Last doings

[larryhammer]

Last four of twenty lines, including admittedly some of the hardest:

"Beauty, vision, midnight dies" ("Lullaby" aka "Lay your sleeping head, my love," Auden, irongall)
"Because many of them are thirteen stories high"
"The City is of Night, but not of Sleep"
"This is the parting that they had"

Any takers? If it's any hint, Yog Sysop would certainly know two of them.

Meanwhile, if you ever get caught in the world of Edward Eager, watch out for those teenage girls -- they'll ruin things every time. Teenage boys are usually worse, but he rarely comments on those.

---L.

Comments

[randimason.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile, if you ever get caught in the world of Edward Eager, watch out for those teenage girls -- they'll ruin things every time. Teenage boys are usually worse, but he rarely comments on those.

Grrr.
Why *is* that, anyway?

And has anyone ever written a "What really happened to Susan when everyone else went off to Narnia" story?

(She hasn't told me, or I'd write it myself)

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

It's always an interesting question and it tails into a story I'm working on. Susan is lost, I always thought; she grew up, after all; she stopped believing in superstitions/myths/omnipotent sky fairies/Aslan even after she knew the truth about him (that he was real). Notably, even in Narnia, Susan tried to live a normal adult life and she was the only one who thought of marrying (The Horse and His Boy. None of the children are allowed to marry and beget children of their own. They all live and die in saintly ignorance and chastity. Wendy at least is allowed to grow up and have a life, and notably Barrie presents this as better than the alternative: Peter Pan's perpetual heartless childhood is not a good thing. A good essay could be had with Peter Pan, Narnia, and His Dark Materials: compare and contrast the fates of the principals.

One senses a certain squidginess in C. S. Lewis's inability to tell us this directly; it must be the single most-often-asked question about Narnia. I'm sure his successors in fantasies of religion would have no qualms.

Given the general trend in mid-20c children's books to destroy children's memories and negate their fantastical, nonconforming experiences, perhaps Susan forgets or blocks the memories of Narnia. Or perhaps she's the only one who escapes; the rest are insane and living in hallucination in an asylum somewhere.

[larryhammer]

Contrast again with ultimate fates in Eager, who is perfectly willing to admit to sex (if somewhat coded) and even has generations, protagonists begatting others, and in more than one line (Roger's Old One gave magical adventures to his father and grandfather, or some ancestor at any rate). But for him, puberty is incompatable with magic. Some adults may learn about it, but they can't participate, Mr. Smith's treasure not withstanding. And kids can't participate when they are noticing boys or girls. All of which is closer to Barrie than Lewis or Pullman, I suppose, but still distinct (I like to call the recent Pan movie The Seduction of Wendy Darling for a reason). For one thing, Eager seems to hold both the magic and sex as natural and good -- merely exclusive, to his regret.

---L.

[larryhammer]

Eager also puts in constant reminders of losing things as one grows older, even before puberty. Every book, older children make disparaging remarks about certain pastimes they've grown out of that younger ones haven't yet. It'd be tempting to merely note this as naturalism, for a group of mixed-age children, or as prefiguring the magic/sex exchange, were it not that one prepubescent discard is a vital plot point in Knight's Castle. Which means Eager was quite conscious of this aspect of aging, all throughout. Both aging and time.

All of which makes Time Garden more central than I'd been considering it. Hmm.

---L.

[larryhammer]

And what is Nesbit's attitude? I've not read enough to know. Can anyone can shed light on how much Eager took from his avowed master/mistress?

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Hunh. You know, I've read some Nesbit, but not enough to make a sweeping statement with my customary special-prosecutorial sweeping authority. Nonetheless I'll go out on a limb.

Nesbit allows people to grow up; they fall in love; they get married. But only children get magic, and even so the magic they get is a mixed blessing. They lack the wisdom to use it well, but by the time they could be old enough to have that knowledge, they can no longer use it.

This must in part derive from/tie into the (relatively recent, historically) sentimentalization of childhood as a liminal period when Other Influences are felt.


[Edith Nesbit (http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1322152,00.html) was a woman, btw]

[larryhammer]

Interesting. Any connection between the wisdom and puberty, and if so, beyond coincidental?

[Indeed; thus my master/mistress jape: Eager used "master"]

---L.

