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Jan. 12th, 2008 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adiva_calandiaWent to bed at 10 PM; was immediately struck by the incredible, unique loneliness of an empty dorm; discovered that cuddling plushy Chthulhu didn't help; fell asleep. Woke up at 3:30 AM; tossed and turned and cursed my sinuses for an hour or so; fell asleep. Woke up at 10 AM; said screw that; fell asleep. Woke up at noon; sighed; hit the snooze button for an hour; got up.
And here I am.
I seem have to been clenching my teeth in my sleep, 'cause, ow. Chewing shouldn't crackle unless you're eating chips.
Things to do today:
-Figure out my mailbox combination.
-Shower. Oh lukewarm dorm showers. I didn't miss you. I really didn't.
-Buy Kleenex. And milk. And maybe OJ. Oh, and detergent and shampoo.
-Unpack and find homes for a lot of little bags of coffee.
So like I said, I got about halfway through re-reading Fire & Hemlock yesterday. I've also reread Pamela Dean's Tam Lin twice this school year (it's good comfort reading for a college student).
And something clicked for me, this time, when Polly receives her first package of books from Mr. Lynn: just how much literature plays into both retellings of Tam Lin.
It's not just that Polly and Mr. Lynn in F&H and Janet and Thomas in TL are all voracious readers. Diana Wynne Jones and Pamela Dean both use literature to underscore what's going on in the story. Examples:
Fire & Hemlock
Fairly early in the story, Tom sends Polly a package of books "nobody should grow up without reading." They include The Wizard of Oz, about an adventure in a fairyland (that's what Baum called it) that may or may not have been a dream; Five Children and It, which is about a cranky sand-fairy who grants wishes that rarely turn out like the five children hope (sidebar: I'm named after the eldest of the five children); The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is about heroes; and Henrietta's House, which Polly describes as "The peple in it do lik hero bisnis only they invent a hous and in the end it is reely trew."
There are others, that I can't comment on because I haven't read them, but just from those four, we see themes that will later be repeated: memory, wish fulfillment, heroism, and the thin line between reality and fantasy.
Tom also tells Polly to read fairy stories; the first one she reads is "East of the Sun, West of the Moon." She notes that the title is a sort of way of saying Nowhere, but doesn't, of course, notice that it's about a girl who must save a man under an enchantment. Moreover, it's an enchantment that turns the man into a bear. Although Tam Lin never turns into things in this version, he does in the original ballad, including a bear, and Janet -- or Polly, in this case -- must hang onto him through the changes. (Tom does change near the final confrontation, personality-wise, and Polly recognizes that she must hang onto him through it.)
Later, Polly reads The Lord of the Rings and is immediately inspired to steal the best bits for the adventures of Hero and Tan Coul. Tom tells her curtly that she should think of things for herself. If Polly just uses what others have come up with, her imaginings won't have the power to save Tom.
Polly also reads The Golden Bough on Tom's suggestion, which Wikipedia tells me is about religion and mythology, and particularly the idea of a king that sacrificially dies and is reborn. Mr. Leroy, Laurel's king, must be strengthened by defeating one of Laurel's men every few years.
Polly also plays Pierrot, the clown in love with Columbine. I think that this must be very significant -- particularly because of the way Polly combines both her names, Polly and Hero, to make Pierrot -- but I'm not entirely sure what it is yet. Pierrot is in love with someone he can't have, and so is Polly; Pierrot eventually settles for the plainer Pierrette, and Polly settles for the much less interesting Seb when she can't have Tom.
And, of course, you can't ignore the Dumas Quartet. Tom names his quartet after the Musketeers -- heroes if ever there were -- and later they publish a book of short stories called Fire & Hemlock that leads Polly to remember her true life, instead of the false one Laurel planted. Talk about metatextualism.
Tam Lin
One of my favorite things about TL is that within in the first few chapters, Janet and Molly mention some of my favorite books (Molly uses the opening line of Voyage of the Dawn Treader to distract Janet in a game of hand-slapping, and says of Janet "Nobody wants a stuffy roommate, even if she does read Madeleine L'Engle.") and Dean comments on college freshmen reading "kid's books." Not to mention Janet's reasons for being an English major, which coincide nicely with my reasons for being a Dramaturgy major: "Look, if the thing you liked best to do in the world was read, and somebody offered to pay you room and board and give you a liberal-arts degree if you would just read for four years, wouldn't you do it?"
("But what will you do after that?" asks the pragmatic Christina.
