Inklings-Jahrbuch 30 (2012)

Inklings-Jahrbuch 30 (2012) Klaudia Seibel LITERATECS, NURSERY CRIMES, AND DRAGONSLAYERS The Fantastic Fictional Universes of Jasper Fforde Jasper Fforde is one of the most prolific writers of 21st-century fantasy fiction. When his first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001, the genre of fantasy fiction was enriched by a new strand of writing that cannot be placed easily into any of the subgenres of the fantastic. As in all his novels, Fforde describes a slightly odd fantastic world that accommodates easily metafictional elements without disturbing the credibility of the fictional world. This paper will try to demonstrate which metafictional elements are characteristic of Fforde’s different worlds and how they are integrated into these worlds. Jasper Fforde ist einer der produktivsten Autoren der Phantastik im 21. Jahrhundert. Als sein erster Roman, The Eyre Affair (dt. Der Fall Jane Eyre) 2001 erschien, wurde die Gattung des Phantastischen um Texte erwei- tert, die sich in keine der phantastische Untergattungen einordnen lassen. Wie auch in seinen anderen Romanen, beschreibt Fforde eine etwas merk- wu¨ rdige phantastische Welt, in die sich metafiktionale Elemente gut einfu¨- gen ohne die Glaubwu¨ rdigkeit der fiktionalen Welt zu unterminieren. Der Aufsatz versucht zu zeigen, welche metafiktionalen Verfahren kennzeich- nend fu¨ r Ffordes verschiedene Weltentwu¨ rfe sind und wie diese in die ent- worfenen Welten integriert werden. “My imaginative worlds of which some are very odd indeed are only there essentially to give credibility to the central idea in the story.” (Jasper Fforde)1 1 British Council 3:50. 87 Klaudia Seibel, Literatecs, Nursery Crimes, and Dragonslayers Jasper Fforde had his first novel printed in 2001 and has been very busy ever since, publishing twelve books so far. His books are grouped into four series, each of which creates a distinct – and very odd – fictional universe. He started off with the Thursday Next series, centred around the adventures of the literary detective Thurs- day Next, which has grown to seven volumes so far. The second series, the Nursery Crime series, is centred around the detective Jack Spratt and the investigations of the Reading Nursery Crime Divi- sion and can be read as a spin-off of the Thursday Next series. With the Dragonslayer series Fforde started a series addressed to young adults. And, last but not least, there is Shades of Grey (2010), which claims to be volume one of a new dystopian series. In many aspects, Fforde’s worlds are quite similar to our actual world, but they also contain many fantastic elements, “a realist narration that is inflected through the fantastic” (Hateley 1024). In order to describe Fforde’s fictional worlds, let me first have a short glance at the nature of fictional worlds. In his famous poetological lecture “On Fairy Stories”, J. R. R. Tolkien describes the process of fictional world-making as follows: “the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter” (Tolkien 36). This points at the interdependency between the creativity of the literary production process and the im- mersivity of the process of reception: It is the author’s task to create a world which can be metaphorically entered by the reader, to pro- vide access to the Secondary World. During the act of reading, the reader’s mind is cognitively re-centered into the Secondary World, and he uses his “knowledge of reality to fill any relevant gaps in the content of the fictional worlds” (Semino 64). This ‘principle of minimal departure’ means that the reader “will project upon these worlds everything we know about reality, and [...] will only make the adjustments dictated by the text” (Ryan 51). As Jasper Fforde stated in an interview given at the 2012 Abu Dhabi International Book Fair (British Council), his fantastic fictional worlds are usually created around a central idea or “narrative ‘dare’” (H. Lewis) that is accountable for the oddities of the world while he takes a more or less realistic approach to the marginal fea- 88 Inklings-Jahrbuch 30 (2012) tures. In terms of their oddity his ideas are comparable to the green sun Tolkien uses as an example in his poetological lecture: To make a Secondary World inside which a green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks, but when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed, narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode. (Tolkien 46) In order to make his ideas work, which are as strange as the idea of a green sun, Fforde creates fictional worlds that are “related to, but separate from, our own” (Hateley 1024). His texts engage the readers in processes of constant schema revisions because they ruth- lessly blend genres, introduce new ideas and cross ontological and epistemological boundaries. Fforde takes on typical features of ex- perimentalist postmodernist writing and provides them with a fictional universe. In this paper, I will attempt to give an overview of the literary aspects of what I will call the “Ffordiverse” which con- sists of four novel series, which are intertextually interrelated, the Thursday-Next series which starts out with The Eyre Affair,being by far the most complex one. We will look at three different ways to build fantastic worlds out of metafiction: The Thursday Next series rests on metalepsis – a continuous border crossing between an alter- nate historical universe and the worlds of canonical literature as we know it; the Nursery Crime series uses palimpsestic character de- scription while the Dragonslayer series takes a parodic turn on the magical fantasy genre. The Thursday Next Series: Literature Matters It all began back in those Halcyon days of 1988 with two names and a notion scribbled with a pencil on the back of an envelope: Thursday Next and Bowden 89 Klaudia Seibel, Literatecs, Nursery Crimes, and Dragonslayers Cable and someone kidnaps Jane Eyre. (Fforde, “Be- ginnings”) The novels of the Thursday Next series form a complex fictional universe with several interrelated worlds. The central imperative that started off the series was “Create a world in which Jane Eyre can be kidnapped” (H. Lewis). But instead of exploring might- have-beens within the textual actual world of Charlotte Bronte¨’s original novel, as Jean Rhys does in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Fforde takes the empirical world we live in as a starting point and makes it “slightly different” in order to fit in his strange idea which gives the reader a “a half-shocking, half-pleasurable feeling of com- bined disorientation and stability” (Berninger/Thomas 188), but is nevertheless “at odds with our normal world schemata” (Rubik, “Frames” 342). As a consequence of this, literature plays a central role in the textual actual world of The Eyre Affair: Not only does the boundary between the fictional world of the novel Jane Eyre and the world of Thursday Next become penetrable so that a literary character can be taken out of ‘her’ book; but the textual actual world is also shaped in a way that somebody cares about the ab- duction and there is even an appropriate institution to investigate into the crime: the Literary Detectives’ Department whose main purpose is to discover counterfeit manuscripts, deal with “literary fraud, overenthusiastic interpretations of protected plays, and the illegal trade in bogus Shakespeareana” (Fforde, Woman 11). Though this special treatment of literature is central to the story, the textual actual world seems “an apparently familiar world, which is peppered with just enough manifestations of the unfamiliar” (Funk 6): The Thursday Next series is set in an alternative historical 1985 in which the Crimean War never ended, England is a republic that had been occupied by the Germans and Wales is an independent Socialist Republic. Genetic re-engineering has produced pet dodos, migrant mammoths and a community of Neanderthals. Cheese is a rare commodity and subject to smuggling across the Welsh border while the Toast Marketing Board is ubiquitous. Crocket is a highly competitive spectator sport, culminating in the annual Su- 90 Inklings-Jahrbuch 30 (2012) perhoop. Long distance travel is done either by airships or by grav- itube through the earth’s core, but there are cars and trains nevertheless. Thursday Next’s father is able to travel through time and used to be a member of the ChronoGuard, an ominous agency that polices and manipulates time. All these ‘slight’ deviations from the actual world as perceived by the empirical reader contribute to the Thursday Next books’ fantastic generic atmosphere. Against this background Thursday Next’s interactions with the BookWorld unfold. During the course of the series, she gets more and more entangled with the doings of the BookWorld and be- comes a chief mediator between the so-called Outland and the BookWorld. Starting point for this interaction is her special rela- tionship with Jane Eyre, her “roman fe´tiche” (Tran-Gervat 1). By choosing Jane Eyre as his main hypotext, Fforde has picked out a novel that itself invites fictional boundary-crossing by constantly addressing the reader in its discourse, the most famous reader ad- dress being “Reader, I married him” (Bronte¨ 544) at the begin- ning of the novel’s last chapter. This mild form of metalepsis (cf. Genette, Erza¨hlung 280) foreshadows the massive transgressions of the boundary between the textual actual world and the BookWorld that are characteristic for the whole Thursday Next series. In the first volume of the Thursday Next series, TheEyreAffair, several ways to cross the boundary between the textual actual world and the BookWorld and hence “the inter-permeability of the world of the reader and the world of a text” (Taylor 27) are described, starting off with the material penetration of a copy of Jane Eyre by a bullet meant to kill Thursday Next fired by her former English tu- tor turned one of the world’s most wanted criminals: “Hades’ slug had penetrated to the back cover but had not gone through” (Af- fair 55).

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