From: Perry Nodelman <nodelman>
Date: Sun, 30 Jul 1995 10:25:10 -0500 (CDT)

Just a few comments on Sharon's response:


Why, I wonder? Unfamiliarity? Just the fact that it's invented
(something that seems necessary to me if in fact it's a new concept and a word doesn't exist for it already)? Just the sound of the word? Personally, I rather like it--the sound, I mean: nicely echoing c's and s's. It might make a good name for a character in a fantasy novel if those ideologists hadn't used it up already. A baaad character.


The point, I think, is that fiction ALWAYS distorts reality--that all representations are distortions. Realistic fiction claims to represent reality as it is, and is therefore particularly suspect; even more suspect is fiction which makes claims to timelessness, since it implies that there are timeless aspects of the human condition, and therefore denies the power and the possibility of changing historical specifics, such as the uneven division of power amongst people: we humans are stuck always with our unchanging human essence; we always have been and always will be the same, and so disenfranchised people should just shut up and stop complaining and trying to do the impossible and actually change anything.
 From this point of view, abstraction in art may well be acceptable, since it's a form of representation that makes no claim to be an accurate depiction of reality as we usually perceive it. BUT: that doesn't mean abstraction is in any sense "timeless"; like supposedly timeless realistic fiction, it represents culturally and historically specific ways of thinking and being as if they had always existed and always will exist. To my mind, Becket, for instance, is very much of the fifties, of a particular cultural milieu.


A good strict, ideological theorist such as Althusser would say, but yes, of course. The very fact that you insist you're not brainwashed merely proves how very brainwashed you are. The more we are IN ideology, Althusser says, the more we deny we are in it: what you call ideology, we say, I call common sense and obvious (or timeless human truth?) Why can't you see that, Sharon? It seems obvious to me.


Personally, I can't ignore them. It's these specifics of time and place and person that give these texts their life for me, and all of their interest. If Shakespeare did actually write about the timeless, then presumably I'd already know what he has to show me-?ter all, it still exists, and I'd already have experience of it. But in fact I'm constantly surprised, shocked, annoyed, horrified, delighted, by the odd and unique and, to me, very alien feeling that emanates from a writer as brilliant as Shakespeare, who chronicles so exactly a time so very different from my own. The only thing I find timeless in this is the sense that different people in different times and places are so totally unlike each other. The things that guy takes for granted utterly flabbergast and astonish me--and often, utterly horrify me. and I'm not surprised that high school students asked to read him and notices his timelessness often find him so completely incomprehensible.
        And, I might add, I feel much the same delight, shock, annoyance, etc that I do in reading Shakespeare in reading a writer as brilliant as Sharon Creech, whose novel I find equally eccentric, AND equally of its time--our time, despite the lack of confirming details (and that I continue to see as a delusion and a bit of a weakness, I'm afraid; sorry).
        Walk Two Moons would have made little sense to Shakespeare or to Sophocles as a description of a timeless human reality, I bet--for one thing, neither of them would have been prone to believe, given the values of their time, that the thoughts and experiences of an ordinary non-royal female child could be of much interest to anybody that mattered--such as men, and adults, and titled people. I suspect theyat Shak and Soph might even have thought that such people--ordinary, non-royal female children--didn't actually do anything you could seriously acknowledge as thinking. But I also hope that they would have been intrigued by the very specific and, I think, decidedly non-timeless world WTM does describe so well.
        That's why I like it-?cause it surprises me. Because it shows me people and experiences (and uses language) so non-timeless and so non-universal that I had no idea they might exist before I read the book. This is a representation of a world convincingly human and quite unlike my own--the one I live in and end up representing, for good or ill, in my own novels for children.
        The only way in which WTM fails to be convincingly human for me is when the characters, who are otherwise often so perceptive, seem to lack consciousness of so many pervasive and almost unavoidable aspects of contemporary culture. Once more, it's not specific details and brand names I'm looking for, or even specific experiences of watching television, etc. It's just a sense that such things do exist, and that they help to shape our world whether we want to be conscious of them or not.
        Also, to go back to something else Sharon said, I suspect this would bother me less if the book didn't work so hard to seem realistic otherwise: a more abstract or totally timeless book wouldn't create a sense of gaps.
        Another possibility--I'm just imagining gaps. The reality represented in the novel does make perfectly good sense--just not the sense I was expecting. Perhaps I need to read it again.

And that's more than enough. I'll try to answer the other comments people made on my earlier messages soon.

Perry Nodelman University of Winnipeg nodelman at io.UWinnipeg.ca
Received on Sun 30 Jul 1995 10:25:10 AM CDT