Intertextuality and elitism in school stories – Julien on Darch

Heather Julien writes: “As Sheila Ray and others have observed, most girls’ school stories written in the first half of the twentieth century centered on representations of boarding schools—an environment that did not reflect the education experience of most readers and writers. A prime example of this bias toward representations of an atypically elite education experience might be Elinor Brent-Dyer’s sixty-two-book-strong Chalet School series, which ran from 1925 to 1970. The fantasy of class privilege that Brent-Dyer’s books arguably offer does not, of course, mean that other aspects of the novels lack political and social valence. …Not only Brent-Dyer’s books, of course, are set in elite institutional environments. The boarding school setting is so central to the entire genre that Beverly Lyon Clark’s book-length genre study systematically excludes any representations of day schools… Darch’s books bucked this tendency and demonstrate that stories set in day schools can be more intensely concerned with school life than boarding school stories, which commonly incorporate extra-generic elements of mystery, fantasy, and family stories (the three chief “intergenres” with the school story).” (pp.2-3)

“The intertextuality of Darch’s novels’ per se is not what distinguishes them. As is characteristic of much children’s literature, most school stories are intertextual and might be said to engage in what have been called “reading games” with their readers. In countless school stories—for adults as well as for children—the characters read, think about, quote, and refer ironically to school stories. Joanna Lloyd’s Audrey—A New Girl even contains a disclaimer: “The names of any girls’ school stories mentioned in this book are not, to the best of the author’s belief, those of existing books.” What distinguishes Darch’s novels is the degree to which they make sense of their own and their peers’ roles and identities in school via fictional representations. In her essay on intertextuality in children’s literature, Claudia Nelson examines texts that “use devices that may seem considerably more elaborate than the more usual practice of employing a protagonist who is said to enjoy the consumption or creation of literature but showing this enjoyment from the outside”. From this vantage point, Darch’s use of intertextuality—characters read and talk about books and magazines—is quite common.
However, while they most definitely do not fit any postmodern criteria for metatextuality, her evocations of girls reading contain more significance than simply the promotion of literacy, the provision of a bookworm heroine, the salute to fellow practitioners of the genre, or the pleasures of readerly recognition. They testify to and participate in an economy of self- and institution-building in which school narratives were the local currency. Newcomers to school are especially prone to rely on fiction as a sort of conduct book and key to mythologies.” (pp.10-11)

Ref: (emphases in blue bold mine) Julien, Heather. Learning to Be Modern Girls: Winifred Darch’s School Stories The Lion and the Unicorn 32,1 january (2008) 1–21  2008

Do Rozario – The Gothic Architecture of Children’s Books

“The words shone momentarily on the page and they too sank without a trace. Then, at last, something happened. Oozing back out of the page, in his very own ink, came words harry had never written. (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, cited p.209 Do Rozario)

“Back to his own world, created from paper, printer’s ink and an old man’s words.” (Cornelia Funke, Inkspell, cited p.209 Do Rozario)

Following on from the above quotes, Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario presents a rather interesting argument about Gothic children’s literature. She writes:

