Tag: Ecocriticism

Journeys

With the questing, voyaging Earthsea world rattling round in my head, and the next Wild Spaces, Wild Magic trip in the planning – and the sun from my summer holiday still embedded in my face and shoulders – journeys have been much on my mind. It was natural, then, to look at a new blog review of Francesca Sanna’s wonderfully involved and visually effective The Journey from Simon Smith.

Mat Tobin has been consistent in talking about this book as an example of a complex text, as he says, “it shows how powerful the relationship between words and image can be.” He is quite right, and Simon Smith, acknowledging Mat’s insight, suggests

Sanna plays pictures against words wonderfully. The use of the child as the narrator creates a naivety and innocence to the written narrative that she exploits brilliantly.

Just last month I suggested, drawing on Alan Garner, that the world experienced is given meaning for us through story. The Journey is no simple trip, however: to compare it with, say, John Burningham’s The Shopping Basket (which I use with undergrads to think about the relationship between childhood and ecocriticism without getting into the issues of how much of a catechism ecological literature can be) would be misleading. It does, however, do just what Garner says: moving through the story is moving through the landscape, and gives sense to that environment. Sanna does the same: even though the scale of the figures – especially the menacing ones – is indicative of an internal perception of danger,  and the landscapes of forest and mountain are largely schematic, the intention is to help the reader make sense of the world. As Mat points out, this is partly because of the author’s encounter with real refugee children: this is where th power of the author comes from, I think. In the same way, when thinking of the ways that power transfers to the reader,  I was shocked – but I’m afraid not really surprised- that Simon was abused for his using this with the children he works with. No matter how symbolic this journey is, it represents a real world, just as the lad in Burningham’s book  is going past the “place where the nasty dog lived” and the “men digging up the pavement.” Migrant children need to be kept unreal, otherwise we may have to pay attention to the reality of the loss and difficulty they suffer. Naivety and innocence as Simon suggests are wholly appropriate; they also allow for a direct appeal to the reader. Maybe this is what makes Simon’s use of this book seem threatening.

In this, because of its realist roots, Sanna’s The Journey differs sharply from the well trodden epic-as-journey: as a huge oversimplification, I am edging towards suggesting that traveling to fight Khumbaba, to return to a mythic Ithaca, to found Rome tells us about the journeyer much more than the environment. The ecocritical approach might be to say that the human is at the centre in the epic and in the more intimate books of childhood, the child is part of a much bigger world. It may be that the marrying of text and illustration plays a part in this, too: I need to think this one through a bit more.

That’s grand epic (ineffectively) dismissed, and childhood at least discussed. I am still unsure about Odysseus, and really about the life-and-death questions of Frodo and Gilgamesh. What about Ged, in his little boat, sailing to see dragons and confront death?  And where does Frodo fit in all this, with the detailed history and geography Tolkien created?

…and if I’m thinking about Garner Country, what kind of a journey does Gawain go on? To the interior? To dream in Ludcruck?

Creating Relationships with Place through Story

This is Garner’s own line, and I come back again and again to the talk it comes from.

I am not going to debate his method or dispute with him about this. I do wonder, however, about whether there is a mutual relationship here, too.  Place gives rise to story, story creates relationship with place – this is at the heart of the repeated line in Boneland that has become something of a motto for me “I dream in Ludcruck.” It is also at the heart of the saying I have on my office door, “Sing me frumsceaft.” (This is as good an introduction as any to the English text of Bede’s story of Caedmon.) “Sing to me the origin of things” commands the vision – and the illiterate, tone-deaf shepherd does:

He ærest sceop    eorþan bearnum

heofon to hrofe,  halig Scyppend

and it is a divine act of shaping, creation from on high, ex nihilo: the world comes from nothing, the song from nothing, too.

The world experienced, “place” in effect, is given meaning for us through story. However, I think the converse is also true: for me the song does not come from nothing: this valley, that hill, have meaning because of a story about it, and the meaning is given because of the story. We are knots in a web of interconnected stories and places, “haunted,” as Robert Macfarlane says in The Wild Places, by the archetypes, for example,  of forest and upland, and what our forebears have made of them or said about them. Perhaps this is one of the Oxford connections for writers such as Cooper, Garner, Lewis, Tolkein: they are searching not for a one-way relationship but something much more mutual and complex.

