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His version of the Celtic past is the solution to the riddle posed by these remains, as well as a promise that the war will pass like a bout of bad weather, leaving only stories of courage and trickery behind it, and a few archaeological wonders which need the stories to bring them alive. In fact, the novel represents war as a kind of ritual, the human equivalent of the war between the seasons as this was celebrated in the half-forgotten Celtic festival of Beltane.
The young protagonists, Donald and Jean — whose names mark them out as Scottish — already have some awareness of the procession of the seasons. The Beltane festival took place in Spring, around the first of May, while the main hay harvest happens in July, so the presence of Beltane fires at harvest time is something of an anomaly. The king takes the wheat sheaf symbol as a sign that the dragon will be defeated and that harvests will be possible again, as they have not for as long as the dragon held sway over the fields and hills.
Donald and Jean, then, stand for the return of new life to a depopulated kingdom, and carry intimations of both spring and harvest with them. Time, then, is held in suspension in this damaged country; death or suspended animation has dominion over it, and its rulers are confined and powerless. The children, on the other hand, are full of unbounded youthful energy, exemplified in their decision to visit a wood at night at the beginning of the story, and by the stream of questions they fire at the wizard Borrobil when they meet him.
They disrupted time by their actions at Beltane, and they go back in time to see time reassert itself over a land that has lost it.
The children also hear about another king of that country, King Eochaid, a kind of Ossian figure, who is condemned by the King of the Fairies to keep riding on his horse until a white dog jumps down from his arms — which it never does. When the hero Morac kills the dragon he gains the gift of second sight by touching its hide with his lips — the gift, that is, of intermittent visions of the future — and thereby signals the recommencement of chronological change.
Each time their emergence from these enclosed spaces signals a return to normal time, a wholesale reorientation under the guidance of their mentor Borrobil, who may lose them occasionally but is always at hand to come to the rescue — independence and agency not being such an attractive option for young readers, perhaps, in the middle of a global war. The most significant form of time in the novel, however, is what might be called story time; the binding together of different elements into a continuous narrative. Borrobil is a storyteller, and always makes sure he has time to tell a story no matter how urgent the business he is caught up in.
This is where the Celtic context of the narrative comes to the fore. Scotland has no coherent interrelated body of Celtic texts as Ireland has, and this absence is reflected in the fact that Dickinson never names Scotland as the setting of his novel: I suggested earlier that he treats each feature as a kind of riddle — as with the explanation of the crannog by the presence in the neighbourhood of a dragon who cannot fly or swim, or of the hills with rings as having been caused by the death throes of the same dragon, which had wrapped its tail around them — and this tendency is also reflected in the shorter tales that crop up throughout the narrative.
These are full of actual riddles in rhyme all of them solved by Borrobil and ingenious ruses performed by tricksters to escape seemingly impossible situations. For much of its length, then, the novel substitutes verbal combat — by riddle or ruse — for armed trail by combat; and even the spear- and swordfights it contains, from the killings of the dragon to the defeat of the invading Norsemen — are won by cunning rather than force.
Like Lynch, Dickinson delights in wit and laughter rather than bloodshed, and his invented version of Celtic Scotland is populated by tale-tellers, jokers, singers, punsters and riddle-makers, who use brains instead of armies to defeat their enemies. Like Lynch, too, Dickinson peoples his Celtic era with multiple coexisting cultures, in accordance with his views of Celtic Scotland as a historian.
Through this diverse landscape of conflicting beliefs and customs Donald and Jean wander, finding a welcome wherever they go and witnessing the defeat of aggressors and invaders of all kinds by their cunning companions. In both novels, stories come alive and inhabit the same space as their youthful listeners and readers; and in both novels the Celtic connections of the stories link them intimately to the land, with its peat bogs, mountains, lochs and mysterious roadways.
Stories bring people of all cultures and ages together, bring the past and present into conversation, hold out the promise of a better future. Instead Lewis narrates the chapter as if from a consensual position — as if all four of the Pevensies were in agreement about what is happening to them and their attitude to it. But it quickly emerges that this apparent consensus excludes Edmund. For another, this moment is followed by a muttered comment from Edmund that signals his exclusion of himself from what he sees as the intolerable smugness of their collectivity: But Edmund again represents the contrary or resistant reader — much as Eustace does in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , where he is the only one of the visitors to Narnia who has no knowledge of or interest in imaginative fiction.
