Children’s Literature in Education (2017) 48:73–88 DOI 10.1007/s10583-016-9305-3 ORIGINAL PAPER
Drawing Out the Resistance Narrative via Mapping in The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet Alya Hameed1
Published online: 28 December 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract Though many children’s texts include maps that visually demarcate their journeys, modern texts rarely involve active mapping by child characters themselves, suggesting that children cannot (or should not) conceptualise the world for themselves, but require an adult’s guidance to traverse it. Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (2009), however, views the child as active cartographer and expands the conversation on the relationship between children and space to uncover new (or more nuanced) understandings of children’s place in society, and their constant tension in finding selfhood. This article examines how the act of mapping in literature often leads a character away from home to a place where the child can reconstruct ‘‘home’’ within his or her memory—a memory that instils resistance against the status quo of the child’s position in life. Cartography’s direct relationship with children experiments with and subverts the binaries of child/adult, fantasy/ reality, civilised/primitive and home/memory of home, completely dismantling them in the specific example of Larsen’s novel and demonstrating that the child protagonist’s space is neither solely real nor fantastic. Mapping induces the young protagonist to move into alternative spaces, and to resist social pressures in order to assert fuller agency over his or her identity formation. Keywords Maps Mapping Identity Resistance Home Memory Trauma Reif Larsen
Alya Hameed holds an M.A. from San Diego State University, specialising in Children’s Literature. Her thesis focused on children’s maps and mapping as tools for resistance in contemporary children’s novels, and her current interests include Muslim and Asian-American literature and multicultural studies. She is currently an editor at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley. & Alya Hameed
[email protected] 1
UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
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Autonomy and agency are notoriously problematic in children’s literature. The complication arises in understanding that the child is literally being written by an adult and, perhaps, ‘‘has no oppositional voice until reaching adulthood,’’ as Jacqueline Rose asserts (qtd. in Sahn, 2016, p. 149). However, it is possible to use this relationship structure between adult and child as a means to argue that resistance can take place within the child character, and perhaps just as much in the reader, specifically because of the influences from adults. Thus, this article explores the ways that resistance shapes child maturation by examining how the role and presence of mapping contributes to a child’s agency in Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (2009). This argument hinges upon the definition and manifestation of ‘‘home’’ in relation to the adult-child dynamic, specifically the ways in which ‘‘home’’ is used to explain that the purpose of parental roles, rather than mitigating the steps toward autonomy that T. S. achieves via mapping, actually supplement his drive toward independence. It has often been argued that travel and mapping in children’s literature are shaped by the Odyssean view of home, or as Lucy Waddey (1983) puts it, a refuge and stronghold of memory and emotion; as such, journeys home are as important and sometimes as fraught as the journey out. According to Christopher Clausen (1982, p. 141), while literary children are often ‘‘tempted by travel, […] home is clearly where [they] belong and where, after many vicissitudes, they return.’’ Children’s literature, therefore, is differentiated from adult (and perhaps young adult) literature by the child’s world being framed so exclusively by home. However, while maps may also provide the impetus for movement in Larsen’s T. S. Spivet, this is determined less by the need to return home, than as a means by which the eponymous protagonist determines his own identity in the face of personal trauma, and in spite of his emotional and physical estrangement from his home and family. Thus, in T. S. Spivet, the act of mapping itself demonstrates what Waddey (1983, p. 14) describes as a Promethean pattern, where characters ‘‘must create homes for themselves, and, as they do, they become more fond of what they have created and more defined by it.’’ What is more, I will argue that T. S.’s mapping actually facilitates his understanding of place and makes clear the boundaries erected around him, both socially and emotionally. Ultimately, and more importantly, his mapping sheds light on how children can actively cross those boundaries, making a claim for agency and power in a system and literature that usually seeks to subjugate and control. In T. S.’s case, mapping proves to be a cathartic process that finally heals his physical and intellectual isolation; this is achieved partly through recognising that going home to his parents cannot bring him either solace or personal fulfilment. Thus, as part of this discussion, I also show how deeply home and parental figures are integrated into the child’s mind as a means to reveal the ways in which T. S. actively engages in resistance to heal himself and move forward. When combatting emotional and domestic limitations, mapping does not necessarily lead one back home; in T. S.’s case, not only does it reconstruct the memory of such an environment—a memory that arouses a resistance against the cultural norms expected of behaviour and identity—but it opens access to both fantasy and tertiary spaces that are created by T. S.. Both provide him with the space he needs to