I am typing maybe 200m from where, driving back to Oxford in Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night,  Harriet Vane starts her descent:

Headington. She was very near now, and in spite of herself a chill qualm cramped her stomach. Headington Hill, up which one had toiled so often, pushing a decrepit bicycle. It seemed less steep now, as one made decorous descent behind four rhythmically pulsating cylinders; but every leaf and stone hailed one with the intrusive familiarity of an old school-fellow. Then the narrow street, with its cramped, untidy shops, like the main street of a village; one or two stretches had been widened and improved, but there was little real change to take refuge in.

Magdalen Bridge. Magdalen Tower. And here, no change at all–only the heartless and indifferent persistence of man’s handiwork. Here one must begin to steel one’s self in earnest. Long Wall Street. St. Cross Road. The iron hand of the past gripping at one’s entrails…

For Sayers, this is the start of a deceptively simple exploration – Gaudy Night is at once a crime thriller, a romance and a gentle satire – of the city where she was born, where she attended University.  Her principal character is coming to terms with the “the whimpering ghost of her dead youth” in a landscape (and an urban and very particular one at that). She is creating a place, both real and imagined, making sense of the place through story – but also recognising how much the story shapes the characters. I don’t think it shapes just the characters in a story, however wonderful and terrifying it is to be out in the marshes with Pip or on the rooftops of Paris with Vango, or with Olive in the Lighthouse  in Emma Carroll’s book, or in the chalk pits with Tom Tit Tot or even (the list goes ever on and on) in the fairytale landscape of the Ahlbergs; it also shapes the reader, helps give sense to their world.  Story arises from place, and invites us to make sense of place: aetiology is not a one-way path, and it is not just for critics and folklorists. As Thomas Lane’s ingratiating dedicatory poem-preface to Robert Plot’s “Natural History of Stafford-shire” begins:

Describe the Land, Israel’s Commander said

And the glad Artists strait the word obey’d

Describing, engaging: this is the heart of Garner’s intensely localised life-long project, it seems to me. In looking at/for Thursbitch, we recognised as we wrote for Folklore Thursday that

the fear of us losing touch with the stories that made us who we are and still design us. What will happen to us when we stop looking back; when we can no longer dreamwalk into a history?

 

From Alderley to Arkudah

When William Mayne’s Vendale appears in Earthfasts it is largely a recognisable place, a Dales market town, but with features from the Lakes, the high Pennines: it is a composite of a number of places. Emmerdale is maybe one valley away one way; Wharfedale is another. De Fombelle‘s Scottish Highlands in Vango, the wonderfully named Everland, is similarly more-or-less fictional. In both these works the authors move the reader from one imagined place to another skilfully.  Skillfully, in that the atmosphere of a place is beautifully captured – but maybe at the expense of accuracy.

But does that matter, except to a pedant like me? I am not sure that de Fombelle is really interested in the clerical dress of the Church of Scotland, for example, but I am sure he wants the reader to be with Ethel in her horseback chase after the lost sheep and the horror with which she finds her neighbours are hunting a human, not a deer. The rush of the story needs setting and landscapes, and I hold it up by quibbling. Vango is set in real as well as half-real places: so much so I feel it is in a parallel universe. What is worth speculating on, I think, is how de Fombelle makes the choices between accuracy and setting.  The author creates a powerful fantasy that is atmospheric enough to makes us believe in a hidden monastery in the Aeolian Islands as much as a life of marginalised young people in the Paris rooftops. Fantasy, adventure, real and imagined landscapes all are presented together in a jumble. His own travels enrich de Fombelle’s writing.

