Unwary Travelling – References

Or Unofficial (and Sweary) Views about Referencing

This is an odd piece to write because some of the students whose discussions prompt it graduate this summer. Too late, maybe, is the “well, I think” nature of this personal rant. Sorry.

I am also not able – or in fact willing even if it were in my power – to bring the whole edifice of referencing down, and I am not speaking for anyone but me – and probaby not me as a marker, when I am, apparently, harsh. I’m writing as an unwary fellow traveller myself, someone who continues to forget where a quotation comes from, and who, when I actually do publish something, dreads the Guides for Authors which tell me my own style won’t work for the Journal of Grindylow Studies when it was perfectly OK for Nelly Long-Arms Quarterly. So this is just my view, and you can’t hold me to it when I mark you down for something.

And with that disclaimer has to go the advert for the Brookes UpGrade (or Upgrade) service, who will help Brookes students get it right. The Upgrade web pages are a study handbook in themselves for referencing, note-taking, how to make a powerpoint… and include my favourite resource, Manchester University’s Academic Phrasebank. Yes, I use it when I get stuck, if you’re wondering.

Why Referencing?

The official view – and I wouldn’t depart from it – is that academic integrity demands it, and that anyone who writes should be able, as it were to show their workings. Nicely put here, it comes down to: No Fudging, No Half-quoting, and No Nicking ideas off other people. But with this there is another subscript, if you like: students reference because courses from Foundation Degrees and BAs on are in some bizarre way part of the apprenticeship for what every student really wants to be, and that’s an academic. And academics’ jobs hang on the notion that their work is their own, their writing and teaching are trustworthy – so you, dear students, must buy into this most basic membership of the academic club.

Why Referencing like This?

or that? Why footnotes or endnotes or Harvard or whatever?

Really only because for the first bit to work, the reader/marker has to know what you’re trying to get at and where your ideas are coming from. Death by buzzword makes for an essay with little substance, and “everybody knows” is not a watertight argument.

Here we go with the kind of ranty thing I can’t really do much of in a class.

So I am bowling along in my writing and there’s this article, and I want to cite it. It’s Elizabeth Bucar’s The Ethics of Visual Culture, and it’s in the Journal of Religious Ethics, March 2016, Vol. 44 Issue 1, p7-16. That still won’t do us, even though I copied it faithfully from the article itself. Since the references list is alphabetical by surname, it has at least to be Bucar, E – and since we also used the date when citing inside the essay, that makes sense to be next. Bucar, E (2016). The rest falls into place as Article title, Journal title and then more precise details.

Bucar, E (2016) The Ethics of Visual Culture. Journal of Religious Ethics. 44:1, pp7-16.

Or something like that. And that’s where people start to panic.

What was all that stuff about Grindylows?

A Grindylow is “a Yorkshire water-demon who lurks in deep stagnant pools to drag down children who come too near to the water” (Briggs 1976: 206. See also Jenny Greenteeth, Nelly Long-Arms and Peg Powler) and I used the fictitious journals earlier because referencing is itself a bit of a Grindylow in that if you’re not careful it can drag you under if not, as the song has it, by “the fancy tie round your wicked throat.” Let’s not panic – but I’ll admit that a couple of weeks ago it dragged me under, chasing references because I thought I had lost the notes I was working from – so

Rule 1: Take Notes and Keep Them. Full notes too – not just “Bucar” (as above) but the title and the year of the journal at the very least.

And it can drag you down in other ways too. Tutors are not always very helpful here, and my experience is that we think we are consistent but often we slip or we have different expectations. This isn’t a Brookes thing: I’ve done enough work as an External Examiner, looking at coursework from other Universities, to know that one tutor will find

Bucar, E (2016) The Ethics of Visual Culture, Journal of Religious Ethics. 44:1, pp7-16.

acceptable and one will want

Bucar, E. (2016) The Ethics of Visual Culture. Journal of Religious Ethics. 44:1: 7-16.

But in most cases, marking tutors are less worried about this than you might think.

What all tutors find hard is when key information is missing (e.g. the whole reference – and that happens a lot!) or if it turns up in the text and not in the end list, or it some of it, but not all is in the end list, like these:

Bucar (2016) The Ethics of Visual Culture. Journal of Religious Ethics. 44:1, pp7-16. (Sigh: where’s the initial?)

Elizabeth Bucar, (2016) The Ethics of Visual Culture. Journal of Religious Ethics. 44:1, pp7-16. (Ah crap: now not in alphabetical order.)

The Ethics of Visual Culture. Journal of Religious Ethics. 44:1, pp7-16. Bucar, E (2016) (What the fuck?)

Bucar, E (2016) Journal of Religious Ethics. 44:1: 7-16. (What the actual fuck?)

Bucar, E. (2016) The Ethics of Visual Culture. Journal of Religious Ethics. Page 14 (Where’s the rest of it?)

