Green Thoughts, Green Shades, Green Knights

What sort of journey does Gawain go on? I asked this when thinking about the interior and exterior journeys in children’s literature and traditional tales. Today – cold as cold, but sunny even in the woods as the leaves lose their grip – I was struck by the challenge in how I ask my students to take some time alone and quiet in the woods. No ‘phone, no eye contact with one another, just ten minutes (today five, since they were so cold) stood or sat alone in the sunshine of a little wood.

I do this because one of the dominant things when we think about outdoors is the opportunity for boisterous play – the “let kids be kids” argument is full of this. However, I saw this picture of one of my class and suddenly remembered a little girl who “played camping” all one long summer afternoon in a nursery garden. I repeatedly asked her if she was OK, if she needed anything, and she always smiled and said “no.” Letting humans be human is often about the powerful and energetic ways we interact; today’s shelter building and “One Two Three Where Are You?” games were great examples of this. But to “be” outside may also need time: time to listen to the angry little wren, the panic of a jackdaw, the wary crackle of feet (a hoof, I suspect) in the undergrowth. Time to not listen to me melling on, or to the demands of social media –

till what I find, I find
because it’s there

as John Burnside puts.

Rachel Kaplan‘s sustained work on the benefits of being outdoors (for example here) emphasises the restorative effects of being out in nature. She is also clear you don’t need a wood, and I can understand that. I might contend that these forays into expansive environments also can/might include a spiritual encounter – with silence (or, as the students today identified, a lot of different, smaller noises), with our own feelings and intentions. For some this is familiar, welcome; for others, I know from debriefing this activity in the past, it might entail a confronting of an individual’s own discomfort. What sort of journey do we go on to our respective Green Chapels, and what might we find? Time to be alone with (or without) our thoughts can lead to all sorts of different paths and encounters – even in five minutes in an autumn-cold wood.

More on lost words

When, a while back, I made a brief mention of the disappearance of some words from the Oxford children’s dictionary I acknowledged the limitations of the lexicographer, who needs to balance all sorts of needs. I also mourned (briefly) the way that “country” words might fade into ignoble disuse. Today, Robert Macfarlane picks up the linguistic gauntlet, reporting and critiquing a paper (which I must read) on the capacity of children to assimilate knowedge about real species, but contrasts this with what appears to be a preference for Pokemon, which Macfarlane characterises as part of a “lack of natural literacy.” I could, maybe, try and contrast this with the walk I’ve just taken where 7yo granddaughter made up a song about conkers- but as I type, I see “conkers” is not recognised by my predictive text or spellchecker….

His writing is detailed, moving, insightful, and ranges from Barker’s Flower Fairies through Le Guin and Garner. I feel, as I read Rob’s thoughts in the paper, that I have been trotting behind him for a long while, as well as looking at other stuff along the way, and am looking forward to hearing him and Jackie Morris as part of their book tour for Lost Words. His name-checking of authors and critics we both admire – or that a growing community that I am amazed to find I inhabit with him, and Mat, and the great Alison Lurie and others all have read – is enlightening about how a scholarly community is constituted, made up of links and lines as complex as a set of ecological interrelationships.

Jackie Morris explains the evolution of the new book. Here is her blog post on the book, itself well worth a read, and she explains how the vision for their new book moved from protest letter through initial conceptions of a “children’s book” through to something rich and strange. I am looking forward to buying my own, and to having it signed in due course…

But this essay in the paper takes me further, and I am immensely grateful. It seems to me that we (whoever that comprises, but I hope it means me, and Mat, and The Landreader project, as well as bigger names) are no longer marginal children’s lit ecocritics, but part of a bigger movement of eco-literacy. I feel a call, if not to arms, then at least to get my critical compass out, to set out again (and again) on the paths that lead from the crossroads where The Chaperon Rouge meets B’zou, to where Gawain meets the Green Knight – and back again, through the riches of folk tale and legend, through traditional tales and modern inventive fictions, so we can help people appreciate, in Macfarlane’s words, how “nature, naming and dreaming are all tangled together.”

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?

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.

What gives me pleasure in reading?

This post, as I begin it, is an instant “Save Draft,” since it will take a lot of unpicking. Even as I write I see the CLIP Carnegie Kate Greenaway list is out with Tidy, Wolves of Currumpaw and Wild Animals of the North in there. Popularity, pleasure, professional judgement come together. Complex stuff.

Do I read because something is popular?