"Go to graduate school and read some more," answers Janet.
This may have influenced my own plans regarding post-undergrad life a little more than is healthy.
Anyway.)
Interestingly -- to me, at least, being a theatre person -- the most important stories are all plays: Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, and The Lady's Not for Burning. Robin and Thomas have an impassioned discussion after Hamlet about Hamlet being the odd one out of the court; Thomas clearly identifies himself as Hamlet, set on an inescapable course in an implacable, inhuman court, while Robin is certainly Horatio, who is both of the court and against the court.
The Revenger's Tragedy takes up almost the entirety of chapter 12 of TL, wherein Thomas, Nick, Robin, and several other Classics majors -- some of them of the fairy court -- stage the play. Thomas goes to great lengths to tell the audience that the lustful, immoral, rotten-to-the-core court onstage is the same as the Classics department sitting in the house. And when Medeous, the Queen of the Fairies, rises and walks out, Thomas once again brings in Hamlet, crying, "The King rises. Give o'er the play. Lights, lights, lights." and ending the play.
The Lady's Not for Burning isn't gone into in quite as much detail as either of the other two plays. However, it serves as the catalyst for Janet and Thomas consummating their relationship. As Janet notices, finally, "it was about two people named Thomas and Jennet. ... She knew perfectly well that, if examined with the eye of logic, these associations would unravel, since the plot of the play bore no relation to the events of the last three years." Nevertheless, from there she turns to Thomas, and they save each other, just as Thomas and Jennet do.
Other works weave throughout TL: Keats is particularly prominent, especially through "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," but Eliot's "The Wasteland" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" both make appearances as well. Shakespeare is all over the place, though rarely with such significance as the production of Hamlet (although I think one could make an argument for a certain Beatrice-Benedick vibe between the book's several pairs of lovers, and of course Robin, Rob, and Nick are Shakespearean actors; Robin is Feste and other fools, slightly outside the court).
One of my favorite conceits of the book is the way Dean handles the lines She had na pu'd a double rose, / A rose but only twa / Till upon then started young Tam Lin / Says, Lady, thou's pu nae mae. Janet goes to the library to find a translation of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's The Romance of the Rose, an allegorical poem on the Art of Love, and finds both translations have been pulled by other students. There's another one, luckily -- in the hands of an extremely annoyed Thomas Lane. Dean's choice of poem is obviously not idle. Not only does the title play into the ballad, but the subject matter of the poem once again reflects romance in a court.
One more example strikes me as particularly important: the Fourth Ericson ghost, Victoria Thompson, who throws books out the window. Victoria, it turns out by the end of the story, was in the same situation as Janet, pregnant with the child of one of the Queen's tithes, but unlike Janet, she killed herself. The books she flings out the window are all clues to the her demise: Lidell and Scott, one of the Classics textbooks; The Scarlet Letter, about a women pregnant out of wedlock; The Legendary Ballads of England and Scotland, which I suspect has "Tam Lin" and probably "Thomas the Rhymer" in it; and The Fifth Reader, another Classics textbook. Thomas points out that she also threw A Midsummer Night's Dream, about a court of fairies.
All right, that's more than enough examples. The question now: So what?
Here's what I think -- I think Terry Pratchett got it right. When PTerry writes about fairies, in Lords & Ladies, there's a lot of talk of stories, and plays, and things being unreal and real at once. I didn't include L&L in this analysis because a) it's not a retelling of "Tam Lin" and b) since it doesn't take place on Earth, he obviously can't be filling the story with other literature. He does, however, reference Midsummer Night's Dream -- a lot, and brilliantly -- and I think he may even reference the passage in "Thomas the Rhymer" about O see ye not that narrow road, / So thick beset with thorns and briers? / That is the path of righteousness, / Tho after it but few enquires., but not having the book handy, I can't quote you passage and page number.
Anyway. Several of PTerry's books talk about the way stories warp the world. "Tam Lin" seems to have a lot of gravity, a lead weight on a rubber sheet. Other stories roll down into its valley and stick to it, making it even heavier. It might be the concept of Elfland at the center of that ball of stories, rather than "Tam Lin" specifically, but I think the ballad's the heaviest. It touches on a lot of themes: pregnancy, love, heroism, betrayal, loyalty, magic, Hell . . . By modernizing the story, Dean and Jones get to play a giant game of free association with those themes and Western literature.
