I get a lot of students writing about my work for degrees of one kind or another, and I thought it might be interesting to post them on this site, for the use of anyone else trying to do the same, or for anyone who is just curious.
Many thanmks to Josiah Jackson-Taylor for letting me post this first one. I should note that Dramweaver doesn't transcribe formating in anyway, and anyu faults in this are due to me and not to Joe!
Have you felt about any of the books we have studied that you would not want a child to read them?
Until my teenage era I was raised in Bristol immersed in literature, as television was prohibited in our house. As a result 'The Chronicles of Narnia', imbibed in their entirety, provided a template to understand the world, the implications of which are only emerging to me today. The approach of Melvin Burgess is one far closer to the trend of explicit, episodic exposition in contemporary culture, and revealed facets to my home town that I was shielded from in my adolescent years. The vibrant agency of the child is central to both The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and Junk but execution of each text is vastly different. The most fascinating contrast resides in comparing the semantic concerns of the former with the structural features of the latter.
An approach that seems to generate a gravid insight is the application of psychoanalysis to work of C.S. Lewis, who at the time of writing 'The Chronicles of Narnia' held a scholarly post at Magdalen College, Oxford. Earlier in his academic life, as a student at his last school of Malvern, this restrained writer developed a taste for sadomasochistic fantasies evinced in personal correspondence. Letters to a friend detailed the names of certain women whom he had envisaged spanking, and he even signed this mail with the title "Philomastix" - meaning 'whip-lover' . The reason I highlight this potentially peripheral biographical detail is that revisiting the Narnia series revealed this fantasy world as one saturated with veiled adult investment, not only in regard to Lewis' didactic aspiration but also as an expression of the unconscious. It is of supreme importance to realise the role of the unconscious in the process of artistic creation. The association of thoughts, in psychoanalytic topology, is governed by unconscious purposive ideas; all that can be eliminated are recognised purposive ideas, therefore unknown purposive impulses channel the course of voluntary mental output. The unconscious "holds the association of ideas in abstract thinking as well as in sensuous imagining and artistic combination" (Freud, p.672) - it is the larger sphere of the unconscious that houses the machinations of the conscious. Thus emerges the realisation that the creative process is steeped in unconscious memory, which operates on a latent, insidious and, most significantly, preliminary level.
The unresolved sexual and emotional issues are consequently unconsciously incorporated and explored within the text as a subterranean stream, inaccessible to the conscious plane of thought - an "expression of impulses which are under the pressure of resistance [repression]" (Freud, p.774) which nonetheless exert a profound influence. A close appraisal of Peter's first battle proffers an illumination of this point: ostensibly drawing on various literary traditions including the heroic quest, the courtly romance and the violent fairy-tale, his combat inauguration is parturient with prurience. There are manifold layers to the etching of his initiation rights: he wins his spurs as a warrior, yet there is also the discovery of sexual physicality as "everything was blood and heat and hair" (Lewis, p.170). The carnal excitement evoked by this passage is unmistakeable, and it seems irrefutable to me that it is an instance of authorial cathexis, an investment of libidinal energy into a child's adventure: the paragraph ends with "He felt tired all over." (Lewis, p.170) The notion of a violent sexuality surrounding the slaying of the wolf is interesting in that it relates to the desire for authority: "Freud defines sadism as the impulse to master the world" (Bersani, p.87). Another element of the conflict has be ascertained that reinforces the notion of adult investment, phrased as "the uneasy juxtaposition of children and child-adults…what are we doing except in wish-fulfilment with a child who leads an army into battle?" (Manlove, p.123). The rhetoric here underlines the infusion of adult sensibilities and the disquieting construction of child; the suspicion slowly starts to envelop regarding authorial investment once these strong adult themes are disentangled from the carefully crafted narrative.