Not always, but sometimes I have to, if only to keep up to date with other people’s ideas or trends in production. A Hello Kitty version of Red Riding Hood recently stands out as a low point. I persevered with Harry Potter because I thought I should, and was glad I did.

Do I read children’s books for pleasure?

For my own pleasure, as well as the pleasure of sharing? I get pleasure from the innocence – whether knowing or otherwise on the author’s part – which I can see even if I don’t really participate in it. Granted , as Hollindale so gnomically says “ours is the age of Lord of the Flies,” where even the bear-protagonist of Jon Klassen is vengeful and murderous, there is in much children’s literature a lightness that is engaging.

I like the simplicity, whether (again) knowing or unknowing. The foxy-looking gentleman leading Jemima Puddleduck astray; the bromance (an anachronistic term) of Esca and Marcus Flavius Aquila; the inversion of roles in the Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig: they are tricksy, or challenging, funny and poignant but simple in the storytelling in some way I haven’t yet teased out, somehow. I know I am in danger here of seeming as if I like the descent into liking the easy read, and I will only protest (using Julien Benda’s phrase (revisited by Hollindale) Le Trahison Des Clercs, the way that intellectuals do not stay true to their “calling”) that it is the subtlety and playfulness of the design and language that I find attractive, not the easiness. There’s so much more to say on this, but this will do for now.

I get pleasure from good design, from inventive use of colour, interesting cadences in prose, from irony and jokiness. I get pleasure – and did as a child – at the knowing wink towards the world of the adult in the Moomins (I like it less in Dahl). I suppose I get pleasure in the play of ideas: it’s a bit like reading poetry, where rhythm and cadence and imagery and word choice and the appreciation of all of them together makes for the biggest part of my pleasure in reading. Look at these lines from R S Thomas for example:

What is the Christmas without
snow? We need it
as bread of a cold
climate, ermine to trim

our sins with, a brief
sleeve for charity’s
scarecrow to wear its heart
on, bold as a robin.

My pleasure comes from appreciation of the shared experiences, but also from the way the words are placed, with care and attention, the slipperiness of simile and metaphor, of sacrament and observation.

And I get pleasure from the debate I have with colleagues about something we delight in together. Children’s literature is one of the reasons I came to Brookes, with my original work title of “Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies, Communication, Language and Literacy. ” It is a joy to find that discussion still alive in the last years of my work.

Professional Judgment comes in somewhere?

Because of my job and my chosen area of research (now here’s a circular argument bowling down the hill of criticism!) , yes.

I can cite two voices in announcing the prize lists today :

There are journeys to be made, friendships to discover, characters to fall in love with and worlds to truly immerse oneself in.
Questions of identity, friendship and responsibility, both to others and to the natural world, are key themes this year. It is also hugely heartening to see our shortlisted writers and illustrators tackling potentially difficult and big ideas…

And I like those descriptions of the values that professionals see in books. I’d like my students to appreciate these views.

Boneland and Thursbitch

As I come away from Twitter this evening I am aware I have started a hare around “favourite” works by Alan Garner. Now, Mat raised a tricky question about “good books” and children’s books in his MA session in which the class explored the Brookes Early Children’s Book Collection, and this evening I feel pulled in all sorts of directions.

What do I “get” from Thursbitch as a novel?

Is there something that takes the edge off Boneland for me?

Is Elidor a better children’s book than Thursbitch is an adults’ one?

In response to Mat’s challenge these are crass questions here, I know, simple responses, not Lit Crit. I’m only going to look at the first one, and “which is best” faced with these two books is a game for the deluded: I have to admit this is just about taste, and that others can defend their own options as robustly.

What I love about adult Garner is his trickery. He deliberately lays trails of myth and language across his known landscape, dragging us (like the unwilling Mobberley farmer in the Alderley Edge foundation myth) around the countryside in search of his deepest roots. This is known territory. In Boneland- crudely recapped here and with a crystal-clear review from Ursula LeGuin here – Garner asks what it might be like to grow up having had some ambiguous and dangerous adventure as a pre-teen. But this is not really his motive, it seems to me: in linking a present story with a Mesolithic (or even pre-Sapiens hominid) story in the same place, he is challenging the reader to ask about time, about myth and religion, and therefore about people as storytellers. He draws on his own story, first seen in the Weirdstone and the Moon of Gomrath, but with a real reverence for pre-history, for advanced astronomy, and for the tale of Gawain and the Green Knight, whose denouement is set in the area. Like the Green Knight, Garner offers a challenge to go beyond the comfortable, and does so in a moving and accomplished conclusion to the Weirdstone trilogy.