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construct his own identity in the face of the crushing experience of being at home in Montana. Therefore, while resistance can be political, it can also be personal, especially when it pushes against the social demands of how one should live, grieve, or even be a son. Ultimately, childhood resistance emanates from the cartographic impulses of the child, who strives to redraw and re-map the landscapes allotted to him and, through this process, inscribe his own purpose. There have been a handful of child cartographers in British children’s literature, but few active mappers in American children’s literature.1 However, despite America’s own historic impulse to explore and conquer, notably through the ideology of manifest destiny, unlike British child cartographers, such as Arthur Ransome’s Walker and Blackett children, the maps in T. S. Spivet are not about spatial conquest, but about internal exploration. Thus, a novel such as T. S. Spivet offers exciting terrain for the reader and the scholar alike. The novel follows the travels of a young boy, T. S., as he makes his way from the Midwest to Washington D.C. to accept the impressive Baird Award from the Smithsonian Institute for his cartography skills. T. S. lives on a ranch in the remote regions of Montana, but the reader recognises immediately that his isolation is as much emotional as it is physical, and it sets him apart from his family. The reader is also set apart from the normal reading experience, because the book’s pages and margins (and even front and back matter) are peppered with drawings, notes, and maps created by T. S.; these illustrate, among many other things, family trees, geographical, thematic and topographical maps, anatomical diagrams, aerial plans and myriad diagrams of people and objects. These geographical maps and charts of human behaviour provide the reader with the tangential thoughts, emotional explorations, and critical observations of a ten-year-old trying to make sense of his identity and his place in the world, or at the very least, in his family. Viewing the child as a cartographer—whose agency grows with his or her perception of the world—opens up the conversation about children and space so that we can question and subvert certain binaries, including civilised/primitive children, reality/fantasy and the physical/imagined home (binaries I will discuss later). Here, then, I show the effects that extensive cartography has on T. S., who learns what significance home and memory have. It is with this memory that he finally and completely resists subjection to adult determination of children’s spaces, while maintaining an essential hold on the value of home. The child’s space, rather than a socially determined ‘‘primitive’’ landscape, is neither solely real nor fantastic, but an unconscious blending of the two that results from a discontent with his or her current place in society; in T. S.’s case, as the overlooked surviving son of two preoccupied parents following the accidental shooting of his brother, Layton, he is induced to seek alternative spaces, spaces that are born out of the knowledge gained from mapping. 1
Those who grew up in the U.S. may be unfamiliar with the legacy of Arthur Ransome, whose ‘‘Swallows and Amazons’’ series features the Walker and Blackett children’s adventures on Wild Cat Island in the Lake District. These books spawned a wealth of early twentieth-century British children’s books that featured children as map makers, often as would-be colonialists [see Bird (2014) for more on this]. Richard Phillips (1997, p. 6) also says ‘‘Ransome’s history of adventure roughly spans the European age of exploration when Europeans were exploring and mapping what they called the ‘New World’.’’
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Arguably, the most prolific use of maps has been to familiarise us with the unknown. Denis Wood (1992, p. 12) discusses how maps direct us to places we might know; Susan Honeyman describes the fulfilment that child readers glean from maps as a ‘‘sense of mastery gained in naming and knowing the unknown’’ (2001, p. 122). The map is about space—about naming those elements that seem most important to name. J. B. Harley (1989, p. 233) defines cartography as ‘‘a body of theoretical and practical knowledge that map makers employ to construct maps as a distinct mode of visual representation.’’ Thus, Harley implies that the cartographer actively engages not only in disseminating truth, but also in a distinct truth that embodies his or her knowledge and perspective—in short, a highly subjective truth. One can use these suggestive qualities of the map, then, to find definitions of identity—a quest that most children seek out, whether purposefully or accidentally, on their way to adulthood. Thus, the map’s qualities can potentially galvanise the youth’s sojourn into a new conception of space with greater efficiency. T. S. Spivet demonstrates this shift in cooperating with maps, because T. S. so genuinely embraces the world he experiences via his cartography; consequently, the resulting influence of the maps is palpable. Here, the child’s developing nature allows him to move in directions that adults are blind to precisely because children who map have opportunities to discover a new ground that elevates them above standard social structures. Such treatment and consequence of mapping by a young person can be seen in T. S. Spivet, where the reader discovers that the child’s first step in this process of change begins with the literal mapping of the space around him. The novel overflows with graphs, maps, and infographics, but the initial images we see in the first chapter are of T. S.’s home, bedroom and the skeleton of his namesake