Article: Pathways' End: The Space of Trauma in Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking

Kertzer, Adrienne, Pathways' End: The Space of Trauma in Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking. Bookbird, Jan 2012. Vol. 50 , Iss. 1;  pp. 10-19

Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking is a trilogy of ideas obsessed with the experience and healing of trauma. Using the conventions of speculative fiction to probe the relationship between the language of choice and the experience of trauma, Ness frames his representation of Holocaust-like trauma through his depiction of the collective memory and governance of the Land (the planet's indigenous inhabitants). As a result, Chaos Walking differs from many realist historical novels for young people that focus their narrative energy upon trauma as an individual psychological disorder. The trilogy's growing interest in its final two volumes upon the place of traumatic memory in the mind of the sole indigenous survivor of what is repeatedly referred to as genocide enables Ness to ask contentious questions about the healing of trauma, and how individual trauma differs from cultural trauma. 

[Headnote]
Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking is a trilogy of ideas obsessed with the experience and healing of trauma. Using the conventions of speculative fiction to probe the relationship between the language of choice and the experience of trauma, Ness frames his representation of Holocaust-like trauma through his depiction of the collective memory and governance of the Land (the planet's indigenous inhabitants). As a result, Chaos Walking differs from many realist historical novels for young people that focus their narrative energy upon trauma as an individual psychological disorder. The trilogy's growing interest in its final two volumes upon the place of traumatic memory in the mind of the sole indigenous survivor of what is repeatedly referred to as genocide enables Ness to ask contentious questions about the healing of trauma, and how individual trauma differs from cultural trauma.

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." (George Eliot Middlemarch 191)

Recognizing that "[e]veryone agrees [Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking is] a great read," Matt Hilliard asks, "but what exactly is it about?" (Hilliard 2011). This essay proposes that Chaos Walking is a trilogy of ideas obsessed with the experience and healing of trauma. The quotation from George Eliot's Middlemarch that serves as the epigraph to The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008), the first volume of Ness's trilogy, provides a fitting introduction to the circumstances of the male settlers of the planet they have named New World. "[We] should die of that roar" is an apt description of how the settlers are initially tormented by the Noise-the telepathic transmission of men's thoughts and memories-that deprives them of the ability to keep anything private. In keeping with Roger Luckhurst's (2008) description of trauma as "violently open[ing] passageways between systems that were once discrete, making unforeseen connections that distress or confound" and Sigmund Freud's (1920) speculation in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" that the trauma occurs when "an extensive breach [is] made in the protective shield against stimuli" (Luckhurst 3; Freud 303), the male settlers appear to be suffering a collective trauma produced by a lack of boundaries between the self and the group as a whole.

Todd Hewitt, the adolescent narrator of the first book, born ten years after the colonists first landed, regards Noise as the "mess" of men's minds: "It's what's true and what's believed and what's imagined and what's fantasized and... even tho the truth is definitely in there, how can you tell what's true and what's not when yer getting everything?" (Knife 42). Todd's definition points to the trilogy's title: "The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking" (Knife 42). Todd's language not only alludes to the absence of a Freudian protective shield-a filter-but also to the absence of women in his town; he has been told that all the settler women died when the indigenous inhabitants of the planet "released the Noise germ during the war" (Knife 14). While references to indigenous inhabitants and germ warfare obviously remove the fantasy world of Chaos Walking from the realist setting of Eliot's novel, the novel's epigraph announces Ness's desire to situate Chaos Walking beside Middlemarch, the novel that Virginia Woolf (1925) called "for all its imperfections... one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" (Woolf 172). Including Middlemarch in his list of "unsuitable" books that adolescents should read (2011), Ness has no interest in rigid distinctions between young adult reading and adult reading. Young adults can and should read what adults are reading, and what Ness provides in Chaos Walking is a dystopian fantasy version of Middlemarch for the 21st century: a novel of ideas that addresses numerous topics of contemporary concern to readers of any age, including genocide, indigenous histories of conquest, terrorism, torture, ecological disaster, and media-induced information overload.1

All of these topics relate to trauma. Using the conventions of speculative fiction, Ness probes the relationship between the language of choice and the experience of trauma. Because he frames his representation of Holocaust-like trauma through his depiction of the collective memory and governance of the Land (the planet's indigenous inhabitants), Chaos Walking differs from many realist historical novels for young people that, despite their reference to events that might traumatize a collective group, focus their narrative energy upon trauma as an individual psychological disorder. In so doing, such books reflect the tendency John Stephens (1992) generalizes is characteristic of children's fiction as a whole. In contrast, the trilogy's growing interest in its final two volumes-The Ask and the Answer (2009) and Monsters of Men (2010)-in the place of traumatic memory in the mind of 1017, the sole indigenous survivor of what is repeatedly referred to as genocide, enables Ness to ask contentious questions about the healing of trauma, and how individual trauma differs from cultural trauma.

According to Jeffrey C. Alexander (2004) and Neil J. Smelser (2004) both individual and cultural traumas are related to concepts of identity. "I am Todd Hewitt," Todd reassures himself when Noise overwhelms him (Knife 17). The concept of identity is more complicated for 1017 who takes on different names that situate him in relation to his personal trauma: called the Return when he escapes the settlers and has returned to the Land, he becomes the Sky when he is chosen by the Land to succeed the former leader, also called the Sky.2 But at the novel's end, this multiply-named character has not resolved the relationship between his traumatized identity as 1017 and his trauma-free identity as the Sky. As a sign of this conflict and his remorse over the apparent death of Todd, he refuses to take the cure for the festering wound- the physical trauma-produced by the band that numerically marked him as a Holocaust-like victim. Ness leaves open whether 1017/the Sky's murderous attack upon Todd, the settler that he most hates, is produced by his ongoing trauma, or whether that trauma prompts him to mistake Todd for the villainous David Prentiss. After he has attacked Todd, Viola reads the doubt in his Noise as proof that he acted deliberately, but the ambiguity surrounding his agency in this attack foregrounds the fraught relationship between individual choice, the compulsive symptoms of trauma, and its resolution.