And yes I’ve seen all of these. They aren’t the be-all-and-end-all but they sometimes indicate a lack of respect for the sources used. So to be safe:

Rule 2: Make sure all the details are there and in the right order. Styling is helpful.

We tend not to mind if you have a convention of pp rather than : to introduce page range; we don’t always notice if the author’s initial has a . after it (and some styling argues against it); consistency will help, and if you use things like Cite Them Right (the library at Brookes recommends it) you will rarely stumble too much.

And the third way references can drag you down is the really complex one: why you are quoting in the first place, and what you need those actual words for. Maybe you don’t. Look back at the guidance from Upgrade about why we reference anyway.

to enable other people to identify and trace your sources quickly and easily
to support facts and claims you have made in your text
to show that you have read widely and use a variety of sources

So it starts from how you access and use your sources. That means

Rule 3: Propping up the Easy-to-Grab Sources as you write and bunging in quotes that sound good won’t help you make your argument.

Reading, thinking and talking about your ideas will help your argument: quotation for the sake of it is just a bit desperate.

And that reading and discussing will also be the best “entry into the academic club,” in which as a graduate you will be able (and at liberty) to define Higher Education in terms of inclusivity, raising aspirations, employability or plain BS Spotting. Not fancy words, not even, actually, neat referencing – but reading and digesting other people’s ideas and making coherent and engaged arguments that challenge you, challenge the writers you have read and the practices you have seen. Get the references right and then forget them: what you really need, and what your markers are looking for is usually much more about ideas than whether you have put bullet points on all the entries in your references list.

***

PS: Don’t put bullet points on the entries in your references list. It really pisses me off.

“George took his lantern”

John Masefield ‘s The Box of Delights is a fantasy published in the 1930’s which draws on the hopes and fears of people after the first war, and set in the English landscape. We meet not only characters from the earlier work The Midnight Folk but the story deepens as the protagonist, Kay, battles forces of witchcraft intent on destroying the traditional English Christmas by ruining the thousandth midnight Christmas celebrations at the Cathedral. The Box of Delights is a sequel that in many ways surpasses the nightmarish first book (pace Rob Maslen, who praises the Midnight Folk here) and its narrative strength means it has also made a radio play, a classic BBC TV adaptation and more recently a well received stage representation. All this is summed up very neatly here in the Guardian, and explored by Jake Hayes with his usual depth and perspicacity in his Tygertale blog for this Advent, and it is the language when we come to the denouement that I find striking – I’m coming to this.

Throughout it is Kay’s relationship with Cole Hawlings that sustains the narrative. Cole is a travelling Punch and Judy Showman, but so much more than just an itinerant busker: like his successor, Susan Cooper’s Merriman Lyon, he is at the centre of a struggle against evil, represented (as in the previous book) by the murderously wicked Abner Brown. As with Merriman, we are allowed to see only snatches of the battles the adults are fighting; there are more than symbolic “wolves running,” allies we do not always recognise, dangers for the adults as well as for the children… But there is an important set of differences: while Merriman/Merlin openly entrusts the Matter of a New Britain to the children in Cooper’s Silver on the Tree, Cole Hawlings, having helped Kay restore the rightful place of Midnight Mass in the embattled Cathedral, is still looking back: the nostalgia for Old England is strong in the final pages of The Box of Delights as, speeding towards the Cathedral, we hear the bells start up in all the little churches, and meet the monastic community of the Cathedral’s past. And while we are flying along in Herne the Hunter’s unicorn-pulled sleigh, to move the recently freed Bishop and Dean and choir (&c., &c.) from some kind of sub-Trollope or All-Gas-and-Gaiters imagery, we have a Christmas hymn in a folk idiom, which Masefield calls a carol: here is the text. What surprised me on my first reading as a child, and still surprises me, is that Masefield gives the singing of it to the ambiguous dating-from-Pagan-times Cole Hawlings.

[Incidentally, the first time I heard this song, Móirín Na hEaglaise, sung by Nóirín Ní Riain, I thought of this carol, with the higher sections or answering melody being used in verses 4 and 7. I have tried it, although unsuccessfully: it may need something more robust, where maybe the last line of each verse is the “chorus after each stanza” Masefield notes].

The carol is a remarkable piece. I’d like to look at a few details to see what they tell us about The Box of Delights:

Let’s start, like Masefield, with George. His very name seems to set the lyric in England, maybe even rural England, and it occurs in four of the verses. He is the figure of compassion, a carefulness that twice calls him to the byre (a beautifully localising word: again we are in rural England), where he first lets in a poor couple and then comes back because of the trouble and sees the Christ Child and then the kings.

Lantern, byre, hay, stable – even inn and snow – put the Nativity in the same landscape as The Box of Delights. The “-a” at the end of the shorter lines moves this further into the folk-song idiom, although what is and isn’t a folk song (a bit like what is and isn’t a carol) is disputable. Perhaps the most truly rural – or maybe best attempt – at a “country tone” is the line George heard a trouble in the beasts. It sounds like my Father in Law. It is snowy and dark, George has a lantern to go to the stable/byre – and England receives its revelation.