A chapter that opened, then, with Edmund as the sole dissenting voice amid a strong consensus ends with his voice as dominant. At the end, in fact, Edmund is in the strongest position of the four, since he at least knows where to find his only ally in Narnia, the woman who had Tumnus arrested.
The chapter, then, performs yet again the reversal, or change of tone and emphasis, the reader experienced between the first two entries into Narnia, as well as within them. And in the process it demonstrates, better than any of the previous chapters, that the act we are engaged in as we follow the chapter — reading itself — is a serious business. The formal language of the note is carefully calculated to effect this alteration. The note, then, provides additional evidence that stories come true in Narnia, even nasty ones and one might again think of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , where the island where dreams come true also harbours nightmares.
And it is Lucy — to whom the Faun told these Narnian stories — who first identifies the link between the note and the children who read it. He hid me from the Witch and showed me the way back. We simply must try to rescue him. Because he helped Lucy, and because helping her led to his arrest, the children owe the Faun a debt of gratitude by virtue of the rules of the very serious game called obligation. The children continue to follow the rules of fairy tale and romance when they choose to follow a robin as the first step on the road to rescue.
Clearly, then, the interface between our world and the secondary world that contains Narnia is something more complex than a series of entrances and exits through the portal of the wardrobe. The difference in attitude of those who pass through the portal is what drives the action of this first of the Narnia chronicles, and these attitudes are carried over from their attitudes to our own world — and in particular by their attitudes to games , which include the games of reading fiction and telling stories. Those who refuse to participate in collective games, including stories, find themselves rapidly enlisted by the despotic self-styled Queen, and consequently read the landscape and every other Narnian they encounter as hostile.
An enjoyment of playfulness, which embraces playful or imaginative fictions — fairy tales, romance and fantasy — has a serious role in preparing the enjoyer for what Lewis convincingly represents as resistance against a Nazi-like occupying government. Hostility to playfulness of this kind, on the other hand, is both symptomatic of and likely to reinforce an attraction to power games aimed at personal advancement, and to oppressive authority figures who adopt the same philosophy. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , in other words, amounts to a defence of reading and writing fantasy, the most playful literary mode of all, in that it demands the most active imaginative engagement from its readers.
Once again, Edmund is the outsider, and his next encounter with Aslan — or what he thinks is Aslan — confirms his continued resistance to collaborative play, as indicated by his horror. To confirm his new connection with maturity he dispenses gifts which are emphatically real: All four items would be toys in twentieth-century England, but in Narnia they are in fact what in our world they only mimic: Appropriately enough, the act of self-sacrifice begins with a display of bullying playfulness on the part of the Queen and her hideous entourage, as they subject the lion to a succession of humiliations designed to point up their triumph over him, their climactic victory in the long war game that has been going on between them.
The awakening of Aslan from the sleep of death, however, brings a new form of playfulness of Narnia: The three interfaces between our world and Narnia were all building up to this moment, when an imaginary enactment of a deadly game — that of hunting — succeeds in articulating the gigantic joke or trick the lion has played on his power-hungry enemies. The final interface with Narnia in the book comes at the end — as it does in all the Narnian chronicles but one — with the return to our world, in this case through the familiar medium of the wardrobe.
By this stage in the story the adult protagonists also talk in the language of the literature three of them loved as children; even Edmund speaks as they do, having been naturalized to romance thanks to his reconciliation with his siblings. The effect is literally charming. The sight of the lamppost triggers memories in all four siblings, though for these heroes and heroines of romance it is our world rather than theirs that is the stuff of the fantastic imagination: The link between the imaginary and the important, the fantastic and the real, the playful and the deeply serious, has become central to the philosophy the children live by, a founding principal of the culture they inhabit and the language they speak.
And the reader, by following the children on their journey from this world to the next and back again, have become acculturated to the same perspective, the same reading of ordinary and extraordinary people and objects. The book ends by bequeathing this climate or culture to the world beyond its pages. The four children pass the lamppost and find themselves tumbling out of the wardrobe — in their old clothes, children once again, at the very moment when Mrs Macready and the visitors are moving past the doorway of the room where the wardrobe stands.