What I love about adult Garner is his trickery. In Thursbitch, Garner plays again with time – as he has in Elidor, Red Shift and the Owl Service – but here , as in Boneland, his argument is not just with simplistic and linear history but with how past and present are mutually influential. In Boneland, the Man, the shaman of a prehistoric refugium, is anchored in a spirituality that returns him again and again to Ludchurch, which Garner renames Ludcruck. I found myself profoundly moved by the place, on visiting it – and in contrast found Thursbitch no less – well, what? “vigilant”? “sentient”? but markedly less welcoming. It would seem natural, therefore, to like Boneland more than Thursbitch (I had read them both a number of times before the visit). But actually, much as I like (too weak a word) Boneland, and especially the prehistoric sections, I think it’s Thursbitch the novel that takes my prize, even if it’s Ludchurch, the place, the Green Chapel, Ludcruck that has my heart.

What I love about adult Garner is his trickery. He tickles me into action, into deep (as much as close) reading, and thence into the archaeology of story. In this way the mystical parallels that underpin Thursbitch play out Garner’s own insights into the valley’s potential as a cultic site. In making Jack Turner the jagger or packman key to the story, he is able to pull threads (yes, this is a Garner metaphor) of stories from 4000 BCE Sumeria, astronomy and myth from England and elsewhere, and weave the passing tales of local farmers he knows. In doing so he writes with an authority I do not feel in Strandloper or even Boneland. Can I defend this? Is it simply that in Thursbitch – and arising from Garner’s own evocative commentary on it in a number of places – I can see the trail of reference, half-remembered story, song and ritual? That I am flattered, or flatter myself?

There is that.

What I find so moving in Thursbitch is the complexity of his meditation on love and death. Sal, terminally ill, finds herself attracted to the place. Her companion, the Jesuit Ian confronts, with her, her impending illness. The barely spoken love they feel is half explored, and ruthlessly, painfully part of their relationship. In the eighteenth century valley, Jack loses his wife to the plague, loses his baby, and nearly loses his soul, too. The dual protagonists come so close in their experience of love and loss they discern one another’s presence in the valley – and in the end, when Sal and Jack meet the end that has been inevitable since their first appearance in the novel, there is some sense of a kindness in the way the Immortals end their sport with the two of them.

So it presses lots of buttons for me: it gets my mind racing, it excites me to think and read (and read and read) beyond the text and then go back for more. It has (and if you have followed this blog before you are maybe tiring of the references) dragged me up to the Tors themselves for (no pun intended, but inescapable nonetheless) a Peak Experience. Quid multa dicam? There is a lot more to say – a lot more work for Mat and me (and others) to do, unpicking the landscape and the myth and the story. But this will have to do for now; I think I have written enough to convince myself of my love and admiration for Thursbitch.

But I dream in Ludcruck.

Return to…

A return to Garner country is demanded. I will confess here what Mat already knows: I dream of Ludchurch and spend a lot of sleep time in Thursbitch.

It is unfulfilled business, I guess, that takes me back. While these chaps seem to have done the things we might have I am left feeling that there is more to do, more to say. Is this because I am looking for a “safe” way of looking at the experiences we had, a tame Analytic Autoethnography (Anderson, Journal of Contemporary Ethnograph, 2006: thanks to Jon Reid for the source)? Am I just fighting shy of the overwhelmingly evocative? Would categories and Digimaps tame our experience? A lengthy quotation follows, although I would discourage this in a student essay:

Evocative autoethnographers have argued that narrative fidelity to and compelling description of subjective emotional experiences create an emotional resonance with the reader that is the key goal of their scholarship. The genre of auto ethnographic writing that they have developed shared postmodern sensibilities—especially the skepticism toward representation of “the other” and misgivings regarding generalizing theoretical discourse. Evocative autoethnography requires considerable narrative and expressive skills..

and these are skills beyond me, or maybe the hugeness of the experience simply dwarfs my skills.

It is as if (clumsy extended metaphor alert) I foolishly took up a challenge and find the Big Thing (Garner’s translation of þurs) bigger and more humbling than I had expected, and the Gawain quest provides a suitable framework.

