one or more emotions; if these emotions conflict (for instance, a longing to act in a certain way tempered by an awareness that such behavior may be ill advised), “routines for adjudication. . . . [involving] (at least) three sorts of regulative principles—informational, prudential, and ethical” snap into place, permitting action by “activating emotional memories and emotion-eliciting imaginations with adequate intensity to overcome a motivational conflict that itself preceded and generated the appraisal” (232–4). Memory, in short, is central to the human response to complex situations such as those dramatized in dystopian fiction. Hogan concludes his explication of this cognitive process by noting the connection of memory, guilt, and empathy (236). Significantly, this triad recurs throughout the fantasy novels that we discuss in this chapter, in which characters may reach turning points by simultaneously reaching back into the past and reaching out to others. Thus in The Game, Hayley discovers that her former nanny is Baba Yaga, who is willing to help her for old times’ sake and because “nobody else had ever wanted to hug” this notorious witch (174); in Suzanne Collins’s Mockingjay (2010), mind, memory, and love can only be restored by building on the foundation of the individual past. Moving beyond the world of the text to contemplate reader response, perhaps one way to summarize in general terms the effects of consuming the dystopian fractal text is to say that the repetitions inherent in the form create for the reader a coherent

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set of memories relevant to the story world; simultaneously, the reader’s identification with one or more characters sets up the “enhanced empathic responsiveness” that June Price Tangney sees as a crucial component in guilt (qtd. Hogan 236). Identifying with a given character, the reader vicariously shares in that character’s experiences and doubts, facing the same mixed emotions and ethical quandaries. And because in a fractal text the stimuli prompting those confusing sensations and complicated “routines for adjudication” are repeated again and again in different form, the sensation of being torn is amplified as the reader continues on in the story world. It is to be expected, then, that the texts that we discuss in this chapter prompt in some readers a second-guessing of important concluding actions taken by characters. For instance, readers may experience resentment that Jones’s Tollie/Autolycus remains unpunished for having brought down Jupiter’s wrath upon the family (133), anger at Tom’s coding of his suicide note in Alan Garner’s Red Shift (1971), shock that Simon and Brad reject the chance to return to their own timeline at the end of the final installment of John Christopher’s Fireball books (1981–6), and dismay (as is expressed by a number of critics; see, e.g., Broad 125) that Katniss becomes a mother at the end of Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy (2008–10) after reiterating throughout three volumes that she doesn’t want children. Such feelings replicate emotions that central characters have experienced earlier in the narratives, in effect prolonging the adjudication process that the characters themselves have already replaced with action. If the palimpsestic neoclassical text (which, we proposed in Chapter 3, also has much to say about trauma and its processing) seems to have fallen out of literary fashion after about 1980, one might see the fractal text in some ways as its heir. Postmodern in its dark atmosphere and in its sometimes fragmented form, the fractal neoclassical text is still relatively uncommon; Red Shift is our earliest example, followed a decade later by the first volume of Christopher’s trilogy. The form seems to have become more popular in recent years, however, given the success of Collins’s trilogy; the projected four-volume sequence presently comprised by Sabaa Tahir’s bestsellers An Ember in the Ashes (2015), A Torch Against the Night (2016), and A Reaper at the Gates (2018); and Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief series, which as we write consists of the Newbery Honor Book The Thief (1996), The Queen of Attolia (2000), The King of Attolia

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(2006), A Conspiracy of Kings (2010), and Thick as Thieves (2017).² The remainder of this chapter will explore these and other works with particular attention to the issues of war and memory introduced above.

6.1 Despairing Didacticism: Learning and Misery in Red Shift Of all these texts, Red Shift may be the most self-evidently fractal. Neil Philip observes that “every sentence is a comment not only on the immediate action but also on the rest of the book” (88–9), and he has produced an especially comprehensive and brilliant critical explication of the correspondences among Garner’s parallel narratives. Red Shift flickers back and forth among three plots, all involving the same specific locations in Cheshire but at three different times; indeed, Maria Nikolajeva remarks that “the whole structure of the novel is an expanded metaphor of time” (“Insignificance” 129). The earliest plot takes place in the second century AD, when refugees from Rome’s lost Ninth Legion slaughter the inhabitants of a tribal village and enslave their young priestess, who later poisons with ergot all the legionaries but the one with whom she has formed a sympathetic bond. The middle plot is set in December 1643, when, in a documented historical event, Royalist soldiers massacre most of a group of Puritan sympathizers who have taken refuge in a church, leaving a young epileptic and his wife among the few survivors. And the plot that begins and ends the novel coincides with Garner’s own day. Here, a love affair between a working-class student and the daughter of two psychiatrists threatens to end in the young man’s suicide after he betrays her by selling the Stone Age votive ax that all three couples have serially possessed and that she sees as the symbol of their love. Macey, the surviving legionary in the first story, is subject to fits during which he has visions of both Thomas’s seventeenth-century and Tom’s twentieth-century experience; more, his squad leader deliberately brings on these fits by providing stimuli known to provoke action in Macey, who runs amok and slaughters the enemy in a fashion that suppresses in him both guilt and empathy, an interesting take on the cognitive ² In an interview with Sally Lodge, Turner notes that she is at work on another installment. The ending of Tahir’s most recent novel makes clear that at least one additional volume is planned.

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processes discussed by Hogan. During his own seizures, which lead to helplessness rather than to action, the epileptic Thomas has a similar fleeting awareness of Tom, yet neither Macey, Thomas, nor Tom can look back into the historical past. The three young men are linked most obviously by their name, their cerebral and/or emotional damage (Garner himself was eventually diagnosed as bipolar in 1989 [Batty]), and their role vis-à-vis a woman who has been the sexual partner of another man, in two of the three centuries against her will; for Charles Butler, “The theme of substitution . . . [may] be understood as part of the novel’s wider preoccupation with the instability—the shiftingness—of personality itself” (80). In other words, one of the novel’s projects would appear to be the representation of what one might term a crisis of selfhood, the difficulty of either performing meaningful actions or maintaining individuality in a world in which versions of one’s own painful experiences have been enacted over centuries before one’s own birth and will be re-enacted for centuries to come. What Red Shift represents as the cyclical, repetitive nature of time creates a kind of whirlpool in which those who are born late are apparently particularly likely to drown. McCallum has noted that readers may interpret the three plots either as “different versions of the same story” or as “three similar stories situated in different social and historical contexts,” depending on whether they prefer “teleological and linear notions of historical continuity” or “notions of alterity and circularity” (152–3). In either case, readers are confronted with the narrative repetition of (among other elements) abuse and betrayal, psychic damage, and a confrontation of alien cultures, all of which operate on both the individual level and that of the larger group constituted by family, tribe, or faction. As multiple critics have pointed out, the novel’s title, which refers both to local details of the individual narratives (for instance, the alder-dyed petticoat or “red shift” belonging to Margery, the principal female character in the Civil War strand) and to the astronomical phenomenon of the expansion of the universe as galaxies move away from one another at great speed, connects the details of the individual tragedies chronicled here on the human scale to the ultimate macro level, the cosmos itself. Humankind’s difficulty in finding common ground is mirrored by all creation. Given the existence of multiple excellent explications of Garner’s novel, we focus most of our attention here not on the macro level

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represented by the production of a global reading of the novel that excavates Garner’s larger vision of time, history, memory, and trauma,³ but rather on the more local level of how the novel connects the issue of learning and education (forms of memory) to conflict, moving upward or downward in scale as it does so. Red Shift refers directly to major characters’ education only briefly: seventeenth-century Margery reveals that she has learned to read and write (Garner 50); twentieth-century Tom has won a scholarship to university and says that he is choosing among three colleges (87); one legionary quizzes another on tribal dialect (56–7). But it addresses an ideal reader of broad educational attainment, inasmuch as it deploys the “Tam Lin” ballad, scientific knowledge, quotations from King Lear and other high-culture literary works, contemporaneous accounts of the Barthomley massacre, and more to create its complex representation of the past; paraphrasing Walter McVitty, Owen Martin reports that to write Red Shift, Garner consulted some 200 books. Moreover, the novel contains several characters who boast considerable learning. Tom, a student of Greek, is such an inveterate quoter of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Browning, Horace, and other sources that Jan complains, “You can’t put two words of your own together!” (195). Like Tom, the Puritan John Fowler and his father the rector are adept manipulators of the classics, swapping quotations from Plato and Juvenal for a puzzled but admiring audience who assume that the Greek and Latin are “old church talk” (66).⁴ Yet importantly, neither the novel’s implicit expectations of readers’ wide general knowledge nor some characters’ scholarly ability suggests a narrative of Whiggish meliorism. Rather, the function of learning is to highlight conflict, the difficulty of communication, and the incurability of mental fragility. To associate learning with a despairing view of human progress is an unusual perspective in youth literature, which conventionally connects education with the idea of Bildung and increased autonomy for the

³ McCallum’s work, in particular, focuses on providing such a reading, and we highly recommend it to readers interested in this approach. For additional sophisticated and insightful criticism, see especially Philip, Nikolajeva (“Insignificance”), and Butler. ⁴ Among other functions, the classical quotations in the seventeenth- and twentiethcentury segments provide a tiny echo—a small fractal—of the world of the Romano-British section. As Garner’s legionaries show no signs of being inclined toward literature, the text implies that learning may be a substitute for experience, furnishing a new, metaphorical battleground to take the place of what once was literal.

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aspiring student. Arguably, Red Shift is a didactic novel, but its didacticism is focused on encouraging the reader to adopt a pessimistic understanding of the world, an understanding that is furthered by the novel’s structural focus on repetition without improvement. Moreover, if one believes that Red Shift primarily addresses adolescent readers (some critics, though perhaps not the majority, consider it an adult novel), one is faced with the undeniable gap between the knowledge base of the average teenager, however intelligent that teenager may be, and the remarkable erudition that the narrative brings into play. While Tom explains to Jan and thus to the reader the principles of physics and astronomy that he brings into their conversations, only very infrequently is a literary reference identified and sourced. Consequently, although Jan’s complaint about Tom’s overreliance on others’ words suggests that she, at least, can tell what is quotation and what is original, and perhaps also knows where the quotations come from, many readers will merely be baffled by exchanges such as the following, located at the very beginning of the novel and thus helping to establish its narrative practice. Here, in rapid succession, Tom draws on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, an old English proverb reused in W. M. Thackeray’s Catherine and Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta, and Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur”: “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” “Quote.” “More know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows. And that’s another.” He stood back from her and bent down to skim a stone across the lake. “On one side lay the M6, and on one lay a great water, and the site was full. Seven bounces! Bet you can’t do more than three!” (4–5)

Characteristically, Tom’s “Bet you can’t do more than three” might refer either to the bounces of the skimming stone or the number of quotations that he has just packed into a few seconds’ worth of conversation, with the added wrinkles that his “Tom Fool” proverb seems intended also as a reference to King Lear and his Tennyson quotation is a parody pointing to the contrast between the unromantic modern landscape and a less mechanized past. Particularly in the pre-Internet era of 1971, the chance that even a reader who, like Tom, is bound for a top university will be able to track down all the intertextual references made in the novel and form a coherent view of their thematic implications seems slight.

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More likely, perhaps, such readers will decide under Garner’s guidance that the knowledge base implicitly required here is too big, that Garner is depicting a universe of learning too boundless to be mappable, that—as in an astronomical red shift—the intellectual universe is expanding at a pace that humankind cannot hope to match. If, as the cognitive research that Hogan cites suggests, memory is deployed to enable action when one is faced with a quandary, Red Shift’s emphasis on what might seem the inhuman scale of memory defined as centuries of literary and scientific knowledge may render it too unwieldy and intimidating for use. Significantly, while Tom is capable of action in this novel, his actions frequently seem a product more of hostile impulse than of forethought and empathy, decisions to be regretted rather than applauded. The reader is thus encouraged to form an alliance with Jan, a nursing student who, despite her superiority in class status to Tom, is positioned as the twentieth-century plot’s representative of the middlebrow, normal, and emotionally balanced. Jan’s choice of profession is suggestive: she will presumably be spending her career tending ailing bodies, having turned away from her parents’ focus on the neurotic mind. A similar effect is produced in the seventeenth-century plot in that learning here is associated primarily with John Fowler and his father, who put in train the events that end in their own deaths and those of many parishioners at Barthomley Church: the rector urges his flock to gather in the church, where they are readily corralled by the enemy forces, while his son’s bullying of Thomas causes the latter inadvertently to fire the shot that touches off the slaughter. Here again, the central female character is well grounded and intelligent without being intimidatingly hypereducated; while Margery has shown initiative and ambition in getting John to teach her to read and write, her claim that he will also “learn me Greek, and all sorts, good as Oxford” (50) seems specious, a mere effort to get the upper hand as she tries to persuade Thomas not to destroy the votive ax. Thomas is no scholar, and Margery pleads with John, “Don’t work him up with ideas of learning”—to which John responds that “books [and] Latin” are “the greater part of rubbish” in any case, compared with the direct insight into the divine that he believes (wrongly, as Philip observes [99]) to be conferred by Thomas’s fits (Garner 52).⁵ John himself is ⁵ See Philip for a discussion of Thomas, Macey, and Tom as “failed shamans” whose psychic or cerebral damage holds out an (unrealized) possibility of transcendence (99).

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a devotee of books; the historical John Fowler is described as a “scholemaster” in Thomas Malbon’s contemporary account (qtd. Philip 95), and Thomas looks up to him as the person who has “learned me. All my life” (116, 126). Yet learning has done John little good; although he promises to “find my own words” (66), Philip points out that he shares Tom’s inability to do so (Philip 99), and even John’s father recognizes that he is a fragmented personality: “Head and heart, John. They should know each other. Yours have never met” (Garner 151). As Philip observes, for John as for Tom “education is . . . isolating rather than liberating” (99). Furthermore, the Romano-British sections establish that learning is a tool of conquest or revenge. The deserters from the Ninth Legion (whose speech and actions are modeled on media accounts of American soldiers in Vietnam) use their knowledge of tribal languages and religions not to communicate or develop alliances but to rape and slaughter. Even when the soldiers are about to go off the grid, they remain subject to their own military discipline, which exploits knowledge for its purely instrumental purposes. A sanctuary must be closely read to identify the shifting balance of opposing forces. After pressing his subordinates to analyze the confusing scene before them, Logan delivers ancient anthropological information about the Cornovii and Brigantes tribes, here known as “Cats” and “Mothers” (Philip 93), concluding in twentieth-century style: “The guards have been taken out, maybe not by Cats. The Mothers have come south. They’ll raid the Cats wherever they find them, and both sides will whip our ass if we let them. Solutions[?]” (24). The captive Cats priestess deploys her own learning, both of ritual and of poison, to exact revenge for the profanation of her body, revealing an answering instrumentality tempered only by her decision to spare Macey’s life. Civil War era’s Tom’s phrase “learned me. All my life” is thus intriguingly ambiguous since the novel is concerned with insight into human beings that transcends the markers of Bildung or instrumental learning. In the modern sections of the novel, where academic learning is most on display, education’s uses as a shield to deflect intimacy are also most manifest, helping to establish what McCallum terms the novel’s “negative version of modern humanism” (160). Tom answers Jan’s idle question about the objectives of drivers on the M1 by recourse to astronomy, making a conversational gesture into a frighteningly complex word problem. When intimacy or talk of intimacy is about to occur, his verbal facility rises up to interrupt it. When his father and mother tax the young

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people with sexual trysts, his flippancy delays the questioning and attacks his parents’ indirect but still interfering and prurient desire to know what he and Jan have been up to. His command of the verbal, however, cannot protect Tom from his own rage and shame, which remain beneath and behind his clever verbal jousting, suggesting that this intellectual authority has no power to salve emotional wounds. Indeed, his desire to carve out a space of privacy with Jan drives the two of them from plain English into a code devised by Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson in order to frustrate Tom’s mother’s desire to pry. Yet Tom himself pries into Jan’s earlier sexual experiences with a German winemaker, following her on her way to their meeting in Crewe. For all of his resentment of his mother’s investigations of his private life, he combines her desire to violate Jan’s secrets with a similar (and mistaken) conviction of Jan’s perfidy, oblivious to his hypocrisy. Tom thus remains unlearned in his own nature, and the novel’s tripartite structure does not enable its protagonists to acquire the self-knowledge to heal themselves. While Thomas and Macey can glimpse the future (that Tom cannot do so may imply that no further future exists), this vision cannot avert unhappiness or increase self-command; it appears only to produce panic. In an episode in which Tom rages at his parents, so angry that he pushes his hands through the glass of a window, we learn that Macey briefly senses his action, suggesting that unhappiness ricochets back and forth between past and future, a consequence of lack of self-knowledge and an implication that what most endures in memory/history is pain. Modern Tom has styled himself a perpetual cosmic victim, remarking to Jan of what he sees as her desertion in her family’s impending move, “No one does this to me,” to which Jan mildly replies, “No one’s doing anything to anybody” (6). Tom’s learning, then, is an impersonal screen put up before what he perceives as a personally tormenting existence. His perception of his own pain as paramount suggests why there is repetition not only between sections but within them: not only are the lessons of imperial Rome or the Civil War still unlearned in the present, so are the lessons of Tom’s own previous conduct or experience, since his book learning appears to substitute for the productive use of his personal memories. He expresses horror at the technology, ironically named TAM (short for Telephone Answering Machine), that permits Jan’s parents to keep in touch with patients or daughter without being present, without even speaking to

