Revisionary Fantasy: Children's Spatial Practice and the Cambridgeshire Landscape in John Gordon's the Edge of the World
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Vol. I, Issue 1 · Spring 2017 ISSN 2514-2070 DOI: 10.24877/rt.1 Distri!ute" un"er ## B% 4.0 Revisionary Fantasy Children’s Spatial Practice and the Cambridgeshire Landscape in John Gordon’s The Edge of the World NI#& #'()$*++ 1 IN R!"#C I!N Midway through John Gordon’s fifth novel for children, The Edge of the World (1983), a teenage girl flags down a truck on the outskirts of a rural village. She and her friend need a lift back to their village or there’ll be a row with their #arents. $n the %ourney, the girl tells the driver &a long story about how they had gone out walking and got lost', but he is incredulous: &Lost* +,- $ut here? .ou can’t get lost out here. /here’s nowhere to get lost in ' /he girl replies, 0ysteriously, that she and her friend &managed it', that, in fact, they are &#retty good at it' (Gordon 111) 2it’s e3change with the truck-driver inverts conventional ideas of the lost child, vulnerable to moral degradation, epitomised in countless 5straying-from- the-path’ narratives since 6ed 6iding 7ood’s tumultuous %ourney 8or a child to be lost represents a failure of the social ap#aratus to adequately guide the indi4 vidual, but equally su##orts a characterisation of childhood as a time of e3#lora4 Nick Campbell is , -urrent rese,r-h student ,t the Uni0ersit1 o2 3oe.,4pton, ,5,iting his 0i0,. 6is t.esis is entitle" 7#.il"ren8s Neo-3o4,nti-is4: 9.e 'r-.,eologi-,l I4,gin,tion in )ost-:,r #hildren8s ;,nt,s1<. 6is rese,r-. interests in-lude r,di-,l 0isions o2 pla-e, 2olklore, ,n" the histor1 o2 children8s publishing. tion, growing self-determination and adventure. :t recalls the wayward victims of neglect indicted "y ;illiam <lake’s work, and the idealised country child run4 ning free and without direction evoked "y ;illiam ;ordsworth /hroughout the twentieth century, the lost child was the o"%ect of increasing concern for the <ritish establishment, to which the founding of the !couting 0ovement, the $utward <ound organisation and the =uke of Edin"urgh award scheme can be viewed as a response. ?hildren’s literature reflected this #roject to 5orientate’ the child with non4fiction titles such as Geoffrey Grigson’s Looking and Finding (19@8) and Gordon ?opley’s Going into the Past (19@@), the latter even being included in a series of re4 lated, i0#roving titles when it was reprinted "y Auffin <ooks: Going to the Ballet, Going to the Opera, and Going to a Concert being the more metropolitan alternat4 ives. 7aving studied Geography at school all week, children could en%oy an ar4 chaeological e3cursion in their own time, orientating themselves in their re4 gional 5#lace’, to ensure the most #roductive, enriching and edifying e3#erience. /he %ourney of the lost child is also one of the key themes of children’s literature: it is the e3#erience of deepening su"%ectivity, and threatened alienation, that characterises many novels of emotional maturation for young readers. Gordon’s truck driver cannot conceive of this undevelo#ed rural ?ambridge4 shire, a region of wide open fenland, as somewhere you could lose yourself, let alone be lost, whatever your age: lost-ness, for him, is as a #lace-specific e3#eri4 ence. 2it’s res#onse is low on detail "ut essentially true( she and her friend, /ekker, have been out walking, %ourneying ever further from home into territories which disorientate and amaze them. Getting lost is the beginning of a series of adven4 tures for them, and being &good at it' represents the cultivation of an imaginative response to #lace that, whilst irrational, brings rich rewards. As : will demon4 strate, such a response is closely related to cultural ideas of archaeological aware4 ness i0#lied "y Grigson and ?opley’s non4fiction works. /he conversation about lost-ness between 2it and the truck driver e3em#lifies Gordon’s su"version of established tropes of the 6omantic child as a figure not only ca#able of heightened vision and even fantastic visions "ut revisioning( seeing the landsca#e anew The Edge of the World is a novel stee#ed in the fenland landsca#e of ?ambridgeshire, and is, like all Gordon’s fiction, a work rich with fantastic and su#ernatural tropes. :t continues a convention of children’s fantasy, beginning in its first Golden Age and e3emplified in some of its most #o#ular texts, whereby travel to another world entails "oth wonder and adversity for #rotagonists. Like those literary antecedents of theirs, who visited ;onderland, $B or Darnia, 2it 2 3oun"9,!le · Vol. I, Issue 1 · Spring 2017 and /ekker’s travels into and through a fantasy world, vividly contrasted with their own world, comprises a sense of agency and empowerment, #articularly in o##osing adult foes. Gordon’s novel reflects a further trend in #ost4war <ritish children’s literature for fantasy adventures set in rural landscapes i0"ued with fantastic dimensions, strongly influenced "y the work of #rolific, well-regarded