They must not tell many other people about their adventures — must not even discuss them much among themselves — for fear we might suppose of disenchanting what they have experienced by the inadequacy of their verbal descriptions of it, or else perhaps of being ostracized, ridiculed, bullied, like immigrants from a despised community. It will be clear to them who can be told about Narnia without courting mockery: And Lewis makes sure he casts the spell of this confidence into the environment beyond the book in the final sentence.
One of the most astounding things about the Narnian chronicles, for an adult reader returning to it after long absence, is its sheer economy: When I asked students in a class on The Silver Chair what had surprised and interested them about their re-reading of Narnia, many replied that they remembered the book as much longer and denser than they now found it: This is because Lewis asks us in his fantasy series to do the major legwork of world-building ourselves, as readers — to make Narnia our own.
The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And, oh, the cry of the sea-gulls! Have you heard it?
As he hands Susan her bow and hunting horn with one hand, the gift-giver takes them back, or restricts their use, with the other: Women, then, have one set of roles in Narnia, and men another, and there would seem to be no interface between them; indeed, part of what marks out Jadis as evil may well be her readiness to take on masculine traits such as fighting, commanding, and political manoeuvring against her enemies.
At the same time, it seems to me that there is a real attempt in this novel to achieve a kind of parity between the status of boys and girls as protagonists, and that this was something Lewis thought of as central to the fantasy tradition — however inadequately he may have succeeded in bringing it about. But elsewhere he sets the ungendered fantasy reader against the boy who reads about, and yearns for, a success often specifically gendered as male in the s: This concern extends itself to other forms of interface: I hope my over-detailed analysis will have shown that his apparently simple stylistic and narrative structures mask a really considerable moral and philosophical complexity.
I hope, too, that it may prove a bit of an intellectual springboard to thinking about interfaces more widely in relation to fantastic fiction. Lewis, Of This and Other Worlds , ed. Fount Paperbacks, , pp. Things happen back to front, as if in a mirror; and one reason for the reversal is that Edmund has already made up his mind before he enters the wardrobe that Lucy fabricated all her adventures. Edmund necessarily sees Narnia through different eyes because the mind behind those eyes has different priorities, a different philosophy.
Where Lucy was driven by Alice-like curiosity and a sensuous delight in the feel of fur, Edmund is driven by the desire to mock his sister for her inventions: The discovery that the wardrobe does not in fact contain Lucy, that it is larger than he expected, that it sounds and feels unlike the interior of a piece of furniture, makes Edmund shiver — and, one presumes, not just with cold. There are two possible reasons for the fear suggested by his shivering. The other, related reason is that the country he finds himself in is definitely not his. Lucy found it first, which makes it effectively hers from a colonialist perspective — from the perspective, that is, of a person who likes to stamp his authority on other people.
It represents, in effect, a contest between them which she has won in emphatic fashion, thanks to his having been forced into the position of primary witness to her truthfulness. For both these reasons, Narnia can be taken as inimical to him. His state of mind is neatly summed up in the following sentence: Ironically, her physical appearance also ticks a number of boxes in the iconography of goodness. As with the Faun, her mood undergoes a sudden change, but this time from rage to cunning, from violence to seduction, from command to conversation.
She offers the boy food and drink after her change in mood — not before it, as Tumnus did — and the provisions she offers are yet further removed than those of Tumnus from the dreariness of wartime rationing: The Witch may promise to adopt Edmund as her son, and hence eventually as her equal, but the imbalance of their relationship is obvious from their verbal exchanges. The most intriguing aspect of their conversation is the way it ends.
Edmund is not an accomplished player of consensual games, as his treatment of Lucy shows, so he is ill equipped to see when he is being played with against his consent; that is, when he is being manipulated. The success of a story, as of a game, depends on a collective act of imaginative complicity between the teller and the listener; a lie depends instead on the consciousness of the liar that she or he possesses information unknown to his or her audience. True to his nature, however, Edmund at once sees an imbalance in the collective pleasure she anticipates.
But their attitude to the game has changed entirely, since they now know that there is something genuinely strange hidden in the wardrobe which was one of the hiding places in the game. This makes it all the more shocking when Edmund decides that his best tactic both for preserving his self-esteem and hurting his sister is to pretend that he and Lucy have been playing a different game instead of experiencing a different reality: Just for fun, of course.