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them directly. Tom’s objection is that TAM tethers them to other people’s emotional neediness while also diminishing their perception of the urgency of human suffering. Jan appears to ratify the concern about detachment when she admits that “they never let themselves be involved. It’s in the training.” But she notes that detachment works both ways: “There are some patients who would rather talk to a phone than to Mum or Dad. . . . They feel safer. A tape recorder doesn’t want things from them” (7). While Tom laughs at the notion of a “cassette confessor,” the novel’s end offers precisely this scenario when he puts a coded suicide note into Jan’s bag without telling her, the most detached possible way of asking her for a sign of engagement sufficient to prevent him from killing himself. Tom’s experience of betrayal is thus not sufficient to prevent him from betraying in turn. His mother puts the stone ax in the trash, a gesture that assaults both past and present inasmuch as the ax is the totem, as it were, of all three couples. While the placement in the garbage can might suggest a radical ignorance of its value as artifact, the gesture appears calculated on the part of a lower-middle-class woman who finds her son’s learning nearly as frightening as his interest in Jan. Tom’s affiliation with learning might separate him from his mother, but he replicates her willful gesture of disregard for other people’s feelings when he sells the ax to a museum. He alienates it from Jan and reduces it on the one hand to money, used to punish Jan by treating her to an expensive outing in a fit of jealousy, and on the other to a form of sanitized learning. The ax is now no longer available to bind Tom and Jan as a couple (Jan’s sense of loss is suggested by the fact that she has even named it “Bunty,” after a defunct childhood pet), and it is no longer available to be found by other couples, having been imprisoned in a vitrine rather than being embedded in sites of domesticity, such as the ruined cottage in which Tom and Jan find it. The ax thus simultaneously separates Tom from and connects him to his mother, Jan, and the two previous couples whose experience of the ax seems to be more fortunate. Tom’s sale of the ax to the museum is the final, physical manifestation of the hostile relationship between learning and intimacy, but it is also a reprise of his desire to use learning to deflect shame. When the rector of St. Bertoline’s wrongly surmises that Tom and Jan have been using his church for a sexual interlude, Tom defuses the situation by engaging in what he calls “an academic trick,” remarking to the rector that “if I may say so, the execution of the Flight into Egypt

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on the south panel of the altar is one of the finest pieces of Tudor carving in my experience. The vernacular detail is delightful” (87). Thereafter, Tom has a relationship with the rector that excludes Jan, while Jan still feels “dirty.” The effect of learning here is to defeat intimacy and empathy, not because Jan is inadequate to requirements but because Tom understands how to manipulate it to create a homosocial community not unlike that of the Roman soldiers. As McCallum observes, “Ultimately, Garner’s narrative strategies assert an unattainable desire . . . for transcendence of historical and cultural difference, a desire which, in the context of Garner’s modernist vision, is fundamentally unachievable” (142). Learning separates, rather than binds, the characters whom we want to see united. But learning has different consequences for the reader. It is the means of entry into Tom’s hyperactive mind; it excites the reader by demonstrating the numerous linguistic, historical, and even emotional connections between past and present. It even suggests that those connections come at the expense of the lateral connections in the present among contemporaries. In other words, through the novel readers become intimate with the past at the cost of hope for connection in the present: in Hogan’s terms, identifying with Tom might be said to enable the acquisition of memory while keeping empathy at bay, making the possibility of decisive action more remote.

6.2 Separate Spheres and If Worlds: Culture Clash in the Fireball and Warriors Trilogies The concept, perennially popular in science fiction and fantasy, of the alternate reality that resembles but is not identical to the reader’s own is particularly well suited to the fractal modality, since readers are necessarily sensitized to looking for parallels between the worlds. In this section we pair two trilogies dealing with alternate realities initially focused on Roman Britain: John Christopher’s Fireball series—Fireball (1981), New Found Land (1983), and Dragon Dance (1986)—and the Warriors series by another British writer, N. M. Browne, which consists of Warriors of Alavna (2000), Warriors of Camlann (2003), and Warriors of Ethandun (2009). Our aim is in part to demonstrate that these works’ similar approach to time, in each case represented as something

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whose short-circuiting can be expressed as an atmospheric oddity, is combined with similar approaches to emotional matters. In his Fireball trilogy, Christopher (one of several pen names used by Christopher Samuel Youd) takes up some of the same issues that concern Garner, including anxiety about what learning—and, William Laskowski observes, efforts at communication—may do to damage human relationships. John R. Pfeiffer, one of a handful of critics to have written an extended essay on Christopher, notes that his post-catastrophe science fiction for young adults typically addresses dark themes such as “the conflict of the individual with society, of reason with feeling, of personal morality with public and popular morality, and of tradition and custom with progress and change. They are not significantly more optimistic” than his works for older readers (17).⁶ Surveying Christopher’s science fiction for young readers, K. V. Bailey similarly finds a preoccupation with dystopia, manifested as “smothering uniformities” that the protagonists must seek, not always successfully, to escape (97). The despairing elements in the Fireball trilogy’s component novels make them a good fit for the fractal modality, and as Bailey’s insight about “uniformities” suggests, the reader of these texts will again find extensive repetition and mirroring as the stories shift between micro and macro levels. The same might be said of Browne’s novels, which move between the violent and dirty pasts represented by an alternative first-century Celtic/Roman conflict, a fifth-century British effort to hang onto the remnants of Roman civilization, and King Alfred’s Dane-threatened Wessex on the one hand and a polluted twenty-first-century England inhabited by unpleasant teenagers and ineffectual adults on the other. As is also the case with Browne’s trilogy, only the first of Christopher’s three volumes draws upon the Roman past, yet because the plot structures and preoccupations of each trilogy remain constant and because these consistencies are important to overall meaning, it makes sense to discuss these trilogies as unities, just as we have not focused exclusively upon the Romano-British sections of Red Shift. Each volume of the Fireball series follows the adventures of Simon and his American second cousin, Brad, in an alternative reality that they have accessed by close contact with a “fireball” encountered in the English countryside. Volume ⁶ From Dictionary of Literary Biography. © 2002 Gale, a part of Cengage, Inc. Reproduced by permission .

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1 reveals that in this “If world” (Dragon 14), imperial Rome still rules; Simon is sold into slavery to become a gladiator, while Brad is befriended by a local aristocrat. Reunited, the two find themselves overthrowing the status quo for the benefit of the long-oppressed Christians, only to regret their actions when it becomes apparent that the resulting theocracy will be more oppressive still. Brad and Simon, together with two friends, consequently take to the sea in Volume 2 to discover America. Near starvation after an Algonquian tribe withdraws its friendship, the group falls in with a Viking settlement but must quickly escape southward (with the assistance of a young Viking woman, Lundiga, who has become infatuated with Brad) upon the discovery that the Vikings plan to sacrifice them to the gods. They then enter the Aztec empire, where they make their fortune as ball players. Lundiga’s golden hair causes her to be identified as a desirable bride for an Aztec god, and leaving her and their surviving Roman companion behind, Brad and Simon flee to California, where they are kidnapped and trafficked to China for the final installment of the saga. Here they take opposite sides in a devastating civil war before eventually getting the chance (offered by the 700-year-old Bei-Kun/Roger Bacon) to return to their own world; Brad turns this down in favor of trying still another If world, and Simon, for reasons not entirely clear to him, decides to accompany his cousin, whom he has never much liked, into uncertainty. Similarly, Browne’s trilogy brings Dan and his sullen classmate Ursula through a strange yellow Mist, initially landing them in an If world in which Latin-speaking soldiers known as Ravens are attempting to eradicate a Celtic tribe, the Combrogi. Summoned by magic that was designed to call up a host of martial allies, teenaged Dan and Ursula, who have hitherto been primarily preoccupied by their unhappy home lives and the social demands of the school world, at first seem ill equipped to help the Combrogi, but it gradually becomes clear that passing through the Mist has made the protagonists fractally enhanced versions of their original selves. Always tall and heavy, Ursula gains shape-shifting powers that enable her to take on the guise of a giant male warrior at will, while Dan turns out to be a berserker capable of slaughtering a host of enemies. Eventually, Ursula becomes able to manipulate the Mist and uses it to relocate the Ninth Legion from her own timeline to the If world; persuaded that the Ravens are following an illegitimate and criminal emperor, the Roman soldiers—Celts themselves—take the Combrogi’s

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part and help to defeat the Ravens. Dan and Ursula then step back through the Mist, but instead of returning to their own world, they enter a timeless stasis from which they are summoned in Volume 2 by the druid Taliesin, who has survived from the first century to the fifth (he will later reappear in Volume 3 as Dr. Merlin, a twenty-first-century youth trauma expert) and is hoping that they can again help the Combrogi, now led by a not very charismatic High King named Arthur. After this new pass through the Mist, Ursula no longer possesses her shapeshifting magic but is still preternaturally strong, while Dan is now subject not to berserk rages but to an empathic ability so strong as to make fighting more or less impossible for him, since he must feel both the wounds he receives and the wounds he inflicts. In the process of establishing the Arthurian legend, Arthur is killed and Ursula gravely wounded, after which Dan is able to return with her to their own time. Volume 3 thus begins with the considerable awkwardness of trying to explain Ursula’s injuries and Dan’s bloodstained state, followed by the difficulty of reintegrating socially into their school—a task so unrewarding that the two retreat through the Mist once more, finding themselves in yet another war-torn era of British history and re-encountering several characters from earlier installments as they try once more to defend the values of a unified Roman-Celtic Britain against the forces of chaos. Together, these plots establish a pattern of repeated conflict. Browne’s trilogy is filled with battle after battle, ranging from modern-day psychological bullying to deep divides within the self to individual physical combat to small-group skirmishes to all-out war. In the case of Christopher’s trilogy, readers encounter the brief physical fight between the cousins that immediately precedes their encounter with the fireball; gladiatorial combat; skirmishes with assorted inhabitants of the North American continent; the Aztec ball tournament, effectively a battle in that the second-place finishers are to be executed; and, of course, the wars that consume both Europe and China once Brad and Simon are available to provide technological know-how (the stirrup and the longbow in Volume 1, airplanes and tanks in Volume 3) to the factions that they are advising. What begins as personal conflict between two boys, that is, moves through different gradations of size but consistently involves a clash of cultures in which innovation confers victory but not peace. Simultaneously, cultural conflict is repeatedly punctuated by personal animosity between Simon and Brad; during the (many)

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moments when things are not going well, the narrator often reports feelings on Simon’s part such as “He felt a resentment which, as the hours ground by, turned to something close to hate” (Land 21). The opening paragraph of Fireball shows Simon listening to a conversation between his grandmother and her sister, Brad’s “Yankee Granny,” as they reminisce about their wartime experiences; referring to some past acquaintance, Simon’s grandmother says, laughingly, “I never could stand him” (1, orig. emphasis), a seemingly random line that nonetheless sets the tone for everything that is to come. Much as the national difference between Simon and Brad is unbridgeable within the context of their family, what follows establishes that national, tribal, and religious differences are unbridgeable everywhere else as well. The most emphatic expression of this gap within Christopher’s series is, of course, the premise upon which the trilogy is built, namely that there are countless parallel worlds that resemble but do not speak to that inhabited by Simon and Brad (and, implicitly, the reader). Within Simon’s experience, this combination of familiarity and strangeness is recapitulated by the many occasions on which it turns out that some important assumption that he has made is wrong. In a characteristic moment at what he has taken for a military training camp, for instance, Simon asks his mentor and friend Bos how Bos came to become a soldier, to which Bos responds with “belly-shaking laughter,” “Miletes non sumus, Simonus. Gladiatores sumus!” (Fireball 45). The revelation that they are not soldiers but gladiators stuns Simon, requiring a drastic re-evaluation of his situation and prospects that mirrors, in little, that mandated by the discovery that he is no longer in twentieth-century England and the subsequent discovery that he is no longer in his own world. In this sense, Simon’s apparent command of some of the knowledge that he needs—his rudimentary grasp of Latin and of Roman social structures, say—is hindrance as well as help, since it encourages him to think that he knows more than is actually the case; most obviously in the first volume, his acquiescence in Brad’s assumption that Christian rule will be preferable to pagan Roman rule proves disastrous. Simon’s repeated misjudging of identities, character traits, and emotions offers readers a way to interpret the trilogy’s foundational metaphor as ultimately referring to human relationships at large: perceptions of kinship and understanding may be illusory, as ultimately, in this trilogy, characters and readers alike all occupy parallel worlds, seemingly familiar but finally unconnected.

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As in Red Shift, academic learning is an important factor in the conflict depicted in Christopher’s trilogy. Brad’s photographic memory and wide store of knowledge consistently give him the upper hand in his competition with Simon, yet they confer little more mastery of the civilizations in which the cousins travel than Simon can muster on his own. It turns out that Brad’s learning is sufficient to enable him to destroy a culture but not to build one; he cannot, for instance, bring into being the vision of a California replete with technological wonders and a welcoming father that he has crossed the Atlantic and a hostile continent to find. While he has a much better command of history and languages (from Latin to Algonquian) than Simon does, this sense of public memory neither helps him make sound decisions nor bestows empathy, as is apparent from the fact that, unlike Simon, he moves through the parallel world without ever forming a close emotional connection of a positive kind. While Brad is quick to make decisions and seems not to feel guilt or anxiety about them, then, his decisions are often the wrong ones. Considering the potential effect upon the adolescent of reading Christopher’s works, Bailey concludes that these novels position the reader as “responsively involved in ‘problem’ situations, the resolutions of which may often occasion some degree of ambivalence” (110). Recall that early in this chapter we quoted Hogan’s explanation that, cognitively, people feeling torn over a decision invoke “(at least) three sorts of regulative principles—informational, prudential, and ethical,” using “emotional memories and emotion-eliciting imaginations” in order to come to a conclusion and act. This point offers useful insight into the ambivalence that Bailey identifies as a characteristic outgrowth of reading Christopher’s oeuvre. Although able to draw upon a stock of relevant information much richer than Simon’s, Brad seems impoverished in terms of both ethics and emotion; thus it is typically he who “seem[s] restless and sp[eaks] of moving on” (Land 5), particularly when any kind of emotional connection appears to be in the offing. Yet because the world in which they find themselves offers unwelcome or mismatched emotional connections—Simon’s romantic interest in a Roman girl is met not with betrothal, as he has hoped, but with an invitation to become her adoptive brother; Lundiga’s romantic interest in Brad threatens to make him her possession and slave; the mistress of incalculable mental powers who elicits infatuation from Brad in Dragon Dance turns out to be

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both evil and many centuries old—“moving on,” though not in a way that permits anyone to leave ambivalence behind, seems to be the only solution. For her part, Browne repeatedly focuses key moments of her trilogy on guilt, memory, and empathy, cognitive functions central to our chapter. At different times, both of her protagonists experience amnesia or other forms of the loss of self, a temporary forgetfulness associated with the traumatic realization of culpability: for instance, after Dan has his first berserker episode in Warriors of Alavna and kills two Ravens, who appear to have been “so horribly savaged that they must have been killed by animals” (40), he does not remember his actions or responsibility for the men’s deaths. Emotion in this trilogy not infrequently takes physical shape, as when in Volume 3 Dan finds himself turning into a bear whenever he gets angry, or when, confronting the leader of the Combrogi early in their acquaintance, “Ursula felt Macsen’s anger and frustration like a physical force around him. . . . she thought she saw it physically manifested as a nimbus of orange flame” (Alavna 47). This perception of the connection between feeling and form guides the reader to see other physical phenomena, from the Mist to the unprepossessing twenty-firstcentury landscape that so repels the time-traveling Taliesin, as outgrowths of human minds. Because the exaggeration or warping of form is a concern from the first page onward (when Dan sees through the Mist shapes “distorted as if through rippled glass” [Alavna 7]) and because important characters tend to appear as expanded versions of themselves as the narratives progress, it is easy to read settings, particularly battlefields, as manifestations of turbulent emotional states. As Dan in particular progresses from amnesia and denial to guilt to an empathy so extreme as to be incapacitating, he traverses landscapes notable for the obstacles that they present, from forests to mountainsides to swamps. Much as Christopher’s trilogy focuses upon its protagonists’ repeated destabilizing of the cultures in which they find themselves, Browne’s trilogy is built around Dan and Ursula’s continuous experiencing of an instability that extends from their minds and bodies to characterize the early history of Britain. Ursula’s shape-shifting (itself unstable, as it gives way to other magical abilities later in the sequence) and Dan’s precarious negotiation between normalcy and berserker or bear mode are merely the most dramatic examples of the omnipresent pressures upon their identities, given that they repeatedly find themselves having to learn new

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languages, establish new social positions, gain new skills, and fend off new enemies. Yet, at the same time, the various manifestations of change themselves come to form patterns; for instance, the term for “berserker” in Warriors of Alavna is “Bear Sark” (which becomes Dan’s sobriquet), while the names Arthur and Ursula respectively mean “strong as a bear” and “little bear,” and Dan literally becomes a bear in Volume 3. So extensive is this mirroring that Volume 2 leaves it up to readers to decide whether the Arthur of British heroic legend is the often unheroic man holding the role of the Pendragon, Dan, Ursula, or some combination of these figures. In other words, the very symmetry and order inherent to the fractal structure contribute to readerly confusion and uncertainty, a paradoxical but appropriate effect in a trilogy in which instability—like ambivalence in Christopher’s series—is the quality continually replicated.