Garner, rooted in his land and its past, however, offers a different challenge: fantasy in a “real” (I’ll come back to this) landscape. In doing so, he offers up for appreciation a topography of Staffordshire and Cheshire and Derbyshire –  his corner of the world – that I am trying to explore in textual and actual exploration. Solvitur ambulando: de Fombelle has his Zeppelin; Garner has his walking boots.  Visits are vital, Garner seems to say, reading is important. Get out the map, prepare your research tools. This is underlined in Rob Macfarlane’s essay The Gifts of Reading which, like so much of his writing makes me want to put my boots on, take my kettle and a sleeping bag and walk off. His description of the “famously ornate style” of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “hopschloss” across a doomed Europe struck me as a good connection with Garner:

Almost everything in his prose leads to something else (path to path, culture to culture, word to word)and this abundance of connection is itself a kind of offering up, or giving away. You feel, as a reader, passionately- perhaps even at times oppressively – hosted: Read this! Look here! Listen to that! Walk this way!

This is where the “reality” persists: we walk a geographically recognisable path through the adventures of Colin and Susan in Weirdstone and Gomrath; we have that path snatched away from us in Boneland. We are challenged to walk this way, and that, and that again (to use Garner’s own story, to go this way and that as lead by the Wizard, by Seven Firs and Goldenstone) to accept the Man in Boneland as the metaphor for the story of the area, as the first teller of the Garner Ur-Myth, in the Garner landscape. A deeper read, time spent reading the topography and archaeology (Read this! Look here!) of this small, magic area, and I am still challenged to accept the Garner philosophy of story and landscape. Ludchurch is an ancient cultic site before Gawain learns his lesson: Alderley is a place to encounter the uncanny before its landscaping for the visitors from Manchester.

So how “real” is all of this? What do I mean by “real”?

I mean, at one level, that I have been there. It is as de Fombelle’s Paris: I can see the bones of the authors’ settings. I do not need the streets to be named exactly, but more or less, this is Paris, this is Cat’s Tor…  At another level, something is impelling me to look at Ludchurch and Alderley and Thursbitch in a different way. His meticulous scholarship tells me there are interpreters’ paths to follow, with James Dakeyne and Frederick Hackwood and Robert Plot, and geologists and archaeologists: this is at once a verifiable landscape and its own stage set on which Garner has placed not only his characters – Colin, Sal, Jack, the Man – but a maze of metaphor for us to pass with them.  If it was easy for Macfarlane to forget, in the midst of his time in China that

literature might be there to thrill, perplex or amaze,

Alan Garner’s landscapes are there to tell us that “dreaming in Ludcruck,” telling the myth of a place, is at once to be playing with history and geography – and astronomy and archaeology- and yet is nevertheless a “true story.” He goes way beyond de Fombelle in playing with visitabke settings, and it is enough for now to ask why.  The sonorous beginning to Garner’s 2010 lecture gives the best clue as to his intent:

the uniquely human quality: our ability to derive a sense of belonging through oral tradition, to create relationships with place through story.

and maybe that is as far as I can get tonight.

Green Thoughts: time and space in Thursbitch and Boneland

It is interesting to speculate on the role of a complex author such as Alan Garner and whether he can be counted a “green writer” – or whether that kind of nomenclature is at all useful. He is not writing the polemic of George Monbiot, whose  lyrical, engaged prose in work like his Feral has an explicit moral tone. In critiquing (p215) a Wildlife Trust’s management plan, for example, Monbiot writes

“…invasive and undesirable species are native trees such as rowan, sallow, birch and hawthorn, returning to their natural habitat… [A]t great expense, it sustains the ambiance of a nuclear winter.”

Powerful advocacy. We might, however, contrast Garner’s use of trees at the moving death of the eighteenth-century protagonist in the final scene at the end of Thursbitch:

“If I’m to rest tonight in this flowery valley, tell them to put me in my own fold, so as I’m close to you. Then, tell them, put at me head a pipe of hornbeam, for sweetness, a pipe of holly, for sadness; a pipe of oak, for wildness. Then when the wind blows it must play.”