“There is a Gothic architecture of books, both as objects of and within children’s literature: books filled with secrets and potentially dangerous passages, the narratives as labyrinthine as any castle interior or ruins, the dust jackets as intimidating as any fortress walls. Entering such a book is, potentially, as perilous to the reader as to the characters within the story. These are children’s books of a Gothic persuasion; they include ever-more peculiar books that are magic or that have magical potential, that are devious and complex. The books comprise a fascinating Gothic library marketed to children, through which their fictional counterparts conspire and scheme to counter the intertext of Gothic ruins and enigmas which hem them in and threaten them with intertextuality itself. Deidre Lynch notes the Gothic tradition’s literary impulse, arguing that early Gothic authors ‘are remarkable […] for the density of their intertextual allusions’ (2001: 31). In making these allusions, authors create characters who are, as Lunch indicates, ‘surrounded by books, ink and paper’ (29). In regard to children’s books, material [-p.210] rather allusive intertextuality – the book, ink, and paper – becomes the Gothic manifestation.
This shift, essentially from allusion to materialisation, is a response to the more commonplace intertextuality of children’s literature itself. John Stephens argues that children’s literature is ‘radically intertextual because it has no special discourse of its own,’ occupying, as it were, ‘the intersection of a number of other discourses’ (1992: 86). Responding to the ‘ordinariness’ of intertextuality in the genre, these particular children’s books reinvest it with significance by actualising it as Gothic peril. They subsequently realise absence in the dearth of a founding discourse, alongside the profusion of discourses that are fragmented, alternated and hidden so as to re-emerge mysterious. The discourses become the stuff of the bibliophilia of children’s literature, its compilation and rewriting of myth, fairy, folk, and other tales. As Lynch suggests, bibliophilia infuses Gothic novels, but in children’s books, it also destabilises the fundamental ontological distinctions between text and lived experience. Bibliophilia, manifested in its intertextual excesses, becomes the architecture of the Gothic novel through which the secrets of children’s literature can be endlessly whispered and through which the distinctions between reader and text can be repeatedly dispelled.” (pp.209-210)

Hmmm! I really like Do Rozario’s argument here.She draws on JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart trilogy and Jonathon Stroud’s Bartimaeus Trilogy in particular, with reference to Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, and Marcus Sedgwick’s The Book of Dead Days and The Dark Flight Down. Her interest is in the presence of books within these books – and textual fragments that hint at other tales – alongside characters that become aware of their literary nature, eliding the distinction between reader and text. The possibility of entering and exiting texts (and one’s textuality), of being menaced by books (think JK Rowling), etc. is seen as a Gothicisation of text itself in children’s literature…. The supernatural and the literary become one and the same.

More than that, Do Rozario also highlights the gothicisation of traditional literature and of literariness in these texts. In a digital age of information networks, bound paper books are being represented as (or have come to represent) the Gothic and the supernatural; the books in these texts have heavy bindings, intricate lettering, elaborate engravings, etc. and their very ‘bookishness’ serves to reveal their Gothic and supernatural nature. I like the argument!

For example, Do Rozario observes: “The act of writing itself may release dangerous secrets. J.K. Rowlking’s Harry Potter series creates a Gothic parallel to our own ‘Muggle’ world, one in which books can scream, snap, become invisible, put spells upon the reader, or simply yield perfectly horrendous curses. The magic of Rowling’s wizarding world infuses its books, creating, across the series, an imagined library of fantastical books to serve the supernatural. The series, however, likewise raises the more personal, ordinary, spontaneous, and contemporaneous kinds of books to Gothic status. The diary, [-p.215] for example, becomes a central text in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998). The diary is an everyday repository of deeply personal secrets, but when the ink of those secrets becomes absorbed into the paper of T.M. Riddle’s diary, the secrets themselves feed a fragment of soul hidden between the covers. The diary is quite ordinary, purchased rather prosaically from a news agency on Vauxhall Road. Riddle, whom Harry, Ron and Hermione discover is the real name of Lord Voldemort, concealing his origins in an act of anagram, had left an imprint of his schoolboy soul within the diary, one that could only be manifested through the ink invested by a new diarist, in this case Ginny Weasley ‘I grew stronger and stronger on a diet of her deepest fears, her darkest secrets’ (Rowling 1998: 228).
The ultimate secret of the diary, therefore, can only be manifest by other secrets, hence it is a very secret diary, as Chapter 13’s title indicates. Yet that deepest secret is itself obsessed by that other Gothic occupation: history. Riddle seeks to discover Harry Potter’s history, the diary fragment of Riddle having been bound in its own textual temporality and so unaware of Harry’s incomplete defeat of his mature self. Even such a textual phantasm is bound to the historical continuum, to a longing and loathing for pastness as it reveals the mystery of his present.” (pp.214-215)