6.3 Panem et Circenses: Countries, Cats, and Conflict in the Hunger Games Trilogy The daughter of a professional soldier, Suzanne Collins perennially explores war in her works for young readers; her best known series thus shares the interest in conflict (and in the practical expertise that victory demands) manifest also in Christopher’s and Browne’s works. Inspired in part by Greek myths including those of Theseus, Artemis, and Philomela (Hansen 161) and in part by reality television, Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy is set in the postapocalyptic nation of Panem, in which teenagers annually fight to the death to remind the citizenry of the potency and necessity of a strong government. The arena, in which alliances are expected to last only as long as they are expedient for the District representatives engaged in this imposed battle, is a microcosm of the nation as a whole, in which there is little communication among the constituent parts competing for the limited resources provided by the governing Capitol. Meanwhile, the Capitol has its own microcosms in the form of the Victors’ Villages, small zones of enhanced privilege and surveillance located within each District for the use of arena survivors and their families. The requirement that each of the twelve known Districts into which Panem is divided (the continued existence of a secret thirteenth District is revealed in the second volume) must hold a yearly lottery to select one

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male and one female “tribute” from among its young starkly illuminates the contrast between the safety that today’s Western societies generally associate with childhood and the deprivation and danger of childhood in less privileged settings: children here are consumed rather than having the luxury of consuming. Taking her younger, more vulnerable sister’s place as tribute, Katniss Everdeen wins her Games to become, unwittingly and unwillingly, the face of rebellion. That her survival is both enabled and complicated by her ability to project emotions for the television audience consisting of the Panem citizenry highlights the idea that surviving dysfunctional childhood requires, above all, performance of a script largely provided by external circumstance, a process through which the performer both gains and cedes power vis-à-vis her adult audience. The question “Real or not real?”, repeatedly invoked in the third volume as the rebels try to undo a brainwashing accomplished by the Capitol, thus has wider application throughout the trilogy than the restoration of one damaged memory; the history of any victim is intimately linked with that of all Panem and may extend into our reality as well. Before the Games, the script for Katniss’s performance involves not emotion but merely competence. When, some years before the start of the first novel, her father dies and her mother sinks into depression and defeat, Katniss finds herself cast in the role of head of the family. To ensure the survival of herself and her young sister, Prim, Katniss must effectively become her father, mastering the skills of hunting and foraging with which he was associated and succeeding him as provider. During the Games, though, competence by itself is not enough; since competitors may receive gifts of useful supplies from admirers in the audience, it is also important to master appeal. In Katniss’s case, appeal is accomplished by participating in a narrative of doomed young love constructed for her by others; she must acquiesce in the unexpected and possibly fallacious announcement on television that the male tribute from her District, Peeta, has long nurtured a secret passion for her, even though by the rules of the contest only one of them can survive. Manifesting a romantic interest in Peeta that neither is sure that she feels, Katniss is able to bring about a modification of the rules that enables both to emerge victorious at the end of the first novel. In the later installments of the saga, she must simultaneously negotiate her emotions and manipulate her new roles as celebrity and

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as symbol in order to fight against the unjust authorities who see her only as a pawn. As this summary implies in its emphasis on one entity standing in for another, larger entity, the series is organized around several key metaphors that function as fractals.⁷ The title of the second volume advertises that one is REBELLION IS FIRE; the word “fire,” not to mention allied terms such as “flame,” “spark,” and so on, recurs dozens of times in each volume, establishing the importance of this image in the reader’s memory. Katniss’s “brand,” so to speak, is that she is known throughout Panem as “the girl who was on fire” due to the costume assigned to her in the televised parade of tributes before her first Games, and she is linked with fire visually and experientially multiple times thereafter, literally catching fire more than once, losing Prim and most of her District in two separate holocausts, and seeking at the end of Mockingjay to exorcise her nemesis President Snow by burning the rose that he has left in her room as his calling card, observing, “Fire beats roses again” (381). But, as Snow comments, fire does not operate only on the individual level: “Your stylist turned out to be prophetic in his wardrobe choice. Katniss Everdeen, the girl who was on fire, you have provided a spark that, left unattended, may grow to an inferno that destroys Panem” (Fire 23). Katniss’s personal anger at the mistreatment of herself, her family, and her friends is eventually felt by the majority of the country, demonstrating the truth of her insight shouted to the camera after Snow’s forces bomb a rebel hospital, “If we burn, you burn with us!” (Mockingjay 98). Kathryn Strong Hansen notes of Collins’s use of a Greco-Roman substrate that “the presence of mythic elements points to the dangers of reproducing beliefs inherited from the past” (161); the tying of the destructive force of fire to the fractal structure is another vehicle for Collins’s dystopian message.

⁷ The metaphors that we discuss here are, of course, not the only instances of fractal repetition and mirroring in the trilogy. For instance, Katniss’s second Games take place in a domed arena that she describes as “Very exact. Very symmetrical” (Fire 285) and that turns out to be a symbolic rendition of a clock, with different torments assigned to different “hours” on the clock’s face. The idea that the passing of time will be associated with the orderly iteration of a sequence of tortures suggests an association between this particular Games and the carefully choreographed and ritualized seventy-five-year Games tradition: as so often in Collins’s narrative, the one stands in for the many.

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Another prominent metaphor is the idea THE FAMILY IS THE STATE. Katniss’s struggle against the controlling Snow and, later, her rejection of the leader of District 13, Alma Coin, parallel and extend the separation from her parents that has taken place much earlier. The two leaders are themselves interchangeable—“Make no mistake, she was intending to take my place right from the beginning,” Snow tells Katniss (Mockingjay 357)—as both claim to offer salvation for the country but, like King Minos in the Theseus myth, are ready to achieve their goals by sacrificing innocents. Accordingly, the denouement of Mockingjay involves Katniss in shooting Coin instead of Snow, a perhaps forlorn attempt to keep history from repeating itself. The areas controlled respectively by Coin and Snow are interchangeable as well, since “In some ways, District 13 is even more controlling than the Capitol” (Mockingjay 34), and both realms are highly unscrupulous in gaining their desired ends, magnifying a thousandfold the abandonment and cruelty that play out on a small scale in Katniss’s home. Indeed, Miranda Green-Barteet points out that in Mockingjay, “Katniss suffers a breakdown of sorts when she realizes her participation in . . . District 13’s organized rebellion is causing people in other districts to suffer” (38). Although Katniss is in most cases not acquainted with these compatriots and repeatedly describes herself as a socially awkward person who finds it hard to make friends or even to feel much interest in other people, by this point in the narrative she has come to identify strongly with her fellow citizens as a group, to such an extent that her response to their suffering prefigures her later emotional devastation at Prim’s death. In addition, over the course of the trilogy Katniss constructs a series of surrogate families for herself out of her fellow tributes and assorted other allies; since all these arrangements look like nascent political threats to the Capitol, each is almost entirely destroyed, thus recapitulating in a framework of civil war the original family drama (the mine accident that kills her father) that has shaped Katniss’s life. Arguing that Katniss’s “expressions of love and desire are more often directed toward her sister Prim, and also toward Rue, who fills Katniss’s sister-shaped hole of desire during the Seventy-fourth Games,” than they are toward Peeta or her other potential conventional love interest, Gale, Lisa Manter and Lauren Francis trace the origins of her “survival queer” orientation to her impoverished childhood to demonstrate that at least in the first volume,

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“her libidinal energies are wholly directed toward her own survival and the survival of her immediate, rather than potential, family. In this way, Katniss implicitly rejects a fantasy of the future that upholds heteronormative object-choices” (287, 291). We suggest that while Katniss’s “survival queer” outlook certainly causes her to resolve not to produce her own children, it simultaneously encourages her to form familial ties with a host of people with whom she does not share genetic kinship. She learns to feel a degree of responsibility for Peeta’s family (even his mother, whom she dislikes), Gale’s mother and siblings, her mentor Haymitch (“He’s dreadful, of course, but Haymitch is my family now,” she muses [Fire 175]), and many others. Ultimately, and in accordance with this same fractal principle of defining the family outward, Katniss engages in self-administered therapy. With Peeta as her illustrator, she creates the text for a family album memorializing all the details [about the dead] it would be a crime to forget. Lady [Prim’s pet goat] licking Prim’s cheek. My father’s laugh. Peeta’s father with the cookies. The color of Finnick’s eyes. What Cinna could do with a length of silk. Boggs reprogramming the Holo. Rue poised on her toes, arms slightly extended, like a bird about to take flight. On and on. . . . Haymitch finally joins us, contributing twenty-three years of tributes he was forced to mentor. (Mockingjay 385)

This extending of family to include, apparently, all those citizens of Panem with whom Katniss has shared an emotionally meaningful moment, among them individuals who died before she was born, entails an embrace of history, a device that—as predicted by the findings on cognition that Hogan cites and that we have referenced elsewhere in this chapter—enables the recurrent activation of memory in order to permit Katniss’s continued action. While her identification with others nearly destroys Katniss more than once (it is used against her in her second Games, as well as prompting the breakdown mentioned by GreenBarteet), and while the omnipresent willingness to define individuals as mere symbolic representations of the larger polity is an evil that has corrupted Panem, her ultimate ability to see the state as a family offers what shreds of hope the ending of Mockingjay provides. Guilt, empathy, and memory work together. A third important aspect both of Katniss’s battle and of the frequent manifestations of her trauma-induced difficulty in feeling and acknowledging emotion is the metaphor EMOTION IS PERFORMANCE,

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here embodied particularly by the mockingjay, a product of genetic engineering and chance that has the capacity to provide a perfect imitation of human-generated sounds.⁸ Mockingjays can thus be used to send messages, but they can also confuse. A kind of mockingjay of emotion, Katniss can perform feeling, which, notes sociologist Frank Füredi, is central to reality television, a form that “encourages the contestants to continually expose their emotions to the viewing public” and in which “Contestants who emote deeply and reveal intimate details of their personal troubles are customarily applauded for being ‘brave,’ ‘honest’ and ‘strong’ ” (Culture 54). In the arena during her first Games, Katniss performs a reciprocal emotional interest in Peeta in order to score useful gifts from the viewing audience, but she does not consider this performance honest. As their relationship develops, however, with new memories accruing and buried memories being recovered on both sides, performed and genuine emotion begin to merge. Even so, the line between the staged and the felt remains blurry, both for Katniss and Peeta and for Panem more generally; Plutarch Heavensbee, the former Head Gamemaker who becomes chief propagandist for the rebels, remarks ironically, “The best thing about the Capitol basically ignoring Twelve for all those years is that you people still have a little spontaneity. The audience eats that up” (Mockingjay 29). Katniss may be compared to the British reality-TV star Jade Goody, who had her protracted 2009 death from cervical cancer chronicled in depth in the tabloids in a way that, according to sociologist Tony Walter, many spectators saw as redemptive both for herself and for her dysfunctional mother and unappealing publicist. Much as Walter writes of Goody, Katniss not only “beautifie[s] and sexualize[s] the dying female body” but also, despite the androgyny of her role and voice, “use[s] her condition to assert her femini[ni]ty through the key rituals”—for Katniss the makeover, the engagement, and finally the production of children, for Goody the wedding and christening—“that celebrate the specifically female roles of wife and mother” (857). The performance establishes her as both the manipulator and the pawn of her society; Katniss provides honesty, love, and self-sacrificing femininity at her audience’s demand, ⁸ Hansen suggests that in its guise as the inspiration for a pin that is “an inheritance from a suffering woman” and that Katniss wears into the arena before it becomes the symbol of the rebellion, the mockingjay works to affiliate Katniss with the myth of Philomela (172).

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but the extent to which these products represent “reality” is perennially in doubt. At the same time, readers of the trilogy are gratified by the awareness that they have a more intimate knowledge of Katniss than does the viewing public of Panem, since readers know that the meaning of her feeling and its potential distance from the genuine are never entirely clear, even to herself. That is, while Katniss’s viewers see her in terms of a traditional Romeo-and-Juliet enactment of doomed young love, Collins’s readers are provided with a more up-to-date vision of emotion as conflicted, ambivalent, and damaged by exposure to a dysfunctional family and state. Füredi notes that reality television began by focusing on expressions of sexuality—in many cases fabricated expressions—before moving on to an assortment of malaises physical and emotional, from sickness to chemical dependency to troubled family lives (“Jade”). The viewer of Panem television sees Katniss in the former light, the reader of Collins’s trilogy (which features all the sources of angst that Füredi lists in his rundown) in the latter. Whether this vision is more “real” than the other may be open to question. As a final, extended example of Collins’s use of literary fractals and their association with metaphors, we point to one that seems particularly pertinent because the trope of interior vs. exterior with which the text associates it offers guidance to the reader about how to navigate the trilogy’s mazelike structure. The common dystopian metaphor PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS takes multiple forms in Collins’s narrative. Humans appear as wild beasts who may tear out their victims’ throats or devour their corpses in the arena; as domestic animals (Katniss comes to think of her team of beauticians as “pets” [Fire 245]); and as the creators and victims of murderous traps based on the awareness that people under threat will behave much as animals do. The first figure of the human-level/animal-level fractal to be examined here is Buttercup, the cat belonging to Katniss’s sister, Prim. His similarity to both girls is initially established through his name, since like Buttercup and Prim (short for Primrose), Katniss bears a flower name; the katniss plant is an herb for which Mr. Everdeen used to forage, although her friend Gale also calls her “Catnip.” While Katniss expresses dislike for Buttercup, it is for qualities that she too exhibits: he is a fighter and hunter rather than a lap cat, reserving his displays of affection for Prim alone (Prim is also the only member of the family whom Katniss admits to loving) and prizing his freedom and his own ways of doing

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things. When, after the destruction of their village, Katniss returns to their home to see what might be salvaged, Buttercup is one of the possessions rescued, and his adjustment to the family’s new quarters in the secret District 13 requires their rehousing in a room with an unusual feature, a window, from which he can access the outside world. His nightly forays into that world, frowned upon but tolerated by the rebel authorities, resemble Katniss’s earlier pattern of scaling the fence around the village in order to hunt, a crime that goes unpunished because the village authorities are unofficially glad of her contribution to the food supply. Indeed, like Katniss, Buttercup “attains celebrity status” within District 13 when he puts on impressive but pointless displays of his aggressive instincts by chasing a flashlight beam, at which point Katniss recognizes their metaphorical identity: “I am Buttercup” (Mockingjay 153). But if Buttercup is Katniss, he—and she—are also the lynx that she remembers as a former companion. She recalls that in her early days as a hunter, “this crazy lynx started following me around the woods looking for handouts. . . . I finally had to kill the lynx because he scared off game. I almost regretted it because he wasn’t bad company. But I got a decent price for his pelt” (Games 7). This trading of emotion, the mutual but denied affection between herself and the wild cat, for profit prefigures what she will later have to provide within the realitytelevision world of the Hunger Games, and also what is already being asked of her as provider for her family, in which she must separate herself from them in order to furnish money and food. In the final volume, moreover, Katniss (who admits to a habit of “visualiz[ing] Buttercup’s fur lining a pair of gloves, an image that has helped me deal with him over the years” [Mockingjay 143]) is again confronted with cat pelts, but this time instead of distancing herself from the lynx, she must become him—moving, like Buttercup, between the outside and the inside. This transformation occurs when Katniss, on the run from Snow’s troops, takes shelter in a shop run by a former Games stylist, Tigris. The shop’s stock in trade is fur underwear, and Tigris has engaged in the Capitol’s penchant for “surgical enhancement” by turning herself into a blend of human and cat: “The skin has been pulled back tightly and tattooed with black and gold stripes. The nose has been flattened until it barely exists. I’ve seen cat whiskers on people in the Capitol before, but