They are writing for different purposes, of course. Monbiot, to state the baldest argument, has a concern for place and the future, while Garner’s project is place and the past. Jack Turner seeks a resting place and finds it at the intersection of myth, legend and a mystical experience of the powers that shape his cultic space. The end of Boneland offers a similar set of images, of story at the heart of land and belonging. The modern protagonist Colin walks free of his nightmares (to some extent) and the Paleolisthic Man rests, his story passed on. Garner is even bold enough to cite the rhythmic refrain from the local story of the sleeping knights as the past and present protagonists become one, walking

…by Seven Firs and Goldenstone and Stormy Point to Saddlebole

where he (who? Colin, the Man?) see “a new story, a Dream.” Where – or more precisely when – are we in these last, beautiful rags of prose in the book? Whenever we are, we are [at] the heart of the human story, with sacred cutting of stone and Jodrell Bank. There is no simple catechism of how we might be kind to the earth, but we are at the heart of how and where we belong. This is where Garner’s “greenness” resides, where his inspiration rises like a spring on a hillside.

Lyotard (I am not an expert) suggests that the Oikeion, the “belonging to the dwelling place,” is “a relation with something that is inscribed at the origin in all minds, souls or psychic apparatuses” (in the brief but incredibly dense section “Ecology as Discourse of the Secluded” in The Green Studies Reader, ed Laurence Coupe, p135). While I can see that Lyotard is going in a very different direction in looking at the oikeion as a motivating relationship in literature, it strikes me that this brief quotation might be a way of looking at Garner as an ecological writer. That it not to say that we should choose a title like “Green Writer” and shoehorn someone we admire into a role we choose for them, but that it points to exactly the deeper relationship with the world, the deep ecology that we see in Thursbitch and Boneland. Time is a crucial part of this.

When Sal, the modern-day protagonist in Thursbitch, surveys the ruined farm at Thursbitch, she says plainly “The stones belong but the house doesn’t. What’s here is much older.” The house is a ruin, much as Sal is, and affects her so deeply that even in the challenges of her deteriorating condition, it remains powerfully in her memory. In the same way the Man, the pre-Sapiens hominin, tells the first story of his “dream in Ludcruck” in Boneland and thus passes to modern humans, to the early Cheshire people, his story,and gifts for the future  his song

To dance in Ludcruck to cut the rock and to keep the sun from death.

Story (song, dream) help us pass out of a linear view of place into something else, something that loosely is called Heritage (however that term is used and abused by the tourist industry these days).

Garner is concerned with belonging in time and space, and the non-linear peculiarities of his stories only serve to point out how difficult it is to come to terms with. Place is powerful not only because of our use (or abuse) of it, but because of our intimate relationship with it, inextricably linked to our experience of time. Nails grow at the same rate as tectonic plates shift. Sal sees Jack Turner and he sees her. Is she Sal at the end, or Jack’s wife Nan? Characters and objects move through spaces and time in a very fluid way: myths represent themselves in the Owl Service, historical episodes and artefacts merge and confuse in Red Shift, in the earlier works Weirdstone and Gomrath, Garner plays with story and legend and language in ways that even the powerful adult third episode in the trilogy, Boneland, only half resolve. He is acutely aware of how inhabiting a landscape places the writer – maybe the reader – in a place but not necessarily in time. As he ends his meditation on the alder copse in Arboreal, “the dead men in the ground had worked the same land.”

 

 

Stranger Visitors

Five years ago we lost Maurice Sendak, or at least we lost his continuing ability to create. It was an amazing, richly endowed talent. In this post from BrainPickings, for instance, we are presented with his anarchic, triumphant pair, Jack and Guy – it was the eagle-eyed Mat who first pointed out the illustration of Trump Tower in it to me – whose carnival through the chaos of modern times has lots to tell us about how to live well. For me, it is his pictures of the outside breaking in – the Goblins and the menacing sunflowers in Outside Over There – that always make me wonder about the complexities of breaking-in from outside in stories. What is so bad about things breaking in?

Two texts, then, quickly, about monsters calling. The first is this:

The Strange Visitor I knew from my son’s telling of it, but here is the text from a general sharing site:

Once upon a time there was a house in the middle of a deep, dark forest, and in the middle of a deep, dark night, the only sound you could here was the creak of a rocking chair, and the clacking of knitting needles.

A woman sat in a rocking chair, knitting and rocking, rocking and knitting.

She was lonely.

