farah mendlesohn - denying the exoticism...

Suzanne Rahn wrote of historical novels for children that they had the power to reveal ‘whole new worlds’ and to throw the reader’s own world into a ‘new perspective’. This is eminently true of the novels of Diana Wynne Jones; she rejects the frequently encountered fantasy idea that the reader is an alien in the story, visiting a strange world and constructs instead an irony of mimesis in which both protagonist and reader are treated as if they are at home. This is a form of fantasy which I have taken to calling immersive.

The immersive fantasy is the fantasy told as if from within that world: the protagonist is intimately familiar with that world and their expressions of surprise or naivitÈ have to be consistent with what they can be expected to know. One of the best examples is from Howl’s Moving Castle; when Sophie meets Calcifer for the first time the description happens in her own head, in the context of her own thoughts and imaginings. It is not a description for us, but an attempt to make sense in her own mind of the space around her. She stares into the fire, thinking that she is imagining a fire demon, who then appears. As we will later learn that Sophie can talk life into things, there is just a chance that her speculation forced Calcifer into the open. But the real issue is that Sophie is not an outsider in this fantasyland. Indigenous to it, she is in dialogue with the world around her and it is in this dialogue with the fantastic that Jones constructs the immersion. Sophie may be surprised to meet Calcifer, but she is not surprised to meet something like him. Jones has written the kind of meeting that takes place in a cocktail party. Too often, this kind of meeting in fantasyland would include a statement which, if transferred into the real world would be the equivalent of remarking to one of one’s own species: ‘My, you’re a human.’

The immersion that Jones constructs is often many layered. Both Howl’s Moving Castle and its sequel, Castle in the Air move our perspective away from that of the tourist in the quest fantasy, marvelling at the exotic, and position us instead inside the head of a person for whom all that we regard as exotic is normal.
I want to go on consider the Dalemark sequence, focusing on how in these books Jones succeeds in (1) creating a sense of the present, (2) making other pasts, and (3) destabilising both past and present.

The convention in otherworld fantasies, whether fully immersive or the shallow stagesets of the portal quest fantasy, is that they be set in a world that is somehow similar to one of our pasts. Jones follows this convention in all of the books except The Crown of Dalemark, some of which is set in a place and time that looks a lot like our present. But Jones creates her sense of place and time in two different ways. One of these is that most of her characters are absolutely of that place, and they describe it in limited ways that allow us only to see what they see; things unknown to them are described in metaphors of what they find familiar. Futhermore, in The Crown of Dalemark, Dalemark is moving through different stages – some places are still agrarian, some in process of industrialising, and some in an artisan culture. Jones rejects the orientalist historical stasis so common to fantasy.

Jones also has something to say about how thoroughly or otherwise anyone can be absorbed into a culture not their own. One of the conventions in fantasy is that the protagonist can take on the clothing of another culture and become part of that culture, and this is an assertion, in part, that time is merely another part of the shopping mall of life. Jones jolts us out of that in several ways. For instance, when Mitt in Drowned Ammet dresses as a palace boy, he is suddenly confronted by the traces of poverty on his own body. This is a portrayal of a political world, not a fantasy land in which poverty happens to caricatures whose role is to provoke pity in the hearts of the truly noble or to demonstrate the true worthiness of the child of destiny.

The result of all this is that the present becomes somewhere rather complex. One might argue that each of the characters in the Dalemark sequence lives in a different present, constructed through their sex, their gender and their class. One of the most disorienting aspects of the sequence but also one of its strengths, is that Jones has built the world’s history and prehistory and then distilled it out, leaving us with only the trace elements that its inhabitants might know. The past really is a foreign country and we catch it through glimpses here and there. In Cart and Cwidder, the first of the novels, Clennan the singer tells his children the legends of Osfameron and the Adon, but because they’ve heard them before, they are not filtered through to us. The Spellcoats is perhaps the most radical book of all in these terms. First, we slowly realise that we are in the pre-history of the Dalemark we met in Cart and Cwidder, but then we discover that perhaps this is the root of some of the legends, that the people we are meeting will go on to be gods. Part way through we discover that the first coat is an unreliable narrative, and that it forms the history on which the second coat comments –communicated in part through a shift in tenses. Eventually we learn that this ‘historical’ place has both a pre-history and a future. What we have been reading is not ‘the past’ but ‘history’ mediated both by the coats themselves and the process and context of translation. This is a remarkably powerful point to make in a novel intended for young teens.

Last in the sequence we have The Crown of Dalemark, which does something very simple but startlingly original. It starts and selects its protagonist from Mitt and Moril’s future. Suddenly we have to ask which element of this tale is in ‘the present.’ Is this a science fiction story set in the present with a vision of the future appended? Or is it a time-travel historical in which the protagonist’s world is the present?

Jones’ novella, ‘The True State of Affairs’ was written long before the Dalemark books, but it is nevertheless a Dalemark story. A young woman, Emily, has stumbled from what might or might not be our world into a Dalemark that is in the middle of a war. Emily finds herself on the banks of an unknown river where she is persuaded to swap clothes with another woman, who moves off. Emily is captured and imprisoned, at first because she is thought to be the woman with whom she exchanged clothes, later because no-one knows what do with her. The story is then about Emily’s imprisonment, the relationships she builds with her jailors, the picture of the world and its civil war that she constructs, and her growing friendship with the prisoner in the other tower. What is interesting here is how Emily constructs her world. Not for her the unravelling of the world, carefully explained by a guide as she travels through it. Instead she is forced to piece the world together through glimpses restricted by both physical and linguistic barriers.

Jones uses Emily’s descriptions to emphasise the constricted (and constructed) view of the stranger, relying on glimpses through prison bars to build the pattern of the world. Emily’s narrative is itself a translation, rendering words and phrases by other characters into her own English, while she is seduced by her confidence in how she translates. Her romance with another prisoner, Asgrim, does not precisely prove false, but it is based on their different understandings of the word ‘romance’. At the end, Emily has to acknowledge that Asgrim’s concept of their relationship is far more abstract than hers.

By the end of this story, as elsewhere in her writing, Jones has demonstrated that the past is not a picture window but a truly foreign country. She writes it through the continual juxtaposition of the familiar and the foreign, forcing the reader to translate and then manipulating our misprision in order to estrange us.