Final Paper

Too Curious: Discovering the World of Children's Literature

A prick on the finger, the turning of a key, a jump down the rabbit hole, and the closing of a wardrobe door - curiosity is what discovers the world. Curiosity is not only the motivation, but also the main character in children's literature. It is the portal through which we all must step, never to return. For not only are the characters in children’s literature curious, but so also are the readers. Narration of all stories must start and end in the mind of the reader, in the imagination of a child – an imagination that is nosy, probing and questioning. So often in children’s literature, curiosity becomes both a bane to the main character and essential to moving the story forward. And this seems to beg the question, can we be too curious?

Psyche, in Apuleius' story of Cupid and Psyche is a character who cannot escape this compelling need to know. As readers we sense the peril of Psyche indulging her curiosity and yet we cannot help but joining her in the need to understand the world. Even though she is warned that she cannot see her husband, Psyche must hold up a lamp to see the supposed serpent who climbs into her bed each night. Not only does she indulge her curiosity to see her until-then invisible husband, but she is also entranced by the newly revealed Cupid's sheaf of arrows. And it is this particular curiosity – the inevitable prick on the finger – that defines her life. Because at this moment of unflagging curiosity, Psyche (the soul) falls in love with love. It is at this moment that her quest truly begins, for no one, not even Psyche, can ignore the power of Cupid's arrows.

Nor does Psyche's curiosity lessen once she begins her quest to find the lost husband, the beast groom. As Psyche travels to the underworld in the last leg of her quest and obtains a box of beauty, she is again overwhelmed by curiosity. Psyche does not open the box because she needs or wants more beauty. Indeed, her story begins because Psyche's beauty rivals that of the goddess Venus. Instead, Psyche opens the box because she is told not to - because she is too curious about its contents. Psyche is the archetype of the character who is too curious, someone whose story is defined by their desire to understand the world - a desire that is both destructive and essential.

The same forbidden curiosity – this time in the form of a forbidden door – drives Perrault’s fairy tale Bluebeard. The wife of a hideously ugly and yet extremely wealthy man with a blue beard must confront her curiosity in this fairy tale that makes us question, is this really for children? As he leaves town, Bluebeard instructs his wife in the workings of the household and the keys that open each door. And it is the last golden key she receives that pushes the story forward. Indulging her curiosity of the forbidden – the turning of the key – reveals a room filled with Bluebeard’s past wives murdered and hung on the walls. The opening of the door is essential to the narrative Bluebeard. As his wife steps through the doorway, crossing over the luminal state, she gains a new understanding of her world. Curiosity not only has the power to transform her reality, but also the power to create it. Because it is this act of indulgence that sets the wheels of punishment and rescue in motion. Curiosity creates the fairy tale – the happily-ever-after.

And although the wife’s curiosity sets up the fairy tale ending of the story, Perrault leaves us with a moral that again questions the character who is too curious:
Curiosity, in spite of its appeal, often leads to deep regret.
To the displeasure of many a maiden, its enjoyment is short lived.
Once satisfied, it ceases to exist, and always costs dearly.
Does curiosity cease to exist, as Perrault suggests, when it is satisfied? Is it something that, once used, disappears forever and leaves only a price to pay? Or does the story of Bluebeard instead exemplify the necessity of the curious imagination? Although the moral Perrault provides seems to warn against the ills of curiosity, the story itself teaches a different lesson. Without curiosity, and the characters who indulge in it, the story itself cannot exist. And without stories, our own reality crumbles.

Yet stories do not always submit to the crumbling of reality. Emerging through the dissolution of logic and reason is another type of story, one that is, “curiouser and curiouser” – a story of nonsense. A white rabbit running past a dozing Alice in the field is not out of the ordinary. We expect rabbits to jump down rabbit holes. Alice is not even startled when the rabbit mumbles, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” But the comfortable reality of Alice begins to crumble when the seemingly ordinary white rabbit pulls a pocket watch out of his waistcoat. Rabbits, Alice knows, do not have pocket watches or even waistcoat pockets from which a watch can emerge. So, “burning with curiosity” Alice runs across the field and jumps down the rabbit hole after this unusual animal. And with a jump down the rabbit hole, the story of Alice and the ultimate childhood story of nonsense begins.