Is she suffering from mental illness? For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth. In other words, the Professor is more concerned with the psychology of human beings than with the empirical evidence of the senses. From this point of view Narnia would seem to be a country of the mind, whose capacities, like those of the house he inhabits, are vastly more spacious — and vastly more interesting — than conventional empiricism or logic would tend to assume.
Lewis associates logic with Scottish culture, but Scotland also produced the visionary writer whose work Lewis most admired, George MacDonald. There was a real, historical Edmund the Just, a tenth-century King of England who obviously suggested the sobriquet to Lewis among other things, this Edmund I made peace with the Scots: The interface with fantasy in any narrative — the moment when the reader first encounters the particular version of the impossible with which the story will concern itself — both defines a text as fantasy and indicates the kind of fantasy it will be.
So exciting does Lewis find this moment of first encounter that he re-enacts it over and over again in the course of his series: I can still remember quite distinctly a time before I first read the novel, when I knew only what it said on the cover of the Puffin paperback edition, above a picture of two girls dancing with a lion I suspect I was told the title instead of reading it; I was a late-ish reader and remain a slow one. And closer acquaintance with the house only makes it more mysterious.
It was the sort of house that is mentioned in guide books and even in histories; and well it might be, for all manner of stories were told about it, some of them even stranger than the one I am telling you now. Shortly afterwards the narrator again implies that the house may have something literally magical about it.
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In fact, by this point in the novel the house has acquired a vitality that makes it seem like an extension of its owner, the hairy, rational, courteous and unexpectedly open-minded Professor Kirk. Like the Professor, it is full of possibilities, rendered more diverse by the fact that none of them are particularised or confirmed. The next three interfaces, of course, are the three entrances into Narnia by way of the wardrobe. First Lucy on her own, then Edmund and Lucy — though they effectively go separately — and finally all four Pevensie children step through the door with a looking-glass in it a nod to Carroll?
So imaginatively potent, for Lewis, is this moment of transition from this world to the next that he makes us go through it three times, each time from a new perspective, which imbues each entrance with a different mood and meaning. The other impulse that takes her into the wardrobe is that of pleasure. The stress on many senses, not just one — and the stress on familiar , precisely-evoked sensations — is what makes the transition so utterly convincing.
The first things she finds in Narnia — a wood full of fir trees, the whiteness of snow, the darkness of nighttime — are all perfectly consonant with the experience of playing, or falling asleep, in a dark wooden wardrobe full of fur coats and snow-white mothballs. Her discovery of an ordinary lamppost a few steps later — in the middle of wood, far from any discernible path — reassures her still further: It continues with the rapid-fire questions the Faun poses to her, which suggests he is just as curious as she is, and by his readiness to take Spare Oom and War Drobe as geographical locations as exotic for him as Narnia is for her.
After telling his tales of midnight parties where Fauns dance with Nymphs, of milk-white stags which grant your wishes and of summer visits from the god Silenus, who makes the rivers run with wine instead of water, Tumnus abruptly reveals that such seasonal delights no longer take place and that Narnia itself has receded into the past, to be replaced by the perpetually snowbound country Lucy has discovered. The Faun then drops the bombshell the wartime metaphor seems appropriate that he himself is not what he appears to be — that he is a bad Faun, not a good one, and that his entertainment of Lucy has a hidden agenda: Even this reversal, however, mirrors a similar reversal in the world that Lucy has left.
It might be said to resemble something we never actually witness in the novel: So when Tumnus breaks down in tears and tells the girl that he is wicked she assumes that he is talking about some past misdemeanour on his part, and assures him that he cannot possibly be bad now because he is so sorry for what he has done. But her conviction that Tumnus is what he appears to be — a friend — helps to change the direction of the narrative once again. In other words, by this stage in the novel the question of what is real has come under scrutiny.
The country Lucy comes from, England, is a land in crisis. So is the country she arrives in, Narnia. But as soon as that imagined person proved to be real Tumnus realized he could never betray her without also betraying his sense of his own real self as first and foremost a decent person. She tells her siblings about the visit to Narnia, and they at once assume that her story is impossible. This gives rise to three alternative interpretations of her narrative: All three siblings also decide that whichever one of these interpretations or readings of the story is correct, the lie or game or joke has gone on far beyond what is acceptable.