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none so long” (Mockingjay 318). Hiding with her small group of allies in “fur nests” in Tigris’s basement, Katniss feels that she has been “swallowed up by her store” (321, 320). Yet although she worries that the shop may be a trap and identifies Tigris, whose major form of communication appears to be snarls and lashings of her tail, as a “decrepit tiger-woman with . . . an all-consuming passion for Snow’s death,” Katniss decides against posting a guard. Instead, “we all burrow into our pelts. . . . I surrender to the soft, musty fur and oblivion” (322). Thus while on one level Katniss resists understanding her similarity to Tigris, on another level she appears to embrace it. The “pelt” of tough, unlovable predator is one to which Katniss, ever wary of emotion, ultimately feels comfortable “surrender[ing].” Yet the distancing from emotion also enables it. When she leaves Tigris, Katniss kisses her. And similarly, when after Prim’s death she again confronts Buttercup, who has once more survived against all the odds, Katniss both rejects the cat and accepts him: “Go away! There’s nothing left for you here!” . . . Out of nowhere, the tears begin to pour down my cheeks. . . . “She’s dead, you stupid cat. She’s dead.” A new sound, part crying, part singing, comes out of my body, giving voice to my despair. Buttercup begins to wail as well. No matter what I do, he won’t go. . . . But he must understand. He must know that the unthinkable has happened and to survive will require previously unthinkable acts. Because hours later, when I come to in my bed, he’s there in the moonlight. . . . guarding me from the night. (Mockingjay 386)

In giving Buttercup her hard-to-come-by breakfast bacon in the morning, Katniss thus identifies him simultaneously with Prim, earlier the object of her self-sacrificing attempts at provision, and with herself. For in keeping with the fractal model’s need to show similarity across different levels of size, it is Buttercup, not Peeta or Gale, who ultimately shares what Manter and Francis rightly identify as Katniss’s most genuine and least adulterated emotion. We have emphasized this trilogy’s literary fractals in part to show how metaphor contributes to the overall structure in a way that suggests that the arena is a miniature version of our own avidity for drama—and of the difficulty that we may experience in processing it. But we are also concerned with how these fractals elicit from Katniss emotion that readers will be inclined to identify as “private” and “real,” although since they are associated with the fictional protagonist of a major

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bestseller, they are demonstrably neither. It is important to note that the private/public, inside/outside distinction in Collins’s work has a strong political dimension.⁹ In its discussion of how the Panem televisionviewing audience, obsessively tuned in to the Games and the contestant pageant that precedes them, is slowly united into a revolutionary body, the trilogy makes a careful distinction between audience and public. The former is composed of consumers to be titillated or pacified; the latter is composed of citizens with political beliefs, rights, and obligations. The novels work both to establish this distinction, by showing how the rebels differ from the Capitol, and to undermine it, since the rebels use the ideas and personnel of the Capitol’s Games in order to accomplish their propaganda aims. Just as the teen reader is implicitly expected to become a better citizen by pondering guilt, responsibility, survivorship, and the untrustworthy state while consuming Collins’s entertainment, the Hunger Games within the trilogy have an explicitly political function that initially aims at the establishing of a passive audience but is subsequently hijacked by the rebellion and turned into the creation of a participatory citizenry or public. In both cases, the key to this process is emotion. In his work on “the therapeutic state,” sociologist James L. Nolan, Jr. argues that “the therapeutic cultural ethos,” which valorizes intensity of emotion above, say, reason or decorum, “has penetrated . . . the American state” (280), to the extent that Americans, who are in any case overwhelmingly “agreed that political events today [Nolan published his book in 1998] seem more like entertainment than something to be taken seriously” (44), are more likely to accept the state’s ever-increasing growth and impingement upon individual lives if that growth is justified via appeals to emotion. “With the expansion of the state,” Nolan notes, “the problem of legitimacy is intensified” (40); the therapeutic discourse suggests both that “we can control and re-create our inner psyches,” so that the state is not overly intrusive after all, and that the state is really “ ‘soft and sensitive’ . . . [designed to remedy] the harshness of life in a mechanistic, bureaucratic, impersonal world” (285). Thus, as Füredi puts it, “US politicians concerned with mobilising popular support have

⁹ Asked in an interview, “Did you intend for social and political commentary to be as important to the meaning of this book as they seem?”, Collins responded, “Yes. The sociopolitical overtones of The Hunger Games were very intentionally created to characterize current and past world events” (Blasingame 726).

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attempted to extend their influence through harnessing the influence of therapeutic consciousness,” performing emotion in a confluence of politics with reality television by “publicly acknowledging their vulnerability” and, indeed, “turning to reality television producers to learn how to engage with an otherwise disinterested public” (Culture 57–8, 54). The election of a reality-TV star to the presidency seems in this context an inevitability. In Collins’s trilogy, Snow’s strategy is not to perform emotion himself but rather to have vulnerability and emotion performed for him by the young contestants in the Hunger Games, reminding viewers that the state is in control because it can supply not only the participants’ bodies but also the angst that they express for the delighted sympathy of the audience. But that Snow is acutely aware of, and as desperate as Katniss to distance himself from, his own vulnerability is illustrated by his practice of taking poison prophylactically as a guard against assassination attempts.¹⁰ At the end of the third volume, Snow and Katniss acknowledge their likeness to one another, he revealing that “we both have been played for fools” by the rebel Coin, she seeing him as “the consummate survivor” (a phrase that also describes Katniss herself), voting to continue the Hunger Games as an act of revenge, and finally shooting Snow’s enemy Coin while sparing him (Mockingjay 357, 360ff). If Snow’s project has always been the manipulation of emotion on a macro level, whether that of all Panem or that of the participants in the Games, Katniss’s project has always been the manipulation of emotion on the micro level of her own psyche: first, its denial, as prefigured in the killing of the lynx that has offered her companionship, but later its manufacture, since in order to survive, she must come not only to project but even to feel a certain set of emotions. Indeed, the reader, as hungry for emotion as any Panem spectator—Lev Grossman’s review in Time magazine rightly observes that readers are implicated in the pleasure of the violence that the series and Katniss condemn—may

¹⁰ Presumably this strategy is inspired by Roman historians’ accounts of the ancient king Mithridates VI of Pontus, the “Mithridates, he died old” famously referenced in A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896). While Collins’s foundational myths in the trilogy are Greek, her depiction of the culture is more often Roman or, as in the reference to the vomitorium as an adjunct to elaborate Capitol banquets in Catching Fire, pseudoRoman. For a valuable discussion of the trilogy’s Roman roots, see Makins.

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consider that there is little point to Katniss’s survival until her feelings begin to return. Yet insofar as the series addresses adolescents and is also a serious look at the corruption of emotion by contemporary politics, alienation is the emotion that the reader is urged to trust. Significantly, it is also the emotion that typifies the fractal strategy throughout. In a continuation of the pattern of reversals of insides and outsides, one may observe that the alienated person feels divorced from self; the feeling that should be inside is not, or the person feels as if he is external to himself. The alienated citizen feels excluded from (or wishes to exclude herself from) the polity; again, the person who should be inside the community is not. At first blush, this affect might seem to render impossible any project of social amelioration; shouldn’t we participate in the corporate ethos of the polity in order to reform and perfect it? Here Katniss’s suspicion of her own feelings (and Snow’s suspicion of them for her) usefully recalls the psychic difference between audience and public. What is wanted of audiences is rapt attention and forgetfulness of self, the psyche greedy for the banquet laid before it. The public, in contrast, needs to be selective, rejecting, skeptical—self-aware and external to the enterprise of government. Thus Katniss’s assassination of Coin revises the most shocking development in the series, that Katniss herself is willing to vote for one final Hunger Games. In killing Coin, Katniss demonstrates that murder is a tool, not an aesthetic enterprise; she performs a necessary public deed as a revision of a private act of franchise, and readers understand the former as somehow truer than the latter. The Latin phrase “Panem et circenses” couples two appetites, two acts of consumption that create a pacified community. Katniss’s experiences remind readers that there is a sacred hunger in political life, continuously repeated and continuously replicated. Being a citizen means never being pacified.

6.4 Monsters and Masks: Trust and Treachery in the Ember in the Ashes Series Memory, guilt, and empathy, tropes that we have been exploring throughout this chapter with reference to questions of war, family, and agency, are again central in Sabaa Tahir’s as yet unfinished Ember in the Ashes quartet, which describes a dystopia still more blood-drenched than

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Collins’s Panem. Tahir’s story world has both Roman and North African roots. She describes an empire composed of different castes and peoples, each of whom controls different kinds of knowledge. These groups consist of Martials, who range from Plebeians to Illustrian patricians who bear Latinate names and are often (for men) and occasionally (for women) educated at Blackcliff, a brutal and effective training academy dedicated to producing the world’s greatest fighting force; Scholars, repositories of secular and civilian knowledge conquered and enslaved by the Martials five centuries before the beginning of Volume 1; the Tribes, nomadic desert dwellers, keepers of the ancient lore of the supernatural world, and perhaps the least Roman and most sympathetic of the peoples about whom Tahir writes; and the supernatural beings themselves, the jinn, efrits, ghuls, ghosts, wraiths, and wights populating a shadow world with which, it becomes increasingly clear, the Empire is still more at war than it is with the mortal barbarians who threaten its boundaries. While in the third volume the chief jinn, known to his human foes as Nightbringer, occasionally narrates a section, the series is voiced primarily by three young representatives of the Empire whose positions and backstories illustrate a trope particularly common within contemporary young adult dystopian fiction, namely the potency of girls or women.¹¹ The figure who connects the other two is Elias, grandson of an important Illustrian, son of the hated Commandant Keris of Blackcliff, and foster son (until his forced removal from his new family and induction into the Blackcliff student body) of Mamie Rila, storyteller to Tribe Saif. Another Illustrian and another narrator is Elias’s erstwhile Blackcliff best friend, Helene, who becomes Blood Shrike or right hand to the sadistic new emperor, Plebeian-born Marcus, before (and while) he kills most of her family and marries and torments her one surviving sister. The remaining narrator, and the first to whom readers are introduced, is Elias’s Scholar beloved, Laia, daughter of two legendary Resistance members who becomes a spy and Keris’s personal slave at Blackcliff as part of an effort to rescue her brother, Darin, from an imperial prison. Arguably, guilt is the primary motivating force driving much of the action here. Elias, a brilliant soldier who hates killing, is tormented by the thought of the many who have died either at his hand or as a

¹¹ For much more on this point, see Day, Green-Barteet, and Montz.

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consequence of some decision of his. His involvement with Laia seems on one level a symbolic atonement for five centuries of Martial abuses of Scholars; their star-crossed romance appears (as of the end of Volume 3) to be at an end once Elias takes on and becomes absorbed by the role of the Bani el-Mauth, the “Chosen of Death” or Soul Catcher whose work is to receive the newly dead and persuade them to move on to the afterlife. The role is in a sense forced upon him because he is dying of slow poison at his mother’s hands, and only by accepting the job can he have continued existence—which, guilt-ridden, he seeks in order to help the living, especially Laia, even though he has been told that “The Commandant poisoned you. You, in turn, are a poison” (Torch 55, orig. emphasis). Nevertheless, being the Bani el-Mauth is a fitting destiny for a man who has longed for a way to come to terms with the deaths of others. But Elias is only one of many figures wracked by guilt. For her part, Helene accepts her own role as protector and enabler of an emperor she loathes because it seems the only way to protect first Elias and eventually all the peoples of the Empire. Refusing to be Blood Shrike, she believes, would be an act of disloyalty so profound as to make her responsible for all the ills that would then befall the Empire, yet the catch here is that as Blood Shrike, she bears responsibility for the ills that she is unable to avert. Finally, Laia agrees at the behest of the Resistance to take on the suicidal mission of spying on Keris because she feels such guilt at having fled when her grandparents were butchered and her brother arrested. Over the course of the complicated plot that ensues, she incurs more guilt by having developed love for Keenan, a Resistance member who turns out to have been the Nightbringer in disguise; her mother’s silver armlet, which she gives to him as a token of her affection, is revealed to be the penultimate piece of a magical Star that the Nightbringer is assembling in an effort to free the surviving jinn from the long captivity imposed after their betrayal by Scholars centuries earlier. The dramatically different lifespans of the human and supernatural characters save neither the short-lived nor the near-immortal from guilt for crimes committed long since, and while the series opens by focusing on Laia and thus getting the reader to contemplate the oppression of the Scholars, that oppression is later presented as a consequence of their responsibility for the still greater oppression of the jinn. Up and down the scale of time, existence is shaped by betrayal.

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Bound together by guilt and haunted by memories of misdeeds and failures, then, important characters in Tahir’s series resemble one another on an individual level. Thus, for instance, while Laia asserts at various points that “I’m not my mother” and “I’m nothing like my mother” (Reaper 257, Ember 146), Volume 3 reveals that a prophecy’s mention of “the Ghost” might refer either to her or, as ultimately is the case, to her mother, Mirra of Serra, “Lioness” of the Resistance. Just as Mirra, herself enslaved by Keris, sought by protecting a younger kitchen slave to alleviate her guilt for having “saved” husband and older daughter by killing them, Laia takes on responsibility for the younger child as well—and after that girl’s death, for other children too, a move that ends again and again in tragedy but that establishes Laia’s unshakable commitment to humanity. By the end of the third novel, Laia has become “Laia of Serra,” the new face less of resistance to the Empire than of protection of the Empire’s vulnerable against barbarians both internal and external. Similarly, readers see that Mirra is a mirror (like the Laia/ Lioness chime, the echo here is surely intentional) of another flawed mother, Keris, when she tells her daughter, “I’m no mother, girl. I’m a monster. Monsters don’t merit comfort” (Reaper 348), and Elias hears from a group of jinn the unwelcome message, “You are like her [Keris]. . . . Your mother’s story lives in your blood” (Reaper 137–8, orig. emphasis). Again and again, pairs of characters are linked through their experience of trauma. Yet what makes Tahir’s sequence fractal is not so much its use of mirroring to show resemblances between characters on the mortal level as its deployment of scalar difference to show how mirroring also applies across boundaries of mortal/immortal, individual/collective—in other words, time and space. We have noted above that both the short- and the long-lived suffer betrayal and incur guilt, a point further illustrated by the relationship of Helene, Elias, and the Nightbringer, particularly as worked out in the third volume. Cain, an Augur (one of a near-deathless group of mysterious figures with oracular power) who is eventually revealed to have been the prime mover in the original sin constituted by the Scholars’ long-ago betrayal of the jinn, tells Helene that “the Nightbringer is no monster, child, though he may do monstrous things. He is cloven by sorrow and thus locked in a righteous battle to amend a grievous wrong. Much like you. I think that you are more similar than you know” (Reaper 70). That Cain speaks with the authority of a seer

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requires the reader to give particular credence to his insight that likeness can exist between the human level and the supernatural one.¹² Meanwhile, Elias’s experiences parallel those of the Nightbringer in some important ways, given that as the leader of the jinn, the latter was the first Bani el-Mauth. Thus when efrits destroy the cabin that has been the Soul Catcher’s refuge, leaving a desolate Elias to mourn that “My sanctuary—my home—is gone, and I will never get it back” (Reaper 163), the destruction reprises in miniature the destruction of the jinn way of life at the hands of the treacherous Scholars. Moreover, it is while the Nightbringer is laboring to reconstruct the magic Star shattered by the Scholars that Elias is transitioning into the supernatural role that requires him to give up his humanity bit by bit. When his immediate predecessor as Bani el-Mauth, the jinn Shaeva, tells him that “Every time you bid farewell to yet another part of your old life, a piece of you will die” (Reaper 19), her explanation functions as an inversion of the way in which the Star gradually grows into an assemblage that can restore the “jinnity” of the Nightbringer’s trapped kin. Indeed, the Star is itself a fractal inasmuch as it is composed of a combination of emotionally meaningful objects that cannot be seized by the Nightbringer but must be given to him willingly and in trust—a trust that is repeatedly broken by the jinn’s ongoing betrayal of his human relationships, much as the Scholars betrayed him. The continuous cycle of trust and treachery, played out over both short time and long, constitutes the heart of the dystopia described in this series. The metaphor THE PAST IS FRACTAL obviously makes specific reference to time, and time is central to the dystopian mindset of the novels that we examine in this chapter because of the implication that meaningful change for the better is impossible. While nostalgia for some vanished past—the golden age of the jinn, Elias’s childhood among the Saif, Laia’s upbringing under her grandparents’ care—suggests that the trajectories of individual lives are not flat (rather, the present usually seems considerably more difficult than what it has replaced), such nostalgia seems unproductive, a gateway to pointless longing rather than to agency. It is not coincidental that for the human characters, at ¹² Cain’s authority does not extend to the moral realm. He describes himself as “an error, a mistake. I am failure and malice, greed and hatred. I am guilty. We are, all of us Augurs, guilty” (Ember 401).