References to choice appear throughout Chaos Walking. In book one, Todd explains to a settler that he and the newly arrived settler, Viola Eade, had "no choice" but to blow up a bridge so that they could avoid capture by Prentiss, only to be told, "there's always choices" (Knife 157). In book two, The Ask and the Answer, numerous characters echo Mistress Coyle who tells Viola "We are the choices we make" (98). Coyle is leader of the mainly female opposition to Prentiss, and a survivor of an earlier female opposition to his tyranny, yet Ness emphasizes the resemblance between her and Prentiss when Prentiss uses the same words about choice in speaking to Todd (The Ask 18). Viola frequently chastises herself for starting the planetary war between the Land and the settlers (Monsters 523) just as Todd constantly berates himself for choosing to kill an indigenous inhabitant whom he is shocked to encounter, given that he has been led to believe that all of the indigenous inhabitants were killed years before. When Prentiss subsequently tells Todd he may have no choice in leading armies in a new war against the indigenous inhabitants, Viola also insists, "There's always a choice" (The Ask 459) to which Prentiss replies, "Oh, people like to say that...It makes them feel better" (The Ask 459). Given that writing for young people often encourages them to believe that there is always a choice, Prentiss's words function as more than the cynical comments of a character who often acts as though there are no limits to what he can choose to do.

The problem with this language of choice is its relationship to trauma. Chaos Walking is not just about the choices characters make; it is also about the debilitating experience of trauma. What the novel never clarifies is how a traumatized person can make choices. The contradiction between choice and trauma can be traced throughout the latter term's history. Originally derived from the Greek word meaning wound, a physical trauma nullifies choice. When bodies react to the trauma of a wound, they respond automatically. In the late nineteenth century, trauma shifted from its dominant meaning as a physical wound to a new meaning as psychological disorder. What puzzled Freud as he considered the nightmares that characterized psychological trauma was the absence of choice. In psychological trauma, the victim does not choose symptoms such as suffering repetitive nightmares that do not distinguish between past and present, a symptom that currently dominates fictional accounts of trauma as it does in Chaos Walking. The conviction that traumatized soldiers during World War One were choosing to imitate such symptoms led to accusations of malingering; the accusation assumed that a nontraumatized person could choose whereas a traumatized person could not.

The more we use the term trauma, the harder it is to be precise. As psychologist Richard J. McNally (2005) notes, the widespread use of the word "trauma" does not indicate clarity about what exactly it is: "trauma might be defined by the objective attributes of the stressor, by the subjective responses of the victim, or by both" (79). Cathy Caruth (1996) in her rereading of Freud's theories of trauma similarly blurs the distinction between trauma as event and trauma as subjective response: "trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena" (11). Consistent with a fundamental uncertainty about whether trauma is the catastrophic event or the uncontrolled response to the event, Chaos Walking shifts from one definition to the other, and for this reason proves far better at explaining how characters recover from physical trauma than from psychological trauma.3

It is also striking that in a novel where so many characters are traumatized, either physically or psychologically, the word "trauma" appears only once. Presumably because the word has become so commonplace, the term is never defined. This assumption of knowledge is in sharp contrast to the introduction of trauma in American children's literature in the 1990s, when authors were conscious that they were introducing a new vocabulary to their readers.4 Rather than provide a definition, Ness takes advantage of readers' expectation that characters who have witnessed death, whether it is parental death or genocide, and either as victims or perpetrators, are likely to be psychologically traumatized. Assuming that we can recognize trauma, he subverts our confidence that we really do know what it is. The only time that the word "trauma" is used occurs when Viola realizes that her inability to hear Todd's thoughts may not be evidence of war-induced trauma, as she had assumed (Monsters 255). She suddenly realizes that the absence of Todd's Noise is the result of Prentiss's ability to control the male settlers through a combination of hypnosis and telepathy, an ambiguous power that not only constructs parallels between him and medical professionals accused of using hypnosis to implant false memories in their patients, but also paradoxically associates him with healing, since his power helps Todd deal with his own traumatic memories: "it makes the screaming of the war disappear...makes it so I don't gotta see all the dying over and over" (Monsters 108). What Viola had mistakenly assumed was a symptom of trauma is a way of reducing its symptoms.

Further complicating Ness's exploration of traumatic memory is the place of trauma in the representation of the Land. Literary scholars routinely assert that "one of the main features of trauma is the difficulty of verbal communication" (Higonnet [2008] 117), refer to the inability of "integrat[ing] the traumatic event into consciousness" (McMaster [2008] 57), and trust that "repetitive, intrusive forms of visualization" (Vickroy qtd. in McMaster 57) are key symptoms of trauma. In Chaos Walking we may well assume the effects of trauma as soon as we learn that an enslaved group of the indigenous inhabitants have lost their ability to communicate telepathically because of the actions initiated by Prentiss, and this is further supported when we learn that the indigenous language that Prentiss destroyed was visual, not oral.5 But the trauma of the enslaved group is quite different from the trauma-free visual communication system of the Land who have not been enslaved. The visual in Chaos Walking is thus presented as both symptom of trauma and also as "true language" (Monsters 81). Just as Viola has to learn to distinguish between symptoms of trauma and Prentiss's telepathic control of Todd's mind, so too are readers encouraged to question their assumptions about the relationship between the visual and the traumatic.

Readers are also encouraged to read Chaos Walking as a Holocaust novel. Although the Library of Congress cataloguing data does not classify it as such a novel, Holocaust parallels are plentiful: they include but are not limited to the enslavement of a targeted group, their numeric branding, the sadistic medical experiments inflicted upon them, the mass shooting that only 1017 survives, and the humiliation that he subsequently experiences as he broods upon the group's lack of resistance to their oppressors. When the Sky refers to "Crimes Against the Land" (Monsters 359), the phrase clearly echoes crimes against humanity, a phrase popularized during the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis, just as Neville Chamberlin's infamous defence of the 1938 Munich Agreement is an intertext of the mayor's speech: "PEACE IN OUR TIME" (Monsters 334).