This is what drives them to discuss the problem with the Professor. The game abruptly becomes potential fact, and the relationship between the elder siblings and the youngest shifts in consequence. Objects and people — Lucy, Susan, Peter, the mysterious wardrobe — subtly change places, in the process changing their signification. Lucy comes from lux , the Latin for light, and the saint who originally owned the name became associated by the Catholic Church with the longest night in the year, a time when the memory of light, and the current location of its source, must have seemed in the days before artificial lighting as far away and inaccessible as an imaginary country.
But even in the longest night of the year the sun is real, and the conviction that its light and warmth will at last return can be sustained by stories as well as memory. Lewis seems in fact to have written it last. This exists in two versions that I know of: To me the longer version reads as both a trenchant analysis of the state of Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century and an ambitious work of art. Other poems follow emigrants into exile from their homes in Ireland, Arabia, Canaan, Egypt, France, and the lands of the Cherokee people; her lifelong interest in the subject may have arisen from the fact that her father was the local emigration officer for several shipping lines to America and Australia.
At the same time, many of her poems are about isolation, featuring a succession of male and female Robinson Crusoes the introduction tells us this was one of the books her parents owned, along with the travels of the Scottish explorer Mungo Parke. One gets the impression that loneliness was an experience Browne knew well, despite the size of the family she grew up in.
She has no portion there. Woe — woe for deeds of worth, That were only paid with ill! Here the girl expresses her disenfranchisement in a verse form widely used in Presbyterian hymns of the sort familiar to Browne from her upbringing rhymed ABCB, with lines one, two and four in trimeter and line three for the most part in tetrameter. Levy and Mendlesohn see this tendency as driven by the desire to protect children by containing their imaginative and intellectual wanderings within a safely limited environment.
For Browne, by contrast, the domestic space is very far from safe. Home is not home for her heroes and heroines, and most of them set out to seek their fortune in classic fairy tale fashion, their restlessness echoing that of the Irish people in the mid-nineteenth century, who emigrated in their millions in the face of hunger and oppression. Instead each story begins by locating itself at a certain point of the compass: These compass bearings imply that the collection takes place within a clearly defined topography, like the island of Ireland divided into many small kingdoms; and the work of the various protagonists and their families in each story — spinning, weaving, cobbling, shepherding, pig-keeping, fishing, fiddling, and so on — would have been familiar to Irish readers from their local communities.
At the same time the namelessness of the land makes it universal, a land of the mind, so that the travels it contains could be inward as much as outward ones; and indeed many of the stories in the collection are concerned with inward matters: Interestingly, each of these absentees is represented as a much-loved figure whose return is yearned for rather than dreaded. The frame narrative, for instance, tells of a poverty-stricken girl called Snowflower whose grandmother sets off on her travels, leaving her alone with only a magic chair for company.
Luckily the chair is capable of telling her stories and transporting her physically as well as mentally anywhere she chooses — a metaphor, perhaps, for the books and stories Browne encountered in her own childhood. The king of the mer-people in the sixth story is similarly discontent because a fisherman will not marry one of his daughters, and because the young man also refuses to tempt other mortals into visiting the underwater kingdom, which thrives on riches purloined from humans and their ships.
The seventh and final story, which concerns a boy called Merrymind with a magic fiddle, again tells of a land made wretched by its ruler: In these unhappy kingdoms cheerfulness is more valuable than gold: Each of these protagonists has an artistic gift. Fairyfoot, for instance, is a passionate dancer, while the fisherman Civil who visits the merfolk has the gift of the gab, as he tells a captive mortal woman when she asks him to help her escape from the submarine kingdom: Before setting out the bulk of these young people already feel profoundly alienated.
Merrymind is mocked by his father and siblings for his attachment to a fiddle he at first cannot play. Fairyfoot is derided by his large-footed family for the dainty size of his feet. If the ruling classes in each of these stories are disconnected from the lands they govern, their adult subjects and tenants are equally disconnected from their young dependants, showing no appreciation for the arts they practise or the generosity and good manners the children treasure.
The abused children of the lost Lords of the White and Grey Castles find their way to the woodland home of a mysterious replacement mother, Lady Greensleeves, who has similarly been forgotten by the rest of humankind, and who helps them because she is lonely and likes their company.
When Merrymind shows his community spirit by gathering firewood to keep them warm, the Night Spinners reward him with golden strings for his broken instrument, and he proceeds to smash the spell of glumness over the land by playing the tunes he heard them singing. The men paused in their delving; the women stopped their scrubbing; the little children dropped their work; and every one stood still in their places while Merrymind and his fiddle passed on.