And there within the manger bars
A little child new born-a,
All bright below a cross of stars
And in his brow a thorn-a.

The Mother, the Child, tenderness – but never too far from the cross and the Pieta: we are in Durer’s bleak theology, with those cross-like structures present in the nativity scene in his Madonna on a Grassy Bank. George’s vision is mystical; we are with Durer, with Chesterton and Gill, in seeing a Gloria in Profundis, although what Masefield presents is a transcendent Child, a submarine vision of humanity divinised not “the height of the fall of God.”

What happens next is interesting from the point of view of a rural poem. The visitors are not shepherds but Kings. I am unsure whether to read anything into two great kings and Melchoir but will assume we needed Melchoir for scansion and rhyme. They bring Eucharistic gifts, too – and at a practical level welcome ones for the poor Family – bread and wine. The ecclesiastical imagery is extended with the mention of robes. We have, by now, a crib scene – but where are the shepherds?

They – and we – are there in the person of George. The plain people of England (to misappropriate a phrase from Myles nagCopaleen) kneel down with the farm worker in homage of

that dear Babe today
That bears the Cross and Crown-a.

In looking back to a rural, more innocent time, we are at the heart of the nostalgia project that occupied so much thinking in the post-War period; we are also in that hankering for a countryside of freedom and adventure and risk that is at the heart of Masefield’s two books, and which informs Lewis, Garner and Cooper — and… and …

And when Cole Hawlings – the theologian Ramon Lull – the pagan countryman and the lost medieval mystic – sings of this past time when George knelt down and prayed-a we are invited to a personal piety that is itself nostalgic, a recreation after The War to End Wars, of a pious peasantry, a dedicated episcopacy and (and here we are into a whole new set of thoughts about the villains in this story) the defeat of corrupt and self-serving greed. Not a bad wish for Christmas in the inter-war period; not a bad wish for this Christmas, either, but I am mindful of how Masefield’s vision played out in the following years: Masefield knows it is a “nice dream,” as Kay admits at the end of the book.

A Carol

…from John Masefield’s The Box of Delights. Presented here without comment – which perhaps is for a future post. – except that in Masefield the even lines are indented.

George took his lantern from the nail
And lit it at the fire-a;
He said, “The snow does so assail,
I’ll shut the cows in byre-a.”

Amid the snow, by byre door,
A man and woman lay-a
George pitied them, they were so poor,
And brought them to the hay-a.

At midnight, while the inn kept feasts,
And trump and whistle blew-a,
George heard a trouble in the beasts
And to the stable drew-a.

And there within the manger bars
A little child new born-a,
All bright below a cross of stars
And in his brow a thorn-a.

The oxen lowed to see their King,
The happy donkey brayed-a,
The cocks and hens on perch did sing,
And George knelt down and prayed-a.

And straight a knocking on the door,
And torches burning red-a,
The two great kings and Melchoir
With robes and wine and bread-a.

And all the night time rolled away
With angels dancing down-a;
Now praise we that dear Babe today
That bears the Cross and Crown-a.

Amid piles of books

The great Alcuin once praised a time (in his past) when he sat with a friend, quiet inter librorum copias – amid piles of books. I have had the privilege of doing the same, and if I didn’t get a PhD out of it, well, more fool me – but I did spend time with chant books, books of hours, office books, the I’m-sure-this-is-interesting-but-it’s-page-after-page-of-crabbed-writing-with-the-occasional-red-capital books… So I wasn’t a complete novice when Lizzie and I went to the British Library for

Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War

…even if my “own period” was six or more centuries later, the late C15th and early C16th MSS. The printing press; the rise and fall of Norman-French; complex harmony; Wycliffe; America… In coming to this eagerly awaited event exploring the piety and power of the kingdoms of what is now called England, I thought I knew what I was getting into – naive of me: this is so much richer than a timeline of MSS.

It is simplistic to say so, but six hundred years is a long time for any scholar, committed professional or amateur, and the thousand years between Cnut the King and us seems more than that by a huge stretch. These are works that never were designed to come together – they span five hundred years themselves – but together they make the most wondrous kaleidoscope of a culture – or of a string of shifting cultures. The BL has skillfully collected material that is not only of monumental importance but also illustrates very well what a different world the peoples of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms inhabited. The lady Wynflaed who left her nun’s veil in her will, as well as naming her slaves that were to be freed; the warning illustration in a bilingual psalter against deceit, showing Cupid firing arrows at a cuddling couple; the elegant copy of Alcuin’s letters; Aelfric’s Grammar… The exhibition is designed to lead the visitor roughly through the first peoples we might think of as “The Anglo-Saxons” (book after book is available on this shorthand; suffice it here to say that, while explaining the rise of Germanic kingship in Southern Britain, the curators steer mercifully away from Our Island Story) through to one of the final cases, The Domesday Book. And for similarities we have not only a growing and changing view of power and relationship with the rest of Europe (and Africa: it was lovely to hear the astonishment of two visitors reading about the African Abbot Hadrian of Canterbury), but the growth of ‘our’ language from the grey, tatty wonder that is Beowulf through to Bishop Wulstan’s poem in praise of…. well, himself. There is enough here to challenge and to enlighten what it is to be English – or even English-speaking – in the uncertain times we live in, partly because we are shown a story – uncertain, faltering, violent, pious – of the growth of English identity.