sparrow (his full name being Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet). This choice of mapping corroborates Honeyman’s argument that children seek to map out the mysteries of their small universes (home and play spaces) with no impetus or necessity to map ‘‘the world beyond their grasp’’ (2001, p. 121). As geographers have demonstrated, this act of totalising the most localised of spaces speaks to children’s desire to familiarise themselves with their world so that it can be a place of respite and refuge. Equally, studies of children’s sense of place via mapping exercises reveal the most important needs and impressions that children hold. Jessica Lee and Rebecca Abbott’s (2009) work with rural children in Australia ably demonstrates this; they asked children to map their local spaces, and the most recurring themes included family and friends (followed closely by sports and physical activities). Grandparents’ and friends’ homes are depicted in close relation to many of the children’s homes, and the ‘‘visual methods also illustrated the importance of grandparents and their role in the rural young people’s participation in physical activities’’ (2009, p. 200); thus, this highlights the influence that personal and social structures have on developing a child’s sense of refuge. Likewise, T. S. Spivet initially adheres to these observations, starting with maps and stories about life around T. S.’s home in Divide, Montana (Fig. 1). Yet, almost from the start, T. S.’s maps serve more complex purposes; he is an avid cartographer of everything, not just his personal space, and the reason why T. S. makes maps emerges throughout his works, works which pulse with the latent pain and hollowness brought about by the death of his brother. Despite his extensive
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Fig. 1 T. S. Spivet’s map of his home (p. 3). From THE SELECTED WORKS OF T. S. SPIVET by Reif Larsen, copyright 2009 by Reif Larsen. Used by permission of Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC
collection of extremely remarkable maps and journals, one terrain is noticeably missing: his full home. Aside from a map of his bedroom and the yard around the family ranch, all other liveable rooms are absent. Excessive descriptive detail is given to his father’s ‘‘Sett’ng Room,’’ but we never see an actual map of this room or any other specific area of the house. Considering that the annotated maps and commentary that T. S. includes on every page ‘‘visually [represent] his impressions and interpretation of the events he narrates’’ (Warnecke, 2016, p. 109), the reader gets the painful impression that the rest of the home is scientifically off-limits for him; for a boy who defines himself by his scientific craft, his selfhood is, thus, set apart from the other members of his household. The novel firmly captures the distance between T. S. and his father, from the faded photographs in the Sett’ng Room to T. S.’s acknowledgment that his father never asked him anything. Sylvia Warnecke states that T. S.’s maps ‘‘offer information about the emotional and mental state of the protagonist, which has to be decoded by the reader depending on her own life experiences’’ (2016, p. 110). The contemporary reading experience—in many ways mimicking a digital experience of mining through tangential information—depends on the emotions that T. S. instils in his (descriptive) mapping. Even without a visual image or annotation of his home, T. S.’s mapping of his father’s room demonstrates the emotional void he feels in his father, who sets more value in mythical and ancestral figures than in conceding his son’s existence. Even T. S.’s coleopterist mother, Dr. Clair, from whom he derives his talents, remains aloof most of the time, caught in intangible work (chasing a pipe dream beetle species and working on a fictionalised ancestral history). Gaston Bachelard writes that ‘‘the house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being’’ (1969, p. xxxii), but for T. S. that intimacy does not yet exist. For Bachelard, ‘‘all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home’’ (1969, p. 5) and this homeness can be found within the imagination as a creative force that allows memory and belief to construct a protective dwelling-space away
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from any ‘‘real’’ home. Thus, T. S.’s description of it actually reveals that his father enlists this imaginary creation of ‘‘home’’ in his Sett’ng Room. We also discover over the course of the novel that T. S.’s mapping, which leads him toward a more confident grasp of imagination, provides him with more emotional comfort than the security of his home. Within the refuge of maps he can mend the pain of isolation and construct his own intimate home. Through this novel, we find that mapping predominantly emerges as a coping mechanism for T. S.. Acknowledgment of emotional truths unfurls via mapping to offer clarity and comfort. For T. S., the logical approach of mapping helps him cope with an unconventional and uncommunicative family, exacerbated by Layton’s untimely death. The reader is offered bits and pieces of Layton’s accident throughout the novel, until we finally learn that it occurred while the brothers were running an experiment measuring gunshot reverberations; Layton’s death, at the hand of a jammed rifle that is suddenly set off, haunts T. S. daily because he carries the weight of involvement and spectatorship. Witnessing Layton’s accidental death marks the first concrete trauma that T. S. experiences. If maps convey the personal truths of the artist, they can also deliberately mask facts during grief (that is, denial). T. S. first mentions Layton’s death in a diagram on measuring gunshots, explaining that ‘‘Layton died this past February during an accident