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Heterotopias in Fantasy Fiction for Young Adult Readers in France and Britain

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Heterotopias in Fantasy Fiction for Young Adult Readers in France and Britain When Worlds Collide: Heterotopias in Fantasy Fiction for Young Adult Readers in France and Britain Sarah K. Cantrell A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2010 Approved by: Dr. Laurie Langbauer Dr. Dominique Fisher Dr. Beverly Taylor Dr. Marsha Collins Dr. James Peacock ©2010 Sarah Kathryn Cantrell ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT SARAH K. CANTRELL: When Worlds Collide: Heterotopias in Fantasy Fiction for Young Adults in France and Britain (Under the co-direction of Laurie Langbauer and Dominique Fisher) My dissertation examines the alternative worlds in recent fantasy fiction for young adults in Britain and France. I compare J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007) and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000) trilogy to two French fantasy series, Erik L’Homme’s Le Livre des Étoiles (The Book of the Stars) (2001-2003) and Pierre Bottero’s Ewilan (2003-2007) series. My work contributes to scholarship on French children’s literature and reflects some of the ways in which comparative approaches to writing for children and young adults can highlight the differences in literary traditions as new genres, such as the rise of la fantasy in France, emerge as acceptable modes of literary production. Via the spatiality theories of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and others, I argue that the alternative worlds in these texts constitute training grounds that prepare protagonists and their readers to develop codes of ethical action. Focusing on fantasy allows me to explore and compare two very different traditions of writing for children and adolescents. While the British “Golden Age” of children’s fiction led to works such as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Winnie-the-Pooh and later to C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, a similar shift towards imaginary, fantasy worlds did not occur in France, where writing for children and young adults was grounded in instructional strategy. I argue that in current fantasy narratives, protagonists model resistant and subversive strategies that readers can also use to oppose abuses of power in their own world. What is at stake in these texts is not the traditional iii binary between light and dark or good and evil. Through the mental and moral growth of their protagonist-heroes, fantasy authors are teaching their readers of all ages to think critically about responding to moral injustices and ethical uncertainties in their own world and in their everyday lives. By imagining these impossible worlds, fantasy provides readers of all ages with the mental practice necessary for becoming capable and mature problem- solvers, who are equipped to face the challenges and problems in their own world with bravery and hope. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project did not come about by itself. Like the characters in the stories I discuss, this project had a number of guides. I would like to thank Lilian R. Furst, who said, “You might just have something there,” when I explained a provisional idea over three years ago. My co-directors, Laurie Langbauer and Dominique Fisher, provided me with encouraging comments and helpful advice as I drafted portions of this project. Marsha Collins, Beverly Taylor, and Jim Peacock have all kindly supported my work. Sophie Cornu and Virginia Douglas at the Institut International Charles Perrault in Eaubonne showed incredible generosity with the Institute’s resources and granted me free use of their copy machine. The staff at La Bibliothèque de L’Heure Joyeuse and La Joie par les Livres in Paris were both instrumental in helping me procure source material that would have been otherwise unattainable. Ann Schnell went out of her way to buy and send me a copy of Lecture Jeune. Most importantly, I would like to acknowledge my parents, Bob and Marie Cantrell, for their willingness to take on what Hamlet called “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” on my behalf. This project would have been impossible without their generosity of spirit, their unceasing faith, their unstinting patience, their abiding love, and my mother’s eagle eye for issues of clarity, grammar, and sentence structure. Although it is impossible to thank them for the magnitude of such a gift, I hope these few words are a start. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………..…………………..1 I. “I solemnly swear I am up to no good”: Subversive Spaces and Growing Up in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series…………..