“How I wish I had some company!”

And as she sat there, knitting and rocking, rocking and knitting, in came a pair of great big feet, which sat down by the fire.

The woman sat there, knitting and rocking, rocking and knitting, and in came a pair of skinny skinny legs, which sat down on the feet.  And as she sat there, knitting and rocking, rocking and knitting, in came a pair of great round knees, which sat down on the skinny skinny legs.  And as she sat there, knitting and rocking, rocking and knitting, in came a pair of thin thin thighs, which sat down on the great round knees.And as she sat there, knitting and rocking, rocking and knitting, in came a pair of huge huge hips, which sat down on the thin thin thighs.  And as she sat there, knitting and rocking, rocking and knitting, in came a teeny tiny waist, which sat down on the huge huge hips.

The old woman kept on knitting and rocking, rocking and knitting, and in came a pair of big broad shoulders, which sat down on the teeny tiny waist.  And as she sat there, knitting and rocking, rocking and knitting, in came a pair of teeny tiny arms, which sat down on the big broad shoulders.  And as she sat there, knitting and rocking, rocking and knitting, in came a pair of great big hands, which sat down on the teeny tiny arms.  Still, she sat there, knitting and rocking, rocking and knitting, and in came a pair of scrawny scrawny neck, which sat down on the big broad shoulders.  And as she sat there, knitting and rocking, rocking and knitting, in rolled a huge huge head, which sat down on the scrawny scrawny neck.

And the mysterious visitor sat there, and looked at the woman.

And the woman looked at her visitor, and then she said, “And how did you get such great big feet?”

Much tramping, much tramping

“And how did you get such skinny skinny legs?”

Too much water, not enough meat.

“And how did you get such great round knees?”

Much praying, much praying.

“And how did you get such thin thin thighs?”

Too much water, not enough meat.

“And how did you get such huge huge hips?”

Much sitting, much sitting.

“And how did you get such a teeny tiny waist?”

Too much water, not enough meat.

“And how did you get such broad broad shoulders?”

Much sweeping, much sweeping.

“And how did you get such small small arms?”

Too much water, not enough meat.

“And how did you get such huge huge hands?”

Much grabbing, much grabbing

“And how did you get such a small small neck?”

Too much water, not enough meat.

“And how did you get such a huge huge head?”

Much thinking, much thinking.

“And what have you come for?”

For you !

and the Tailypo, which occurs on a number of sites, but of these sites, this is perhaps the richest – certainly one I would treat with care, despite its name, if working with children.  I think this telling from the Galdones’ book, is the closest to my own version, because I got it from them! Both stories are real shockers, designed to scare: the uncanny interrupts the solitary life.

As Sarah Maitland vividly puts it in her essay in Arboreal, the demigod Pan is “seldom found in the bright courts of Olympus…”  – but she still places him “deep in the ancient wood [where] he will still drive even the innocent -hearted to irrational, senseless, panicked fear.”  But the question is, for me, what is the significance of the outside-coming-in motif from Tailypo and The Strange Visitor? It is again the Green Knight and Long Lankin: the challenge, the threat, Beware the Moss, Beware the Moor.  The breaking-in brings redemption for Gawain, but wholesale death in the folk tales I’m citing and in Long Lankin. What happens when we go out is our conscious exploration of the anything-may-happen world, but what does that imply for our own world? How comfortable do we want it to be? How comfortable can we keep it? These are the fundamentals of the current political debates in UK and US, the appeal of a controlled past of known certainties (if such a thing every really existed), of comfort and “meetable” challenge. The riddle – not exactly a new one –  is something like “How do we want our world? How should we live in it?” When we “attempt to unriddle the world” as Susan Cooper suggests, we often think in terms of quest, of going out, something I have written about here, but the quest in Gawain begins at home, the quest in A Monster Calls is about the breaking-in to the life-half-lived of chaos, with truth in its wake.  Is our dream of a comfortable life irrevocably gone? Or only to be bought at the price of strong and stable and (unacceptably conformist) control? What is the risk of letting in the dark and the dead? Learn or be destroyed?