Certainly the tension between the discourse of choice and the experience of trauma in Chaos Walking is similar to patterns evident in Holocaust fiction for young people. One recurring challenge of such fiction is the conflict between the genre imperative of giving young readers reassuring stories about choice and the historical reality that for the victims of the Holocaust, the space for choice was severely limited (Kertzer 2002). However, Ness deviates from the patterns that dominate Holocaust historical fiction for young people in a narrative that keeps demonstrating how easy it is for victims to become perpetrators. All three adolescent protagonists-Todd, Viola, and 1017-are both traumatized and in danger of becoming perpetrators. In contrast, eliding the distinction between victim and perpetrator is rarely an issue in 1990s children's fiction about the Holocaust; for example in 1990s time-travel fiction, young people tempted by neo-Nazi activity normally learn to abandon their admiration for perpetrators when they are transported into the bodies of Jewish characters during the Holocaust.6 But twenty years later, perhaps because we live in a post 9/11 world that the novel alludes to in the way Prentiss oversees episodes of torture by waterboarding, the distinction between victim and perpetrator blurs. The men who torture may have been traumatized by their exposure to Noise and thus more vulnerable to Prentiss's control, but when they torture, they are perpetrators.

Furthermore, because the Land possess a collective mind, the "Never forget" imperative of Holocaust fiction for young readers resonates differently. Ness's treatment of the Land's concept of leadership implies that memories of personal trauma threaten ideal leadership precisely because leaders who are traumatized are more likely to repeat the past. Although trauma victims are often portrayed as incapable of action-too traumatized to act- Ness's use of speculative fiction allows him to highlight the consequences when trauma victims have political power. In the final volume of the trilogy, the elder Sky (the current leader of the Land) constantly exhorts 1017 that in order to become a proper leader, he must master the rage and desire for personal revenge that torment him. He attempts to reassure 1017 that memory of the enslavement and massacre will persist, since in the collective memory of the Land, "nothing is forgotten," but 1017 responds that the memory of an event differs from the experience of it: "A memory is not the thing remembered" (Monsters 119).7 The Sky acknowledges that this distinction may be valid and it is one often drawn in Holocaust memoirs when survivors insist that those who did not experience the death camps can have no real idea of what they were like.

In addition, the need to enclose trauma in a separate space is evident when the Sky asserts that leadership requires secrecy: "the Land must sometimes keep secrets from itself...It is the only way to make Hope possible" (Monsters 272). Immediately following this statement-which as a metacritical comment about how hope is produced in young people's writing might be compared to Prentiss's observation about why people want to believe in choice-the Sky reveals that in the circle of the Pathways' End, a space guarded by Pathways (members of the Land dedicated to protecting such secrets), the Sky has hidden and healed Todd's stepfather, Ben. Defining Pathways' End as the space "where the Sky leaves thoughts that are too dangerous to be widely known," the Sky reveals that Ben has recovered from the physical trauma that should have killed him (Monsters 273).

Not just Ben but Todd too is placed within Pathways' End in order to recover from his severe wounds. Does the healing within the space of Pathways' End imply that 1017 might also place the rage produced by his personal trauma within this recuperative space? Ness never clarifies whether Pathways' End is also a place for healing psychological wounds. What he focuses on instead is the contrast between the elder Sky's view of the need for setting apart dangerous thoughts and Ben's post-recovery conviction that the future of the planet lies in evolving in the direction of the Land. Certain that if all the settlers can learn to speak as the Land do then there will no longer be any conflict, Ben embraces the concept of open communication-essentially a world without trauma; the Sky seeks to isolate it. In the conclusion of Chaos Walking Viola watches Ben and wonders if "every man [and perhaps every woman if the female settlers can learn to access Noise] will eventually give himself over so totally to the voice of the planet" (Monsters 590). While Ness provides no answer, we might consider how different Ben's faith in transparent, honest communication is from the Sky's advice to 1017. Characteristic of a novel of ideas, Ness does not indicate whose views are correct. Instead, he stresses that the true leader can govern wisely only if he is not driven by traumatic memories that he is unable to control. The Sky teaches 1017 that some personal memories endanger the good of the whole, and that the true leader has as little choice as the victim of trauma: "being called 'the Sky' is the same exile as being called 'the Return,' and more, not an exile he chose" (Monsters 268). The Sky has no choice when other members of the Land choose him as leader.

Although Chaos Walking might be read as gesturing towards contemporary practices of truth and reconciliation, a major difference between the conditions governing those practices and the conclusion of the novel is that 1017 is the sole survivor of the genocide. Only because there are no others is the relationship between his personal trauma and the collective memory of the Land so crucial. The ending of Chaos Walking is hopeful to the degree that it implies that the settlers and the Land have avoided cultural trauma because 1017 has chosen to "act like the Sky" (Monsters 539). This conclusion supports Jeffrey C. Alexander's thesis that cultural trauma is not the inevitable and natural result of a horrendous event (8). Insisting that "Events are not inherently traumatic," Alexander emphasizes that the construction of an event as a cultural trauma requires that "members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways" (8, 1). Alexander and also Neil J. Smelser stress that cultural trauma requires group agreement that their collective identity has been altered in a fundamental and negative manner, but this is not the case in Monsters of Men. Despite the settlers' discovery that some of them are natural "Pathways" able to transmit neural messages just as the Land Pathways do, there is little evidence in the novel's conclusion that the Land's identity has been permanently altered, and if it has been altered, the change is hopeful, not negative.