I’m thinking about the books, principally: they were what I wanted to see. I have mentioned my love of manuscripts before in the blog and although I love them, I know there are crowds of people with more enthusiasm and expertise: my passing note (twice, I think) of Christopher de Hamel’s wonderful Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts just points to who I have read and learned from. (And in such a list I can’t miss out Tolkien (the model for the Dwarves Chronicle in Moria is in this exhibition) or Lewis (and Pauline Baynes, who must, I think, have seen the Utrecht or Harley Psalter) or indeed M R James, whose works I used in paleography tutorials in the 80s.) His book, especially, and Daniel Wakelin’s Designing English book and exhibition were in my head as I looked forward to – and then looked round – the British Library exhibition.

Just sometimes hyperbole around amazement and treasure is justified. It wasn’t just the size of the great Codex Amiatinus that astonishes, but its story: how it got to Italy with Abbot Ceolfrith and why it never got to Rome; what happened to its equally massive sisters; what it shows in illustration and skill. It is open at a wonderful interpretation of a scholar (Ezra, the exilic historian) at the task of writing , a common enough image (not wishing to damn Lindisfarne’s spare and lovely images with faint praise!), but here with his library open, a book on the floor, his ink-mixing stuff to hand… It sums up to me so much of what I love about scholarship both as an activity and as an object of study. Ezra is inter librorum copias, and so I am here, not changing the world by restoring Jerusalem, or making a bid to be made Archbishop like Ceolfrith, but just a tourist into this world of manuscripts, inspired by their beauty and fragility, intrigued by their world(s), glimpsed, like a friend’s face in a crowd.

This is a majestic and vitally important exhibition. It is improbable that I will get to see many of these treasures in another, and it may be that conservation practices will mean they will never come together again. Once in a lifetime? Once in a thousand years.

Oldtales

Reading Peter Dickinson’s The Kin is intriguing. I am not yet finished, but want to take a bit of time to think about stories of origin and how he creates and presents them in between the narrative chapters, the things he calls the Oldtales. Origin stories are interesting in Dickinson because they illuminate the actual tale of the children of the Moonhawk Kin, and their relationship to the places through which their Kin travel.

However, preparing a blog on them I thought I would go back to source books that in turn illuminate “our” own origins (the “our” is in doubt, of course, because of the ways in which increasingly we view our origins: Chris Stringer and Adam Rutherford, for example, give us lively accounts of a trail of humanity that does not include Adam and Eve). I went back to Mircea Eliade to read of the ‘African High Gods,’ of Ngai, of Ndjambi Karunga, and to read the beautiful Hymn to Shamash from Mesopotamia and prayers of a !Kung hunter – and I thought of the stories in Genesis that explain Mamre and Moriah, Beersheba and Bethel. The connections to Peter Dickinson (whose books tell us he was, as a long-term project, often to be found exploring myth and religion in his writings) are really interesting, but didn’t illuminate what I was looking for. How does these stories resonate with the reader? Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces brings me, tantalisingly, to the Bacchae and thence to Thursbitch (“O Bonny Bull”), but again and again I find myself looking at the first stories in Genesis.

They are worth a read in an attempt to see quite what they have to say about earlier views of where we come from, but as Robert Alter in his Art of Biblical Narrative suggests, we need

…some detailed awareness of the grid of conventions upon which, and against which, the individual work operates… am elaborate set of tacit agreements between artist and audience about the ordering of the art work…

and he warns that when we look at biblical narrative

we have lost most of the keys to the conventions out of which it was shaped.

This gives Dickinson a free hand in creating the stories that illuminate the main narrative, of course, and the creation of the Good Places, the multiplication of the sons of An and Ammu – so that these “folk tales” are all distinct, sort of working with the main narrative, sometimes not (yet) – but the opposite is true when we look at our own old tales. We are encouraged, I think, to see them as part of a single book, The Bible, when it might be better to see the biblical texts as a collection – and Genesis itself to be a collection within the collection. All of a sudden I am back in my Old Testament tutorials as an undergraduate, reading Gerhard von Rad.

Von Rad proposes a number of narrative sources, “woven together more or less skillfully by a redactor.” This, in part, explains the two creation stories at the start of the Genesis collection “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” and then “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens” which leads to the next story beginning “Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.” The gods (in the plural form Elohim: we are already into controversy here, but remember that “God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” not to mention the “sons of God” in chapter 6) make choices about the world: reading these stories out of their stained-glass attitudes we have a different sort of world, closer to the movements of Dickinson’s Black Antelope, where the text of Genesis is “de-Biblified,” taken as origin-text rather than sacred story.