. . . So you think I could maybe get a paper out of that? *facepalm* I have no conclusion and a weak thesis, but, uh. This is three pages long, and I haven't begun to analyze all the books and poems Dean mentions, and I know I could unpack the Dumas Quartet thing more, and . . .
One day back on a campus and what do I do but collect evidence and analyze it. *eyeroll*
And here I am.
I seem have to been clenching my teeth in my sleep, 'cause, ow. Chewing shouldn't crackle unless you're eating chips.
Things to do today:
-Figure out my mailbox combination.
-Buy Kleenex. And milk. And maybe OJ. Oh, and detergent and shampoo.
-Unpack and find homes for a lot of little bags of coffee.
So like I said, I got about halfway through re-reading Fire & Hemlock yesterday. I've also reread Pamela Dean's Tam Lin twice this school year (it's good comfort reading for a college student).
And something clicked for me, this time, when Polly receives her first package of books from Mr. Lynn: just how much literature plays into both retellings of Tam Lin.
It's not just that Polly and Mr. Lynn in F&H and Janet and Thomas in TL are all voracious readers. Diana Wynne Jones and Pamela Dean both use literature to underscore what's going on in the story. Examples:
Fire & Hemlock
Fairly early in the story, Tom sends Polly a package of books "nobody should grow up without reading." They include The Wizard of Oz, about an adventure in a fairyland (that's what Baum called it) that may or may not have been a dream; Five Children and It, which is about a cranky sand-fairy who grants wishes that rarely turn out like the five children hope (sidebar: I'm named after the eldest of the five children); The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is about heroes; and Henrietta's House, which Polly describes as "The peple in it do lik hero bisnis only they invent a hous and in the end it is reely trew."
There are others, that I can't comment on because I haven't read them, but just from those four, we see themes that will later be repeated: memory, wish fulfillment, heroism, and the thin line between reality and fantasy.
Tom also tells Polly to read fairy stories; the first one she reads is "East of the Sun, West of the Moon." She notes that the title is a sort of way of saying Nowhere, but doesn't, of course, notice that it's about a girl who must save a man under an enchantment. Moreover, it's an enchantment that turns the man into a bear. Although Tam Lin never turns into things in this version, he does in the original ballad, including a bear, and Janet -- or Polly, in this case -- must hang onto him through the changes. (Tom does change near the final confrontation, personality-wise, and Polly recognizes that she must hang onto him through it.)
Later, Polly reads The Lord of the Rings and is immediately inspired to steal the best bits for the adventures of Hero and Tan Coul. Tom tells her curtly that she should think of things for herself. If Polly just uses what others have come up with, her imaginings won't have the power to save Tom.
Polly also reads The Golden Bough on Tom's suggestion, which Wikipedia tells me is about religion and mythology, and particularly the idea of a king that sacrificially dies and is reborn. Mr. Leroy, Laurel's king, must be strengthened by defeating one of Laurel's men every few years.
Polly also plays Pierrot, the clown in love with Columbine. I think that this must be very significant -- particularly because of the way Polly combines both her names, Polly and Hero, to make Pierrot -- but I'm not entirely sure what it is yet. Pierrot is in love with someone he can't have, and so is Polly; Pierrot eventually settles for the plainer Pierrette, and Polly settles for the much less interesting Seb when she can't have Tom.
And, of course, you can't ignore the Dumas Quartet. Tom names his quartet after the Musketeers -- heroes if ever there were -- and later they publish a book of short stories called Fire & Hemlock that leads Polly to remember her true life, instead of the false one Laurel planted. Talk about metatextualism.
Tam Lin
One of my favorite things about TL is that within in the first few chapters, Janet and Molly mention some of my favorite books (Molly uses the opening line of Voyage of the Dawn Treader to distract Janet in a game of hand-slapping, and says of Janet "Nobody wants a stuffy roommate, even if she does read Madeleine L'Engle.") and Dean comments on college freshmen reading "kid's books." Not to mention Janet's reasons for being an English major, which coincide nicely with my reasons for being a Dramaturgy major: "Look, if the thing you liked best to do in the world was read, and somebody offered to pay you room and board and give you a liberal-arts degree if you would just read for four years, wouldn't you do it?"
("But what will you do after that?" asks the pragmatic Christina.
"Go to graduate school and read some more," answers Janet.
This may have influenced my own plans regarding post-undergrad life a little more than is healthy.
Anyway.)