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least, nostalgia is directed toward a time of life predating meaningful responsibility, and that adult decisions continually involve causing pain to others; growing up, evidently, is all about incurring guilt. Thus the most common fractal images within Tahir’s series all have to do with the relationship between experience and the self. Time, the reader discovers, writes on the body and the psyche in a way that cannot be erased except through death, since in life “Things will never go back to the way they were” (Ember 286).¹³ Not surprisingly, then, the series is full of references to tattoos, scars, and other ineradicable physical marks, all of which serve as records of identity: experience is the self. Particularly memorable instances of this trope include the tattooed motto that Keris is adding to her body, letter by letter, as she reaches particular milestones in the mysterious quest that has consumed her adult life since she abandoned her infant son to the Saif; the horrific mutilations visited upon Mirra in the process of turning her from Lioness of the Resistance to the nameless enslaved Cook of Blackcliff; and the Masks of living silver that gradually bond to the faces of Blackcliff cadets as a sign of their membership in the military elite. The Masks, and in some cases the tattoos and scars as well, function to some degree as buffers between the wearer and his or her humanity, enabling a distancing from regret, softness, and similar qualities considered undesirable in one who must be capable of killing others with absolute ruthlessness and efficiency. The expectation for these soldiers is that their Masks will become part of them and vice versa, forging a uniform identity that can be cast aside only with the utmost difficulty; so integral is the Mask to this identity that those who bear it are in fact referred to as “Masks” rather than as soldiers or as members of a particular fighting force. Yet rejecting this identity nonetheless remains possible, if vanishingly rare. Elias, who as a cadet secretly removes his Mask on a regular basis, never bonds with it; Helene, who has ¹³ That death can effectively turn time backwards rather than simply stopping it is clear, for instance, in the scene in which Elias as the Bani el-Mauth helps the souls of the sadistic young emperor Marcus and the twin whom he killed in the competition for the throne cross from the waiting area that accommodates the newly dead into the full afterlife. Although both were young men at the time of death, “When I look back at the twins, they are boys once more, untainted by the world. And when they step into the river, they do it together, small hands clasped” (Reaper 449–50). Even so, this outcome cannot be reached until Marcus has relived his sins and come to terms with his guilt for them: “He suffers each memory, a rush of violence and selfishness and brutality that, for the first time, he must feel in all its horror” (Reaper 449).

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long since gone through the bonding process, rips hers off her face in Volume 3 (an agonizing process), giving it to the Nightbringer as the last piece of his Star in the hope of saving others through her sacrifice. The use of “Mask” as a term describing the wearer is the most obvious example of the series’s interest in metonymy, a form of figurative language that is itself fractal in that the part can be used to stand in for the whole. Another important version of this trope is the attitude taken toward names. In telling Helene the Nightbringer’s real name—Meherya, or Beloved—Cain explains, “The truth of all creatures, man or jinn, lies in their name. The Nightbringer’s name was his making. And it will be his unmaking” (Reaper 322). Like a Mask, a name constitutes identity, revealing affiliation (one can use it to distinguish a Scholar from a Martial from a Tribesman) or achievement (“the Lioness of the Resistance”), and like a Mask, it can sometimes be used to obscure or keep at bay emotion through absence; slaves lose their individual names and become simply “Cook” or “girl” because they are deemed to have no right to an identity or a past beyond that of possession. Finally, readers are instructed that stories work much as names do. In Volume 3, a Resistance leader tells Laia that she must become “someone worth following. For that to happen, the Scholars in Adisa and in the camps need to know who you are and what you’ve done. And that means that for now, all I need from you is a story. . . . Your story” (Reaper 130). As the Tribes implicitly acknowledge by setting storytellers in the position of greatest honor, stories facilitate connection, which can bring with it either leadership as in Laia’s case or vulnerability as in Keris’s; Mirra answers her own question, “Do you know why the Commandant never fails, girl?”, with the instruction, “Because no one knows her story. Learn her story, and you’ll learn her weakness. Learn her weakness, and you can destroy her” (Reaper 433). Whereas the Mask stands for a particular kind of shared identity, names and stories stand for individual identities, marking different levels of complexity as one moves from the smallest level (name) to the more developed level indicated by story, all in an effort to capture the entirety that is the person. Tahir’s weaving of her title phrases into the various volumes encapsulates the range of small to large on display here. Each phrase refers to a particular character; the first two volumes state in so many words that Laia is an “ember in the ashes” and Helene a “torch against the night” (Ember 401, Torch 267), while the term “Reaper at the Gates,” which occurs in the prophecy

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articulated by the dying Shaeva (Reaper 58), has not yet been explained but presumably refers either to the Nightbringer, the first Bani el-Mauth, or to Mauth (Death) himself. This set of associations neatly links individual to image to story to entire novel. The process of full description that occurs in this progression from name to story to novel is necessarily a process of empathy, the third term (along with memory and guilt) in the triad of cognitive processes identified by Hogan and explored at the beginning of the present chapter. In Tahir’s series, if memory is fundamental to guilt or to the desire for revenge, depending on whether one sees one’s role as that of perpetrator or victim, empathy is fundamental to resolving both of these emotions— but it is also represented as exceptionally difficult to achieve, primarily because the force of memory is so great. Tahir makes this point in part through her description of ghuls, represented as creatures who cluster greedily and (to most eyes) invisibly around the traumatized because “They feed off sorrow and sadness and the stink of blood,” “hissing into [the] ear” of those whom they haunt (Ember 175, Reaper 99). Like scars, then, ghuls are markers of pain given form, and their influence over their hosts, exemplified by their control over a princess who threatens Laia in Volume 3, has the effect of making understanding and connection hard to come by. While ghuls prey upon the individual, the near impossibility of letting the past go or of channeling memory to positive ends extends to the entire society. For in the fractal, we have noted, the problems of the individual are also the problems of the family, the clan, and the culture overall; indeed, they may extend beyond the particular story world to typify the larger body of literature of this kind. Trust and treachery are endemic in the young adult dystopias explored in this chapter, and while many scholars of this genre consider it more “hopeful” than similar fiction written for adults (Day, Green-Barteet, and Montz 10), this standard is admittedly not hard to meet. The difficulty in arriving at happy endings that genuinely overturn the societal malaise described in such texts is acknowledged by such critics as Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz, who suggest that as much as this genre is about resistance, it may also often be about failure: “As young people stand up and fight the system, they also learn their own limitations” (7). This reference to limitations seems especially poignant in regard to Tahir’s work, since all three of her young narrators gain supernatural

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powers over the course of the saga: Elias learns to become a conduit for the magic of Mauth, lord of death; Helene gains miraculous healing powers that depend on her empathic ability to feel the pain and the psychic essences of others; and Laia becomes able to turn herself invisible, a desirable skill for a spy and scout. Yet even this degree of potency strikes the holders of these gifts as entirely inadequate to enable them to rectify the situations with which they are confronted, as often there appears to be no correct decision to make—every cast of the dice is a losing one, though what is lost may vary. Indeed, identifying with the fourth and considerably more powerful narrator, the Nightbringer, still does not suggest the possibility of triumph, as his success in assembling the Star has permitted him to free the jinn but seems unlikely to result in a re-establishing of the utopian jinn world of bygone days. The reader, then, is presented with focalization after focalization that all speak to the agony of wrong choices and the crushing burdens of responsibility in matters of life and death. Although each narrator gains considerably in authority over the course of the saga and thus in trust in the self, the self continuously betrays as well.

6.5 Secret Keepers: Manipulating Misprision in The Queen’s Thief Sequence We have earlier suggested that there is some affinity between the palimpsest topology, associated with trauma and with the sense that it is difficult for any one individual to perform an action so momentous that it will significantly change the historical pattern, and the fractal topology, whose connection to dystopia and fascination with physical and/or psychic damage convey a similar if more intense and despairing message. One could argue for the palimpsestic nature of texts such as Red Shift, The Game, or the Fireball trilogy, for instance, although for various reasons (including but not limited to the presence of repetition across levels of scale) we find the fractal model the dominant one in these cases. But because map texts are predicated on the possibility of forward movement, with all the positive connotations of that idea, the combination of map with fractal is unusual. Pending the absence to date of a conclusion to Tahir’s quartet (whose use of maps as frontispieces to the third volume may presage movement toward some kind of happy ending

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later on, although the grimness of the story world in this case may render such a denouement improbable), we offer as our sole example of that combination Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief series. We argue that the series’s consistent emphasis on how the performance of weakness can lead to triumph enables it to construct a model in which seeming paralysis enables decisive action. It is precisely the books’ readiness to dwell on conflict and on (real or performed) despair that makes possible their ultimate movement away from dystopia. Turner has identified Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War as a transformational text for her, adding that this work is foundational to her own writing (Brown). The series is set not in Greece but (primarily) on a Greece-like peninsula occupied by several rival kingdoms, all of which are at risk of being gobbled up by the powerful empire of the Medes; to date, the principal political question posed by the novels is whether—and at what cost—the peninsular principalities, historical enemies, will be able to make common cause against this larger threat. Cheerfully mingling guns, crossbows, and pocket watches with ancient artifacts and megara, Turner does not seek to recreate either ancient Greek or Byzantine Greek culture and history, but rather to provide an If world with clear and strong Greek echoes that will enable her to connect with her readers on the level of setting.¹⁴ Yet as she moves her characters past olive groves, through mountain passes, and around palaces, she is also describing a laborious and labyrinthine process of personal and communal problem-solving. Turner’s husband, Mark Turner, one of the foundational figures of cognitive literary studies, observes that “Writers often use A THINKER IS A MOVER AND A MANIPULATOR to create parabolic stories of mental events,” so that readers may “interpret the travel story as literally spatial for the body of the traveler and parabolic for the mind of the traveler” (44). In the fractal Queen’s Thief series, the spatial journeys ¹⁴ Because ancient Greece is a standard part of the American primary-school curriculum, Turner told interviewer Lodge, “I was pretty sure that most of my audience in this country would be able to imagine this landscape, with just a few important cues.” She notes in her article “Particles in Suspension,” “The Queen of Attolia wears earrings worn in Crete more than a thousand years ago, and in The Thief, my main character passes under the Lion Gate of Mycenae as he leaves my fictional city, Sounis. I can show you a photograph of the entrance to a cistern, also at Mycenae, [that was] . . . the source of inspiration that I turned to when I needed to describe an underground temple and hiding place for my entirely made up magical stone, Hamiathes’s Gift” (149).

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made by various characters mirror both the mental adjustments that these characters are making and, on a larger level, the political adjustments made by the peninsular nations. In keeping with the fractal structure, these nations share names with their rulers, so that the queens of Eddis and Attolia are known not by their given names, Helen and Irene, but as “Eddis” and “Attolia,” while Eugenides and Sophos, who gain thrones over the course of the series, officially become “Attolis” and “Sounis.” Thus actions taken by royal characters are necessarily also actions taken by their countries; similarly, Eugenides’ acquisition of confidence from child bullied by his cousins (before the start of the first narrative) to trickster boy to adult successfully negotiating multiple bodily and social challenges is paralleled both by his physical journeying and by the increased security of the countries whose fortunes track his. Meanwhile, the interpolated myths included in the narration of each volume link the human level with the divine, as not only do the myths form parallels with the “real world” action of the novels, but the gods also prove to have “real” existence and the capacity to act on the human level. Their interventions offer further commentary on the nature of decision making. Megan Whalen Turner has told interviewer Jennifer Brown that in writing the first volume of the series, the Newbery Honor Book The Thief, “I wanted to see how strong people’s sense of conventions are, and the answer is: really really really strong. I feel that I gave away things over and over and over again, and the power of people’s conventions were so strong that they were surprised at the end.”¹⁵ This comment might be said to apply throughout the saga, both within the novels and to those readers who do not pick up on the clues offered “over and over and over” but persist, like their fictional counterparts, in underestimating the ingenuity or the motivations of central character Eugenides, erstwhile Queen’s Thief of Eddis and later King of Attolia. Indeed, the dominant narrative of each volume is one of misprision, as Eugenides’ strategy is consistently to masquerade as a weaker and less able being than he actually is. In The Thief, the title character’s self-presentation both to his traveling companions and through his first-person narration conceals alike his ¹⁵ Brown’s interview, “Megan Whalen Turner: Testing the Conventional,” appeared in ShelfAwareness on 14 April 2010 and is quoted by permission of the publisher.

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identity (he is a close relative of the Queen of Eddis, not gutter scum as his clothing and police dossier—the latter written by himself—indicate) and his capacities (reportage such as “I brushed shoulders with the magus for just a moment” [197] omits crucial information, in this case that during this moment he steals a vitally important religious and political token). In The Queen of Attolia, Attolia cuts off Eugenides’ right hand¹⁶ when, through divine intervention, he is apprehended as a thief in her palace, and only after some hundreds of pages detailing the trauma, nightmares, and debility that he experiences as a result does the narrator reveal that he is deeply in love with her and that however reluctantly, she reciprocates his feelings. The King of Attolia traces Eugenides’ (now Attolis’s) efforts as newlywed king in a country where he is despised; here again it is his parading of apparent weakness that both saves his life from would-be assassins who underestimate him and gains him the loyalty of the court. And A Conspiracy of Kings and Thick as Thieves follow the adventures of formerly secondary characters (Sophos/Sounis in the former; the escaped slave Kamet, formerly the property of a powerful Mede, in the latter) who develop considerable ability and efficacy through the demands placed on them by captivity, each turning into a man ideally suited to be Eugenides’ ally. Over the course of the series, then, readers are presented with script after script illustrating the precept that in situations of conflict either petty or large—the sand that the Attolian palace kitchen staff sprinkle over the food of their queen’s much resented new husband, say, but also the multinational war in which Eddis moves from seemingly inevitable loser to ultimate victor—it makes good sense not to show one’s hand. Indeed, moving from the metaphorical to the literal, the amputation that Eugenides suffers makes it impossible for him to show that hand, and significantly, this physical disability is eventually presented in manifold ways as an advantage. Lacking his hand, Eugenides redirects his efforts from stealing objects to stealing people: for instance, the magus and Kamet, who provide him with important intelligence, and more crucially still, Attolia herself. Lacking his hand, he impresses enemies as a weakling and a cripple, blinding them to the extent of the threat that he represents. And lacking his hand, he dons various substitutes, from ¹⁶ Turner identifies Rosemary Sutcliff ’s The Eagle of the Ninth as an important influence on Eugenides’ mutilation (Brown).

