Reinventing the Exodus

Jonathan Rozenberg ENGK01 Literary Seminar Autumn term, 2011 English Studies The Centre for Language and Literature Lund University Supervisor: Birgitta Berglund Reinventing the Exodus: Biblical allusion and Jewish parallels in William Nicholson’s The Wind on Fire trilogy Table of contents Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 The bias towards Biblical allusion ......................................................................... 2 The Manth people – a mirror of the Jews............................................................. 6 The journey – Exodus retold .................................................................................. 12 Conclusion................................................................................................................ 15 Works cited .............................................................................................................. 16 Appendix .................................................................................................................. 18 Introduction When writing a novel, there are numerous ways in which the author can shape the reader’s perception of the story. Language, narrative technique and character portrayal all come into play here. Another way to give the reader a sense of what is to come, is by making use of and alluding to other texts, i.e. intertextuality. In order for this to have the desired effect, though, it must be a work the reader is familiar with. And what, at least in the Western world, could be a more well-known literary work than the Bible? Alluding to stories in both the Old and the New Testament is a common trait in nearly all literary genres, and it is frequently encountered in fantasy literature. Since the nature of a fair portion of the fantasy genre is similar to that of fairy tales and folklore, and the plots regularly share the epic proportions of religious works, authors of fantasy novels have access to a medium in which Biblical allusion can easily be worked into the text. The most famous examples are perhaps C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and his other works set in Middle Earth. The former sought to retell the Gospels in a new fashion, and thus introduce children to the New Testament, with his now classical Narnia novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , whereas Tolkien drew on Genesis when writing a creation myth of his own in Silmarillion . Another theme which is ever-present in the Bible and central in most fantasy novels is the constant struggle between good, often represented by a seemingly weak and outnumbered protagonist or faction, and the much larger and stronger forces of evil. Because authors of any kind obviously draw on their own life experiences to shape their writing, one can pose a pertinent question: If Judeo-Christian religious themes and Biblical allusion still seep into fantasy works of the early 21 st century, by chance or on purpose, what part do they play? Perhaps it is not too great a venture to say that Old Testament symbolism will not be as salient to the average 21 st century reader as it would have been a hundred years ago. At least, general opinion seems to be that familiarity with Christian texts was much more a part of everyday knowledge in the early 1900s. By looking at William Nicholson’s the Wind on Fire trilogy, 1 I hope to find the answers to the questions above. The books were written for young adults and published between 2001 and 2003. Due to their recent publication, very little, if any, academic material has been 1 A note on reference: For clarity, Nichlson’s novels are differentiated by title. Thus “ WS ” refers to The Wind Singer , “ SM ” is Slaves of the Mastery and “ FS ” is Firesong . 1 written concerning the series. The same lack of reliable source material applies to information about the life of the author. I therefore turned to Nicholson himself, reading his online biography as well as interviewing him, in order to gain some insight into both his life and the process of and ideas behind his work. This method presents a problem, since the author via an interview is free to, in a sense, “write” his own story and even modify it. However, with no secondary sources available, I turned to the “primary source”. The biographical information also ties in with the intertextual point of view, from which the novels are interesting not just because of their themes, mentioned below, but also because of the mixed religious background of the author himself: his Jewish mother and Methodist father converted to Catholicism when Nicholson was seven years old. My aim with this essay is to investigate the intertextuality and historical references of the novel; how and why has Nicholson in this series made use of allusions to Judeo-Christian themes in general and the Bible in particular? In order to relate the religious symbolism of the novels to the life of the author, a biographical section on William Nicholson and his religious heritage is included in the essay. Regarding the novels themselves, I will concentrate on three main themes. The first of these is which allusions are used to make sure the Manth people depicted in the novel makes the reader think of the Jews. The second theme is how the plot in general appears to be a retelling of the Exodus story. Finally, I will try to show that by using these allusions to the Bible, Nicholson gives the Manth an ethnic identity and lends his story a sense of the epic. The bias towards Biblical allusion How does one know whether a literary allusion is truly an allusion, or just coincidence? One way of knowing is to determine the author’s familiarity with the work alluded to. Imagine a novel about a man named Francis, who can speak to animals. A natural assumption upon reading this would be that the author’s choice of name for the main character is an allusion to the catholic Saint Francis of Assisi, who is said to have shared that very ability. Would the assumption change if the reader managed to find out that the author had, to the best of her knowledge, never read nor heard anything about the (supposedly) real St. Francis? The likelihood of the fictional character’s name alluding to the genuine man now seems less likely. Arguably, it could be that the author simply did not remember, for example, a 2 documentary she once saw about hagiographies, where St. Francis was briefly mentioned. The author could even be Catholic herself, and encountered tales of St. Francis early in life. The name and what it represents could have stuck in her mind, only to appear later on, when she penned her novel, as an unconscious allusion. The difficulty with knowing anything certain about the sub- or unconscious parts of the mind thus makes it nearly impossible to disprove “her” Francis’ status as an allusion. The opposite, however, appears to be a far easier task. The process dealt with here is one which in textual criticism is called contamination . Greetham, who in The Pleasures of Contamination discusses intertextuality, among other things, defines contamination as a “sort of confluence whereby an external or precedent text invades the composition (consciously or unconsciously) of the current text” (10). The situation could be that one knows for certain that the author has studied the stories of St. Francis. It would then be possible to say that the name of her creation – as well as any choice of words, plot detail or other element of the book which seems to bear a connection to the real St. Francis – really is an allusion, perhaps even an intentional one. However, as mentioned in the introduction, one needs to always be careful regarding biographical material. There is always the risk that the information in a biography, interview or article about the author is wrong, due to mistakes or even intentional attempts to redefine or rewrite the story of the person being researched. A researcher of the novel can credibly, but never with perfect certainty, argue that an allusion really is what is seems, if it fits with the knowledge he or she has of the author’s background, the social climate or time period they live in, or their knowledge of whatever the allusion could be connecting to. The fact that the fictional world of the novel is explicitly, or, as in the case of Nicholson’s work, implicitly disconnected from the real world, does not provide an incentive to not look for allusion. Rather, as Brian Attebery argues in Strategies of Fantasy , it is in the nature of the reader to look for connections because they have been denied (67). In the case of Biblical or other religious themes in The Wind on Fire trilogy, the reason for allusion becomes apparent when looking at William Nicholson’s life prior to writing the three novels. As he writes in the biography on his webpage, his paternal grandfather was a Methodist, and his maternal grandfather was Jewish. Nicholson’s mother, “seeking something to make sense of her life” and inspired by Catholic missionaries, decided to convert to Catholicism, and convinced the father to do likewise. At eight years of age, their children were baptized and later on educated by monks in Catholic schools. It was during this time, and later on during his time at university, that Nicholson claims to have developed his faith and theological opinions. He states that he “came of age intellectually at a time of ferment in 3 the Catholic Church” and was taught by his monastic teachers to “pursue the truth wherever it led”, moving from a steady childhood faith to end up with a rather more agnostic worldview by the end of his academic years (Nicholson “Bio”). Traces of religious faith, belief in or a search for a salient greater power, and even something resembling prayer surfaces at a few places in The Wind on Fire . Althought the Manth people do not have any religion or even a notion of a divine being, at least two members of the Hath family show a spiritual side, a search for protective force of some kind.

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