The story of 1017's uncertain transformation from traumatized survivor/witness of genocide to the Land's new leader exemplifies how Alexander and Smelser distinguish between individual and cultural trauma. As 1017, he is a traumatized witness, unable to escape repetitive visual flashbacks of the massacre of his fellow beings and of his "one in particular" (Monsters 271). To be an effective leader of the collective, to be the new Sky after the old Sky dies during the apocalyptic war with the colonists, he must (somehow) set aside his personal trauma in the way he abandons his earlier names. Just as Alexander connects cultural trauma to concepts of collective identity, when 1017 is told to act like the Sky, he is implicitly being advised that his personal memories threaten the Land's "sense of its own identity" (Alexander 10). The Land has experienced Holocaust-like events, but moving forward requires that the Sky shield his memories of personal trauma-he is after all the sole survivor-and control how they affect the memories of the collective.

In focusing the trilogy's final volume upon 1017, Ness raises several issues about Holocaust representation in young people's writing: not just the role of genre in affecting that representation but also the implications of Maurice Halbwachs's (1992) sociological thesis that social frameworks control what individuals remember. Consistent with the growth of genocide studies (in which the Holocaust is examined as one of many genocides), Chaos Walking depicts the Holocaust as a dominant but not unique genocidal event, and invokes Holocaust analogies that suggest that the Holocaust, like the word trauma, has entered popular discourse. Like Ness, Thomas Buergenthal (2009) in his memoir, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy, is as interested in what comes after the Holocaust as he is in depicting its horrific details. Although he believes that his years in post-war Germany enabled him to "overcome hatred and desire for revenge" (192), in a Reading Group Guide included with his memoir, he admits that had he written his memoir earlier "the book would have dwelt too much on all the cruelties I witnessed and been hate filled" (2). And elsewhere in his memoir, Buergenthal is much vaguer about how long it took him to get beyond "the cycle of hatred and violence" (163). Both Buergenthal and Ness's interest in getting beyond the cycle of hatred and violence may signal how Holocaust representation in young people's writing may soon focus more on getting beyond the event than on the event itself. Our desire for stories that tell us that there is always choice even when the historical record and the experience of trauma suggest otherwise is hard to quench, and it is quite likely that one function of Holocaust-inflected speculative fiction will be to satisfy that desire.

[Sidebar]
This essay proposes that Chaos Walking is a trilogy of ideas obsessed with the experience and healing of trauma.
Using the conventions of speculative fiction, Ness probes the relationship between the language of choice and the experience of trauma.
Chaos Walking is not just about the choices characters make; it is also about the debilitating experience of trauma.
Certainly the tension between the discourse of choice and the experience of trauma in Chaos Walking is similar to patterns evident in Holocaust fiction for young people.
Chaos Walking depicts the Holocaust as a dominant but not unique genocidal event, and invokes Holocaust analogies that suggest that the Holocaust, like the word trauma, has entered popular discourse.



[Footnote]
Notes
1 Library of Congress cataloguing data states that social problems, telepathy, and space colonies are examined in all three books. Human-animal communication appears as an additional topic in The Knife of Never Letting Go, and war leads the list of subjects in the final volume, Monsters of Men.
2 Although I refer to the indigenous survivor as 1017 in the context of his personal trauma and as the Sky when he succeeds the former Sky to become leader of the Land, his uncertain identity means that I also refer to him as 1017/the Sky.
3 Although Prentiss appears to be one of the few characters who are not traumatized, we might read his ultimate destruction by the planetary Noise he has tried to control as trauma.
4 See Virginia Euwer Wolff's (1991) The Mozart Season where the heroine's father must spell trauma for her and illustrate its use through several examples (Wolff 66).
5 Ness conveys this visual language by having the Land "show" their thoughts rather than "speak" them.
6 See Adrienne Kertzer (2002), My Mother's Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust (359, note 4).
7 Ness uses different fonts to distinguish the voices of his characters, including the voices of the animals that communicate with the settlers. He also uses italics to signal the non-verbal communication of the Land. The shift from italics to non-italics communicates 1017's uncertain identity; because of his traumatic experiences, he is both haunted by visual traumatic memories and unable to communicate fluently in the visual language of the Land.



[Reference]
Works Cited:
Children's Books
Ness, Patrick. The Ask and the Answer. Chaos Walking, Book 2. Somerville, MA: Candlewick P, 2009. Print.
Ness, Patrick. The Knife of Never Letting Go. Chaos Walking, Book 1. Somerville, MA: Candlewick P, 2008. Print.
Ness, Patrick. Monsters of Men. Chaos Walking, Book 3. Somerville, MA: Candlewick P, 2010. Print.
Ness, Patrick. "Patrick Ness's Top Ten 'Unsuitable' Books for Teenagers" The Guardian. 8 Apr. 2011. Web. 5 June 2011.
Secondary Sources
Alexander, Jeffrey C. "Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma." Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. 1-30. Print.
Buergenthal, Thomas. A Lucky Child: A Memory of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy. Foreword by Elie Wiesel. New York: Back Bay Books- Little, Brown, 2009. Print.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. 1874 New York: Signet Classic-New American Library, 1964. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. 1920. "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." The Penguin Freud Library Volume II: On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Penguin, 1991. 269-338. Print.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Ed. and Trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. The Heritage of Sociology. Print.
Higonnet, Margaret R. "Picturing Trauma in the Great War." Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War. Ed. Elizabeth Goodenough and Andrea Immel. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2008. 115-28. Print. Landscapes of Childhood.
Hilliard, Matt. Rev. of "Chaos Walking Trilogy by Patrick Ness." Yet There Are Statues. 26 Apr. 2011. Web. 31 May 2011.
Kertzer, Adrienne. My Mother's Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust. Peterborough, ON: Broadview P, 2002. Print.
Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.
McMaster, Lindsey. "The 'Murray Look': Trauma as Family Legacy in L. M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon Trilogy." Canadian Children's Literature 34.2 (Autumn 2008): 50-74. Print.
McNally, Richard J. Remembering Trauma. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P-Harvard UP, 2005. Print.
Smelser, Neil J. "Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma." Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Jeffrey C. Alexander, et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. 31-59. Print.
Stephens, John. Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction. London and New York: Longman, 1992. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. "George Eliot." The Common Reader First Series. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1925. 166-76. Print.
Wolff, Virginia Euwer. The Mozart Season. New York: Henry Holt, 1991. Print.