However, it should be pointed out that this sexual content is almost certainly inadvertent and perhaps this unwitting inclusion extends to the powerful adult themes of bravery and betrayal. I find this a little difficult to believe, although Lewis was 'untheorised' in his approach - unsophisticated in psychoanalytical terms. The writer embarked on his first fully sexual relationship as a middle aged don when he met Joy Gresham, and thereafter followed the period in the 1950's when he not only produced 'The Chronicles of Narnia' but also his autobiographical account of his conversion to Christianity, Surprised By Joy. Tragically, his wife died of cancer a few years into their marriage; the following excerpt from his reflections in A Grief Observed provides a glimpse of the man's metamorphosis during their relationship: "no cranny of heart or mind remained unsatisfied" (Lewis, p.167). In terms of psychological influences, the sexual awakening of the middle aged scholar seems to have seeped into the pages of his children's stories, as I have already propounded. Having already established himself as a writer of popular fiction and as a literary critic with such publications as the 'Space Trilogy' and The Allegory Of Love respectively, Lewis turned deliberately to children's fiction with 'The Chronicles of Narnia'. This presented the opportunity to utilise the tradition of figurative narratives to impose a moral message, a religious doctrination through allegorical didactics.
Consequently there emerges a Kleinian denigration of the wholly bad and the superimposition of the wholly good, as the children's adventure is distilled into Christian dichotomy with simplistic fairy-tale binary oppositions. The White Witch is the embodiment of evil, emanating coldness and disseminating treachery, whereas Aslan is literally a Christ-figure, bringing salvation and accepting the burden of Edmund's perfidy. In the symbolic Stone Table scene Aslan attributes his resurrection to "deeper magic still which she did not know" (Lewis, p.185): the White Witch's lack of religious enlightenment is ultimately her undoing, signalled by the thaw of spring. The intertextual references to the New Testament are patent: the sacrificial death of God's son to purge and save mankind; the earthly reincarnation; the audience of women watching this unfolding of symbolic events. The analogy is carried further by Christ-like creation of the post-battle meal: "How Aslan provided food for them all I don't know" (Lewis, p.193), a line that amplifies the Christian mysticism surrounding this biblical figure. Following his revivification, the language depicting the lion is elevated and enervated as "He rushes on and on, never missing his footing, never hesitating, threading his way through with perfect skill between tree trunks, jumping over bush and briar and the smaller streams, swimming the largest of all…right across Narnia, in spring" (Lewis, p.186). Here Aslan is presented through the religious sublime, augmented by the harmonious synergy with nature as Lewis reformulates the Christian doctrine in terms of the fairy-tale.
The simplistic nature of the fairy tale format shows through in the reiteration of the "foolish" (Lewis, p.113 & p.122) closing of the wardrobe door behind both Lucy and Edmund. The ascribing of virtuosity onto Peter is heightened by the fact that "of course, he remembered, as every sensible person does, that you should never, never shut your self in a wardrobe" (Lewis, p.133). The delineation of Peter is in stark contrast to the "spiteful" Edmund who "jeered and sneered at Lucy" (Lewis, p.121) on her excited return from Narnia, in addition to indicating the authorial orientation and intention. The obnoxious and disloyal Edmund receives all the projected depravities that require amendment, and consequently gravitates towards the evil White Witch, whereas the commendable Peter extrapolates the author's notions of moral fibre and common sense. Edmund is corrupt and corruptible, avariciously guzzling the Turkish Delight - a literary symbol for sexual knowledge - and thereby fulfils the narrative role of indulging in aberrant behaviour. This descent into moral depravity is related in literal fashion during his flight to the White Witch's palace, "slipping", "sliding", "skidding" and "tripping" until "he was wet and cold and bruised all over" (Lewis, p.152) as he becomes enslaved by sin.
A significant aspect to stress is the instructions that are given to Edmund by the White Witch: "my house is between those two hills" (Lewis, p.127). Again, applying the theories of Klein, the sexual resonance of this becomes clear and rather startling as an image of feminine sexual characteristics - the breasts - are an implicit part of depravity and bolsters the notion of her house as a harem. Hence it is possible to discern the presence of unacknowledged authorial issues: "every combination of sensuous presentations…requires the help of the Unconscious" (Freud, p.675). The manifestation of the unconscious again appears fleetingly as the psychological aperture releases facets of sublimated desire. However, this has a tendency to remain elusive and tenuous as the very operation of this psychological split is to immediately recede as the chasm seals up. The unconscious functions with a veneer of deception, and is consequently extremely fragile on the ontic plane. The 'birthing' into Narnia through the fur-coated wardrobe is another incident that resonates on this level; the penetration of narrow spaces are classic psychoanalytical sexual images, with fur acting as a synonym for pubic hair, and therefore the route into Narnia seems to be both a uterine exit and a move towards sexual contact. The employment of the classic quest motif once the children are in Narnia constructs the journey in pursuit of something lost in the past, a regressive search that entails battling the supernatural. In psychoanalytical terms, the end point of this regressive quest is the return to the womb which is also the cervical gateway to Narnia. Of course, no matter how long the children spend in Narnia, the exterior temporality remains unaffected because at its heart it is an interior journey that maintains the perpetual status of childhood.