The portal of the rabbit hole becomes, then, an emergence into the world of dreams, dream logic, and nonsense. The curiosity driven jump through the portal opens into a world where Alice can swim in a pool of her own tears, receive advice from a hookah smoking caterpillar, and drink tea with a mad hatter. And at the end of the rabbit hole, the nonsense of Wonderland makes perfect sense. Wonderland is characterized by its changing, turning, and shifting – the metamorphosis of forms, thoughts, and ideas. Indeed, the only constant in the topsy turvy world of Wonderland is Alice’s curiosity. It is curiosity that drives Alice to drink from a vial that says “drink me,” peek at the baby who so closely resembles a pig, and play a game of croquet with the seemingly dangerous queen of hearts. Alice’s curiosity is not only the catalyst into this magical world, but the creation of its landscape, inhabitants, and events – curiosity creates the world of Wonderland, the world of dreams.

When we first meet Lyra Belacqua she is stealthily sneaking into the Retiring Room at Jordan College, a place she has been told is off-limits at all times. And it is the fact that this room is off limits, forbidden to not only Lyra but all women, that makes it essential Lyra finds out what is hiding behind its doors. Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon sneak into the retiring room out of pure curiosity. She has no specific reason for entering the room, but enter she must – if only to prove that she is both daring and brave. What Lyra doesn’t expect is the early entrance of the master and his servant, the poisoning of wine, and the visit of her guardian, Lord Asriel. To avoid detection – first from Lord Asriel and then from the scholars of the college – Lyra hides in the room’s wardrobe. It is this closing of a wardrobe door – the realization of plans for murder, expeditions to the north, and twinkling golden dust – that begins Lyra’s adventure into the realm of infinite universes and infinite realities.

Lyra’s seemingly unexciting foray into the Retiring Room, her innocent curiosity, begins a journey that will define her life, her world, and the many worlds she passes through. Once Lyra hears of Dust from behind the wardrobe doors, she must seek it out. Dust, once known, is something that cannot be escaped – it both attracts and is attracted to this girl who will change the course of the future. In this way, Pullman’s Dust is like the curiosity of Psyche, Bluebeard’s wife, Alice, and Lyra. Curiosity is not only a defining trait of these main characters, but a trait that creates their futures and their worlds – their realities. Curiosity is what creates the stories and the stories are what create reality. So then the question of curiosity itself must transform. Instead of wondering about the character who is too curious, we must ask ourselves, are we curious enough?

Lyra on the Borderlands

I have recently been reading a book written by Michael Chabon titled, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing on the Borderlands. In his chapter called "On Deamons and Dust" Chabon explores the worlds of Lyra, Will, and Mary Malone. The whole chapter is fantastic and I would highly recommend the whole book. (If nothing else, the book is worth its multi-layered cover art.) Chabon makes the point that not only is Lyra herself on the borderlands between worlds, but so also is the genre that Pullman chooses to write in. And it is because The Dark Materials lies in this liminal, in-between state that his worlds and words are so powerful. Like Pullman, Chabon also writes both eloquently and clearly. Here is some of what he has to say:

"...all mystery resides there, in the margins, between life and death, childhood and adulthood, Newtonian and quantum, 'serious' and 'genre' literature. And it is from the confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always drawn their power (67)."

"Yet epic fantasies, whether explicitly written for children or not, tend to get sequestered in thier own section of the bookstore or library, clearly labeled to protect the unsuspecting reader of naturalistic fiction from making an awkward mistake. Thus do we consign to the borderlands our most audacious retellings of what is arguably one of the two or three primal human stories: the narrative of Innocence, Experience, and, straddling the margin between them, the Fall (68)."

"Pullman has looked around at this broken universe of ours, in its naturalistic tatters, and has indicated, like Satan pointing to the place on which Pandemonium will rise, the site of our truest contemporary narratives of the Fall: in the lives, in the bodies and souls, of our children (69)."

"...it is Lyra's childhood - and indeed Childhood itself - that will prove to be the irrecoverable paradise, the Dreamtime, of his story (70)."