Their willingness to suffer hunger, in other words, saves them from enslavement. Meanwhile, plenty to eat continues to be the sign of servitude or entrapment. Stephens, too, identifies hunger as a mark of solidarity among the poor, and contrasts the unspoken code that all poor people on Irish roads must share whatever they have to eat with one another with the psychological torment suffered by the servants of capitalism, as represented by two disembodied voices speaking out of the darkness in a police cell.
For Stephens, this code of sharing food provides a template for the simple, egalitarian laws that will govern a future Ireland, unshackled at last from its prosperous and selfish imperial neighbour. The absent, loved lords in several stories have as much in common with the idealized Irish kings of legend as with the absentee landlords satirized by Edgeworth.
For each story the chair narrates Snowflower finds herself rewarded with a new item of clothing, better sleeping quarters and nicer food; each time the king wishes to hear another story he sends a more exalted page to find her. The name of the fairy, Fortunetta, associates her with money rather than good fortune — a lesser, more grasping kind of fortune than the other kind, as the diminutive implies. Having conjured up a happy, prosperous kingdom, Browne promptly erases it again, much as George MacDonald did with the happy kingdom ruled over by Princess Irene and her miner-husband in The Princess and Curdie.
Great wars, work, and learning, have passed over the world since then, and altered all its fashions. Kings make no seven-day feasts for all comers now. Queens and princesses, however greedy, do not mine for gold. Chairs tell no tales. Wells work no wonders; and there are no such doings on hills and forests, for the fairies dance no more. Some say it was the hum of schools—some think it was the din of factories that frightened them; but nobody has been known to have seen them for many a year, except, it is said, one Hans Christian Andersen, in Denmark, whose tales of the fairies are so good that they must have been heard from the fairies themselves.
Wars, schools and factories are the machinery of Empire, and the noise they make, Browne suggests, is capable of drowning out the songs and tales of colonized nations. But they persist, and she has heard them through the hubbub, like her mentor Andersen. Like him she has made their magic available to new generations.
And she is not a singular instance of the sort of person who can hear old stories handed down from ancient times; this is a collective capability, and has helped to generate in some of its possessors a political conviction. It links storytelling to revolution through the person of Prince Wisewit. Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, , pp.
The book demonstrates that the Nazi version of history is no more than an elaborate lie designed to bolster the related myths of Aryan racial supremacy, of martial prowess as the highest human value, and of the natural ascendancy of men over women. Now he realizes that this dismissive attitude to his own self-assessment is the product of conditioning: The ruling elite are exposed as constructors of elaborate castles in the air, the lone fantasist as an impeccable logician.
And both British and German women acquiesced with enthusiasm in their own subjugation. They shaved their heads, the Knight claims, and made themselves ugly so as to bolster the case for Nazi misogyny, in the belief that catering to these anti-feminist fantasies will somehow strengthen their status as objects of male approval and desire. Of course, the opposite has happened, and by the time we meet Alfred and von Hess all male desire for women has long been eradicated, to be replaced by a form of homoerotic desire between men which is merely the corollary to their disgust with the female of the species.
This restoration of women to desirability makes possible a future for them; Alfred ends the book with the vision of a world where his daughter can hope to exist as something better than a breeding animal whose sole function is the fabrication of boy soldiers for some always-deferred future war in Asia. For Burdekin, a Lesbian who felt unable to write freely about gender politics except under a male pseudonym she published novels as Murray Constantine , imagining a better future for women may have seemed almost as revolutionary in s Britain as it would have done in a Nazi Britain years later.
Burdekin is of course not alone among fantasy writers of the 30s and 40s in taking British complicity with fascism as her subject. She is also not alone in identifying the particular social group she belonged to in this case, European women in general as being specially implicated in this complicity. Further down, he discovers a race of human beings descended from the Roman soldiers who built the Wall. These people are still recognizably Roman in costume and technology, still locked into a militaristic ideology, but utterly removed from their ancestors in one remarkable way: Every citizen has his or her mind telepathically shaped in childhood to the precise specifications of some designated occupation.