with a gun in the barn that no one ever talked about. I was there too, measuring gunshots. I don’t know what went wrong’’ (2009, p. 11). Within the confines of his maps, he initially hides from comprehension of Layton’s death. However, with every mention of his death, T. S. acknowledges more about the accident—witnessing it, then reaching out to help Layton steady the gun, then actually coming into contact with the handle—and, finally, emerges from the maps with a bittersweet acceptance of his loss. Despite the fact that T. S. is not to blame, an underlying tension exists in the novel—the wilful silence of his family—that he interprets as their condemnation of him. The way T. S. internalises the accident and the subsequent family silence demonstrates his trauma; the fact that Layton’s name occurs in every map following his death indicates the scar on T. S.’s heart but, through mapping and listening to the imperatives of his maps, he slowly reaches acceptance. These complex results of cartography serve the additional purpose of subverting certain assumed notions of the child as uncivilised. The contentious claim that children are wild and naturally more primitive beings still carries some weight, especially when seen in nuanced examinations such as Jenny Bavidge’s argument that literature for children ‘‘promotes a nostalgic and, often, implicitly anti-urban world view via the places of canonically ‘classic’ [works]’’ (2006, p. 324). Within such arguments rests the notion of the constructed child that these critics rely on to exhort claims similar to those of Honeyman; that is, that a child’s space is a natural, if fantastical, one. Bavidge deconstructs urban landscapes in order to illustrate how children find ways ‘‘to take notice of the traces of nature in their urban world,’’ and ‘‘to improve or rejuvenate the mundane or even unpleasant urban environment […] through flights of imaginative fancy’’ (2006, p. 325), but also to reveal how adults construct and impose this role on the child. Larsen does not portray a child who relinquishes himself to imaginative ‘‘elusion’’; rather, the entire concept is subverted because T. S. reaches into the netherworlds of his own consciousness
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to combat the trauma of a disrupted and imbalanced household. Rather than a child retreating into a romanticised wilderness and away from the confines of civilised restraint, T. S. develops a highly nuanced and civilised approach to all the spaces available to him, thereby defining his own highly imaginative space. Because T. S.’s mapping includes a broad spectrum of work—including topographical maps, zoological charts, insect anatomies, graphs of social behaviour, ancestral tracings and maps of people and their actions—he constantly uncovers inspiration and motivation from his creations. As Peter Turchi (2004, p. 11) states, ‘‘[w]e organize information on maps in order to see our knowledge in a new way. As a result, maps suggest explanations [and] inspire us to ask more questions.’’ Observation coalesces as maps, which then engender inspiration and suggestion. Thus, we can understand cartography as a dialogue between the mapper and the map, in an effort to demonstrate the logic and rationality of theorising space; T. S.’s maps literally portray this dialogue. The rationalism from which his maps are born in turn supports and guides him. This symbiotic relationship is seen early in the book, when his sleepy mind engages in an existential conversation with the porch at dawn, a mildly fantastical moment that hints at the promise of fantasy waiting to unfurl along T. S.’s journey. The porch accuses T. S. of not being a real ranch boy, asking, ‘‘What is there to map? Spit into cans. Ride the high country. Take her easy’’ (2009, p. 8). The porch’s italicised comments clearly reflect T. S.’s subconscious insecurities regarding his father and what he thinks his father expects of him, but eventually T. S. responds: ‘‘I am not finished with my maps. There is more to map’’ (2009, p. 8). He is consistently led back to his desire to map, despite the damaging belief that mapping makes him a useless son. Furthermore, we immediately see a sample of resistance in him already cultivated by his mapping. This episode with the porch takes shape because of the growing dialogues that T. S. has with his maps, which returns us to Turchi’s argument that maps inspire us to further questioning. And in that process, the creation becomes creator as well: the maps open the doorway for T. S. to escape the real world that he knows, though perhaps not in the manner we generally understand in children’s literature. Honeyman has argued that literary children’s spaces should be limited in order to be graspable by the child protagonist, and that they appear wild and unknown to satisfy ‘‘the paradoxical desire [of the adult] for a mapped terra incognita or tame wilderness’’ (2001, p. 122). In other words, give the child a controlled dose of charted wildness and she or he will not venture further. This idea seems to ignore the child who actually creates maps and relies on them to propel him or her forward into an even larger terrain. To be a cartographer enables the child to transcend the narrow construction of childhood in a totalised space; maps do not only depict one’s space, they become active participants in the child’s world by transforming it. For T. S., this occurs when he learns he has won the prestigious Baird Award and Fellowship in Washington, D.C. and decides to hitchhike there in secret. His unmatched skill in cartography has earned him the right to travel. Maps create that space for him. Mapping also enables fantasy to crystallise indirectly and counteract the unstable foundations of real life. T. S. sets out upon his epic journey across the U.S.