Assignment 2 Details

Assignment 2

An essay of 2,500 words, 70%. Learning outcomes assessed: 1-5

Select one essay title from those listed below. Your essay should demonstrate a close focus upon and an analytical reading of the texts, and must be supported by appropriate critical reading. Please note the learning outcomes for the module as above. Ensure that you reference appropriately and please note the policy on plagiarism.

1. Discuss the relationship between the environment and the construction of childhood in two texts studied during the course of this module.

2. ‘Children’s fiction, while it may appear innocent, often contains layered complexities that engage with dominant discourses rather than merely reflects them.’ Fiona McCulloch (2011) Children’s Literature n Context.

Discuss this statement in relation to texts studied during the course of this module.

3. Analyse the narrative structure of two of texts studied during the course of this module and consider the implications and reasons for the use of the particular approaches adopted.

4. Analyse and discuss the implications of class and power in two texts studied during the course of this module.

5. ‘Historical fiction functions …as both a memory and a transmitter of culture.’ (Kim Wilson, 2008) Discuss this comment in relation to challenges which may be raised by two texts studied during the course of this module.

Assignment submission date: Wednesday May 15th

Assignment return date: on or before June 12^th, 2013

Learning Outcomes:

1.      describe and define aspects of the history of English children’s literature from the nineteenth century to the present day;

2.      show a critical understanding of children’s literature in the light of contemporary critical practice;

3.      apply their knowledge of children’s literature to specific examples;

4.      use previously learned knowledge, skills and competencies to inform their understanding of the study of children’s literature;

5.      with tutor direction, critically assess texts from children’s literature in relation to literary movement, genre and contemporary critical theory.

 

ENGL2011 Children's Literature 12/13 Texts



Article: Is our future set in stone? A discussion of Michelle Paver’s Chronicles of Ancient Darkness

Webb, Jean ‘Is our future set in stone? A discussion of Michelle Paver’s Chronicles of Ancient Darkness.’ in Deep Into Nature: Ecology, Environment and Children’s Literature ed. Jennifer Harding Pied Piper Press, 2009.

 

Is our future set in stone? A discussion of Michelle Paver’s Chronicles of Ancient Darkness.

Professor Jean Webb.

Currently there is a high level of awareness in the media, politically and generally in the consciousness of the developed world, of increasing threats to the environment emanating from climate change and the destruction of the natural environment with, for example, industrial pollution and de-forestation for commercial development. Ironically, although there would seemingly be a greater engagement with nature, as Western society becomes increasingly urbanised the relationship of the individual with nature and the environment is ever more that of the civilised observer who is distanced from the natural world experiencing such, for example, through the media or by visiting zoos and nature reserves. In addition Western childhood is becoming more protected as children (particularly in the UK) are increasingly protected both by institutional fear of litigation in the case of accidents and by the social fear of the hostility of the urbanised environment. The child’s experience of and relationship with nature is far more sanitised and distanced than say in early 20^th century England. For instance Kenneth, the brother of A.A. Milne, recalled long country walks as a boy in the 1890s:

Alan and I often used to get up at 5 o’clock and go out and walk five or eight miles (Thwaite 2006 34)

The boys would also engage in vigorous physical play in the public playground:

There was a swing in the playground which served as a flying trapeze. ‘The swing was set in motion, we ran at it from the far end of the playground, took off from a springboard, jumped, caught it, swung off at the other end, and left it swinging back for the next boy. Every game had its ecstatic moments...’ (Thwaite 36)

Such activities would now surely be banned under current health and safety regulations. The effect on childhood of contemporary attitudes is far-reaching. The availability of experiences where children can gain a direct sense of adventure and exploration, and are able to exercise independent and individual judgement, problem solving and decision making are now limited to organised activities, for example with the scouting movement or through school trips. Furthermore the opportunity for immediate engagement with nature is also impeded, as is the understanding of the reasons for and importance of environmental concerns as the child is further distanced from the actuality of such matters. However, one means of vicarious experience is through reading. As Stephen Bigger notes: ‘Environmental responsibility is an acquired concept’ which can be developed through reading fiction (Bigger and Webb 2008). The impact and quality of such development very much depends on the quality of the reading experience. Children’s literature, (and one could argue literature for adults) is always to some extent didactic. High quality literature, exemplified by Michelle Paver’s series Chronicles of Ancient Darkness (2004- ), has the capacity to engage the reader in a vibrant world of the imagination which is ‘naturally’ underpinned by the particular moral values and perspectives of the author, rather than the notion of writing for children as a ‘loudspeaker’ for propaganda (Mursepp 2005.)

The deeply engaging and vibrancy of the characters and world created by Michelle Paver in The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness stems from the combination of her long held fascination with the period of the Stone Age in which the novels are set and her extensive research which is documented on her website. (http://www.michellepaver.com/Features/p2_articleid/7). During her talk at the 2008 IBBY/MA Conference at Roehampton, Paver closely recalled her desire as a child of about 10 to live as people did in the Stone Age. This included wanting to eat, sleep and dress as our fore-generations had done. Despite the understandable constraints she did actually do so! As an adult she not only carried out considerable research from an academic perspective, but also engaged in courageous adventures to research the Stone Age period and to ensure accuracy and authenticity to substantiate her created worlds of the Clans, Torak and Wolf. Thus Paver combines a well-researched history of life during the Stone Age with her own fictional social world and the adventures which ensue.