So I’m ending on a different tack, another BrainPickings post, where we are greeted by other views from the genius Sendak. “Dipping into yourself” to find the wonder for children is important, as Sendak points out in his interview with Studs Terkel (linked in BrainPickings), being “foolish and silly…but you tell the truth in some way.” Even in 1970 he describes us as “ringed round by liars.” These monsters impinge to challenge or destroy perhaps: truth, “seeing what we shall see, hearing what we shall hear,” – even dressed in fantasy – is our way to conquer. And since this has turned into a sermon, let’s finish with the hymn that taught the 7-year-old me about how fantasy and life meet: When a Knight Won His Spurs. 

 

 

My Outdoor Learning

Last weekend (the final weekend in Oct 2016) I went outside.

Not to the allotment, and not to the Kalahari: a sort-of-adventurous outside for a 59-year-old academic who was a great hiker in his early teens but since then…

Well,  this is where we went.

thursbitch

And the “we” is Mat Tobin and I.

The notes of the work leading up to the trip and then the weekend’s notes are here:

It’s very obvious what we did well, and equally obvious what I didn’t prepare for properly.  Ah well, it was a first go. Others have also attempted it – cf Emily Morrison. There are even YouTube clips. As Garner and Langland say we “blostrede forth as bestes ouer baches and hulles,” and saw, and learned and came back.

What I want to think about here is how children’s experiences of “going out of their comfort zone” might parallel mine. I am struck by an impressive autoethnographic study by another colleague, Jon Reid, whose imaginative leaps have compared the metaphorical journey into doctoral study with physical travel.  It would be too cheeky – not to say intrusive –  to use his ideas verbatim, but let me just pull up one idea: that learning is very easily translated into journey imagery, and that the relationship is so intimate that “outdoor learning” might even seem a tautology.

It isn’t, of course: I’m not saying that no-one learns indoors, or that learning outside is automatic, or something so process-led that merely travelling is to arrive.  I simply can’t (yet?) get my head round the learning we did, since it was bound up in three elements:

  • Who I am and the past that brings me here, both positive and negative;
  • The experience of planning, doing, seeing;
  • Peak experiences.

“What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?” What did we go out to see? What do we ask children to do when we take them outside? There is a challenge, maybe even a hint of sarcasm in Jesus’ question to the comfortable bandwagonners in Matthew 11. What attracted me to the weekend? A love of being outside, a sense of challenge, a friendship. What did I go out to see? I went to find Thoon and found Lud.

The planning taught me a lot of skills, from Digimaps to revitalising my small skills with OS on the ground. The doing – the emailing for a taxi, sorting accommodation &c., &c. – was small beer compared with the journey up, the staying in Cheshire. I could have stayed for a week, repeated the visits we made, taken a lot more time over every aspect. I talk a lot to students about the value of first-hand experience, but here I was out doing stuff  myself: the verge by John Turner’s stone; the oddness of Jenkin Chapel; the wet underfoot past Gradbach and the sound of the water on the stones – the clonter. A series of little things making one big event of discovery.

And the huge experiences. The face in Ludchurch, the struggle to Thursbitch, the hardness of the journey from the valley to the Tor (and Mat’s driving us back to Oxford). I feel – as I suspect Garner intends us to – torn between the opinions of the scientist Sal whose mental state is allowing her the insights in Thursbitch that drive her story, and the hesitation of her devoted companion, the Jesuit medic Ian. Where they discuss “sentient landscape” encapsulates my own dilemma:

“Are you telling me, after all we’ve seen and done here, that this is just any old gritstone anticline?”

“I’d say that it’s a powerful and dramatic sub-Alpine environment. But what I accept as appearing to be strong atmosphere is no more than our projection of our own experience and emotion onto a circumscribed place.”

“How can a man with your job talk such crap?”

And this brings me to my pedagogic questions: do we take children out for peak experiences or something more subtle? When we talk about the “learning journey” where does this metaphor (here it comes again) lead us? Is there a spiritual dimension to the week-by-week going to Forest School – and does it need actively fostering or is it just there? What do we send children out to see? Reeds shaken in the wind or something bigger?