the Brontes and Peter's Room

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I cast an eye over Peter's Room (which I don't own, and know far less well than other AFs) lately, and found myself wondering about the sections that deal with the Brontes, before the Marlow/Merrick Gondal kicks off - the conversation in the Shippen where Ginty tells the others about the Brontes, and Gondal and Angria, and the slightly later one where Karen (all hot water bottle and Thucydides) nudges Nick and Ginty through a sort of Socratic dialogue about art vs life and the general wrongheadedness of adult addiction to fantasy games. (I suppose there weren't role-playing societies at Oxford in her day, and one can imagine her opinion of on-line RPGs...)

It's completely fascinating and the usual intellectually-sophisticated AF stuff, but I found myself wondering whether the novel actually required so much Bronte material? It's probably my own favourite part of the novel, but, after all, all the characters in PR have independent capacities for starring in their own fantasies, as shown in the novels as a whole, and the collective fantasy isn't so much of a stretch from Nick's Scott or Lawrie being a resistance fighter when her conduct mark is read out etc etc. So - in some ways the Bronte stuff reads like a compulsively readable red herring. I'd forgotten simply how much of the early part of the novel those two conversations actually take up, effectively postponing the start of the 'action'. Also, I have no memory of when I first read the novel, but I read the Brontes young, and so probably knew what AF was talking about from other sources, but there may well have been readers completely befogged by the very elliptical way in which the Brontes' story is told by various AF characters. I was talking about it to a children's book agent friend the other night and she didn't think that kind of digression would get past an editor these days.

So - how effective/necessary is the Bronte stuff to Peter's Room? If you read PR young and without any knowledge of the Brontes, were you at sea or not? Did anyone read the Brontes because of PR? And, because this occurred to me as I was reading, how does anyone imagine the Marlow/Merrick Gondal to have been carried out, exactly? We know they don't act it out by actually moving around and doing the actions, apart from the very end, because Patrick says so, but are we to imagine them taking it in turns to narrate a kind of recitative, something like the italicised narrative the reader gets? Or just speaking their own parts?

Comments

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

I have tried and failed about three times to articulate why I feel that those opening sections are so important. I am now giving up, but I might try and come back to it. Certainly AF in general made me think more deeply than anything else I read as a teenager, with the exception of some of Chaim Potok, and an odd little book called 'I, Juan de Pareja', about the moral valency of art, and of what kind of troubling relation their might be (to be pompous) between art and virtue, both for the artist and the reader. (Northanger Abbey might have done this too but I read it a good deal later; actually re: adolescent girls 'The Rainbow' is very good on this too, Ursula in her hay loft thrilling to 'Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine the lily maid of Astolat'.)

I only actually got hold of 'Peter's Room' in quite late adolescence, but it certainly fitted with, and expanded upon, thought prompted by what I had already read of her.

I had an imaginary world myself as a child, but a solitary one, and rather different from the Gondal version - more in the line of endless maps and law acts and treaties and graphs of language distribution (seriously!). I did the accounts for my vast and populous country every Saturday morning for quite some time, and occasionally wrote speeches to deliver to my cabinet . . . (I don't know why I'm admitting all this. I'm going to stop right now.)

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

Language distribution graphs and accounts??? You ran an infant imaginary bureaucracy!

Though I remember once eating precisely nothing for almost three days because I was being starved and wandering in the wilderness in my particular imaginary world, so I suppose I was an eight-year-old masochist. My imaginary world involved me continually being kidnapped and mistreated, and occasionally being burned at the stake, for which I used to gather the sticks.

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think it's probably rather a shame that all my maths teaching at primary school was so singularly ghastly, as I obviously had quite an appetite for it that went entirely to waste. As I remember my people spoke a curious mixture of English, Welsh, and various imaginary languages: the map was carefully emended to indicate areas of particular linguistic anomaly! The accounts were quite something, because I made the numbers up as I went along (outgoings of various kinds; income largely of trade and taxes) so each week I wasn't quite sure whether we were going to come out in the red or not! My country was called Goston, and my rather marvellous name was Jaclceon Prettler; I was 32. Evidently I thought that *quite* old enough for stateswoman purposes.

It's odd how the practical side of these imaginary experiences can be by such a long way the most exhilarating part (ie stick-gathering for your pyre). I suppose it's something about the temporary coincidence of the fantastic and the real that's so pleasing (fantastic context; real sticks). My little sisters and I had a ridiculous but strangely marvellous game called 'weary traveller'. The entire content was: one sister limps up to the shed - the 'weary traveller' - is welcomed and met with 'soup'. This was fundamentally a pretext for the great pleasure of leaving grass and leaves to steep in an old kettle for long enough that the water turned green ('soup'). It is odd though, and pleasing, how resiliently children continue to play at the most archetypal stories (weary traveller could have come straight from Exodus really) despite the utter lack of any real life analogues whatsoever.

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

How on earth did you pronounce 'Jaclceon'?

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

Jack-el-see-on. I have no idea at all on what I might have drawn in thinking it up. But no doubt a competent analyst could have fun.

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I made my little sister swallow some of our 'soup' once, then covered over the resultant sick with leaves and forbade her to tell our mother.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

My family/neighbours had grit on rhododendron leaves as our soup equivalent cure for the Black Death. Fortunately as the game required it not to work, no-one had to eat it.