"[Pullman] is also, in the great tradition of unabashed concocters of stories, a highly self-conscious storyteller. By the end of The Amber Spyglass, on has come to see Pullman' s world-calving imagination, to see Imagination itself, as the ordering principle, if not of the universe itself, then of our ability to comprehend, to wander, and above all, to love it (73)."

"The bond between humand and daemon is fundamental, essential, empathic, and at times telepathic. When a daemon's human being dies, its own life ends; the daemon winks out of existence, snuffed out like a candle flame (74)."

"Under [Mrs. Coulter's] spell, and frightened by the implications of Dust's evident attraction to experience in the Blakean sense, to Fallenness - believing that Dust may be the physical manifestation of Original Sin itself - the Church leadership has authorized Mrs. Coulter to lead a northern expedition of her own, one that wills seek to determine whether Dust - Sin - can be forestalled, fended off, or eliminated entirely, by the intercision of a child before his or her daemon has 'settled' (76)."

"As Lyra's daemon comes ever closer to settling in its final form, the narrative itself grown ever more unsettled; for a single point of view is a child's point of view, but a multiple point of view is the world's. And the settling of a daemon into a single form with the onset of adulthood, Pullman tells us, represents not simply a loss of the power to change, of flexibility and fire; it also represents a gain in the power to focus, to concentrate, to understand, and, finally, to accept: a gain in wisdom (81)."

"That's the trouble with Plor, and its gloomy consigliere, Theme. They are, in many ways, the enemies of Character, of 'roundness,' insofar as our humanity and its convincing representation are constituted through contradiction, inconsistency, plurality of desire, absence of abstractable message or moral (83)."
(This seemed especially to reference the characters in Alice...)

"Lies, as Philip Pullman knows perfectly well, tell the truth; but the truth they tell may not be that, or not only that, which the liar intends. The secret story he has told is not one about the eternal battle betwen teh forces of idealist fundamentalism and materialist humanism. It is a story about the ways in which adults betray children; how children are forced to pay the price of adult greed; how they are subjected to the programs of adults, to the General Oblation Board. Each of its child protagonists has been abandoned, in different ways, by both of his parents, and while they find no shortage of willing foster parents, ultimately they are betrayed and abandoned by their own bodies, forced into the adult world of compromise and self-discipline and self-sacrifice, or 'oblation,' in a way that Pullman wants us - and may we have the grace - to understand as not only inevitable but, on balance, a good thing.
Still, we can't help experiencing it - as we experience the end of so many wonderful, messy novels - as a thinning, a loss not so much of innocence as of wildness (84)."

Daemon Test

Fun Loving Soul

Suggested forms: Meerkat, Labrador Retriever, Sea Lion, Lemur

You are an open and social person. When you are left alone you tend to get bored and restless, and too much time without social contact makes you fade away. A good night surrounded by friends and laughter soon perks you back up.

You are trusting and truthful, and you aren't good at hiding your emotions from friends or strangers alike. People need to take you as you are - and often they do. You are confident but not overconfident, sensitive but not touchy. You aren't afraid to give your opinion, or to let someone know when they have offended you, but you don't constantly fly off the handle. You simply want to make your thoughts and feelings known, and you are just as open to hearing others' points of view. Sometimes your friends feel slighted by you, because they aren't as open about their feelings as you are, and so you don't always notice when they are feeling hurt or down.

Your daemon's form would represent your social and emotionally honest nature, as well as your balanced sense of self. He or she would constantly be throwing him or herself into the moment - enjoying the feel of the afternoon wind, the throbbing beat of music in the club, or helping you argue your point.