Except, maybe, all origin-tales, to sound “right” to us, have an element of sacred story about them? I think I have a lot more to think about.

Codicil:

The amazing Neil Philip, on Twitter, has helpfully informed me and Mat:

The Genesis Rabba, a Jewish commentary of c.400 CE, says that while G-d created Adam in his own image, this likeness to G-d only lasted until Enosh, son of Adam’s 3rd son Seth, after which humanity degraded and acquired faces like apes. Also says humans had tails like animals.

Loads and loads more to think about then!

Using Children’s Literature

I need to preface what I am going to write here by saying that I know that adults read for themselves or for children for a wide, wide range of reasons, and that the key reason why many of us are involved in children’s literature is at its heart pedagogic: we read because we want our students to appreciate our passion, whether they are three in nursery or thirteen in secondary school or training to be teachers or established teachers exploring at postgraduate level. I therefore do understand why teachers ask “Is this suitable for Y2s?” and “Could I use this with the Y7s?” It’s just that this is not where this blog post is starting from.

If we think about literature at any level – let’s say a hard-but-marvellous book like Tristram Shandy, or the much-loved Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam – we are confronted by questions like

Do I understand this?
Does it teach me anything?
Does it give me pleasure?

before (or alongside the moment where) we move into questions such as

What does this text tell us about the historical context of its composition?
How does the author use language to convey character?
Does the narrative structure (or lack of it) illuminate something about the writer’s ideas?

It is true, it seems to me, that the thoughtful reader moves beyond what Bachelard calls “sentimental resonances” produced by text or image. It may be that what Chambers (and others, standing on the shoulders of giants) suggests about developing a community of readers is partly about moving beyond the simple pleasure to the more analytical or critical joys of exploring text and design and language and… and… I find myself getting lost, or maybe I just get the feeling it would be good to come to something of a critical approach, the single, sharp insight on what Children’s Literature is and does, a spearhead.

When I look (as I often have done; as I am doing this evening) at Rob Pope’s English Studies Book, I wonder where Children’s Lit fits into the complexity of English Studies. Are we looking at close reading, with the text-centredness also taking into account the hand-in-hand nature of image and text in picturebooks where it might need to? Are we, as critics and consumers, reading a culture and doing so by consuming a cultural product/object? Do my gender/sexuality, ethnicity, culture come into play? Just as Pope suggests “No-one has a single, pure and fixed position.”

And here we are at the nub of the issue. Not only do we as critics not have a single apparatus to wheel in to view Children’s Literature, it may be that we cannot view Children’s Literature , in all its complexity, as a unified subject for discussion. Can we really look at The Secret Garden as part of the same phenomenon as Revolting Rhymes simply because they are both accessible to Primary-aged children? We might follow Tolkien though his themes such as Escape and Fantasy and see recurrent themes, but how much are these really uniting Elphinstone’s Sky Song with the Rosen/Oxenbury Bear Hunt or The Children of Green Knowe with My Father’s Arms are a Boat? Am I trying to make a unified subect because working with children by sharing books (or working with people who will work with children sharing books) is somehow more straightforward than facing complexity?

elidor6

Let me come back to spearhead as an interesting image. It reminds me (for some reason) of the spear hefted by Roland, one of the children in Elidor (Jake Hayes’ blog is a beaut) – and that took me further, to Charles Keeping’s image of the weary children – and that took me in turn to the four gifts the children have entrusted to them: spear, sword, cauldron and stone. While I’m not suggesting that Garner has consciously presented here an allegory of lit crit, it does strike me that these four treasures (in all their C20th grubbiness) can be asked to stand for the notion that we need more than one thing to preserve the magic, to allow for the critical-but-not-dismissive/destructive eye. The close reading of one reader; the eye to sources and history from another; the pedagogic “Can I use this for my science project?” or”we’re doing fairy tales, where should I start?” or “where is the vocab I need to teach?” of others. Maybe we need them all, the field is so diverse.

Adults and children read for a wide, wide range of reasons; we enter not a single section of a bookshop, but a richly unfolding section upon section of fantasy, pathos, travel, speculation, high adventure and myth. We call it Children’s Literature when really it might at least have a plural. “What are your researching, Nick?” “Oh, Children’s Literatures.”

And now I have lots more to think about.

Bachelard, G (1958, translation 1964) The Poetics of Space, trans Maria Jolas. New York: Penguin USA

(I am indebted to Nikki Gamble for discussing Bachelard on Twitter and moving me to explore his work)

Chambers, A (nd) Booktalk http://www.aidanchambers.co.uk/booktalk.htm and The Reading Environment http://www.aidanchambers.co.uk/readingenviro.htm accessed 29.10.18

Halford, D and Zaghini, E (2004) Folk and Fairy Tales: a Book Guide. London: Booktrust

Lesnik-Oberstein, K (1994) Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Oxford: OUP

Pope, R (1998) The English Studies Book. London: Routledge

Tolkien, J (1964) Tree and Leaf. London: George Allen and Unwin

How Dead Are the Dead?