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Interesting that I much prefer the kind of magic that starts with puberty, and found the Narnia model terribly limiting and sad. (Also the Witch World model of magic as adult but sexless.)

One should grow into things rather than out of them, imnsho.

[larryhammer]

In general, I do too. Sex and magic are paired, or even in some symbolic way identical, rather than exclusive. Nostalgia and loss are not my natural modes. One appeal of Eager is he manages to sidestep regret at growing out of magic (aside from characters regretting losing playmates, and even then it's clear they'd regret the changes even without the magic) by making the magic more locally limited: in every book, it's a finite resource, which the kids use up within a couple weeks. Or in one case, the week until the library book is due. The regret is that this adventure is over.

Though, really, it's a voice appeal. The rest is rationalization.

---L.

[larryhammer]

I'm reminded of an otherwise entirely forgettable SF novel by Timothy Zahn, where children on the colony world had psi powers until puberty. Result: creches, where older children looked after (and taught control to) the younger ones, with societal results he propagated, but not quite far enough. I've always been surprised that no one has translated that to a fantasy setting.

---L.

[randimason.livejournal.com]

And I have yet to see how the two were connected.

I read "Five Children and It" on the strength of Eager's repeated recommendations, and was terribly disappointed.

The children seemed to have no relationship at all with any children I've wandered across.

But that may just have been my reading. YMMV.

[larryhammer]

From the few Nesbit I've read, I can see similarities (especially structural) with Eager. But I don't think Nesbit has aged well.

---L.

[randimason.livejournal.com]

That may be it, then.
I haven't read Eager (or Nesbit) for a few years, but I do remember getting a sense that what the children did in both cases was driven by the author, rather than what children would actually do.

[larryhammer]

Eager's sometimes on, sometimes off with child personalities. Even aside from his not recognizing a state of preadolescence, that is.

---L.

[randimason.livejournal.com]

And I'd always thought it was the simpler explanation of Lewis having no ideas of what the teenage female (or perhaps any female) mindscape was like.

Not that I necessarily think the play "Shadowlands" is nonfiction (in any more sense than Copenhagen (http://www.pbs.org/hollywoodpresents/copenhagen/) is a true account of the life of Niels Bohr), but I have to wonder how, if the time table had been different, any input of Lewis' wife would have changed that work.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

And has anyone ever written a "What really happened to Susan when everyone else went off to Narnia" story?

Neil Gaiman did. It's in an anthology somewhere.

[randimason.livejournal.com]

That's the worst thing about being Lucy Anne (http:/www.holycow.com/dreaming) sometimes. I can't tell whether my thoughts are half-remembered Neil stuff or if whether the thoughts I have and what he writes just tend to converge.

It's fairly chicken and egg at this point.

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

I know the Auden, and you and I already talked about it elsewhere, and I won't spoil the answer. It's my favorite poem.

[larryhammer]

That's right, at WFC. I'm going to give you credit for that (it doesnt' seem likely anyone else will jump in at this point).

---L.

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

Yay!

Will you save any unidentified lines for a future Hardest Lines game consisting of the ungettable lines from previous games?

I'm impressed by the fact that there are ungotten lines. It implies an honor code at work, in this Google/Gutenberg age.

[larryhammer]

Well, I was planning to take pity give the answers tomorrow, and move on to other things.

---L.

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

Cool. I wouldn't mind knowing. :)

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Well, I am thinking the City of Night reference is 18c (or 17c? but the City as a subject wasn't really around yet then) and I think it might be Cowper or Gray or Thomson or someone of that elegiac kidney, but I have only vague feelings about it. I know I've read it. I must have seen it in an anthology of Augustan poetry during Johnson studies. It is definitely not from London. I suppose there's always Bartlett's.

Chasing the Edward Eager/E. Nesbit rabbit is more to my unexalted taste.

[larryhammer]

Nope -- it's Victorian.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

argh, it just came to me: "The City is of Night, but not of Sleep" sounds like Milton! There's my money.

[larryhammer]

Nope, but I will allow a Miltonic influence is involved. Answer next post.

---L.

[larryhammer]

Speaking of those teenagers, Eager does use them to good effect, during the Little Women episode of The Time Garden: when her older brother meets Meg March, she exclaims, "I just realized about Meg. You know what she is? She's a teenage girl."

A few pages later, when Jack notices Jo, Eliza realizes she's one too.

---L.