The supernatural reality of Narnia can be viewed as the construction of a dream world: authorial thoughts become objectified into scenes and images as a landscape of ideological lexicography emerges. As a psychical locality "the sense of action in dreams is different from that of waking ideational life" (Freud, p.684). This relates to the psychoanalytical concept of dreams being a construct of stored-up sensory imagery, a hallucinatory revival of perceptual imprints. Freud's definition of a dream world states that it is "a substitute for an infantile scene modified by being transferred on to a recent experience" (Freud, p.696). Hence it is possible to see the enslaved Narnia as analogous to the specificities of the mid 20th Century: the jack-booted police states of Nazi Germany, Il Duce's Italy and the evolving constricts of Stalinist Russia. However, there is another side to this historical location: this can be seen in the sense of optimism and rebirth indicated by the Aslan-induced thaw, reflecting the post-war vision of a new society. In 1950's Britain there was an emphasis on the upcoming cohort of children who were ascribed a sense of hope and opportunity in the relief of this post-war immediacy. This next generation of children were imbued with the responsibility of forging a better world than the war generation had experienced. The writing of Lewis seems to be infused with a religious thaw, a pervasive spring time induced by the appearance of the Christ figure Aslan, coloured by an imagined pastoral idyll, a phantasmagoria that is derived from a town child's perspective - the evacuee children at the hub of the story are "sent" to live with the Professor "because of the air-raids" (Lewis, p.111). The dictatorial White Witch is imbued with autocratic timbre through her ability to turn her dissidents into statues, which functions as a manifestation of totalitarianism that only Aslan can dissipate. The whispering trees add to this despotic atmosphere, mirroring the real paranoia of espionage in the gathering frost of the Cold War period.
Tolkein's criticism of the Narnia series stemmed from what he saw as an unsystematic construction of the 'other' world. It can be argued that 'real' components are haphazardly mixed with the mythological characters of fauns and Father Christmas. I think that the use of talking animals works on two levels: firstly, as an ideological realisation. The sweet-natured Mr. Tumnus is allied with Aslan, who is not only a Christ figure but also equated with England, being, of course, a lion. The tyranny of the dictator state is associated with the ferocious and the "deformed" (Lewis, p.191), embodied by the police chief wolf, Fenris Ulf. The use of animals also can be traced back in the author's biography - he loved playing with stuffed animals as a child - and in addition relates to the Kleinian postulation that the perceived ability to communicate with nature is a profound instance of childhood pleasure. The second level on which this amalgam of mythology and reality works is that it allows Lewis to present his religious didactic in terms of a child's simplistic experience range, a religious awareness based on the celebration of the Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter. Therefore the surreal appearance of Father Christmas combines both popular symbology and the mythologically established form to imply a theological truth. I would like to illuminate this point with the following comment from Lewis: "The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful" (Myers, p.116). In this moment Lewis betrays the premeditated proposed manipulation of his reader; what I personally find disturbing is the inherent arbitrary mediation that is therefore imbued into the construction of Narnia. Lewis aimed to instill his own convictions of Christian humanism, the training of emotions and prescripted 'virtue' that flows from his belief in absolute truths, such as the Incarnation of Christ, using archetypal imagery.