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(1700 miles, from Montana to D.C.), wherein he enters deeper into his fantasy, which had first appeared only as brief interludes in his mind (for example, imagined conversations with the porch). The novel functions as an example of what Farah Mendlesohn calls liminal fantasy, where the fantastic appears without disrupting the narrative or the protagonist’s perspective, and where the origins of intrusive events ‘‘barely raise an eyebrow’’ (2008, p. xxiii). She argues that the liminal fantasy creates a circumstance that ‘‘casualizes the fantastic within the experience of the protagonist,’’ and that while ‘‘it estranges the reader, ‘‘the’’ situation is odd and it is our reaction to oddness that is being exploited’’ (2008, p. xxiv). We must acknowledge that the world itself is not changing; T. S. (and the reader along with him) does not emerge into a fantastical realm that allows his childhood innocence to flourish—he has developed too strong a connection with real geographies and landscapes. Instead, his fantasies are internal, emerging as manifestations of the healing process he initially gains from his maps. These visualisations are real to him and motivated by the safer space he uncovers within the conjurings of his maps, especially because each step T. S. takes into the murky terrain of imagination follows an intense or traumatic experience. His adventure begins when he runs away from home (induced by his bleak loneliness in the Spivet household) and hitchhikes onto a train, in hope of riding trains all the way to D.C.. While hiding on the train car platform next to a harnessed Winnebago, T. S. panics about where to hide from the railroad police. He suddenly has a ‘‘real’’ verbal exchange with the trailer: ‘‘What should I do?’’ I whispered to the Winnebago. ‘‘Call me Valero,’’ the Winnebago whispered back. ‘‘Valero?’’ ‘‘Yes, Valero.’’ ‘‘Okay, Valero, what the heck should I do?’’ I hissed. ‘‘Easy,’’ Valero said. ‘‘Don’t panic. A cowboy never panics, even when the chips are down.’’ (2009, p. 117) Instead of the italicised imaginary conversations from earlier in the novel, clearly indicating a reflection within his own mind, this one marks a huge change in T. S.’s world perspective. He never stops to question why the Winnebago speaks to him, or how his McDonald’s Happy Meal Treat will guard him when he entreats it to ‘‘Protect me, Redbeard’’ (2009, p. 140). His terrifying interaction with an unstable, destitute man who nearly kills him with a knife in Chicago leaves him bleeding, dizzy, and seeking answers in the massive swarm of sparrows that descend around him: ‘‘I was awash in the white noise of their hushed calls—their voices rippling up and down the frequencies as if they were replaying the sum of all conversations ever spoken throughout history’’ (2009, p. 267). The sparrows lead him to the truck driver who will be his saviour, and T. S. surprisingly chooses to keep going. Similarly, the fright of discovering his mother’s doubts about marriage in her journal, which he has taken with him, also elicits similar consequences of shock, horror, and then a turn toward cautious optimism. T. S. follows each incident by visually mapping out his observations, experiences and landscapes. The maps end
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up coupling personal truths with the creation of coping and healing spaces that allow him to progress. Maps can also operate as confirmers of myth. Denis Wood comments that ‘‘[t]his naturalization of the map takes place at the level of the sign system in which the map is inscribed […]. No sooner is a sign created than it is put to the service of a myth’’ (1992, p. 2) as the world displayed on the map is accepted as natural. T. S. uses myth to naturalise the real world traumas he faces, possibly to mitigate their awfulness. Thus, when T. S. reaches Chicago, it is initially illustrated in the text by an incomplete city map, thus giving a sense of scale and sprawl; he is so overwhelmed by the breadth of a ‘‘real’’ city that he sees ‘‘a thousand maps rising into the air like ghostly echoes of the twisting city beneath’’ (2009, p. 251) and must force himself to focus on one to create right then. He hones in on ‘‘The Map of Accompaniment; or, Loneliness in Transit’’ (2009, p. 252, see Fig. 2), which he succinctly titles ‘‘Map of Loneliness.’’ His mind chooses the subject, but the map—having always been a possibility— descends on him, and subconsciously helps him address the most pressing issue in his life: his own isolation. T. S. continues to map the real world as he makes his journey, despite the many traumas that might be expected to push him into the safer space of pure fantasy. Imaginary fantasy spaces are commonly associated with childhood because they are unbounded by the limitations of developed territory. L. Frank Baum’s Oz and Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland are ‘‘classic’’ examples, coinciding largely with the notions of an orderly wildness or, as Honeyman puts it, ‘‘an escape from the civilized adult space’’ (2001, p. 118). T. S. Spivet, on the one hand, conventionally uses the idea of escape, fleeing from an established reality into something unknown; however, on the other hand, T. S.’s constant cartography and observations challenge these assumptions by remaining focused on the real world, even if his maps are coloured by imaginative forces that flourish along his journey. In a sense, his two worlds are transposed, layered upon each other, and the only differentiation resides in how T. S. uses them to cope with his life. Thus, his ‘‘imaginary world’’ is as defined and mapped as the real one. T. S.’s maps, therefore, serve as a potential space, ‘‘the point at which fantasy and reality, self and other come together’’ (Grandy and Tuber, 2009, p. 276), offering a final entry point for untapped exploration, for emotional restoration. T. S. is driven by emotional isolation to follow his maps’ directive (to accept the award) and, along the way, he develops camaraderie and connections with objects, people and spaces including Winnebagos, Native American drifters, big-rig truck drivers and even a bedroom in the Carriage House in D.C. where he stays when he arrives. It is no coincidence that, as mentioned earlier, he settles on drawing the Map of Loneliness: the map siphons his concerns and lets them stay on paper while he moves forward. While his physical and intellectual isolation extends as he travels, T. S.’s internal healing has begun via the mapped imaginary. Thus, slowly T. S. unwittingly abandons more corners of his rationality in favour of fantasy and creativity. Following his maps unconditionally comes at a price though; any alternate space will surely have its own set of rules. The fantasy constructed by these maps
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Fig. 2 T. S.’s ‘‘Map of Loneliness’’ sorts the levels of solitude of passers-by and reveals his insecurities about being alone (p. 375). From THE SELECTED WORKS OF T. S. SPIVET by Reif Larsen, copyright 2009 by Reif Larsen. Used by permission of Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC
threatens to control T. S., just as much as the previous construction of reality with his family did; similarly, the fantasy unfolding around T. S. begins to construct rules and organisations that he must serve, specifically upon reaching D.C.. According to Bachelard (1969, p. 16), ‘‘[i]t is on the plane of the daydream and not on that of facts that childhood remains alive […]. Through this permanent childhood, we maintain the poetry of the past.’’ T. S. accesses his memories and turns them into daydreams of adventure and acceptance that require him to fulfil the fantasy’s needs. This occurs when T. S. recalls a missing manuscript on wormholes he had read once in an
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archive. Once in D.C., he suddenly receives it as a gesture of goodwill from a secret society—The Megatherium Club—that is believed to exist no longer. The entire experience with the society (and the subsequent rules and demands they concoct) supports the idea of a constructed imagination that develops slowly throughout the text. The level of absurdity that evolves is gradual but distinct, resulting from a comfort derived from his maps. T. S. is inevitably ensnared by the absurd fantasy elements, such as the secret society and his teacher’s involvement in it, but within this confinement T. S. will eventually learn how to break free. The conflation of dream and reality—the layering of dreams and secret passages atop the reality of being in the capital—notifies the reader that T. S. is resisting the systems and ‘‘accepted’’ realities around him; he no longer exists with a lack of agency and this realisation instils in him the power to rebel completely against his family’s isolating actions. However, the authority that adults impose upon T. S. is a major point of contention for the authenticity of child agency via mapping, which is as problematic (perhaps more so) than the tension wrought by having an adult author as literal creator of the maps. If images in and of the world rely on consciousness, as W. J. T. Mitchell (1986, p. 17) posits, then we must always ask ourselves whose consciousness dictates the images created and how are they read. Can we accept T. S.’s mapping as an authentic experience that stimulates him to become his own agent of change? In fact, we find that such a stimulation and catalyst for complete change comes from both parents, in spite of their apparent negligence. Initially, it is clear that his mother imposes the greatest weight upon his intellectual and emotional growth, and T. S. feels a kinship with his mother that is lacking with anyone else. Even as he departs on his journey, without any direct guidance, he takes her journal with him, a token of her knowledge and perceptions. An item such as the journal would easily indicate the transference and influence of her consciousness upon his, but T. S. still actively creates his own landscapes. Any lessons he has gleaned from his mother motivate him to maintain