Of Inkheart, though it could also be said of each of the books she is pointing to, Do Rozario notes that “In the absence of an actual castle, books themselves create the architecture, libraries, shelves, boxes, and piles of books configuring paper and ink secret chambers and passages, dungeons and wild woods.” (p.216)

Ref: (italics in original, emphases in blue bold, mine) Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario ‘Fantastic Books: The Gothic Architecture of Children’s Books’ pp.209-225 Eds. Anna Jackson, Karen Coats and Roderick McGillis (c2008) The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. Routledge: New York

Reference is to:Lynch, D. (2001) Gothic libraries and national subjects. Studies in Romanticism, 40(1), 29-48

Stephens, J (1992) Language and ideology in Children’s Fiction. London; New york: Longman

Spike the sympathetic vampire

I really enjoyed Milly Williamson’s article on the sympathetic nature of Spike the vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and on the way in which subtext shifts the audience’s relationship with this character and the text as a whole. According to Williamson:

“The vampire Spike fascinates us because of his polymorphous sexuality, his ambiguity and his emergence as a liminal and pathos-ridden figure. But this is not a new departure for the vampire figure; instead Spike draws on a much longer tradition of the suffering vampire. While much film and literary theory of the vampire has focused on the monolithic evil of Dracula (Astle, 1980; Bentley, 1988[1972]; Jackson, 1981; Jones, 1991[1929]; Richardson, 1991[1959]; Roth, 1988; Twitchell, 1985), there is another tradition which precedes him, in which the vampire is a glamorous outcast, sexual deviant, rebel, rogue and tortured soul. Spike updates several of the conventions associated with the image of the vampire as alluring outsider and, as such, is the latest contribution to the longstanding image of the sympathetic vampire – a creature which always firmly inhabits a contemporary cultural landscape. It is this sympathetic [-p.290] and ambiguous vampire (rather than the vampire-as-menace) which has produced enormous fan cultures throughout the 20th and early 21st century; Spike’s character connects to this fan culture implicitly, thereby adding to the ‘cult’ status of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS).
This article examines Spike’s fictional vampiric ancestry. It assesses what Spike shares with previous sympathetic vampires and it considers the way in which this might resonate with audiences. In addition, the article will consider Spike’s character innovations and will locate the way in which his character changes depictions of the sympathetic vampire in the specific context of the television text BtVS, as well as the larger context of cult television and fan culture.” (pp.289-290)

“Reluctance to kill (or at least a tortured conscience about not being able to resist it) is a key component in vampire fans’ sympathy with the vampire.” (p.291)

“Not good enough to be loved by Buffy and, because of his chip, not bad enough to act vampirically, Spike inhabits an excruciatingly liminal self.” (p.292)

“It was through the figure of Byron that the vampire first became popularized. ‘Byronmania’ contributed deeply to the association between rebellion and a doomed but glamorous outsiderdom which marked the Romantic idea of vampirism.” (p.293)

Describing Spike’s sympathetic ancestry, Williamson describes how “from its entry into the novel, the popularized image of the vampire in Europe and the anglo-American world had become fused to Byronic images of glamorous outsiderdom, morose fatalism, sexual deviancy and social and artistic rebellion.” (p.294)