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artificial hands to hooks, devices that prove useful at various moments in the plot in a fashion that hints that one way to understand the roles of the magus and Kamet is to see them as prosthetic brains whose powers of observation, memory, and so on Eugenides is able to add to his own because he has already confronted the idea that his individual resources have limits and may need to be augmented. If the (royal) individual is also the larger community, insisting on the ability to go it alone seems foolish. Accordingly, in this series both the emphasis on establishing alliances and the emphasis on secrecy, subterfuge, and the jiu-jitsu-like principle of using one’s enemies’ strengths to defeat them present readers with strategy potentially applicable to their own difficulties. The Queen’s Thief series thus suggests an intriguing variation on Hogan’s survey of the cognitive research into decision making. That research, remember, focuses on internal conflict, finding that the more evenly balanced the warring forces pulling toward this choice or that one, the harder it is to commit to a course of action; memory, empathy, and guilt can come into play as forces that heighten emotion in a way that helps to push the decider into action. Eugenides, a master manipulator of other people’s decision processes, succeeds by creating false memories (his manufactured criminal dossier in The Thief, for instance, or Kamet’s erroneous belief in Thick as Thieves that his erstwhile master has been poisoned and that his own life is therefore forfeit) and by making it difficult for others to empathize with him because they regard him with contempt. In effect, he tricks his opponents into thinking that their world is more dystopian, and contrariwise that they have more agency, than is in fact the case. As his knowledge of the past is more complete than theirs and his ability to empathize (and to feel guilt) superior, his decisions are much likelier to prove correct, perhaps especially because the actions that he takes often involve him in a kind of planned inaction or seeming helplessness. The stasis associated with the dystopian fractal novel turns into a tool that Eugenides deploys to bring about happy endings for himself and his ever-increasing band of allies. The fractal nature of the series, perhaps most obviously on display in the royal naming conventions discussed above, is also visible in other ways. Consider, for instance, the description of the underground space that Eugenides must navigate in The Thief in his effort to steal the talisman that has the power to shore up Eddis’s rule: “I walked in corridors all night—a maze of corridors hollowed out of the stone

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bluff. I wandered through it perplexed. . . . This was not the door I had come in, although it was identical. Even the irregular shape of the stone walls leading to it looked the same” (163). Located at the heart of the novel, this setting and what it contains have been Eugenides’ secret goal for months, the cause of considerable self-sacrifice and risk of failure, and thus particularly deserving of readers’ attention; this description matters in plot terms. But it also matters metaphorically. The repetition of “irregular shape” is, of course, the defining characteristic of the fractal in nature, and Turner’s series, with its consistent emphasis on the overturning of narrative convention and investigation of the extent to which the reader (like most of the people whom Eugenides encounters) may be misled by truthful but limited accounts, is committed to irregular shapes of a literary kind as well. Indeed, fractal images recur throughout the series and are crucial to its cosmology. In A Conspiracy of Kings, Sophos, who has been enslaved and is evading his enemies, meets in his dreams with a mysterious tutor, later revealed to be Moira, goddess of fate. She draws his attention to dust motes, catching the sun and shining like tiny stars themselves. “You know, there are just as many outside the sun’s rays that are invisible,” she said. Then, in the way of dreams, she lifted her hand into the air and moved a single dust mote into the light. “And you?” she asked. She lifted her hand again, just beyond the edge of the light, and I knew she held another mote and could move it as easily into the way of the sun and I said, “No, thank you. I am content where I am.” (67–8)

Here the reader is presented with another characteristic of the fractal, the elision of scalar differences. Dust motes in this passage are likened to stars, while simultaneously Sophos sees and accepts his own resemblance to the mote whose fate could “easily” be changed at the goddess’s whim. To the gigantic, evidently, all things are small. Yet matters are more complicated than the above might imply. The quoted passage recalls one at the end of The Queen of Attolia, after Eugenides discovers that the same goddess engineered his capture by the queen earlier in the narrative and thus brought about the amputation of his hand. Impressing upon him his insignificance compared to the might of the gods, Moira forces him to realize that “He was nothing, the smallest particle of dust surrounded by a myriad of other particles of dust, and put all together, they were . . . nothing but dust. Alone, separated

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from the others, in the eye of the gods he may have been, but he remained, still, dust” (352). Eugenides’ perception is horrific because unlike Sophos, he is not “content where [he is],” yet both are responding to the same stimulus, an emotionally freighted awareness of human smallness and lack of agency. In seeming answer to Eugenides’ anguished “Why?” at what has been done to him, Moira goes on to provide both Eugenides and, in A Conspiracy of Kings, Eddis with a vision of the Sacred Mountain erupting and inundating the countryside with lava (Queen 353, Conspiracy 308), apparent foreknowledge that makes the political unification of the peninsula crucial so that the peaceful dispersal of the population will save countless lives. Bad things, that is, must happen so that good— beginning with Eugenides’ marriage to Attolia—may result. But the revelation that Moira’s seeming betrayal of Eugenides is one step in a complex plan to mitigate the future harm represented by the exploding mountain demonstrates that in the gods’ eyes, human beings are in fact not mere dust motes, despite their comparative tininess and weakness, but entities worth saving via the construction of causal chains whose elaborateness resembles that of the plots originated by Eugenides himself. In other words, the gods feel empathy, and that empathy apparently causes them to make decisions that may seem harsh but are ultimately revealed to have been benevolent—again, an undercutting of the dystopian potential of this story world. Faith in higher powers, which Eugenides acquires painfully and Sophos more placidly, accordingly becomes an important philosophical thread in the series, and here again a scalar one: “higher powers” are sometimes divinities, but on a smaller scale they may also be mortals. Tellingly, Sophos is much readier than Eugenides to trust others; for example, although an important military communication never reaches him, he reveals to Eugenides at the end of A Conspiracy of Kings that “I knew you would send help. . . . You told me you needed me to be Sounis. I am. I needed my king to send my help. You did. There had to be reinforcements at Oneia, so they were there,” to which Eugenides, overwhelmed by the other’s degree of trust in him, can only reply, “I see” (315–6). And as a result of his willingness to act on faith, decisions—including decisions involving inaction—seem easier for Sophos/Sounis than they are for Eugenides; the former is readier to embrace his own insignificance when compared to the more powerful (whether the gods or Eugenides), whereas the latter sees insignificance more as a disguise that can be cast off at will. Readers, then, are

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presented with different and distinct models of faith, running the gamut from Attolia’s deep suspicion of almost everyone to the loyalty and trust exhibited by characters such as Sophos. Inasmuch as all are presented as rational, deciding among them is no easy task. One tool that may aid in this effort is given form in the many interpolated myths and stories that populate the series and that function as parables, an inherently fractal form in which, as Mark Turner writes, “one story is projected onto another” (5) in such a way that the small helps to explain the large.¹⁷ Characters in Megan Whalen Turner’s series are not infrequently shown recording their experiences for secular historical purposes (for instance, the ostensible reason for the existence of the first-person narration constituted by The Thief is that Eddis has instructed Eugenides to “write it all down, and it will be a book in your library” [Thief 379]) or consuming others’ accounts of this type; this metafictionality sometimes comments on the immediate political content of the characters’ world, as when Sophos, experiencing the first of his dreams about being tutored by Moira, reads “Poers’s History of the Bructs,” a chronicle of “why each attempt of the king’s failed to make a lasting peace” (Conspiracy 54–5). Yet, if anything, the sacred side of memory represented by the interpolated “traditional” tales of hostility between family members (brothers, spouses) and tension between humans and gods is made more prominent still. Mythmaking’s fractal aspects are probably most visible in Thick as Thieves, where the sheer quantity of interpolated material, here taking the form of ancient verse translated into Attolian by Kamet, is the greatest of any volume. What is more, whereas other volumes generally present material of this sort with little comment from characters, in Thick as Thieves Kamet is charged with the performance of interpretation, beginning in the kitchens of Attolia before the action that the novel describes begins and proceeding with the entertainment of Costis (Eugenides’ agent, although Kamet is unaware of this fact, and the figure whose gradual winning over to the king’s side in The King of Attolia sets the pattern for that novel’s focus on how Eugenides/Attolis gains the allegiance of his new court) on their travels. Early in the novel, shortly after hearing the (fake) news of his master’s suspicious death, Kamet hides from the pursuers he believes to be on his ¹⁷ Parable is foundational to his The Literary Mind, published in 1996, the year that his wife published The Thief.

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trail by joining Costis at a theater, one of the few places in the city where a Medean slave and an Attolian may stand near one another without exciting comment. The entertainment—which Kamet scorns as poorly produced—begins with “A series of comedy skits, with the wily slave Senabid outwitting his foolish master” and continues on to the main event, “the story of Immakuk and Ennikar stealing Anet’s Chariot” (Thieves 33). Both sets of traditional tales, but especially the adventures of King Immakuk and his friend Ennikar (recited by Kamet on four occasions during the narrative, and referred to more briefly at other points), provide an ongoing parabolic framework commenting on Kamet and Costis. Is their relationship one of farce or of heroism? Should Kamet be seen as the clever Senabid to Costis’s doltish master, or are Kamet and Costis equal participants in a noble endeavor? In a quarrel toward the end of the novel, Costis confronts Kamet with the reproach, “I thought we were Immakuk and Ennikar, but we were just Senabid and his master, weren’t we?” (284), an interpretation that Kamet protests. As a slave, Kamet is so aware of his own lack of agency that he has always “hated the Senabid skits. . . . I thought they were stupid, as if any man would let his slave get away with that kind of trickery. I could only imagine what my master would have done with Senabid, and the thought made me sick” (51). His literary and translation efforts have thus been directed wholly toward Immakuk and Ennikar’s selfless and serious adventures, tales of homosocial bonding and risk whose selection and retelling requires editorial control on Kamet’s part. He explains that there are hundreds of ancient tablets extant recounting many different versions of the saga (52); that is, deciding on one’s preferred version and style is a complicated choice, and Kamet, the narrator of Thick as Thieves, has authority over the presentation of his relationship with Costis as well. If they are not Senabid and his master, the rejection of this possible parallel has been Kamet’s to make. The tales that Kamet shares with Costis consistently involve Immakuk and Ennikar in interacting with the supernatural. They are shown saving their city from a flood by stealing the chariot of the sun god, Anet (whose name is also commemorated by the boat that Kamet and Costis begin their journey on); killing the demon Unse-Sek; and rescuing each other from the necromantic, as “when the Queen of the Night sends Death to take Ennikar to the underworld” (116) or when Ennikar must be saved from the consequences of an entanglement with the witch of Urkull.

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While the story-telling enables Kamet and Costis to see parallels to their own lives (the aftermath of the witch story involves them in swapping tales of unwise romantic interludes that they themselves have experienced [203]), Kamet in particular finds it difficult to see the interventions of the divine in his world. Yet the denouement of the novel is provided by the revelation that Eugenides has been shaping Kamet’s destiny from their first acquaintance when the future king, disguised as a kitchen boy, infiltrated the royal kitchens of Attolia and heard the performances of Kamet, who was visiting the palace with his master; Eugenides has subsequently created the illusion of Kamet’s master’s death and provided Costis as protector and friend. Much as the goddess Moira arranges an obstacle in The Queen of Attolia so that Eugenides will be captured, lose his hand, and eventually become the husband of the queen, Eugenides has intervened in Kamet’s life in ways that Kamet initially considers disastrous and later must acknowledge to have been for the best. The novel thus sets up a multilayered series of repetitions that operate on social levels from slave to king and from human to divine. Finally, the fractal is also apparent in Thick as Thieves in the form of mentions of the multiplicity of political strategies available both to countries and to individuals. Because Kamet, enslaved by the empire as a young boy and thoroughly imbued with an understanding of its might, is the narrator, the novel offers a vision of imperial force that would seem unstoppable—except that as matters turn out, other forms of agency are available to Attolia, Eugenides, Sounis, Eddis, and the other representatives of the small peninsular powers. Trained up in Medean ways of seeing and traumatized by memories of the destruction of his hometown and family, Kamet finds it difficult to understand agency that does not involve the straightforward wielding of superior physical force (a master beating a slave, an empire conquering a smaller neighbor). Yet over the course of the narrative, he gradually learns that even in a position of powerlessness, he may be able to deploy scripts to his advantage. For instance, at one juncture he realizes, My problem was a lack of familiarity with ordinary free people. I knew how to be a humble slave around my master and how to be an arrogant slave as I did my master’s work. None of that would help me now to pass as a free man. I thought about how the Attolian [Costis] treated people, but I didn’t have the bulk to move with his confidence. I thought of the leatherworker dealing affably with the Attolian, but his demeanor came with age. I considered the tailor Gessiret,

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back in the city, and his long-suffering response when I had retrieved the money I had given him the day Nahuseresh died. The tailor hadn’t complained to me, but I didn’t doubt he had complained to someone that day. . . . Everyone complained. Complaint was universal. (149)

By astutely deploying complaint, a stratagem that readers of the series have long since learned to identify with Eugenides, Kamet arrives at his desired outcome of unobtrusive egress from a dangerous place. Readers will be able to see parallels with smokescreens used in the series on a level other than that of individual need: military campaigns, diplomatic negotiations, and more. It is significant, then, that whereas readers of the first two volumes are trained to fix their attention on Eugenides, Attolia, and Eddis as the major figures, subsequent novels reveal that the knowledge gained by observing these figures is transferable. The patterns of misprision as power, theft as sacerdotal and a form of rescue, the gradual discovery of the presence of the divine, and more can be found in the narratives of lesser characters. In other words, the more a reader engages in opening up the narrative, the more possible it becomes to see the same patterns at every social level. But if in darker, more dystopian fractal narratives this emphasis on repetition suggests the difficulty or impossibility of meaningful change, The Queen’s Thief offers its patterns to readers in a more hopeful spirit. Nightmarish memories certainly exist and make the past hard to move beyond; ambiguity is rife and complicates the decisionmaking process. Nevertheless, the series suggests, it is possible to turn even powerlessness to good effect.

6.6 Conclusion The collection of neoclassical fractal narratives that we have assembled here could clearly be used to illustrate any number of points, although we have had to be selective in pursuit of coherence. In concluding this phase of our examination, however, we want to widen the focus of our argument slightly. While we have organized the chapter around the questions of guilt, memory, and empathy that speak to the cognitive argument that we are making here, it is also worth noting additional commonalities, in particular the relationships that these texts suggest between knowledge and agency and between agency and the presence or absence of the

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divine. These relationships matter because they implicitly speak to the ultimate macro level operating in all fiction, namely the connection being forged between what happens in the mind of the (presumably) allknowing and all-powerful writer, on the plane of story, and in the world of the reader. This connection is imagined differently from text to text. For instance, Christopher may imply that the realm occupied by the reader is simply another If world, one that looks a great deal like the one in which Brad and Simon begin their journey except for the (presumed) fact that it does not contain mechanisms capable of transporting people from one continuum to another. In contrast, the numerous instances of metafiction in Tahir’s series, which comments repeatedly on how ostensibly fictive storytelling (such as that of the Tribes’ Kehannis) can be understood as a reflection of reality, implicitly instructs the reader to posit an analogy: the Kehannis’ stories are to Tahir’s story world as Tahir’s story world is to the reader’s reality,¹⁸ while Tahir herself functions as the ultimate Kehanni lurking beyond her work. Still another relationship between story and reader is offered in Collins’s trilogy, which, much more than Tahir’s, directs clear political and social messages to its readers for use in the world of their experience. Yet in all these works the question of agency is crucial, and this emphasis seems structurally mandated: if the situation of the individual recapitulates on the micro level the situation of the nation, the world, or even the cosmos (as Garner’s Tom says of red shifts, both “Galaxies and Rectors have them” [159]), can even the heroic individual be said to have free will, or are all beings simply performing their assigned steps in a dance created by some infinitely greater power? Here a given text’s attitude toward the presence or absence of the divine or numinous becomes a potentially valuable tool in one’s interpretation. For instance, that religion appears to be absent from Collins’s Panem may lead readers to conclude that Katniss has more agency than some of her counterparts

¹⁸ For example, in A Reaper at the Gates, Laia pauses to listen to a Kehanni perform and sees that “there is truth within this tale—a history of sorts. Hadn’t I just witnessed exactly what she described, only with Princess Nikla? The Kehannis’ stories, I realize, have as much history in them as any book in the Great Library. More, perhaps, for there is no skepticism in the old tales that might occlude the truth. The more I consider it, the more excited I get. Elias learned to destroy efrits from a song Mamie Rila sang him. What if the stories could help me understand the Nightbringer?” (134).