the scientific inquiry that will eventually coalesce with an imaginative drive. Nevertheless, his mother’s journal does offer an alternative direction for T. S.. As the figurative compass of T. S.’s mental journey, the journal turns its magnetic dial toward a sweeping freedom of thought. It gives him the opening to recognise the veracity of experience even in a fantastical context, such as that illicit joy of no burden of proof. His mother’s words confirm for him that the fantasy can be an acceptable path; thus, his escapades with secret societies and swarming, clairvoyant birds represent a retreat into a liminal region (caught somewhere between logic and daydream) and an ability to uncover an alternate trajectory, an alternate interpretation of his timeline.2 Dr. Clair’s commentary in her journal—the evidence that she is developing a fictionalised account—allows T. S. to look at his ancestral history differently and, therefore, approach his own life experiences as liberated from the norms of social structures and expectations. His adoption of this approach represents a momentous step in the development of his resistance, his maturity, and his ability to control his life. 2
For another example of this alternate view of a timeline, consider Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001). Pi narrates that believing he travelled with animals rather than animalistic and violent people makes for the better story, but that belief works as a coping mechanism for him as well.
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By reading and accepting the imaginative terms of his mother’s journal—a mythical account of their ancestor Emma Osterville, who would marry his greatgreat-grandfather—T. S. ‘‘reinhabits the landscape [of his childhood] using restored ways of life, heroes, heroines, and exploits’’ (Said, 1994, p. 215).3 Sharing in the untold story—lost to the ravages of time and reconstructed into something new—is another reason T. S. can finally render an honest account of his brother’s death in the public sphere. He describes the accident itself—the gun jamming, Layton checking the muzzle, T. S. steadying the base, and the gun going off: ‘‘And ever since that moment of looking and feeling my breath and then his breath gone, I’ve been feeling like something’s going to happen to me’’ (2009, p. 314). T. S. has been carrying the trauma of his brother’s death and possible retribution from the universe for months. This horror—silently brewing inside him without expression—seeps out inadvertently through his maps (which is why Layton’s story comes out in bits and pieces). Yet, ultimately, T. S. can express the tragedy as a family event, something that has happened and cannot be denied. Death, as much as life, must be acknowledged, and T. S., with the aid of his maps, becomes the one member of his family to accomplish that recognition, thereby challenging their oppressive silence. If the mother’s role is to start the development of this resistance, his father—stoic and aloof as he is—ultimately helps to complete it. Once in D.C., T. S. begins to recognise and yearn for his home, craving to return to his mother’s arms in Montana, thus seemingly undermining the emotional independence that his mapping has fostered throughout his journey, and reinforcing the idea that there is, truly, no place like home. In fact, T. S. begins to imagine what Gaston Bachelard (1969, p. 6) refers to as the motionless childhood, where ‘‘we live fixations, fixations of happiness. We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection.’’ The proof that T. S. has begun to heal emotionally is that he can now sense the value and necessity of his childhood home. Directly before his father arrives in D.C. to find and retrieve his son, T. S. has healed enough to firmly proclaim that he wants to be out of this world: he wants to return home. Even while he proceeds to leave with his father, T. S. speaks these words again: ‘‘Are you sure about this?’’ Boris asked calmly. ‘‘Yes,’’ I said. ‘‘I want to go home.’’ Boris nodded. ‘‘Then follow me,’’ he said. (2009, p. 372) These scenes reinforce the presumed idea that T. S. will return home at the end and fulfil the Odyssean pattern of the journey back to one’s place of origin. However, his father’s monologue alters this narrative trajectory entirely, when Boris explains why he did not stop T. S. from leaving, and why he has shown up now. He tells T. S. that his mother ‘‘cares a hell’a lot, ya know that? […] that woman’s devoted to you somethin’ powerful. ‘Cept now I’m seeing this thing’s a load horseshit, your mother’s been cheatin’ me and they ain’t done right by you’’ (2009, p. 374, 3
The next logical step in this article’s conversation is to explicitly focus on the resistance narrative as key to postcolonialism. Perry Nodelman (1992) and Roderick McGillis’s (2000) work on postcolonialism in children’s literature—and their discussion of the child as ‘‘Other’’—as well as Clare Bradford’s (2007) studies on Australian narratives that resist Westernised assumptions offer some jumping points.
