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Critiquing Calypso
Jun. 9th, 2012 08:57 pmMy fiction hasn't really received critical attention, beyond reviews. There have been a few mentions here and there, and for those I'm grateful, but nothing sustained - other than one very good unpublished dissertation on The Fetch of Mardy Watt which I was sent out of the blue a few years ago.
So I was surprised and trepidated to the core to find that New World Orders in Contemporary Children's Literature (2008), by the renowned Australian critics Clare Bradford, Robyn McCallum, Kerry Mallan and John Stephens, had no less than four pages on Calypso Dreaming.
That's the good news. Unfortunately, they don't like it at all. In fact, they talk about it principally so they can use it as target practice for ecofeminist criticism. Oh well, those are the breaks, and although I would take issue with much of their argument (not least because almost everything they say about gender in Calypso Dreaming could be said in reverse of my previous book, Timon's Tide, to make precisely the opposite points), there's an element of truth in some of it, too - especially as regards the tropes I derived rather lazily from Garner.
There was one passage, though, that seemed to me really sloppy, and I'm going to indulge myself to the extent of saying "Now, just hang on a minute!" repeatedly about these few lines.
Our authors begin by quoting a description near the beginning of the book, about the island of Sweetholm:
* Is there an implication here that it should be represented as an "unmarked natural environment"? I'm not entirely sure. But of course there's no such thing, at least in this country. (Could this have something to do with the authors being Australian? I doubt there's any such thing there either, after 50,000 years or so of human habitation.)
** "Wetland" is a strange word choice, referring as it usually does to fens, swamps, bogs, etc., rather than the foreshore of an island. It's used here (as the discussion makes clear elsewhere) to allow the authors to cite the associations of swamps with patriarchal notions of dejection and negative notions of femaleness.
*** Good luck with draining the Bristol Channel! Dredging and draining aren't the same thing: you're thinking of those swamps again. More importantly, why would anyone read "undredged" as a negative formulation here? (In the sentence "The ferry ran aground because the channel leading to the harbour had been undredged for too long", it would be a different matter.) And why would anyone want to dredge the mud flats which are the home to wildlife and wading birds?
**** Does the horror of quicksand need a gloss, let alone such a general, vague-making one? You don't need to live round here long to hear stories like this one about people being sucked into the mud-flats around the Bristol Channel. It happens quite regularly, and it is horrific.
***** Isn't it clear that the quicksands have both negative and positive aspects? It's dangerous to humans, but it's a source of food for birds. It's full of life, but it can cause death. These statements look quite deliberately balanced to me (as indeed they were). Why on earth should its abundance of food for waders be seen as underlining its "horror"?
****** So "lavish" now also implies "horror"? That's not how I've generally heard the word used. Anyway, shouldn't that be sartorial rather than bodily excess, if we're going to read "skirted" as referring to female clothing? (If anything, it's a fashion statement about low hemlines.)
Good, I feel better now. Tendentious readings usually betray a lack of confidence in one's conclusions, but in this case it seems to me that a lot of the horror of nature (female or otherwise) on display here was brought along by the critics.
So I was surprised and trepidated to the core to find that New World Orders in Contemporary Children's Literature (2008), by the renowned Australian critics Clare Bradford, Robyn McCallum, Kerry Mallan and John Stephens, had no less than four pages on Calypso Dreaming.
That's the good news. Unfortunately, they don't like it at all. In fact, they talk about it principally so they can use it as target practice for ecofeminist criticism. Oh well, those are the breaks, and although I would take issue with much of their argument (not least because almost everything they say about gender in Calypso Dreaming could be said in reverse of my previous book, Timon's Tide, to make precisely the opposite points), there's an element of truth in some of it, too - especially as regards the tropes I derived rather lazily from Garner.
There was one passage, though, that seemed to me really sloppy, and I'm going to indulge myself to the extent of saying "Now, just hang on a minute!" repeatedly about these few lines.
Our authors begin by quoting a description near the beginning of the book, about the island of Sweetholm:
The Haven was the island’s one harbour. Elsewhere, the land plummeted in stark cliffs, or was skirted with lavish margins of mud. The undredged quicksands were an asylum for the wading birds. The sand and mud squirmed with life, but had also sucked down sheep, dogs, even (the guide-book said) occasional unwary humans. A party of Edwardian nuns had made their last pilgrimage to the site of St Brigan’s ancient chapel and been swallowed, a hundred years before.
Rather than existing as an unmarked natural environment,* the wetland** is an uncivilised and hostile space, as denoted by the extended lexical sequence, "skirted with lavish margins... undredged quicksands... asylum for wading birds... squirmed with life... sucked down... swallowed." The assumption of culture's superiority over nature is especially evident in the negative formulation "undredged", which implies that in a proper order of things the wetlands would be drained.*** The horror associated with "quicksand" - that is, nature, in its destructive aspect**** - is underlined by the contrast between the site as an "asylum" for birds but a threat to humans,***** and by the implicit horror of female bodily excess ("skirted with lavish margins").****** (p. 87)
* Is there an implication here that it should be represented as an "unmarked natural environment"? I'm not entirely sure. But of course there's no such thing, at least in this country. (Could this have something to do with the authors being Australian? I doubt there's any such thing there either, after 50,000 years or so of human habitation.)
** "Wetland" is a strange word choice, referring as it usually does to fens, swamps, bogs, etc., rather than the foreshore of an island. It's used here (as the discussion makes clear elsewhere) to allow the authors to cite the associations of swamps with patriarchal notions of dejection and negative notions of femaleness.
*** Good luck with draining the Bristol Channel! Dredging and draining aren't the same thing: you're thinking of those swamps again. More importantly, why would anyone read "undredged" as a negative formulation here? (In the sentence "The ferry ran aground because the channel leading to the harbour had been undredged for too long", it would be a different matter.) And why would anyone want to dredge the mud flats which are the home to wildlife and wading birds?
**** Does the horror of quicksand need a gloss, let alone such a general, vague-making one? You don't need to live round here long to hear stories like this one about people being sucked into the mud-flats around the Bristol Channel. It happens quite regularly, and it is horrific.
***** Isn't it clear that the quicksands have both negative and positive aspects? It's dangerous to humans, but it's a source of food for birds. It's full of life, but it can cause death. These statements look quite deliberately balanced to me (as indeed they were). Why on earth should its abundance of food for waders be seen as underlining its "horror"?
****** So "lavish" now also implies "horror"? That's not how I've generally heard the word used. Anyway, shouldn't that be sartorial rather than bodily excess, if we're going to read "skirted" as referring to female clothing? (If anything, it's a fashion statement about low hemlines.)
Good, I feel better now. Tendentious readings usually betray a lack of confidence in one's conclusions, but in this case it seems to me that a lot of the horror of nature (female or otherwise) on display here was brought along by the critics.