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in other dystopian works: her tormentors are coldly unfeeling and frighteningly powerful, but they are at least human. Katniss’s chances of disrupting the workings of her clockwork society are thus greater than those of the major characters in the Queen’s Thief series, who sometimes stand revealed as pawns whose agency is dwarfed by that of the gods. But in another sense the story worlds in all the novels described in this chapter contain mechanisms designed to circumscribe the agency of the characters who occupy them, even though the circumscription happens in different ways: Christopher’s Brad and Simon do not have identical strengths and weaknesses, and neither do Browne’s Dan and Ursula, Tahir’s three protagonists, or even Garner’s tripartite Macey/Thomas/ Tom. Indeed, the prevalence of twin or triplet protagonists in this group of texts seems calculated to illustrate, among other things, the many different ways in which helplessness can be experienced. The instability, ambivalence, alienation, and other emotional states that we have identified as the objects of replication in the various texts described here are all states that diminish agency. On the level of structure as on the level of plot, then, the fractal narrative typically reproduces the idea of being caught up in something too large and overwhelming to control, and if the reader is invited to identify with a character who has extraordinary powers (Browne’s Ursula and Dan, Tahir’s narrators as of the series’s third volume, or in less fantastic mode Collins’s preternaturally talented archer Katniss and Christopher’s improbably learned Brad), this identification often serves to underscore that even the most special gifts may not seem to even the odds in one’s favor. That these protagonists manage to survive and even to succeed offers hope, certainly, but simultaneously implies that a strong admixture of luck has been needed even to scrape through with the considerable damage sustained by characters such as Katniss and Laia. The novels do not foreground confidence as a characteristic or even desirable emotional state; in the fractal text, perhaps, all confidence runs too great a risk of being overconfidence. The doubts about the possibility of progress so visible in dystopian fractal works are thus yoked to a formal and philosophical rejection of agency as a meaningful and dispositive term, leaving readers contemplating action as a goal that, in the worst-case scenario, may never be achieved, precisely because the network of memory, guilt, and empathy that must be deployed before decisions can be made is the largest and most overwhelming impediment of all.

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7 Conclusion As we conclude this examination of texts that use particular topologies of the past in their redeployment of the classical world, one of the more pressing questions might be why the combination of the classical world and this short list of spatial metaphors constitutes such an attractive matrix for the working out of concerns about citizenship, agency, suffering, and the place of the individual within the family. While the power and perdurability of classical mythology is clearly part of the allure of neoclassical settings and characters, it does not by itself completely explain the utility of these frameworks to our various authors’ projects. After all, a number of the authors with whom our work has engaged— including Rick Riordan, Tony Abbott, Alan Garner, Caroline Dale Snedeker, and N. M. Browne, among others—have shown similar interest in other kinds of mythological or historical settings, in some cases emphasizing the position of the classical as merely one segment of a vast interconnected web of myth/history. Nor is it possible to say that that the privileged place of the remnants of the classical world within the canon of the West by itself explains the reliance of authors over the past century upon its familiarity or prestige. For one thing, critics might observe that the classical world is no longer as familiar as it was or should be, and thus it serves only imperfectly as a kind of lingua franca for the communication of particular ideas of civilization. For another, it is notable that with the exception of Echo Echo, the works we are examining are not plain retellings of classical tales or recitations of classical history. They are instead narratives that deploy elements of the classical world, sometimes in spaces, such as those described in Fireball or The Hunger Games, far removed from the classical world. Yet in fact the frequent relocation of struggles involving the classical world to zones that in historical terms lay on or well beyond its periphery, such as Britain or North America, gets us closer to Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction. Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey, Oxford University Press (2019). © Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846031.001.0001

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understanding the functions of the redeployment of classical elements. In those relocations, only some of which are historical, the classical world becomes both an ingredient of and a lens for examining a contemporary civilization far removed from it both geographically and historically. For instance, it is not surprising that Rudyard Kipling should be one of the early practitioners of the classically inflected children’s story, inasmuch as he was concerned with whether Germany or England would inherit the mantle of Rome. Kipling’s palimpsest offers the prospect of the barbarian who becomes more Roman than the Romans; notably, it is in imagining England as layered through invasion, essentially a kind of mongrel nation, that Kipling is able to explain why it receives the baton of legitimate imperial power. Again, we do not insist that the metaphors associated with the classical world are unique to these works; it would be possible to see the metaphor HISTORY IS A PALIMPSEST in a work that went no further back than the nineteenth century, as indeed one might argue of Katherine Marsh’s use of Egbert Viele’s map of New York City’s buried watercourses even if The Night Tourist and The Twilight Prisoner contained no Greek or Roman references. Rather, the classical world offers a constellation of meanings that provide useful contradictions as well as confirmations. So if for Kipling the Roman Empire stands as a model of both the selfsacrifice and the openness to the newcomer that he understands are required of early twentieth-century British subjects, it serves rather different functions for Suzanne Collins. The Hunger Games trilogy is suffused by markers of admiration for Roman might and stoicism that the young American republic took on; these markers cannot be read merely as artifacts of the fantasy but rather are to be found in American life in the reader’s own world, such as the fasces visible on the walls of Congress. American admiration for Rome is, in Collins’s telling, already tainted by a predilection for child-devouring. The Hunger Games may pay homage to the myth of Theseus in the construction of male and female tributes, but the children in question are being consumed by their own state rather than by a foreign power. Theseus and Philomela are classical Greek presences manifest in Collins’s narrative, but a still more dominant presence here is Roman, the idea of the child as treasure to be destroyed by the parent as absolute tyrant. Thus as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson might put it, imperial Rome involves no single entailed metaphor but many; it works to explore

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multiple stances toward the past that in some cases are diametrically opposed. In the century and the geographical divide spanned by Puck of Pook’s Hill and The Hunger Games, the idea of Rome has moved from a guarantee of civilization to its opposite. The denizens of Panem are brutal or brutalized not in spite of the remnants of classical civilization but because of them, while in contrast Parnesius’ determination to defend what remains of Roman rule and culture is the mark of his cultivation and humanity. Lest it seem that the difference between these two representations of the past is simply a matter of greater or lesser despair over the imperial project itself, consider Riordan’s endorsement of the continuation of the classical world in its new setting in the United States, although even the Percy Jackson series also suggests that the past has much to learn from the present about the value of family relationships. What our project seeks to draw attention to instead is how a particular attitude toward the past tracks a specific topological orientation, which in turn invites a specific set of cognitive responses from the reader. Attitudes toward how the past is made available and functions metaphorically correspond to an articulation of the past as a space that the reader might visit, occupy, and escape—or fail to escape. That the classical past can readily be used to signal either civilization or its opposite suggests why the ancient world is so fruitful an arena of reuse for the writer of children’s literature. Indeed, the topographical articulation of the past speaks to one of the most important features of how the influence of the past might be represented (and deployed) for the child reader. Above all, for Western readers, the antique past is a parent, preceding the child of the present moment; the past may be beneficent or malignant in its relationship to the present, but it has priority at least in terms of chronology, a relationship replicated in that of parent to child. Yet our first palimpsest chapter suggests that invasion metaphors dramatize the experience of an inheritance that is not conveyed to the inheritor undisturbed. Invasion thus serves as a metaphor for the experience of hybridity, the parental stem revisited but altered by new experience in the child and rendered stronger thereby. But some parents, of course, are cruel, which makes it all the more logical that the second palimpsest chapter should highlight the recurring association between the past as a site of trauma and a defense against loss or wounding. Similarly, the past is both inhabited by the dead and a haven from death. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas marvels at the Carthaginian

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frescoes praising the heroes of the Trojan War and declares that “this fame / Insures some kind of refuge” (20). The past thus offers in its own literary forms the model of using the recitation of loss to both acknowledge and defy the permanence of death; what we argue that the contemporary works do is something that ancient works have done before them, establishing the tropes and metaphors that contemporary authors revivify. In uniting the traumatized body and landscape, for example, the ancient world offers the child reader a dialectic of the unfamiliar and the familiar in the rehearsal of new/old strategies of storytelling, and this dialectic has the effect of empowering the child reader twice over. To the extent that he or she recognizes the topos of the antique in the modern revisioning, the work will offer the pleasure of recognizing the familiar in novelty; to the extent that the work instructs the young reader in antique forms, he or she will be prepared for subsequent encounters. Moreover, William Thalmann argues that antique rhetoric (for example, the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes) yokes perception of space to the measure of the human body; the epic’s characters “know space by organizing it from the body outward” (4). Thus the emphasis upon the discovering or traumatized human body itself builds upon antique rhetoric. Such indebtedness leads us to think about what one might call the entailed story, which emerges when the terms of one narrative refer back to the terms of a predecessor narrative. While from one standpoint the chain of entailment must begin at the ancestral tale, in prioritizing recent literary texts one might prefer to view their various inspirations, the sometimes shadowy classical presences haunting the contemporary drama, as that which is entailed. In this formulation, entailment is itself a kind of palimpsest. Notably, the texts that we are concerned with in the two map chapters are both fantasies and realist novels of the period they describe. The ancient world, in other words, is not merely the purveyor of myths, timeless or otherwise, but also a reservoir of ways of meeting responsibilities and achieving autonomy. The ancient world has been exceptionally articulate in speaking to the present, and its writings are plentiful and generically diverse. The twentieth- or twenty-first-century author can thus mine these writings both for the fictional tales that can be adapted or reorganized for modern audiences and for historical accounts, since the history of the ancient world gives the impression of being more knowable, better documented, more open to investment and invasion by modern

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authors than the histories of some other notable past civilizations. The recurring fascination with the fate of the lost Ninth Legion or life under the Caesars opens up a non-mythological zone of narrative in which Suetonius is as interesting as Orpheus. Moreover, this zone permits speculation both on historical events and, perhaps more vitally, on the emotional life of historical figures and their imagined contemporaries. That these narratives frequently perform acts of historical detection within the framework of the detective story as a genre again highlights the ways in which the narrative forms presented to the child reader reactivate or recapitulate forms familiar from the antique world. Our map chapters suggest that there is no absolute distinction between adults’ and children’s forms of certain narratives, with the katabasis serving as an example of a narrative that in its Orpheus/Eurydice manifestation speaks to adult experience of erotic love but that is nonetheless available to the child reader. For all our emphasis upon the presence of a recognizable, canonical corpus of narratives from (or about) the ancient world, it is important to recognize that we have not concerned ourselves with retellings, which might seem to function, narratologically speaking, as literal descents into a storytelling past. Rather, our narratives have had to comprehensively adapt and deform to some extent the narrative line of the past to help it operate in a new fictional context. This feature may suggest why fantasies predominate among the texts in our study, but it has the additional important consequence of permitting the past to be used to critique the present, and, more surprisingly, to permit the reader to accept a critique of the past. The child reader is led to understand that the ancient world was a place of violence, cruelty, capriciousness, and perversity. Gods turn on their human victims (as in Bull); young people are left to shift for themselves (as in the Attolia series and the Hunger Games trilogy); parents turn on children and children on parents (as in the Percy Jackson series and the quartet beginning with Ember in the Ashes). The desirable literary deformation of the past and its narratives permits enlightening cultural reversals, such as Collins’s critique of the markers of antique violence and authority. The literary deformation of the past might then be understood as an embracing and creating of a kind of positive monstrousness. One of the most productive of these critiques of the past is one in which the moral valences of characters from mythology are upended, much as Marilyn

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Singer’s reverso poems ask readers to absorb text not only in the standard direction of up to down but also from down to up: that one’s vantage point makes a difference to interpretation is a central insight inculcated both in Echo Echo and in fictions that valorize monsters, such as Bull. In keeping with similar attempts to radically rethink the antique world in adult literature, such as Anne Carson’s retelling of the Geryon myth in Autobiography of Red (1998), contemporary works for children sometimes engage in the reversal of the roles of monster and hero, suggesting how the topological metaphors that we pointed to at the beginning of this book remain generative and important. Inside/outside and image/ mirror are the primary mechanisms of the reversal—once we are granted access to the interiority of the monster, he or she inevitably comes to seem less horrifying or alien. Similarly, when the image of the hero determined upon the doom of a “monster” already rendered sympathetic is presented to the reader, Perseus or Achilles comes to seem ridiculous, self-important, and monstrous in turn. Thus Tobias Druitt’s Corydon trilogy (Corydon and the Island of Monsters [2006], Corydon and the Fall of Atlantis [2006], and Corydon and the Siege of Troy [2009]) opposes a club-footed shepherd boy and son of Pan to the conceit of the hero and the treachery of the Olympians. In the first volume, Kharmides, who enlists with his brother Lysias in the project of ridding Corydon’s island of all monsters, proves unexpectedly immune to the glamor of the hero: “Perseus ran up the steps to the rostrum and turned to face the crowd, his fist raised in the air. The onlookers broke into cheers. He smiled, showing his very white teeth. Kharmides had to admit that he was an impressive specimen, muscular and tanned, with blond curling hair. But from the first words he spoke, Kharmides felt chilled—and worried too.” Kharmides goes on to observe to himself that “he suddenly felt very lonely. Hemmed in by the vast crowd of would-be heroes, every one of them panting with desire to be off, only he could see that the man before them hadn’t an idea in his head” (118–9). This emphasis on singularity asks the reader to celebrate not only the “normally” configured but independent-minded Kharmides but also, and more importantly, Corydon the mormoluke, Medusa the gorgon, Nagaina the hydra, the Minotaur, and so on. Perseus’ vanity requires that he vanquish monsters; the glamor lent to him by the Olympians disguises the cruelty and emptiness of his rhetoric from all but a few observers. The trilogy gains in pathos by suggesting

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to the reader that the Olympians can be read as ancient, divine, and fabulously successful spin doctors behind enterprises so malignant that the metaphorical map guiding Corydon’s journeys is repeatedly revealed to be untrustworthy: because they have been marked down for destruction by the Olympians, there is no way that the monsters can triumph, and (most unusually for a map narrative) Corydon’s final destination turns out to be the death that reunites him with his foster mother, Medusa. Yet speaking more generally, this notion of divine self-indulgent interference in human affairs is already manifest in the ancient works being reactivated in all our texts, suggesting why the antique world in particular recommends itself to this retooling. The freshening that these relationships receive, then, is not alien to the original project, with the consequence that Percy Jackson’s concerns as an American schoolboy or Gryllus’ as a man mostly contentedly trapped in the body of a pig are not, in the end, shocking travesties of antique material. These metamorphoses come across as licensed play sanctioned by the original rather than low, popular forms parasitizing classics. This quality is reflected even in the authorial persona of Tobias Druitt, a nom de plume for the mother/son writing team Diane Purkiss and Michael Dowling. Purkiss is a professor of literature, and they wrote the first volume of the trilogy together when Dowling was eight, suggesting the union of didacticism and play. There is a simplicity to topological metaphors because they stem from basic categories that already speak to children’s experience. They are generative because they assist acts of imagination in straightforward, clear ways: what happens when we reverse heroes and monsters? What happens when we make manifest outside what is typically hidden inside? In these reconfigurations, the familiarity of the parent text is leveraged without being abandoned. That these basic topological metaphors are so readily available may explain a feature that we find striking, namely that there are certain plot types that turn up with great frequency even across metaphorical types. Consider, for instance, the katabasis found not only in the works discussed in our first map chapter but also in texts from the Corydon trilogy to The Land Under England to the series beginning with Ember in the Ashes. Notably, the hero’s journey to the underworld is not just any old quest or task but rather one that requires meeting certain kinds of threats, most obviously the threat of death but also the threat of being surrounded by the sorrow and despair of the dead. Clearly, this plot type activates one of the most familiar narratives from the ancient

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world (and one that is further reinforced through its Christian successor the Harrowing of Hell), but the trip to the underworld models the same acts of retrieval and revivification that writing and reading about the antique world requires as well. This narrative line prizes the agency of the protagonist, but it also allows for the failure of that agency. The child reader or the protagonist may go to the underworld and not find himself able to liberate the spirits to be found there, but the notion of the possibility of the simultaneous presence of the sought-for figure in both the world of the living and the world of the dead is a powerful one. But despite the presence of the katabasis narrative in all our metaphorical tropes (palimpsest, map, and fractal), each metaphorical pattern offers the potential to say something different about the nature of agency. As we have argued from the outset of this study, it is at its greatest within the purest examples of map texts, where protagonists are free to explore the space at their disposal and indeed must master space to some degree through movement in order to equip themselves with necessary information. The palimpsest texts propose a somewhat diminished degree of agency, in that a number of them imagine that the child protagonists are brought back to the past (or that the past is presented to them) in a fashion that is not entirely voluntary, as happens in Puck of Pook’s Hill and The Shadow Guests. But even while the decision to go to an earlier layer may not be voluntary within the palimpsest, once in that layer the protagonists may make moral decisions with the kind of agency available to them in the present. The fractal metaphor offers the least agency to its protagonists, and perhaps to its readers as well. Not only is the decision to be exposed to the past the least voluntary of the three in the fractal (think of the events of the Fireball trilogy here, but even the staging of the Hunger Games, which imagines a society so in thrall to reliving the past that ordinary human volition has no meaning), but the fractal structure mandates that any moral decisions will be flawed, imperfect, equivocal, leading to undesired results. Inevitably, all of our narratives dramatize conflict, and again the antique world provides provocative metaphors to suggest the stakes of this conflict. Mobilizing the antique world as the matrix for topological metaphors mandates the examination of the value of the civilization that the West has claimed for itself; it is notable how many of our works focus on the antique world as the arena for the clash of civilizations or as a space for the exploration of the consequences of one civilization

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succeeding another. The friction between East and West revealed through conflict between ancient Persia and Greece shapes the construction of the Attolia series and Druitt’s final Corydon novel,¹ just as Snedeker’s Roman characters seem always to be conscious of their Greek predecessors and their Christian successors. Indeed, were we to isolate another period that seems to be nearly as rich in tropes and works (and that overlaps with the period we examine), the moment of the withdrawal of Roman soldiers from Albion and the rise of Christian, Romanized kings in England would be that moment. In other words, yet another entailed metaphor (a subset of the map modality), namely a contest between periphery and center, explains why Anglo-American authors are so invested in the reuses of the antique. Britain’s status as a once barbaric country that comes to be on the periphery of a great empire and then becomes the center of another great empire that is succeeded in turn by yet another empire has, we conclude, established a cognitive pattern that endows English-language authors with the need to visit and revisit the classical world, to invade and be invaded by it again and again.