In the comfort of Camelot the quest was achievable, but in Thursbitch I found something- a project, an attraction, a something that cannot be reduced to analysis. I note Garner talks about the bigness of the þurs… So this brings me to the ambiguity of the relationship between Thursbitch and Gradbach. In Ludchurch we met up with the big, slow awesomeness of the Green Knight, but just because it is big, is this Thing the þurs? My instant reaction is to say that if Ludchurch is safe, Thursbitch is danger, the Valley of the Living Dread in Erica Wagner’s tricksy phrase, and for me maybe Ludchurch is (as I’ve said before) masculine, and Thursbitch, feminine: Sarastro and the Queen of the Night. Lost on the moor, in the fog, lost in the folklore, and in some hinterland of Jung and Freud… Two different big things – lots of different big things – in my mind. Continue reading “Return to…” →

Contains Cannibalism and Barry Manilow

This was my “trigger warning” for our Becoming a Reader class this week in which we rounded off our work on traditional tales with a rendition of The Story of the Grandmother – and the meeting at the crossroads with Bzou, the werewolf – and a look at how culture informs our reading of a text, for which we used Copacabana.

I rather like this session: “What’s a ‘showgirl’?” “What do we understand by a ‘dress cut down to there’?” and just who did shoot who[m]? It allows me to present the work of Hilary Janks and Mary Roche not just as ways to look at children’s reading but also at us as adults becoming readers. I am fortunate to be able to explore this further with Mat in his Reading for Pleasure MA module tonight.

Janks makes a powerful point – or set of points – here:

“…decoding is often equated with reading and is associated with functional or basic literacy….The interrogation of texts, reading against the text, is tied to critical literacy and implies that readers recognise texts as selective versions of the world; they are not subjected to them and they can imagine how texts can be transformed to represent a different set of interests.”

and if I had one wish for our third year students, or maybe even just a wish arising from this module, it would be that their time at Brookes has allowed them to develop just this critical literacy – that policy, just like Garner or Shakespeare or the EPPE review, can only ever present selective versions of the world. I’m not asking for cynicism, or a world in which the principal graduate attribute is becoming a Radio 4 listener – but for an engagement with ideas which asks about viewpoint and opinion and world view in a critical way.

The Back of a Shadow

We have been looking at fatherhood and (not quite a coincidence) looking at the work of Alan Garner, and for me they came together here, in Ludchurch.

I am not going to draft out a whole history of Lud, or Ludd, or delve into the speculation the Internet loves of sun-worship and pre-Christian themes in some kind of Ur-Gawain, tempting though they are, but in trying to make sense of Ludchurch in the Garner landscapes I need at least to find a place for Lud.

There is a useful site here for the Gawain literature, and a good ME text here. From these I have picked out some of the points about the Green Knight.

Half etayn in erde I hope þat he were…

For wonder of his hwe men hade,
Set in his semblaunt sene;
He ferde as freke were fade,
And oueral enker-grene.

An Ettin, the other kind of giant from a þurs but clearly from the green world of magic, “he carried himself in hostile fashion,” or “as a Fay-man fell he passed.” Not someone to tangle with, his holyn bobbe in one hand, an axe in the other. The scene is about colour and movement and threat – while Ludchurch, although “oueral enker-grene” is enclosed, and (when we visited, and when the Man visits in Boneland) silent -a cultic space, not an agent.

The location of the Green Chapel has been discussed by others, including Alan Garner, and with more re-reading after visiting Ludchurch I am drawn to its cliffs and rocks and “knokled knarrez with knorned stonez.” In Gawain it is a place of an evil cult, maybe more than an echo of un-Christian practice.

Here my[gh]t aboute mydny[gh]t
Þe dele his matynnes telle!
‘Now iwysse,’ quoþ Wowayn, ‘wysty is here;
Þis oritore is vgly, with erbez ouergrowen;
Wel bisemez þe wy[gh]e wruxled in grene
Dele here his deuocioun on þe deuelez wyse.
Now I fele hit is þe fende, in my fyue wyttez,
Þat hatz stoken me þis steuen to strye me here.
Þis is a chapel of meschaunce, þat chekke hit bytyde!
Hit is þe corsedest kyrk þat euer I com inne!’

But in this place, and from the encounter with the half-Ettin Bertilak -and through the magic of the powerful Morgan –

(“Þe maystrés of Merlyn”…”Weldez non so hy[gh]e hawtesse
Þat ho ne con make ful tame–“)

– Gawain learns his lesson.

Do we meet in the Green Man a father principally as instructor and law-giver? And where does this father “sit”? I began to speculate on the landscape way back in my research proposal in 2010; perhaps I was too glib to write earlier about ” the world of the dad, not the desert of the Patriarch”? To move into my present concern for Alan Garner’s real-and-mythic landscape, how does an author concerned with real places manage their mythology while keeping them recognisable, in some sense “true”?