Interestingly Paver’s series has a number of seemingly shared characteristics with Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, (1894: 1895). Like Kipling, Paver lived in similar conditions to her characters including the natural environment thus gaining an understanding of what the social structuring and lifestyle may well have been like for such societies during those times, and then imagining the adventures of her characters back in that time. Kipling also lived in the climate and environment depicted in his stories, and similarly to Paver had to create the social structure and interaction of his characters in an imaginary way since he was transposing human behaviour into the animal world. Both Kipling and Paver have the focalising hero being raised by wolves, and the protagonist having to learn the hierarchical and complex social structure of their worlds. However, whereas Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books constructed the social world of Mowgli and his journey of self-discovery in order to produce a ‘moral guide book’ for the inheritors of the empire during British imperialism, Paver’s philosophical and moral perspective is more subtle in expression. Kipling’s Mowgli is raised by wolves and learns the ways of the animals and the hierarchical rules of the jungle before he enters the world of Man as an adolescent. His task is to transfer knowledge from one world to another, the implication being that the social world of the jungle has much to offer that of Man in terms of control, respect and behaviour; hence Kipling’s stories were adopted by the Baden Powell in structuring the Boy Scout movement. Paver’s work has a different intention as it addresses an overall practical and philosophical holistic relationship with nature and how homo sapiens relate physically and spiritually to the environment. She is interested in not only how humans can live with other animals, but also how as a species we can live without destroying that which is essential to life, the natural environment. A century on from Kipling and the concerns have changed.

The following discussion considers the construction of Paver’s world and the implications it raises for consideration by the contemporary reader of the current environmental and social problems which are faced by Western culture. The setting of the series Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, which is currently comprised of five of the six projected books: Wolf Brother (2004), Spirit Walker (2005), Soul Eater (2006), Outcast (2007) and Oath Breaker (2008) is, as said, the Stone Age at a time before agrarian settlement. By removing the reader from contemporary ‘normality’ into a pre-historic period Paver can obliquely critique the contemporary situation in Western culture. For example, embedded in the series are social considerations of racism, multi-culturalism and environmental awareness. The setting in the Stone Age also problematises the contemporary scientifically driven paradigm where the sense of mystery and that which cannot be understood is technically removed and the situating of the child subject is one where the expectation is that ‘they ought to be able to know and understand’, unlike Torak’s world where there is a respect for mysticism and spirituality. Paver’s characters have a quasi-Keatsian sense of negative capability. As John Keats described the notion of negative capability as ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’ (http://www.alpheratz.f2s.com/negative-capability.htm). In this Stone Age world the characters live in a state of uncertainty; they accept the mysteries of the Spiritual realm and concern themselves with resolving the imbalance resultant from the irresponsible actions of those who have acted upon their desire for power. Torak and his female companion Renn, albeit uncomfortably, accept their being Mages with the power to enter into the Spirit realms, yet neither desire nor attempt to reductively rationalise. Their energies are taken up with survival in a very practically based reality. They have to exercise independence, courage, physical endurance, tenacity and intelligence to solve the problems with which they are presented. Their engagement goes beyond social contexts such as families, friends and interaction with their own and other Clans, they are having to learn to live with and by nature and their environment, all of which can often be hostile.

Paver’s Stone Age communities are located in an indeterminate place somewhere in Northern Europe and cannot be more removed from the physicality of a contemporary urban setting. The series circulates about close physical and mystical relationships with nature and the environment; the organisation of society into clans; and the central role that the younger generation have in the destinies of their peoples. The different clans which are variously associated with wild life and the landscape, for example the Wolf, Raven and Forest Clans demonstrate tolerance of each other as long as they respect territorial boundaries. The organisation of Paver’s society equates to a multi-racial situation. Each clan has developed the skills and understandings which are required to survive in their particular micro-environment. These skills are not transferred between the clans. For example when the focalising hero Torak has to travel to the Far North in Soul Eater clothing, food, and modes of survival are different from forest dwelling, even the seasons carry different meanings:

In the Forest, the coming of spring is welcomed; in the Far North, it is feared.

(Soul Eater 208)

The clans do meet together at occasional gatherings in a necessary co-operation to avoid a state of outright war, however, they maintain distance, distrust, territorial rights and control over their own sources of knowledge. It is Torak who moves between them and learns of their different ways as he engages on the various quests which will take him to his Destiny of which he is growingly aware as the series progresses. Torak is seen by some as being the destroyer whilst others become aware of his being predicted the saviour, to save the peoples of the clans and the environment. He is the Chosen One with powers of understanding animals, particularly wolves. He is also growingly able to understand the mystical world of spirits as he learns and comes to terms with being a Mage.

Torak’s father had such mystical understanding and spent most of his adult life as an outcast from the clans as he sought closer communion with the darker regions of the Spirit World, which led to the unleashing of malevolent powers which Torak will now have to confront. Torak’s mother is dead; the child spent his first ten years with his father who was then killed by the monstrous evil spirit in the shape of a bear which was released from the other world by Torak’s father’s search for mystical knowledge. For the early period of his childhood Torak’s father left him to be raised by a pack of wolves. Torak’s first decade has been spent living with his father in the forest outside the direct influence of the clans as a result of his father’s previous actions, for which he was ejected from society. During these ten formative years Torak has learned the ways of the wolves plus an understanding of their language and forms of communication. He has also learned to survive as an individual hunter gatherer within the forest and to respect the environment which feeds, clothes and sustains him.

Torak crashed through the alder thickets and sank to his knees in bogs. Birch trees whispered of his passing. Silently he begged them not to tell the bear.

...He startled a young boar grubbing up pignuts, and grunted a quick apology to ward off attack. The Boar gave an ill-tempered snort and let him pass.

A wolverine snarled at him to stay away ,and he snarled back as fiercely as he could, because wolverines only listen to threats. (Wolf Brother 11)

Torak’s communication with and understanding of animals is not that of the exaggerated quasi-Doctor Dolittle, but that which can be learned through close observation and living with them in a shared environment. For all to survive harmony is essential. Paver expresses Torak’s grief at the death of his father through Torak’s sense of being dislocated from his environment:

For the first time in his life he was truly alone. He didn’t feel part of the Forest any more. He felt as if his world-soul had snapped its link to all other living things; tree and bird, hunter and prey, river and rock. Nothing in the whole world knew how he felt. Nothing wanted to know.