¹ Druitt notes in a preamble to the volume’s glossary that “the third book represents the dilemmas of the Hellenistic world, in which Asian and Greek cultures mixed and mingled” (250).

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Index Note: Figures are indicated by an italic ‘f ’, respectively, following the page number.

Abbott, Tony, Underworlds series 97–8, 132–3, 136–42, 150n.2, 239 Adorno, Theodor 174–5 affiliation 31–2, 129–30, 170, 199, 224 Aeneid 7–9, 241–2 agency 11, 22, 239, 245–6 female agency 123–4 (see also Willis, Jessica) in fractal texts 10, 218–19, 222–3, 230–2, 236–8, 246 in map texts 97–9, 110–12, 114, 119, 125–6, 142, 148–51, 166–7 in palimpsest texts 54, 61, 71–2, 90–1, 246 Aiken, Joan, The Shadow Guests 7, 42–3, 48–50, 53–4, 146, 246 Apseloff, Marilyn 80–1 Auerbach, Erich 71–2 archaeology 6–7, 37n.8 in map texts 97, 112–13, 115, 165–8, 171, 173–4 in palimpsest texts 36–7, 40, 47–8, 51–2, 55, 57–8 Bailey, K.V. 201, 205–6 Bakhtin, Mikhail 146–50, 157, 164–5, 170, 189 See also grotesque Basu, Balaka, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz 225 Baum, L. Frank 180–1 Baynes, Pauline 105–6 Beissel Heath, Michelle 163, 178–9 bildung 98–9, 115–16, 194–5, 197–8 bildungsroman(e) 97, 172–3 Blackford, Holly 130–2, 134 Bolens, Guillemette 96–7, 101 Bradfield, Topher 178 Bradford, Clare 67–8 Brandist, Craig 147–8 Briggs, Julia 61–2, 101–2

Broad, Katherine 191 Brown, Jennifer 228 Browne, N.M., Warriors series 200–4, 206–7, 238–9 Budge, E.A. Wallis 64, 101–2 Butler, Catherine 85, 92 Butler, Charles 192–3, 194n.3 Buzard, James 31–2, 35 Cantavella, Anna 95 carnivalesque. See grotesque cartoons 161, 162f, 164–5 See also Northfield, Gary Casablanca 168, 170–1 Castle, Kathryn 30 Christianity 25, 32, 40–2, 52–3, 64–5, 75–7, 80–3, 105–6, 108n.12, 111–12, 118, 120, 201–2, 204, 245–7 Christopher, John, Fireball series 9, 191–2, 200–7, 237–40 chronotope. See Bakhtin, Mikhail citizenship 7–9, 11, 23–4, 41, 127, 163, 178–9, 207–16, 218, 239 Coats, Karen 3–4, 12–14, 16–18 cognitive theory 1, 96–7, 101, 144 cognitive mapping 12–13, 56–7, 145–6 cognitive narratology. See Trites, Roberta and empathy, memory, and guilt 56–7, 190–3, 206, 211, 218–19, 225, 230, 236–8 (see also Hogan, Patrick Colm) and play 144, 146–7, 244–5 and scripts 1, 92–3, 98–9, 102, 124–5, 128, 130–2, 140–1, 207–9, 229–230, 235 Collings, Michael 41 Collins, Suzanne, Hunger Games series 8–9, 190–1, 207, 218–19, 237–41, 243

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Connor, Catherine 144–5, 161–3, 174 consumption 154–7, 159–60, 163–4, 168–9, 174–6, 186, 207–8, 218, 240 Cooper, Susan, Dark is Rising series 42–9, 53–4 Cox, John 110–11 culture, high vs. low 144–50, 153–7, 160–1, 164–7, 169–70, 172–5, 178–81, 183–4 Currie, Gregory 4–5 d’Aulaire, Ingri and Edgar Parin 3–4, 145 Damasio, Anthony 144–5, 152 Dark is Rising series. See Cooper, Susan Deeping, Warwick, The Man Who Went Back 35–43 detective stories 62–3, 111–15, 121–3, 242–3 Dewey, John 176–84 Donne, John 41, 136 Doyle, Christine 125 Druitt, Tobias, Corydon series 244–7 dystopian narratives. See fractal texts education 193–201 See also Riordan, Rick Edwards, Vaughan, and Barry Creyton, The Dogs of Pompeii 146, 165 Elliott, David, Bull 14, 243–4 Ember in the Ashes series. See Tahir, Sabaa embodiment 16, 18, 40, 58–61, 74–5, 78–9, 82, 100, 102, 116–17, 160, 174, 211–12 empathy 18, 56–8, 192–3, 200, 203–5, 216–17, 232–3 See also cognitive theory empire 7, 25, 30–3, 35, 39–42, 50–1, 54, 85, 218–19, 240, 246–7 See also invasion entailment. See metaphors epic 5–6, 153–4, 242–3 Epstein, Jason 80–1 family 7, 239–41 See also trauma in fractal texts 189–90, 210–11, 225, 233 in map texts 97–100, 104–5, 111–14, 118–22, 125–6, 128–32, 135–6, 138, 142, 159, 172–3, 181–2, 185–6 in palimpsest texts 62–5, 68, 72–3, 79–80, 85–6, 90–1

fascism 32–6, 39–40, 46–7 femininity 122–4, 155–6, 212–13 Fireball series. See Christopher, John Fiske, John 144–6, 151, 155, 166–7 fractal, examples of 187, 188f fractal texts 10–11, 187, 189, 201, 209, 213, 215–16, 218, 226–7, 238, 246 definitions of 8–9, 187 features of 189–92, 238 and cognitive theory 190–1, 236–7 and dystopian narratives 9–11, 190–1, 238 and map texts 226–7 and palimpsest texts 191–2, 226–7 and war 189–92, 207, 218–19 Freeman, Margaret 12–13, 56n.1 Freud, Sigmund 8–9, 37n.8, 55, 171–2 Füredi, Frank 211–13, 216–17 Garner, Alan, Red Shift 189n.1, 191–2, 201, 205, 226–7, 237–9 gender roles 71–6, 122–5, 130–1, 210–13 Gleeson–White, Sarah 146–8 Goodrich, Peter 46–8 Grafton, Janet 94, 165 Green–Barteet, Miranda 210–11 grotesque 147, 149–50, 164–7, 172–3, 180, See also map texts bodily grotesque 147, 155, 157–8, 160–1 and carnivalesque 147–8, 164, 166 and consumption 156–8 Gryllus the Pig series. See Shipton, Paul guilt 190–3, 206, 219–20, 222–3, 230 See also cognitive theory Hadrian’s Wall 27–8, 85–6 Haeckel, Ernst 187, 188f Hale, Elizabeth 58–9, 91–2 Hansen, Kathryn 8–9, 207, 209, 212n.8 Haring, Mary Whitson 69f Harrisson, Juliette 110 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 3, 145, 174 Hinchcliffe, Peter 25–6 historical novel 27, 112, 124 and pony story 124–5 classical/neoclassical 3–4 for children 5, 146 Hogan, Patrick Colm 190–3, 200, 205–6, 211, 225, 230 Hourihan, Margery 84

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/9/2019, SPi

 Huizinga, Johan. See play Hunger Games series. See Collins, Suzanne Hunt, Peter 146 Iliad 9n.5, 113–14 invasion 23, 25, 27, 29, 31–2, 34–9, 42–4, 46–7, 49, 53, 79–80, 83–4, 104, 106–7, 241–3 Jack Perdu series. See Marsh, Katherine Jones, Diana Wynne, The Game, 187–9, 191, 226–7 Julius Zebra series. See Northfield, Gary katabasis 242–3, 245–6 Kayser, Wolfgang. See grotesque Keen, Suzanne 56–7 Kendrick, Jenny 42–5, 124–8 Kipling, Rudyard 7, 18–19, 23–5, 29–33, 35–6, 38–43, 46, 48–50, 52–4, 58–9, 64–5, 145–6 Puck of Pook’s Hill 25, 43–5, 48–51, 55, 58–9, 241, 246 Kümmerling–Meibauer, Bettina 131–3, 142 Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson 1, 4–5, 25, 27, 155, 240–1 Lancelyn Green, Roger, Mystery at Mycenae 111–19 landscape 5–7, 23–7, 35, 37–8, 40, 44, 50, 53–4, 57–8, 66–8, 72–7, 83–4, 87–8, 97–8, 141–2, 170–1, 206, 241–2 Lawrence, Caroline, The Roman Mysteries Series 7–8, 10, 97–8, 111–13, 118–24, 133 Lewis, C.S. 8–9, 39–40, 43, 46–7, 53–4, 97–8, 106–7, 111–12, 131–2 That Hideous Strength 40–2, 46–7 The Silver Chair 32–3, 105 Liben, Lynn 95, 165 Lovatt, Helen 111–12, 120, 122 Manter, Lisa, and Lauren Francis 210–11, 215 map texts 8–9, 97–9, 103f, 104–5, 132–3, 135–6, 137f, 138–9, 144–6, 186, 191–2, 221 definitions of 7–8, 94 features of 7–8, 10, 94–8

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and antic map texts 95–6, 145–8, 186 (see also grotesque) and cognitive theory 144–5 and fractal texts 226–7 and journeys 7–8, 10, 94–6, 142–3, 146, 171–2, 184–5 and palimpsest texts 94, 97 Marsh, Katherine, The Jack Perdu series 132–9, 142, 240 Martin, Jay 179 Matin, A. Michael 29, 36n.7, 38n.9 McCallum, Robyn 189, 193, 197–8, 200 McInnes, Andrew 24 Mellmann, Katja 66–7 memory 46–8, 190–1, 196, 198–200, 205–8, 211–12, 221, 225, 230, 233 See also cognitive theory metaphors 5–6. See also Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson and the self 16–18 embodied metaphors 58, 95–7, 145 entailment 25, 34–5, 58–9, 241–2, 246–7 in cognitive theory 1, 3–4 Mikkonen, Jukka 10–11 Millar, H.R. 30–1, 103f Molnar, Alex 179–81 Murnaghan, Sheila 174, 177–8, 180 Murnaghan, Sheila, and Deborah Roberts 3, 34n.6, 71–2, 76–7, 78n.6, 145n.1 naturalization 23, 25, 32–5, 41–2 Nazism. See fascism Nesbit, E. 55, 64, 97–8, 107, 142–3, 145–6 The Enchanted Castle 6–7, 58, 89–92 The Story of the Amulet 5, 98 Nikolajeva, Maria 3–4, 57–8, 92–3, 96–7, 160, 192 mythic and linear time 13–14, 34–5 (see also time, mythic and linear) Nolan, James 216–17 Northfield, Gary, Julius Zebra series 146, 160, 186 nostalgia 24–6, 33–4, 47–8, 222–3 O’Donovan, Hallie 85 O’Neill, Joseph, Land Under England 32–6, 39–42, 53–4, 97, 107, 245–6

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/9/2019, SPi

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Odyssey 7–8, 72–3, 113, 150–1, 154 Osborn, Marijane 32–3, 39–40, 108 Otterspeer, William 150–3 Packard, Vance 180 palimpsest texts 58–64, 66–8, 74–5, 79, 85, 91–3, 97–8, 240–2, 246 definitions of 6–7, 55 features of 6–7, 24–5, 55, 92–3 and Britain as a palimpsest 30–2, 41–2, 53–4 and embodiment 55–8, 66–7, 70, 82 and fractal texts 56–7, 226–7 and map texts 56–7 parable 27–8, 230, 233 parody 146–7, 156–7, 164–5, 172–3 Paul, Joanna 98–9, 104n.7 Pavlik, Anthony 7–8, 94n.1, 95n.2, 142–3 Pavlik, Anthony, and Hazel Sheeky Bird 105–6 Percy Jackson series. See Riordan, Rick Peyton, K.M., Roman Pony series 7–8, 97–8, 124, 131–2 Pfeiffer, John R. 201 Philip, Neil 192, 194n.3, 196–7 Plato 101–2, 108–9, 193–4 play 24, 150–2, 155–6, 163–5 See also cognitive theory poetry 9n.5, 12–14, 18, 136 pony story 124–7. See also Peyton, K.M. Price, Robin, Spartapuss series 146, 156, 165, 170–1, 174, 177–8 Prickett, Stephen 60n.3, 89–90 psyche 14–16, 18, 34, 53–4, 58–9, 216–18 Queen’s Thief series. See Turner, Megan Whalen Quint, David 8–9 Ransome, Arthur 24 realism 6–7, 42–3, 58–9, 116–17 repetition 8–9, 187, 189–95, 198–9, 201, 203–4, 206–7, 210–11, 218, 230–1, 234–6, 238 reverso poems. See Singer, Marilyn rhetoric, antique. See Thalmann, William Riordan, Rick, Percy Jackson series 7–8, 135, 173, 186, 240–1, 243

Roberts, Deborah 18–19, 86 Roman Mysteries series. See Lawrence, Caroline Roman Pony series. See Peyton, K.M. Rowe, Kathleen 155 Rowling, J.K. 119–20, 182–3 Santayana, George 167–8, 187 scripts. See cognitive theory Shakespeare, William 52–3, 107, 195 Shepperson, Claude Allin 26f Shipton, Paul, Gryllus the Pig series 7–8, 146, 148, 156–7, 168, 170–2, 174, 177–8, 186 Shonoda, Mary–Anne 24 Silva, Roberta 61–2 Singer, Marilyn, Echo Echo 11, 239–40, 243–4 Snedeker, Caroline Dale 64, 79–80, 83, 87–91, 246–7 The Forgotten Daughter 70–5, 78 The White Isle 73–8 Theras and His Town 68–70 Spartapuss series. See Price, Robin Speare, Elizabeth George, The Bronze Bow 79, 87 Spolsky, Ellen 1, 10–11 Sutcliff, Rosemary The Eagle of the Ninth 84 The Mark of the Horse Lord 18 Tahir, Sabaa, Ember in the Ashes series 190–2, 218, 226–7, 237–8, 243, 245–6 Talcroft, Barbara 19–20 technology 32–3, 35, 40–1, 198–9, 205 Thalmann, William G. 241–2 Thompson, Raymond 44–8 time, mythic and linear 13–14, 16, 18–20, 34–5 See also Nikolajeva, Maria trauma 7–10, 49–50, 57–8, 61–2, 64–5, 68, 70–1, 75–6, 79, 92, 101, 119–20, 122–3, 190–4, 206, 211–12, 221, 226–9, 235, 241–3 and family 55–6, 79–80, 83–5, 90–1 Trites, Roberta 58, 92–3, 95–7, 115–16, 171 Turner, Mark 28, 227–8, 233 Turner, Megan Whalen, Queen’s Thief series 10, 226, 237–8 Turner, Philip, Sea Peril 50, 53–4

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 underworld(s) 33, 95–9, 106–7, 111–12, 114, 117–18, 121–2, 124–8, 131–2, 134–8, 140, 142, 245–6 Underworlds series. See Abbott, Tony Vance, Norman 79–80 verse novel. See Elliott, David Viele, Egbert 136–8, 137f, 138–9, 240 Voller, Jack 27

Walter, Tony 212–13 war 29–30, 32–4, 38–40, 42–4, 49, 89–90, 105–6, 127, 189–92, 203–4, 206–7, 218–19 Warf, Barney 2–3, 25 Willis, Jessica 123–4 Wintle, Sarah 23, 27–8 Wood, Naomi 100–1 Wright, Hilary 18–19

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