Soldiers, labourers and craftspeople are trained up to be incapable of independent thought, while all the mental powers of the ruling elite are directed towards monitoring the psychological state of their slavish subjects. What drove these descendants of Romans to adopt this mental dictatorship was fear: The underground Romans of Land Under England are clearly fascists — the fasces being a symbol of the ancient Roman republic, adapted for their purpose by the followers of Mussolini. But the Roman model also underlay the British Empire, a link enshrined in the centrality of Latin to the British private school system.
The father once dead, the young man is free to determine his own future, liberated from the nightmare of history — though conscious still of the lurking menace of an army of Roman automata beneath the wholesome English soil, ready to burst out and overwhelm the island if it can find a convenient exit. The reporter, a man called Swan, uses his professional skills and contacts first to ferret out information about the origins of this new species they turn out to have been spontaneously conceived by a rural Welshwoman and later to help coordinate their anti-fascist coup.
But even as he does so he worries that he is merely replacing one dictatorship with another. Uncooperative members of their breed are mercilessly slaughtered for the collective good. Human beings who threaten their safety are casually disposed of. Love is as unknown among them as monogamy. Unencumbered by taboos, they are both capable of imagining better ways to organize society — a miniature woman speculates at one point about the benefits of matriarchy Davies , p. Although they throw in their lot with the anti-fascists, their confidence in their own superiority makes them sound fascistic.
Howell Davies conceives, then, of a future quasi-fascistic dictatorship which is like him spawned in Wales, whose cause is aided and abetted by his own journalistic profession, and whose paramilitary coup is staged in the part of London where he lived, Highgate Hill, only yards from the cemetery where Marx is buried. But unlike their knowing creator, his miniature assassin-dictators have a disarming innocence about them: They are shocked and disgusted by the perverse social arrangements of the ancient world in which they find themselves; and their insistence on improving it makes them attractive as well as horrifying.
This notion of a disturbing innocence in the adherents of fascism crops up quite often in the fantasies of the 30s and 40s. White Ben is an ordinary scarecrow — accidentally brought to life by a little girl holding a mandrake — who goes on to become the fascist dictator of England. Ben springs from the fertile English soil, and a litany of flower-names and tree-terms accompanies him on his road to power: He is constructed, too, from the old garments that clothe him: And as he marches towards London, gathering followers on the way from among the human debris left behind by the recent conflict, he accumulates a stock of phrases and attitudes from men and women of all classes, so that when he is in London perpetrating his atrocities both the aristocratic Lady Pont and the working-class butler Trelawney recognize their own language spilling from his turnip lips in justification of his crimes against humanity Ashton , pp.
The hatreds of his friends become his hatreds; but unlike them he was assembled with the sole purpose of acting on his dislikes, and he has an uncanny gift for provoking his allies, too, to aggression: Monuments are erected to his memory, and the tale of his journey from birth to power is retold again and again by those who knew him, with a solemnity that belies the appalling preposterousness of its turnip-headed hero.
He becomes once again a figurehead of militarism, the fantastic nature of his existence as a living scarecrow underscoring the vein of fantasy that feeds the fascistic rule of force. His awakening is described with the visual precision of a set of cinematic storyboards. We keep hearing his story in retrospect as having been performed in theatres and music halls — a device that both places a Brechtian distance between reader and narrative and brings the narrative closer to the world of Winifred Ashton.
These four now little-known fantasies demonstrate the extent to which anti-fascist writers of the Western Archipelago were prepared to figure fascism as emerging from the dark recesses of their own brains. Ashton refers several times in the Arrogant History to the psychologically and economically crippling terms imposed on Germany by its enemies at the end of the Great War; terms which planted and cultivated the seeds of resentment that sprang up as Nazism.
For Burdekin, fear of the other sex can dominate the unconscious of either gender, and Nazism is one means by which patriarchy may choose to express its gynophobic paranoia. Once one has noticed this theme of complicity running through the obscurer fantastic novels of the 30s and 40s, one begins to see it everywhere in the work of better-known fantasy writers of the period. For a while, novels, novelists and Nazism were woven together in a horrible symbiotic knot, and it seems as if fantasy was a form or mode particularly well suited to undertake the controversial task of addressing this symbiosis.
He then finds his way to a mysterious police station filled with mind-troubling inventions, where he is summarily convicted of the crime he has just committed, despite the total absence of any evidence against him. While awaiting execution he is shown around an underground facility which seems in some obscure way to control the fantastic world he has strayed into; his policemen friends must constantly fine-tune its arcane mechanisms to prevent the whole shebang from exploding and wiping out humanity.