“Yet while the image of alluring outsiderdom is, as Nina Auerbach puts it, ‘dramatically generational’ (1995: 5), the vampire comes to enter the 20th century generally as an anti-hero and one which several disenchanted generations were prepared to embrace specifically ‘because of its curse’ rather than in spite of it (Carter, 1997: 27; emphasis in original). The fascination in the 19th century with vampiric outsiderdom turns to sympathy and emulation in the ‘success’-oriented culture of the 20th century, which of necessity is simultaneously the culture of the outcast. Chris Rojek suggests that the vast majority of us suffer from ‘achievement
famine’ (2001: 49); this is due to the way in which the ‘democratic ideal of being recognized as extraordinary, special or unique collides with the bureaucratic tendency to standardize and routinize existence’ (2001: 149). Lucien Goldmann made a similar point when he suggested that bourgeois society produces an ‘internal contradiction between individualism as a universal value . . . and the important and painful limitations that this society itself brought to the possibilities of the development of the individual’ (Goldmann, 1975: 12). The official discourses of European and anglo-American culture have promised the right to personal fulfilment and significance, as well as creating the conditions that ensure that its achievement is unattainable. This paradox produces potentially contradictory experiences for the self in cultures which promise (indeed demand) a personal success which the majority cannot achieve. These paradoxical experiences contributed significantly to the rise of fan cultures. Stephen Duncombe explains how this dilemma is experienced by the underground ‘zine’ writers in the US who experience themselves as ‘losers’: 
[‘]While there isn’t much they can do about being losers in a society that rewards interests they don’t share and strengths they don’t have, they can define the value of being a loser and turn a deficit into an asset. (1997: 20)[‘]” (p.294)

“Spike connects to contemporary socially-constructed feelings of inadequacy and Otherness more deeply precisely because of his lack of ‘talent’, ‘acceptance’ and ‘fame’; he suffers from the experience of marginality and disappointment that is the majority experience. Chris Rojek reminds us that our success-oriented celebrity culture ‘creates many more losers than winners’ (2001: 15). Similarly, Duncombe points out that America’s ‘meritocracy’ forces people to compete for their place in society and rewards the winners. But he comments that:
[‘]Where there are winners there are also losers – and lots of them. The winners are celebrated with power, wealth and media representations. The losers – the majority of Americans – are invisible. (1997: 20)[‘]” (p.295)

She concludes: “Spike’s fannish appeal is generated simultaneously from the existence of the metatextual sympathetic ‘vampire star’ through which Spike is read, and BtVS’s cult mode of address, which invites (and depends upon) a ‘knowing’ ‘subtextual’ reading of Spike’s character. Initially, the series hints at Spike’s sympathetic, pathos-ridden existence by drawing on the subcultural reading of the ‘cool bad boy’ vampire as signifying hidden suffering. Once Spike’s empathy-inducing pathos is overtly depicted, the series shifts its subtextual allure onto the sexual relationship between Spike and Buffy. The series uses the conventions of slash fiction stemming from television fan culture in its construction of the sexual relationship between Spike and Buffy, thus continuing to generate the cult status upon which such niche market shows depend. BtVS’s overt appeal to cult fandom’s understanding of subtextual meanings indicates that such readings are not ‘resistant’ or ‘poached’ from the text, but are openly invited. Thus the early academic characterization of fandom as subversive of mainstream television culture, which was predicated on the idea that subtextual meanings were at odds with the intentions of the television text, has been undermined because of the way in which the cult television text deploys subtextual conventions.” (p.307)

Williamson’s discussion of the use of subtext to create a fan relationship with this character – and her discussion of ‘the character-as-star’ are really great. They’re just not what I’m focusing on right now.

Ref: (emphases in blue bold, mine) Milly Williamson (2005) Spike, sex and subtext : Intertextual portrayals of the sympathetic vampire European Journal of Cultural Studies 8: 289-311

“ABSTRACT The vampire Spike of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the latest in a long line of ambiguous but sympathetic vampires which have caught the public imagination, stretching back to Polidori’s Byronesque vampire, Lord Ruthven. This article argues that the vampire image that circulates across contemporary vampire fan cultures is one that exceeds any individual depiction of the vampire; the sympathetic vampire operates as a metatext for vampire fans who draw on textual cues to interpret vampires sympathetically, even when the text itself does not. In the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the text overtly encourages a sympathetic subtextual reading of Spike by linking his glamour, sex appeal and rebellion to a hinted-at unseen suffering, which is easily recognized by fans. Fans read Spike’s bad-boy pose as symbolic of hidden pathos. Indeed, the text adopts conventions associated with fan fiction in order to encourage and sustain a surrounding fan culture.” (p.289)