In the great story of Funnybones we are confronted with an unheimlich narrative. Three characters go for a walk, play on the swings and go home – but there’s a problem: they are dead. Or are they? They are skeletons, certainly, but they have emotions, thought, language, relationships and in any case we are told explicitly that

On a dark dark hill there are was a dark dark town…
and in the dark dark house there was a dark dark staircase
and down the dark dark staircase there was a dark dark cellar
and in the dark dark cellar …
some skeletons lived.

The nub of my argument when I talked in the Brookes Hallowe’en Seminar was that depiction of “real death” is sometimes avoided or underplayed, although this is changing. The comic misunderstanding of the skeleton in the park requires however at least some knowledge of what a skeleton is. It comes back to the time (maybe 1993) I read Funnybones in nursery, with animal X-rays darkening the windows, and as I finished (“…some skeletons lived….THEY STILL DO”) the X-rays with perfect timing slid from their places and we all jumped. Death as comic – but also as unnerving.

In Funnybones the dead are hardly that unnerving. A big skeleton, a little skeleton and a dog skeleton are identifiable as a strange sort of being: nocturnal, with a clear mission to frighten people, but not dead, really, and if undead then hardly George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. But they have accidents, experience disappointment, and are warm towards one another. In the disjuncture the reader sees not only the scarily unfamiliar, but also the very famliar, a family unit out with the dog. Their silliness reminds me always of the “gurning to camera” of the third skeleton in the C14th De Lisle Psalter, Arundel MS 83, f. 127v, blogged about (with a great illustration of the grinning skeletons) by the British Library here. But while in “The Three Living and the Three Dead,” the skeletons meet the living princes to “admonish them to consider the transience of life,” in Funnybones we are with Gilbert and Sullivan finding that “we spectres are a jollier crew than you, perhaps, suppose.”

To understand what is going on here, we can refer to Gillian Rose’s visual methodology:

What is being shown? What are the components of the image? How are they arranged?
Is this a contradictory image?
What knowledges are being deployed?

This has come up before (it’s a shame that the new blog hasn’t preserved the images) and formed the backbone of the talk I gave a couple of years ago on the visual methodology of death. It is also pertinent in the run up to Hallowe’en: again something I have discussed before. What is being shown is a family out for a walk – or three animate skeletons on a (rather unsuccessful) scaring spree. In the same way there are complexities in the folk tale of the Teeny Tiny Woman who is compelled to give back the bone she finds in a graveyard. The sheeted figures who look on in horror as she pillages a bone for her supper (what on earth is that about?) require their bone back. They are not, initially, menacing: they are being menaced by a cute little old lady. The comedy lies in the contradictory imagery, with the knowledges being deployed being rather complex.

The Teeny Tiny Woman, Funnybones; these will do for now. They draw on the flwing sheets of M R James and the earlier shrouded corpses. But of course children do know skeletons – museums have them; dinosaur fossils have them; we (and this is a bit of a shock: see this brief observation) have them. And in Funnybones we are invited to see with T S Eliot’s Webster “the skull beneath the skin.”

There are other ways children see death, of course. Children’s Literature does well to represent a number of aspects:

In The Scar we deal, heartbreakingly, with real death – but the dead mother is unseen: her absence is the key act in the story.Dad said “She’s gone for ever.”I knew she hadn’t gone, she was dead and I would never see her again.’This story is not alone in looking, not at death, but at bereavement, just as the heart breaking Sad Book depicts the death of Michael Rosen’s son Eddie as a blank page, a gap in the history, loss. He is drawn very much alive – and then not seen. A kinder view than the medieval skeletons? Or more shocking?
In Badger’s Parting Gifts, on a different tack we are invited to see the actual moment of Badger’s dying, going down into a long dark tunnel with no fear or pain. Yet even here the dead Badger is not depicted.
In Death Duck and the Tulip (when I’ve talked about this the most divisive book choice), Duck recognises Death and they are friends – of a sort. Death here is close kin to the medieval Death the Reaper, or the three dead mentioned above, and maybe there is a message here of living life to the full and accepting our mortality that is not far from Arundel MS 83…

A conclusion to all this? No, there isn’t one. Writing about death finds a number of ways to lighten the message – comedy; the sidestepping of the dead body (not always: Sydney Smith does so well (gently but clearly) in Footpath Flowers); using animals instead of humans – but increasingly these are not hard and fast conventions, and I predict we will see more imaginative ways to deal with letting in the dark and the dead into children’s literature.