…………….65 II. Harry Potter Goes to France: Exploring the Multiple Worlds of Erik L’Homme’s Le Livre des Étoiles.............................................................94 III. “Nothing Like Pretend”: Difference, Disorder and Dystopia in the Multiple World Spaces of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials………132 IV. “Il suffit de faire la bonne”: Choice, Space and Place in Pierre Bottero’s Ewilan cycle........................................................................171 Conclusion.................................................................................................................205 Bibliography..............................................................................................................213 vi Introduction Readers of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 classic Le Petit Prince will remember the diminutive protagonist’s interplanetary travels in search of connection and friendship. During the course of his voyage from his home on asteroid B-612, the prince encounters a variety of adults, all of whom are obsessed with work, profit, power and knowledge. In St.- Exupéry’s water-color illustrations, the simple, sparse globes these characters inhabit provide little or no space for the prince. On none does he find a world in need of his help or his presence until he mysteriously appears in a barren desert on planet Earth. The one-dimensional spheres of St. Exupéry’s king, businessman, lamplighter, and geographer are far removed from those in current post-modern fantasies for children and young adult readers. In the past ten years, the explosion of interest in fantasy literature in Britain and France has heralded a return to the idea of parallel universes and multiple worlds that St. Exupéry’s prince explored over 60 years ago. Authors in both countries have constructed richly detailed, complex world spaces subject to alternative laws of physics, logic and magic. The geographically and culturally diverse worlds in the fictions of J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, Erik L’Homme and Pierre Bottero all exceed and surpass the alternate worlds of their predecessors such as Lewis Carroll, E.A. Abbott, James Barrie, George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis in Britain or St.-Exupéry, Henri Bosco, André Maurois and André d’Hôtel in France.1 Yet despite the world-wide popularity of Rowling and Pullman, and the attention L’Homme and Bottero have received in France, French literature for children and young adults is rarely a subject of scholarly study in the United States and Britain. Penny Brown, one of the few Anglophone scholars working to bring French juvenile literature to English- speaking audiences, writes that “[s]tudies of aspects of French children’s books by Anglophone critics tend to be few in number, and … tend not to explore the specificities of a young adult readership” (8).2 With the exception of Brown’s A Critical History of French Children’s Literature (1998), Claire-Lise Malarte-Feldman’s special issue of The Lion and The Unicorn (1998), consecrated to French children’s literature, and Sandra Beckett’s work on literature for dual audiences in Transcending Boundaries (1999), it is rare to find scholarship on French young adult fantasy written for English-speaking audiences. At the same time that fantastic, fictional world spaces proliferate in books for children and young adults, the work of Claudine Jacquenaud, Wolfgang Iser, Thomas Pavel, and Umberto Eco, in semiotics, fictionality and model theory questions how we conceptualize the representation of the worlds that those texts contain. A generation ago, the work of Fredric Jameson, Pierre Bourdieu, Marc Soriano, and the rise of cultural studies contributed to shifts in the canonical literary field, while the gradual acceptance of mass-market genres (such as rap, the bande-dessinée and the graphic novel) in academia has broadened the spaces 1 This list is not meant to be exclusive or exhaustive. The authors here are meant to reflect the names that are frequently mentioned in scholarship and criticism featuring 19th- and 20th-century British and French literature for children and young adults. 2 For the sake of focus, Brown’s work is limited to continental French writers as is my own study. This choice is not meant as a deliberate exclusion of Francophone authors. The role of the child informs a large part of colonial and post-colonial Francophone literatures, particularly in mémoire and autobiography. 2 available to scholars seeking to explore texts previously deemed too “popular” for rigorous academic study. Concurrently, the crisis in post-postmodern critical inquiry has lead to serious questions concerning the current status of theory and the future of literature. French academic historian and psychoanalytic scholar Elisabeth Roudinesco explains that rather than producing new theories or innovative practices, 21st-century scholars are trapped in paralytic stasis. “All we are entitled to do, it would seem,” writes Roudinesco, “is to take stock and draw up assessments, as though the distance that every intellectual enterprise requires amounted to no more than a vast ledger full of entries for things and people …” (ix). Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times (2008) asserts the continued importance and relevance of major French theorists of the 1960s and 1970s such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, for understanding power relations and cultural shifts.3 Still other academicians question what they see as an over-reliance on theory. In their anthology Theory’s Empire (2005), Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral call for a critical re-evaluation of Theory writ large.
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