Interestingly -- to me, at least, being a theatre person -- the most important stories are all plays: Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, and The Lady's Not for Burning. Robin and Thomas have an impassioned discussion after Hamlet about Hamlet being the odd one out of the court; Thomas clearly identifies himself as Hamlet, set on an inescapable course in an implacable, inhuman court, while Robin is certainly Horatio, who is both of the court and against the court.
The Revenger's Tragedy takes up almost the entirety of chapter 12 of TL, wherein Thomas, Nick, Robin, and several other Classics majors -- some of them of the fairy court -- stage the play. Thomas goes to great lengths to tell the audience that the lustful, immoral, rotten-to-the-core court onstage is the same as the Classics department sitting in the house. And when Medeous, the Queen of the Fairies, rises and walks out, Thomas once again brings in Hamlet, crying, "The King rises. Give o'er the play. Lights, lights, lights." and ending the play.
The Lady's Not for Burning isn't gone into in quite as much detail as either of the other two plays. However, it serves as the catalyst for Janet and Thomas consummating their relationship. As Janet notices, finally, "it was about two people named Thomas and Jennet. ... She knew perfectly well that, if examined with the eye of logic, these associations would unravel, since the plot of the play bore no relation to the events of the last three years." Nevertheless, from there she turns to Thomas, and they save each other, just as Thomas and Jennet do.
Other works weave throughout TL: Keats is particularly prominent, especially through "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," but Eliot's "The Wasteland" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" both make appearances as well. Shakespeare is all over the place, though rarely with such significance as the production of Hamlet (although I think one could make an argument for a certain Beatrice-Benedick vibe between the book's several pairs of lovers, and of course Robin, Rob, and Nick are Shakespearean actors; Robin is Feste and other fools, slightly outside the court).
One of my favorite conceits of the book is the way Dean handles the lines She had na pu'd a double rose, / A rose but only twa / Till upon then started young Tam Lin / Says, Lady, thou's pu nae mae. Janet goes to the library to find a translation of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's The Romance of the Rose, an allegorical poem on the Art of Love, and finds both translations have been pulled by other students. There's another one, luckily -- in the hands of an extremely annoyed Thomas Lane. Dean's choice of poem is obviously not idle. Not only does the title play into the ballad, but the subject matter of the poem once again reflects romance in a court.
One more example strikes me as particularly important: the Fourth Ericson ghost, Victoria Thompson, who throws books out the window. Victoria, it turns out by the end of the story, was in the same situation as Janet, pregnant with the child of one of the Queen's tithes, but unlike Janet, she killed herself. The books she flings out the window are all clues to the her demise: Lidell and Scott, one of the Classics textbooks; The Scarlet Letter, about a women pregnant out of wedlock; The Legendary Ballads of England and Scotland, which I suspect has "Tam Lin" and probably "Thomas the Rhymer" in it; and The Fifth Reader, another Classics textbook. Thomas points out that she also threw A Midsummer Night's Dream, about a court of fairies.
All right, that's more than enough examples. The question now: So what?
Here's what I think -- I think Terry Pratchett got it right. When PTerry writes about fairies, in Lords & Ladies, there's a lot of talk of stories, and plays, and things being unreal and real at once. I didn't include L&L in this analysis because a) it's not a retelling of "Tam Lin" and b) since it doesn't take place on Earth, he obviously can't be filling the story with other literature. He does, however, reference Midsummer Night's Dream -- a lot, and brilliantly -- and I think he may even reference the passage in "Thomas the Rhymer" about O see ye not that narrow road, / So thick beset with thorns and briers? / That is the path of righteousness, / Tho after it but few enquires., but not having the book handy, I can't quote you passage and page number.
Anyway. Several of PTerry's books talk about the way stories warp the world. "Tam Lin" seems to have a lot of gravity, a lead weight on a rubber sheet. Other stories roll down into its valley and stick to it, making it even heavier. It might be the concept of Elfland at the center of that ball of stories, rather than "Tam Lin" specifically, but I think the ballad's the heaviest. It touches on a lot of themes: pregnancy, love, heroism, betrayal, loyalty, magic, Hell . . . By modernizing the story, Dean and Jones get to play a giant game of free association with those themes and Western literature.
. . . So you think I could maybe get a paper out of that? *facepalm* I have no conclusion and a weak thesis, but, uh. This is three pages long, and I haven't begun to analyze all the books and poems Dean mentions, and I know I could unpack the Dumas Quartet thing more, and . . .
One day back on a campus and what do I do but collect evidence and analyze it. *eyeroll*
