Connection and Disconnection in Tom’s Midnight Garden

Literacy, 1985

2018

This essay explores the modernist aesthetic involved in creating a fictive, nostalgic, childhood experience. Evoking the experience of childhood through fiction is as close to actually reliving childhood as we can get. The author argues that it is possible to actually transport the reader into not only the idealized world of childhood, but more so into an embodied experience of childhood through the use of different kinds of narrative and stylistic configurations. In a stylistic and narratological analysis of three modernist novels, Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves (1931), Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace [Is-slottet] (1963) and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), the author explores the different ways that literature can create (or re-create) the very experience of childhood through literary style. The strategies involved in establishing a fictive experience of childhood extend from narratological choices such as free indirect style, strict focalization through a child in the...

Text Matters

This essay explores the modernist aesthetic involved in creating a fictive, nostalgic, childhood experience. Evoking the experience of childhood through fiction is as close to actually reliving childhood as we can get. The author argues that it is possible to actually transport the reader into not only the idealized world of childhood, but more so into an embodied experience of childhood through the use of different kinds of narrative and stylistic configurations. In a stylistic and narratological analysis of three modernist novels, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace [Is-slottet] (1963) and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), the author explores the different ways that literature can create (or re-create) the very experience of childhood through literary style. The strategies involved in establishing a fictive experience of childhood extend from narratological choices such as free indirect style, strict focalization through a child in the ...

LITERA, 32(1): 21-40, 2022

The purpose of this study is to decipher the relationship between trauma and the differentiating perception of the self and time by discussing varying post-traumatic responses of the traumatized characters in Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden (1978) and The Child in Time (1987). To this end, the study applies trauma theory to examine the traumatized characters' altered perception of temporality and the self, and to discuss to what extent the characters in the novels can overcome the impacts of the traumatic experiences they have. The two novels revolve around traumatized victims that lose the conscious perception of the self and temporality in reality after the traumatic experience. The Cement Garden depicts the post-traumatic challenges of four siblings, called Jack, Julie, Tom and Sue after their mother's death. The Child in Time unveils Stephen and Julie's process of working through their ordeal after the disappearance of their little daughter, Kate in parallel to Stephen's friend Charles's acting out his traumatic childhood by regressing to his boyhood. The critical approach to the characters' response to their traumas concludes that trauma disrupts people's perception of time and the self, leading either to tragedy when they lose the balance between their defense mechanisms and the trauma reality, or to awakening to their renewed life when they reconcile with their trauma reality.

Of the one or two questions in life that I prefer to duck, perhaps the most frequent comes from the daunting and amiable creature, the Bloomsbury enthusiast. What was she like? they ask.

The article proposes a new reading of the Garden Story, based on the Freudian concept of the Oedipus complex and the Derridean concept of the supplement. The Woman is considered as an Oedipal replacement of the mother-Earth in its fruit-bearing capacity. At the same time, she can be likened to a supplement in the Derridean sense, intended to compensate for the Man’s loneliness. However, created from a part of the Man’s body, she remains a (dangerous) supplement and not a real Other and cannot divert the Man from the encroachment on Father’s rights (eating of the fruit). The loneliness of the first Man is therefore not overcome but transformed into the loneliness of the whole human species.

This paper considers Terry Pratchett's sophisticated use of dark fairy tale motifs in his Tiffany Aching quartet: The Wee Free Men (2003), A Hat Full of Sky (2004), The Wintersmith (2006) and I Shall Wear Midnight (2010). Like most fairy tales, Tiffany's story reflects the vicissitudes of the transition from girlhood to early adolescence: the struggle to define oneself, the fear of responsibility (and its doppelganger, the fear of separation), the fear of taking up one's place in the adult economies of desire and consumerism – all of which Pratchett equates, in some way, with death. However, Tiffany's self-assurance and self-assertion subvert the story typically associated with the passive fairy tale heroine. For Pratchett, the child-hero is someone who uses First Sight (seeing beyond the gothic illusion to what's really there) and Second Thoughts (thinking beyond the first impression); in this way the child-victim learns self-reliance and agency. Through her stoic canniness and his style of parody, Pratchett criticises elements of the fairy tale that ordinarily disempower children (and girls in particular) while acknowledging the real darknesses that haunt the 'knowing child'. The fairy tale 'monsters' in these novels vary from the openly parodied (witches, ghosts and the Nac Mac Feegle) to the pitiable (the Fairy Queen and the hiver that possesses people) and the terrifying (the hatred-spreading Cunning Man). Often Tiffany is to blame for allowing evil into her world but in taking responsibility, she learns agency. However, mundane situations reveal darker horrors that must also be faced: the death of her grandmother; leaving home; (almost fatal) competition with peers; child abuse; and the inexplicable prejudices of ordinary people. Pratchett's interweaving of the gothic horrors of fairy tale and real life stimulates the cognitive engagement of his readers, challenging them to consider self-reliance as a strategy against fear.