(Wolf Brother 12)

Paver portrays the inter-connectedness of Torak’s life particularly in the phrase ‘world-soul’ which encapsulates the spirituality of Torak’s relationship with his environment. Torak’s dislocation and re-location is essential as now he has to be an independent individual reliant upon his own resources. He cannot be merely an observer, he must engage with the environment to survive. For what he takes from the forest he respects and gives thanks, as when he makes his first big kill without his father.

With a graceful shudder, the buck folded its knees and sank to the ground...

Panting, Torak stood over the buck. Its ribs were still heaving but death was near. Its three souls were getting ready to leave.

Torak swallowed, now he had to do what he’d seen Fa do countless times. But for him it was the first time and he had to get it right.

Kneeling beside the buck, he put out his hand and gently stroked its sweaty cheek...

‘You did well,’ Torak told it... ‘You were brave and clever, and kept going all day. I promise to keep pact with the World Sprit and treat you with respect. Now go in peace.’

He watched death glaze the great dark eye.

(Wolf Brother 40)

Although Torak has been educated by the wolves and his father in knowledge of animal, environmental and spiritual matters, brought up in the forest he has not learnt the ways of the clans, the society of Man. Although he has been warned by his father to ‘Stay away from men’ with the following unfinished phrase ‘If they find out what you can do....’ (41) in his grief following his father’s death he longs for people: ‘He wanted to shout; to yell for help.’ (12). Torak is an outsider to the clans, perceived as different and therefore a threat. He is hunted by the first clan members whom he meets and is in danger of being put to death unless he can survive through his own mental and physical resources. Thankfully he does have help in the form of Wolf, the orphaned cub who has survived the flood and who adopts Torak. The unity between Wolf and Torak is very strong. They are pack brothers who demonstrate the highest levels of loyalty to each other. This relationship is an important part of the narrative strategy since pragmatically Wolf will repeatedly come to Torak and Renn’s rescue, whilst philosophically the relationship demonstrates the holistic vision of Paver’s world. For example Wolf, when albeit still a cub, senses the way to the Great Mountain which is part of Torak’s first quest. This journey is not determined by maps or satellite navigational aids, but by the driving unnamed instinct of the animal working in harmony with the human. The positive collaborative nature of the relationship is not simply one way for when Wolf is captured by the evil ones, Torak does his utmost to rescue him. They have a very strong partnership, however, although Torak’s skills at wolf communication are enhanced by his babyhood experiences as a pack member, Torak knows that he does not have the superior wolf facility of ‘sensing his thoughts and moods.’ (41) Despite the limitations their relationship deepens throughout the series as both Wolf and Torak mature from cub and boy to wolf and man. By the end of Oath Breaker, the fifth book, Wolf has Darkfur, a mate of his own. His priorities are becoming divided and his identity as a wolf being reinforced as he will mate and produce his own pack.

..Wolf caught another sound, but this was one that Darkfur couldn’t hear as it was inside Wolf’s head. It was Tall Tailless howling for him, just as Wolf had howled when the bad taillesses had trapped him in the stone Den. Pack-brother! Come to me! The pack-sister is in danger!

A cold nose nudged Wolf’s flank. Darkfur was puzzled. Why do you slow?

Wolf didn’t know what to do. He is not wolf, he told her.

Darkfur’s gaze turned stern. You were pack-brothers. A wolf does not abandon his pack-brother. (Oath Breaker 198)

Emphasis is being laid on questions of loyalty. Wolf recognises and states difference, yet there is the necessity for physical and species difference to be over-ridden by values and morality. Experience has strengthened their bond. Although Wolf intimates a sense of doubt at the end of this chapter the reader can be almost certain that Wolf will come to Torak and Renn’s aid. In this uncertain world there are some factors which are unchanging and reliable, and those circulate about relationships; for instance, the loyalty between Wolf and Torak; Torak and Renn, and Fin-Keddin’s fatherly overseeing of the youngsters. Beyond the closeness of social bonds there is a strong sense of the unknown and the unknowable. One of the literary strengths of Paver’s work is in creating a sense of holistic fusion between human, animal and spiritual worlds through communicating a sense of physical and emotional reality. In Oath Breaker there is a vivid and convincing account of Torak spirit walking where he enters into the physicality of a mare.

Feverishly, he took the last of Saeunn’s root from his medicine pouch and crammed it into his mouth. If Wolf or Renn were anywhere in this devestation, who better to sense them than prey? (Oath Breaker 155)

Torak is prepared to put himself into a state which may well be highly dangerous in order to simulate the conditions which Wolf and Renn are experiencing as victims. He too becomes the hunted, the prey by leaving his own body and entering into that of the mare.

The other horses side-stepped and tossed their heads, uneasy at his nearness, but the lead mare stood her ground. Swivelling her ears she listened to his moans as the cramps took hold. She lowered her head and watched him clutch his belly, falling to the ground in a cloud of ash...

... and through her horse eyes, Torak stared at the body which lay twitching and frothing at the mouth.

For the first time in his life, he felt the ceaseless vigilance of prey. He twisted one ear to listen to the human kicking at the cinders, and flicked back the other to catch the nicker of a mare chivvying her foal. One eye scanned the shore for hunters, the other the slope above, while his horse nose told him the movements of every member of the herd.

The mare’s souls were surprisingly strong...In the battle of the souls, Torak overcame her. Kicking up his hind hooves, he broke into a canter. With effortless strength his four legs hammered the earth. Such power, such speed! He felt a surge of wild joy as he thundered up the hill, and his herd came thundering after him. (Oath Breaker 156)

The fusion of the drug induced experience of spirit walking stands him in good stead when it comes to the ultimate rescue of Renn from the fire at the end of Oath Breaker. He needs this steed which no man has ever ridden, the mare with whom he entered into spiritual fusion.