Lacan argues that there is a special spectral locus between perception and consciousness that is the interval of the unconscious, and it is here that both the subject is constituted and the Other is posited. Therefore conceptualising Narnia as a dream world gains even more weight as an arena of unconscious authorial manifestations; Nietzsche points out that "some primeval relic of humanity is at work which we can now scarcely reach" (Freud, p.700). The "navel" of dream thoughts, in Freudian thinking, flow into the conscious: "in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought" (Freud, p.671). 'Resistance', the source of dynamic psychical censorship produced through repression and suppression, is dramatically reduced in the dream world, although it remains a distorting agent. This world, as Nietzsche intimated, appears to exist as a vehicle of anthropologically innate resonance and Peter's epistemological questioning draws attention to this: "Well, sir, if things are real, they're there all the time, aren't they?" (Lewis, p.131). Ultimately, childhood is delivered as unending - the wardrobe is always there and, equally, the children are unchanged upon their return. As a result, the channelling mould of childhood is catalogued in the larger sphere of the unconscious, where an exertion of phylogenetic childhood operates, and this permits the unwitting integration and interchange of material in Lewis' construction of Narnia. The influence of his relationship cannot be discarded: "Sexual excitement momentarily breaks down the structure of the self which enables us to "bind" both internal and external stimuli within a controlling and organising subjective wholeness" (Lacan, p.140). It is viable to state that evolution of the Narnia narrative was governed by the latent effect of the unconscious reserve, operating within the social network of Lewis' own experience.
It is the teenage characters of Junk that seem to exist in a dream-perception of the world etched by Burgess' social realism, a vastly different situation to the supernatural fantasy of Narnia. Each chapter posits the reader directly within a character's point of view through a first person narrative stream, inducing audience interpolation whilst allowing autonomous judgement by withholding the authorial commentary imbued through an omniscient, ostensibly objective, third person narrator. This assertion is bourn out in Chapter 14, where the reader is subjected to Lily's enmeshing voice: "It's magic. Listen to the words. You can be anything, you can do anything, you can be anything, you can do anything" (Burgess, p.190). The dream-perception of this excerpt resides in the prevalent repetition, illuminating the depth of self-deception the characters all participate in as addiction sets in. Furthermore, Freud emphasises that dream-wishes are characterised by the present tense which acts to represent these wishes as fulfilled. The present tense is ubiquitous throughout the text, and earlier in the same chapter it can be observed in Lily's declarations about the "Freefood shop": "You go inside. You put the food under your coat or in your shopping bag and then you take it home with you" (Burgess, p.188). Again the theme of self-deception emerges, as the justification for theft is generated by positing possession and authority as "just another form of mind control" (Burgess, p.189). Social responsibility is circumnavigated as each of the characters descend into addiction, rejecting social parameters and in their place embracing a veritable form of mind control through their spiralling dependence on heroin. The clarity of self-knowledge and consequent despair develops only after the damage has been irreversibly inflicted: "slave, hero, rent boy, pimp, master of the universe - you'll do whatever you have to do to get your next hit", even "eat shit" (Burgess, p.358). Here the language reverberates with a teenage intonation as Tar laments his incarcerated situation.
The formal characteristics of Junk make sure it presents itself in complete opposition to the established literary conventions of writing for children. The language is much closer to the diurnal dialects of contemporary teenage interaction, aswell as the effective structural montage. Burgess addresses the adolescent reader directly in a technical sense by adopting a conversational tone and address, whilst the appropriation of the language of the adolescent not only empowers to the young reader but also cements the adolescent as the active agent in the narrative: "it was like, you know, a trap? I mean, they'd covered me in shit and now I was out of their control it was, I love you…" (Burgess, p.198). Here the author successfully recreates an adolescent intonation, inducing identification within his target audience and setting the distrustful parental perspective in opposition to the tone of the narrative. The protagonists' descent into darkness stems for both malcontent and from the failings of the adult world. This plunge is remorselessly depicted as the children make a litany of bad decisions - possibly for the right reasons - which catalyse and accelerate their fall. There is a pervasive sense of carpe diem, a celebration of the moment and an almost hedonistic ethos: as Tar experiences heroin for the first time, his reaction is that "I felt I was just beginning to learn how to live" (Burgess, p.185). The obvious irony is that in fact he is learning how to die; yet this is not preached by the author, it is presented through the evolution of the fabula and the juxtaposition of the different characters voices. The multi-strand structure of multiple first person narratives shifts the audience focus constantly, a method that is both engaging and interpolating, and produces an innately fragmented world view - like the teenagers, who lack the capacity to assimilate experience into learning. The narrative technique of imbedding the fabula inside the adolescent consciousness illustrates the hollowness of their reasoning and the persistent self-deception, and therefore ultimately exposes the dangers that exist when there are not the necessary protective constraints in the absence of maturity. It can be argued that the abstinence of explicit authorial comment is superseded by the expositionary judgement; this is supported by the vacancy surrounding the protagonists, as nothing seems to exist beyond the moment, which soon translates into nothing beyond the next "hit", and the poignant sense of isolation that ensues.