Ahlberg A, Ahlberg J (2010) Funnybones (re-issue ed). London: Puffin

De Paola T (1985) Teeny Tiny. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Doonan, J (1993) Looking at Pictures in Picture Books. Stroud: Thimble

Erlbruch, W (2008) Duck, Death and the Tulip. Wellington: Gecko

Lawson, J and Smith S (2015) Footpath Flowers. London: Walker Books

Moundlic, C (2009) The Scar. London: Walker

Rose, G (2007) Visual Methodologies (2nd ed). London: Sage

Rosen, M (2004) The Sad Book. London: Walker Books

Varley S (1985) Badger’s Parting Gifts. London: Picture Lions

A World We Feel at Home In

It seems odd – maybe contrary to some netiquette that forbids self-publicity – to repost a blog, but with Dave Aldridge‘s appearance to discuss remembrance in Cambridge (and in general) still very current, I want to return to the noxious growlings of Gove against “Blackadder history” and how I looked at this in a blog post earlier. Here it is, with its warning that “it is not only ancient history that makes myths.” This isn’t really about Gove, or the trenches, or the youths who will dress up and march in streets and square next month, but about how we seek to mythologise bloody episodes as part of our story of belonging. Glorious victory at Rochester, Brunanburh, Hastings, the “famous victory” at Blenheim, Prestonpans, Amiens and the Somme , the Baltic? Which is the most relevant now? How do we use these stories? Is Hastings an awful warning about the dreadful continentals or a defining moment in land ownership and language? Is the Somme a warning never to trust politicians’ manipulation of the people or a blow for the freedom of Europe?

Yesterday was the 84th birthday of the great Alan Garner, and as I look at his work, and mindful of my blog post on fiction, memory and Roman Britain, the work of Rosemary Sutcliff, and then think of the Battle of Hastings, remembered last week, and the battles of more recent times we celebrate (is that the word?) in the Remembrance season I think I want just to add some of his thoughts on memory and landscape from The Voice That Thunders. In the first section, from the essay “Inner Time” Garner looks bleakly at the American myth, contrasted with his vision of Europe where myth is richly layered:

Man is an animal that tests boundaries. He is a ‘mearcstapa,” “boundary strider,” and the nature of myth is to help him understand boundaries, to cross them and to comprehend the new; so that, whenever Man reaches out , it is myth that supports him with a truth that is constant, although names and shapes may change… The Biblical, the Epic, the Romantic, the Gothic are all merestones, boundary markers, of their day and the pointers of ours. Three hundred years ago, the mystery was in the greenwood; last century, the nearest grave; now the nearest galaxy…

And then in his essay on Strandloper, he returns to his task in celebrating the autochthonic ideals of language and people and history in the First Peoples in Australia and in his native Cheshire:

[I have been trying] to celebrate the land and tongue of a culture that has been marginalised by a metropolitan intellectualism, that churns out canonical writers…who draw on the library, ignorant of the land; on the head, bereft of the heart. For true reading is creativity: the willingness to look into the open hand of the writer and to see what may, or may not, be there…

Garner has the energy, skill and creativity to be the offerer, the writer who presents us with ideas and wisdom and myth and legend. Perhaps I was wrong in my earlier blog to have thrown all of this into a store room full of the “chill of secrets;” maybe the fiction writer – and the Remembrance marchers and the people protesting – is looking for the defining myth still. Just as the people recovering from the 1914-18 conflict rediscovered land and landscape – returning to a mixture of visions of pastoral and homes fit for heroes – maybe the scambling and unquiet time we are in demands of us a new view of what we mean by “home” and a world we feel at home in.

The trouble is that myths are always shifting: flora changes on the Cheshire hills of Garner and the borders of Sutcliff; we need to read our landscape as closely as the text an author proposes –

The pity is that idiots have driven a chariot of the gods through the great wonders and the true mystery.

Place: literature as guide

This blog – or rather its predecessor – explored place rather a lot. This summer’s trip to Santorini was in part inspired by reading Clive King’s The 22 Letters; Gawain and Ludchurch (“Lud’s Church”) are all over it, too. I have read about places and gone there; I have gone to places and read about them. I read The Canterbury Tales and Mydans’ novel about Thomas Becket and then went to Canterbury. It set me thinking: what might I have made of Paris if I had read Vango first? (After all, after I’d read Becket and its – erm – inspiration, the novel by the great medievalist Helen Waddell, I was disappointed to find so little left of the Paris they describe. In fact, although there is more around Notre Dame than is immediately obvious, there is more tangible stuff left of Clive King’s Ancient Thera in the tablets of Linear B and the archaeological museums than there is of the ill-fated lodgings of the twelfth century canons of Paris.) How do we, as adults, use the written word to tell children about the physical world? How might we (or do we) use story? How might this, in itself, change the visitor’s ideas?

And if Vango might have changed my view of Paris, what of Selznick’s Hugo Cabret? Or Kipling’s or Milne’s Sussex? I could go on… and that’s before we start thinkng of places responding to their visitors – where Canterbury’s rebuild was prompted by its visitors, and Paris still holds the echoes of the Hemingways and Steins so wonderfully celebrated and parodied in the film Anastasia in Paris Holds the Key to Your Heart (of course Paris is particularly susceptible to this myth-making, as is Oxford, my city of aquatint and commuting).