Europe, it would seem on the evidence of this novel, has got itself enmeshed in an appalling practical joke, which will not release its victims until its inexorable logic has been worked out — at the expense of their lives or their collective sanity. Another Irishman, the scholar C. Tolkien assembled the most influential work of modern fantasy, The Lord of the Rings , between and , he began and ended it in a fictional Shire that closely resembles the country round his home town of Oxford.
In twenty-first century parlance, the word fantasy is often used to mean a form of wish-fulfilment, the conscious or unconscious fashioning of simulacra of the sometimes forbidden things we most desire. British and Irish fantasists of the mid-century showed their readers that what they most desired sometimes bore a disturbing resemblance to what they most loathed: They tell a version of the history of the mind in the s and 40s which could not have been told in any other way.
It is time we paid attention to this version.
The Science Fiction Book Club, University of Texas Press, J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis — as Ronald and Jack — provide her with a welcome substitute for the company of her peers, but they compete for her attention with issues of politics, economics, gender, class and race that they largely ignored in their fantasies. One gets the impression that Kearney has hugely enjoyed running themes and people from the books he loves up against the radical changes in social and political consciousness that have taken place since they were written.
But the knife that does the killing in Port Meadow demonstrates something else about weapons like these: And not long afterwards her own knife gets used in transgressive acts: This second death-by-stabbing teaches her that trusted friends can be double-edged too, turning against their companions with the kind of racially-motivated, casual cruelty that would come to characterize the new decade of the s. The same little penknife reveals to Anna the kind of man her father was — a double-edged figure, very different from the melancholy Greek hero she idealized in her childhood though this is something his occasional violence had already taught her.
And at the end of the novel Anna uses it herself in an act of violence, a near mirror image of the one she witnessed on Port Meadow. All these developments confirm the impossibility of passing absolute judgement on any given action: The aspect of the narrative that most clearly marks out its difference from the works of Lewis and Tolkien is its concern with the body.
Kearney pays attention to many aspects of the body those men could never have brought themselves to mention: Pie is short for Penelope, the wife who stayed constant to Odysseus through all the years of his wanderings. Constancy is also the property of the dead, and Pie was given to Anna by her older brother, who died fighting the Turks. Changelessness as applied to mortals is a myth, and not a particularly helpful one in an age of such radical change as the twentieth century. At the same time, the book shares with Lewis, Tolkien and other British-based fantasists a deep delight in the English countryside — a delight which is most fully felt by his Greek protagonist and Lewis, who felt it too, reminds Anna that he is an Ulsterman, and so understands her sense of exile.
There will come a time, one of them predicts, when all will be gone. Anna will become one of the Cassandras of our generation, her fears for the future of her beloved hills and valleys only believed when they have been fulfilled. But her courage, her heroic resistance to having her changes dictated and used by others, also suggests that the erasure of the beautiful places can be withstood. This, at least, is what he suggests in a letter to a woman — an ex-student — written in soon after his abandonment of The Dark Tower: Letters The levers pulled by the sexually promiscuous Camilla in The Dark Tower have truly frightful repercussions.
An Experiment with Time. Faber and Faber, Possible Worlds and Other Essays. Chatto and Windus, Out of the Silent Planet. Perelandra [ Voyage to Venus ]. The Shape of my Early Life. They Asked for a Paper: A Voyage to Arcturus. The Shape of Things to Come. Letters With minor variations Lewis reworks the themes of this letter in nearly every account he gives of his science fiction: Images 11 In his science fiction Lewis begins to flesh out a twentieth-century iconography of the sort he refers to in this final sentence.
Reading, for Lewis, was as vivid a process as remembering. Of This and Other Worlds 29 Things to Come The Dark Tower can be read, of course, as a speculative fiction concerning the nature of time, but we might also think of it as a meditation on the act of reading in the twentieth century. The situation has all the ingredients of Gothic fiction, but Lewis is careful to distance it from the Gothic by leavening those ingredients with a liberal dose of reassurance: In the passage, accordingly, Aslan is described in terms that make him as vivid, tangible and caring as Lewis knows how: The Magic Pool, illustration by Jack Yeats Eileen, in fact, resists the narrative logic of Celtic literature and folktale as much as she embraces it.
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