Steam rose from her flanks. Her great dark eyes were wide, but no longer rimmed with white. For an instant, Torak met her gaze, and a current of knowledge flowed between them. His souls had hidden in her marrow. He had known what it was to be horse. And she knew that he knew. (Oath Breaker 194)

Although there are out of body experiences which give Torak and Renn knowledge beyond the pragmatic and the normal, where they enter into of spiritual existence their world of the Stone Age is nonetheless filled with mystery and mysticism. Materialism where it occurs in this world is connected with survival and remembrance. A bow, for example, is valued because it is a good weapon made by someone who was beloved to the owner. The clans inhabit and guard their territory, but do not own it as such. The hunter gatherer life does not depend upon trading for goods. Their security is not threatened by the fall of a bank, except it be that of a river collapsing under tumultuous flooding due to an imbalance in the harmonies which direct the weather conditions. The careful balance between the spirit other world and that of these Stone Age dwellers is out of joint. It has been upset because of a lust for power. Torak’s father was part of such doing (how far one cannot know until the final book of the series), and now Torak has to endeavour to restore the imbalance. The demon bear is one example of a physical embodiment of destructive power created when the other world malevolent spirits were released. The bear kills for the satisfaction of a blood lust. The more it kills, the more powerful and dangerous it becomes. The bear is a symbol of malevolent power which spreads death, destruction and desolation, leaving the forest dying. In the reality of the 21^st century capitalism and materialism when employed in irresponsible and self-fulfilling modes which become environmentally destructive, can be symbolically equated with the malevolent bear. The environment is being destroyed and the balance of nature is upset; environmentally our world is ‘out of joint’: the parallels are very clear. The threats to Paver’s Stone Age world may be assuaged by the heroism, determination and collaboration of Torak, the Wolf and the other humans who help him. One suspects that Torak will bring the clans together, or that some will be saved and others lost in an environmental disaster, leaving the chosen few to continue with a brave new world. For Torak and his peoples this will be a matter of confronting their inner fears which are symbolised by the malevolent and frightening spirits. They come to terms with their unknown, by employing what to contemporary readers is for the most part, unknown, that is, a world devoid of science and filled with mysticism and magic. Their medicines are natural herbal remedies carried in a pouch. Disease is a monster which ravages the clans as epidemics can so readily do; beyond a certain point they have no response except to try to fight off the demon of disease by the power of the mind. In many ways one would not wish to return contemporary society to the Stone Age.

What Paver depicts is a convincing world where the weaknesses and strengths of homo sapiens are explored: the pragmatic capacity to adapt to wide a range of environmental conditions is celebrated: the destructive nature of territorialism, separatism and lust for power is exposed. The strength drawn from an intuitive and mystical relationship with nature and the landscape is an essential factor which, when respectfully employed, gives harmony and fruitfulness, but when abused leads to destruction and madness. Perhaps through this series Michelle Paver is asking the reader to examine what is accepted to be ‘normal’ in the contemporary world, by producing an imaginative experience drawing upon the realities of life in the Stone Age. A great deal can be learned by studying the past, for as Shakespeare wrote ‘What’s past is prologue.’ One hopes that Paver produces a positive outcome for the series when she writes the last book, for in doing so there would be an expression of hope itself, of faith in humanity and the capacity to overcome the ills of misguided sections of society. I am not suggesting that Michelle Paver herself represents a voice of prediction but that writers can elucidate, inspire, provoke and suggest ways of approaching the problems which beset the current generations and will no doubt, unfortunately recur in the future. The strength of Paver’s literary achievement is in the holistic integrity of her work: the scope, intensity, veracity and moral and philosophical depth of her created world which can communicate values, morality and ways of thinking which are based upon rational problem-solving whilst taking the reader into imaginative spiritual realms. Beyond fiction we can perhaps only contemplate whether our future is set in stone if we are unable to change the attitudes which will devastate our environment. More positively one hopes that we can learn that stone can be shaped to produce an enduring sculpture of great beauty symbolic of a future world in which generations to come can wander in awe and communion like Torak, spirits in a symbiotic relationship, walking with nature.

Works cited

Bigger, Stephen and Webb, Jean ‘Changing Images of the Environment: hermeneutic contributions from children’s fiction.’ forthcoming in Environmental Education Research Special Issue 'Experiencing Environment and Place through Children's Literature' 2009.

Kipling, Rudyard The Jungle Books (1895, 1895) Oxford Worlds Classics 2008

Keats, John http://www.alpheratz.f2s.com/negative-capability.htm

Paver, Michelle           Wolf Brother. Orion Books 2004

Spirit Walker. Orion Books 2005

Soul Eate.r Orion Books 2006,

Outcast. Orion Books 2007

Oath Breaker. Orion Books 2008

Michelle Paver official website accessed January 2009: http://www.michellepaver.com/Features/p2_articleid/7

Thwaite, Anne                        A.A. Milne: His Life Tempus 2006

JAW Jan10^th 2009

Kevin Crossley-Holland's visit

I love this picture of Kevin and I which was taken after his visit to talk in our module (April '13). I am holding the piece of obsidian which inspired and features in his Arthur trilogy. Look at my cheesy grin, look at those dimples!

A captivated audience!



Kevin showing the map of Caldicot Manor he first hand-drew for Arthur: The Seeing Stone





Kevin sharing his love of Arthurian legend

Kevin's 10 things to remember about the Medieval period:

It was a time of:Maturity
Piety
Disease and filth
Birth of Romantic love
Consuming superstition
Social rigidly
Self reliance in terms of clothing and food and material goods
High spirited wit
Open shows of emotion
Privileged very few 1% dreamed of a golden age

Article: The Concept of Death in Children’s and Juvenile Literature: Reading and Interpreting Death in The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Kissova, M., 2009. The Concept of Death in Children’s and Juvenile Literature: Reading and Interpreting Death in The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. In: D. Cooley and L. Steffen, eds, Re-Imaging Death and Dying. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, pp. 57-67.