But then we come (of course) to Garner. The creation of the Alderley phenomenon, drawing on myth and legend, changes a bit of whimsical parkland with a few stories attached into a mythic landscape out of all proportion to the stories that we can find readily. It does so almost entirely because of the authochthonic outlook of Alan Garner. We find ourselves in this place or that seeking to see with his eyes, following his train of thought, his access to myth and legend. We are tempted to try and see his Alderley, his Thursbitch, his Ludcruck. Gawain and Beowulf are in his sights; we peer into his horizons and try to see what he is pointing out.

But let’s broaden this out. As I have discussed before, there are clearly places that have myths or legends attached, where stories have been piled up. The Cheshire/Derbyshire border is one such; maybe Oxford is another, or Paris, or Tintagel. Part of the project I seem to be involved with is the uncovering of these story cairns – but there is another part: it is the job of the critic of children’s literature – or some of us – to look not only at what has been collected, but also at the effect of the stories on the visitors to the landscape.

What does the young visitor make (and here we are in the recent Twitter conversation that started my thinking) of Venice having read about the pig Olivia and her visit? And how might the adult draw on this in September to help the impressions of the visit stay vivid?

Shelving

After years of accumulating homeliness, leaving my Brookes office was a dreadful thing to do; hasty, almost punitive. We left for Greece the day after my Brookes contract came to an end, with thoughts of Prospero set adrift echoing through my reading. My books of magic – of Wild Spaces Wild Magic – were set up, but the rest was just boxes of stuff.

The boxes were sulking when I returned, but with a bit of coaxing, they began to find ways into the study. Joe helped by taking me to Ikea and then helping with building the shelves. I did that job I had called “tonking”when I was a library assistant: setting the shelf heights by sorting out the supports or tonks. And after that it was shelving.

I decided to divide the books into “children’s literature” and “lecturer-type” books, with Wild Spaces Books on their own, starting with Molly Bang’s Picture This, through some (but not all) the Robert MacFarlanes, ending with Z is for Jack Zipes. There were boxes of liturgical and Biblical books – a very nice Liber Usualis, for example, and my battered Greek New Testament – too, but I set them to one side. I looked at the children’s literature and set to. They were in boxes roughly alphabetically, so that a pile of Anholts came out together, and more Mairi Hedderwick than I thought I had; but they weren’t in strict order, and there were gaps. This means that books that had not met for years suddenly were leaning against one another: Sheila Cassidy’s retelling of the Creation was up against Michael Foreman’s eco-committed texts on one side and David Almond’s Skellig on the other. More arrive and these congruences shift: Roald Dahl and Lauren Child budge in; Noel Langley’s Land of Green Ginger, with its rather dubious racial stereotypes, squeezes in with Virginia Kroll’s Masai and I. It’s a bit like rush hour, but they all do get in.

Size is an issue, and while I create “Outsize” shelves, for a while it looks like MacFarlane and Morris’ The Lost Words has no home, until moving the Little Tollers downstairs makes space in Wild Spaces Wild Magic, between Landmarks and W G Hoskins The Making of the English Landscape. Some of these juxtapositions are just right.

Biblical and liturgical find a home like the sparrow in psalm 83.

The grown-up books fill higher shelves, partly in case grandchildren want to browse the lower ones for books that are “for” them, but here it begins again: for a good while, Philip Pullman’s Daemon Voices snuggled next to Rob Pope’s English Studies, until Francis Pryor arrived with Steven Pinker and the Opies. Julie Fisher rested against Ralph Waldo Emerson for a while (or was Emerson the one doing the leaning?); Caspar Henderson and Geoffrey Grigson met briefly, as did Jackie Musgrave and T H White.

It’s all a lovely conceit, as if this crowded Tube train of office shelving means that Simon Schama and Chris Stringer will get chatting as their covers touch, or Katharine Briggs
will strike up a conversation with Jane Carroll as they squeeze together. But of course they won’t. It may be that George Monbiot does talk to Sara Maitland, but they don’t do so on my shelves. Here, that’s my job. Because if this blog has point beyond a rather vain showing you (dear Reader) round some of a really quite small collection, it is this: books “talk” to each other only in the person who reads attentively and makes connections. We become passionate about this idea or that, but it is the reader who is in a position to connect playing outdoors as the Last Child in the Woods with the Hermits and the New Monasticism of the eleventh century (Louv and Leyser). Alcuin of York reminisces O quam dulcis vita fuit dum sedebamus in quieti … inter librorum copias, but I might respond O how sweet life is, Blessed Alcuin, where we sit and read in quiet and let the ideas inspire and jolt and fizz and mix…

We are where the debate takes place, where critical thinking emerges. Not reading alone, but thinking and speaking and mulling and writing – and maybe reshelving our ideas in a different order from time to time.