Class Notes 11/19

*Pullman calls himself a "stark realist"

*Pg. 281 - Idea of North
- idea as the reality of the thing instead of a geographical understanding
- the imagining of North
- Wallace Stevens The Snowman


*Music of the Spheres
- movements of the celestial bodies create a kind of music
- can be heard, but not until your ears are trained to hear it
- what we think of as inanimate, may be sentient - the dust knows

*Animals
- to transcend your human/animal connection is denying your soul
- Animals, daemons, are inseparable from their humans
- to lose your animal is to lose your anime = soul

*Aliethiometer
- symbols mapped out on Ryan's blog
- you bring you own assumptions to the divining instrument
- Taylor's Mongolia divining bones
- devices as symbols of the way the imagination works
- imagination is a device for connection

Class Notes 11/17

*Keep a running commentary on Pullman on blogs

*Pullman Pg. 363-370
-Keats' negative capability
- Coleridge "willing suspension of disbelief" vs. Pullman's "willing suspension of certainty"
- we can never be certain of what we have to say

*Lyre = musical instrument that is played by the wind (LYRA - main character of Dark Materials)

*Pg. 364 Mary Malone
- "shadows are collections of particles...you can't see them unless you expect to see them"
- nonsense is a way of cleaning out the system, of making us uncertain
- Mary Malone calls her computer "the cave" - reference to Plato and reality as shadows on the wall

*Pg. 379 - Sunderland
- "the cat Will had seen in Sunderland Avenue"
- has Pullman read/seen Talbot?
- "it is a poor sort of memory that only works one way" - Red Queen in Looking Glass

*Aliethiometer
- lieth - lethe = river of the gods that causes the drinker to forget
- "a-lethe" = taking away the forgotten, remembering (truth)
- I Ching reading of broken and un-broken lines

* 6 Degrees of Separation
- Definition of DUST
- Pullman's list of essential reading includes Wallace Stevens and Glen Gould
- Gould is a Canadian pianist who played Bach's Goldberg Variations in a groundbreaking and pure way - a portal to Bach
- 32 short films about Glen Gould

*the Idea of North
- Katie's blog - Stevens' Autumn
- central metaphor of the trilogy is the Northern Lights
- Northern Lights as the serpent
- Stanza 6 of Stevens - theater floating through the clouds, the cloud transforms
- Northern Lights as a metaphor for consciousness
- "scholar of one candle"

*Golden Compass, Subtle Knife, Amber Spyglass are all instruments allowing us to use/see imagination

Leaving The Page

I have recently been searching for images of Alice that somehow leave the page of the book and transform. Metamorphosis or transformation is evident on every page of Alice, and even on every page of our lives. In the art of Su Blackwell, words literally transform and jump off of the page.

Artist Statement:

"Paper has been used for communication since its invention; either between humans or in an attempt to communicate with the spirit world. I employ this delicate, accessible medium and use irreversible, destructive processes to reflect on the precariousness of the world we inhabit and the fragility of our life, dreams and ambitions.

It is the delicacy, the slight feeling of claustrophobia, as if these characters, the landscape have been trapped inside the book all this time and are now suddenly released. A number of the compositions have an urgency about them, the choices made for the cut-out people from the illustrations seem to lean towards people on their way somewhere, about to discover something, or perhaps escaping from something. And the landscapes speak of a bleak mystery, a rising, an awareness of the air."

Here are some examples of her work and a link to her website:

Su Blackwell

Alice, Through the Looking Glass

Alice, Tea Party
The Secret Garden

Peter Pan

The Wizard of Oz

Class Notes 11/5

*"Every good book is re-readable." - MS

*Sunderland
- Pg. 297
--political diatribe on immigrants
--history of Alice becomes the history of England which becomes the history of the world

*Relationship between:
- history and myth
- dream
- art

*Talbot seems to find a consolation to the decrepitude of age, passing, ephemeral life in Alice
- cycles, re-birth

*Write about your Favorite Alice Chapter

*Ronnie's Blog - "its refreshing to just be"
- does the remembering take away the quality of be-ing?

*Violence in Alice - are these stories for children?
- Apocalyptic - divine world vs. demonic counterpart
- Pg. 290 - our lives are dream-like
-- Shakespeare's Tempest - "we are such stuff as dreams are made of"
- The Worm as the Mythological basis for the lochness moster
- Death of the Venerable Bede - we are here one day and not the next
--A-B-C-D-E-A-T-H (Book and Heart Film)
- Looking Glass is the winter, concerned with the ephemeral, dying, passing

*Alice is immortalized in art
- she becomes a muse only after she is painted or characterized by Carroll