author, Clan Garner in the 19E1s and F1s. /his #aper argues that "y su"verting some of the tropes of children’s fantasy, Gordon’s novel articulates fundamental cultural concerns about how young #eo#le e3#lore #lace. /he #aper will begin "y weighing the cultural trend toward landscape archaeology as a means of ima4 ginative engagement with #lace and identity, and then considering this series of relationshi#s in Michel de ?erteau’s theorisation of #lace and s#atial #ractice. Gsing this theorisation, : will discuss the meaning of the characters’ movement around, under, and over the Edge in Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (19E1), his first novel and e3emplary of this rural fantasy trend <ased on the su4 #erfluity of shared tro#es "etween the two te3ts, : will contrast Garner’s 19E1 a##roach to the the0e with that of his lesser4known conte0#orary, John Gordon, whose The Edge of the World novel takes the reader on a tour through 0ulti#le borderlines and visions. $ J%C&#' % (%)*'S %N" G'!FFR'+ GRIGS!N, %RC(%'!L!GIC%L I-%GIN% I!N :n 19@1, the 8estival of <ritain, government-backed and forward4looking, cele"4 rated national identity with #avilions of futuristic design, artwork and innova4 tionH yet in that same setting, it made an overt turn to the #ast Clong the exterior of the 5Land of <ritain’ #avilion, #ainter Graham !utherland’s giant 0ural 5/he $rigins of the )and’ de#icted geological for0ations and early life as only !utherland could( a #hantasmagoria of mutations and mutability, as if to remind visitors that their nationality (and their reason to "e festive) was only an accident of history 6eflecting this engagement with the material land was a near"y scul#4 ture, cast in bronBe, "y 7enry Moore. Moore’s Reclining Figure was more recog4 nisably human than Sutherland’s weird forms, "ut only schematically, marked "y those characteristics of erosion that define our sense of anti9uity Ct the 8estival, it would have contributed to a theme of <ritish identity informed "y the mater4 ial evidence of ancient <ritish history, be it uncanny, inconclusive or hard to conceive of( in short, the matter of the archaeological imagination N. C,mp!ell · Re0ision,r1 F,nt,sy > C year later, in A Land, her idiosyncratic account of the formation of the <ritish :sles, writer, archaeologist and adviser to the 8estival, Jacquetta 7awkes celebrated Moore’s affinity with #rehistoric forms. 7e was one of several mod4 ern artists who spoke to 7awkes’s scientific and #hilosophical interests, mediat4 ing aesthetically a convergence of history, materiality, and a 6omanticist con4 sciousness of being in the here and now As she e3#ressed the idea, in A Land( &Geologists and archaeologists +,- +are- instruments of consciousness who are en4 gaged in reawakening the memory of the world' (7awkes IE) /hough 7awkes e3#resses herself somewhat flamboyantly, modern writers on nineteenth cen4 tury science have acknowledged that &the history of geology is the history of imaginative reconstructions', whilst the cultivation of an imaginative response to the material evidence of the #ast was crucial to nineteenth century archaeology (<aumgart 3J) /he artwork of Moore’s #eers reflected a new, democratic, and disorientat4 ing attitude to archaeology in the twentieth century /he trauma of modern war4 fare and threat of invasion 0ay have renewed urgency to the task described "y 7awkes; a Deo-6omantic artistic sensi"ility twinned a##rehension of landsca#e in its most surrealist material forms with a heightened su"%ectivity, engendered "y awareness of mortality :t was also the era of a ;ar Artist scheme, 6ecording <ritain, to memorialise <ritish #lace through watercolour images of significant landscape detail /he medium, employed "y artists such as John Ai#er, evokes their su"%ect’s fragility and the sense of it being i00inently lost Ai#er wrote to fellow artist, Aaul Dash, about such #articular details in the context of Ai#er’s British Romantic Artists (19JI), that &dreams are not as romantic as "its of real e34 #erience' (9td in 7arris 1@@, emphasis in original) Elsewhere, he %uxtaposed an aerial #hoto of ancient earthwork Silbury 7ill with an abstract #ainting "y Joan Miró, again em#hasising the affinities of archaeological techni9ue and radical new artistic endeavour /he materiality of the #ast, whether eroded or enduring, was intrinsic to an evolving <ritish identity Ai#er’s aerial shot of Silbury 7ill was #art of a new way of doing, and seeing, archaeology ;ar had altered not only the #sychic tem#erament of the nation, "ut the way in which archaeology was done in <ritain and the way its results were #erceived :n the interwar #eriod, aerial #hotography had revealed an unknown country in the ostensibly familiar <ritish #astoral scene, equally available and e34 citing to archaeologists, artists, and the lay #erson( in fact, all three #ersonas could be compressed into one "y cultivating aesthetic and scientific #owers of o"servation through the #o#ular #ursuit of landscape archaeology $ G ! 4 3oun"9,!le · Vol.