However, this is executed in contrast to the established traditions of children's literature: Burgess subverts the adult perspective that stems from Victorian literature, seen in such texts as Peter Pan and Alice In Wonderland. These texts were instrumental in enshrining the notion of childhood innocence, and the inherently adult perspective both perpetuated and fiercely protected this tradition. Conversely, when subjected to a Freudian analysis, this position ceases to become anything but innocent: the Victorian construction of the child seems to reek of paedophilic voyeurism, salivating over the idealised child. In Junk the author departs from the implicit adult perspective that constantly seeks to educate the innocent child in a dogmatic sense. Yet there is certainly a didactic aspiration pulsing through the text, perhaps much more effective in that it addresses the teenage audience unswervingly. The argument for censorship, evinced by the reactionary critical responses, is certainly part of this obsolete concept that the innocence of the child must be kept sacrosanct, and the author's comments in relation to this are aptly amusing: "Anyone would have thought there was a free pack of soft drugs with every copy!" As I have already propounded, the strength of Junk lies in the fact that it allows the young mind to reach an autonomous analysis, something Burgess touches upon in one of his interviews: "There are books for grandparents, babies, toddlers and grown-ups - why has this group [teenagers] been left alone? It's all the more odd when you think about how big the youth market is in film, music, computer games and so on." This expounds a position that I find personal resonance with: there is a severe lack literature that addresses the young person directly, unlike the myriad forms of popular entertainment and it is these other cultural artefacts that provoke a debate on censorship, if instructive editing is a valid discourse in any case. Gemma's depiction of the drug induced incarceration functions to highlight the tolerable restrictions of parental control: "You take more and more, and more often. Then you get sick of it and give up for a few days. And that's the really nasty thing because then, when you're clean, that's when it works so well." (Burgess, p.249). The exacting mandates of addiction are far more severe than the parameters of parents; this didactic core, delivered so effectively, is surely a positive insight that any parent would want their child to grasp.
The superficial content of Junk may be a little disturbing, but the underlying didactic drive of the novel mitigates this, in my view, and justifies the inclusion of biographically generated details that, arguably, are adult concerns. I cannot say the same for The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe: a sophisticated regard renders an adult investment in the text which I find to be far more disconcerting than the language and descriptions of substance abuse that appear in Burgess' text - these are surely things that children are subjected to anyway in films, video games, the playground…
1 Critics at Large: newyorker.com
2 Articles: web.onetel.net.uk/~melvinburgess
Bibliography:-
Texts:
Bennett, A. and Royle, N. Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory.
Harlow: Prentice-Hall Europe, 1999
Bersani. L. Baudelaire And Freud. London: University of California Press, Ltd., 1977
Burgess, M. Junk. London: Penguin, 1996
Doris, T. M. Lewis in Context. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1994
Freud, S. Trans. Stachey, J. Ed. James Stachey and Alan Tyson. The Interpretation of Dreams. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1976
Harland, R. Literary Theory From Plato To Barthes. London: MacMillan Press Ltd., 1999 Klein, M. Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945.
London: Karnac Books, 1975
Klein, M. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963.
London: Vintage, 1997
Lacan, J. Trans. Sheridan, A. The Four Fundamental Concepts Of Psycho-Analysis. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1977
Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001
Lewis, C.S. The Allegory Of Love: A Study In Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936
Lewis, C.S. The Chronicles Of Narnia. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998
Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1955
Manlove, C. C.S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement. London: MacMillan Press Ltd., 1987
Mitchell, J. The Selected Melanie Klein. London: Penguin Books, 1986
Todorov, T. Trans. Howard, R. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach To A Literary Genre. New York: Cornell University Press, 1975
Parkin-Gounelas, R. Literature And Psychoanalysis: Intertextual Readings. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001
Websites:- http://www.newyorker.com Accessed on 08/04/2006
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~melvinburgess Accessed on 10/04/2006
http://www.voya.com Accessed on 19/04/2006
http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk Accessed on 10/04/2006
http://changingminds.org Accessed on 22/04/2006 http://cslewis.drzeus.net Accessed on 22/04/2006