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emphasis added). T. S.’s worldview must alter at that single point, when he has verbal proof that things are not fine between his mother and father. Until this point, it had only been his conjecture, from the hints laid out before him at home and in the journal. Now, it becomes real, which dismantles the reality he thought he would return to. ‘‘Home’’ is not thought of again; T. S. only wishes he could ‘‘walk side by side with my father forever’’ (2009, p. 374). He does not necessarily need home to do that, nor does he need to return anyway. T. S. can return to the ‘‘distracted, beetle-obsessed mother […] who had raised [him] into the person [he] was now’’ (2009, p. 356) because she, or at least his idea of her, remains fixed in his mind in Divide, Montana, thus confirming Bachelard’s suggestion that ‘‘memories are motionless’’ (1969, p. 9). Through his experiences, therefore, he has learned to find home through reverie. These multiple shifts of perspective that T. S. experiences—from traditional logical realism to a superimposed imaginary slant and on to somewhere ‘‘off the map’’ (2009, p. 374)—demonstrate what Greer Watson (2003) refers to as crossing over into different worlds, a common model in fantasy literature in particular. The first shift denotes a move from a primary (real) to a secondary world, one that exists within the confines of T. S.’s journal itself and within the charts, illustrations, and entries that T. S. creates; it also coincides with an idea of fantasy space as an escape while children contend with the process of growing into ‘‘traditional’’ adulthood.4 The second move he makes, due to his father’s unintended stimulation, depicts the space T. S. needs to allow his resisting identity to fully dictate its own course. This second shift occurs away from the fantastical world (that amalgam of reality and the stories told by maps) to an unknown, tertiary world, wherein T. S. finally goes ‘‘off the map’’ with his father. What does his third world entail? The tertiary world he moves towards, through the door and into the light at the end of the novel, is entirely unknown to us, and possibly to him as well. Aside from the empowerment of the daydream to nourish his emotional needs, what can we say about the places T. S. has been and where he intends to go? Larsen’s entire conception of T. S.’s mapped world complicates notions of children’s literature that suggest childhood landscapes are primitive and undeveloped, and that the child inevitably will return to their reality (carried by awareness or adulthood). Most often, that fantasy world will be shut off from the child by a closure that can ‘‘feed the fantasy that the friendly space continues to exist’’ for the reader (Honeyman, 2001, p. 125). But we do not know what to make of T. S.’s new fantasy or perception, since he has left the map entirely. In truth, T. S. escapes his reality precisely because of its dysfunctionality and placelessness. He longs for a return to simplicity and ruralness, to a world that actually no longer exists for him. As Doreen Massey (2005, p. 124) points out, ‘‘the truth is that you can never simply ‘go back,’ to home or to anywhere else. When you get ‘there’ the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed.’’ T. S.’s maps are a way of grappling with the truths of his family and of childhood, and the pain of 4
Bruno Bettelheim (1976) argues for the therapeutic power of fairy tales, specifically to help children grow into the form of adulthood that adults expect of them. Others, including John H. Timmerman (1983), also argue for similar understandings of literary fantasy.
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growing up; once he stumbles upon these truths, he has nowhere left to return to, and the only place left to explore is his own self. As such, his world does not conform to the standard notions of children’s space, and his final escape is emblematic of a deeper resistance to all these structures (or strictures). Ultimately, his parents work in conjunction with his maps to motivate T. S.; this is a consolation for the hollowness that trauma has wrought within him (hence his constant need to map). When, after Layton’s death, T. S. describes drawing fifth panels for comic strips as a means of having the last word in this imaginary world, he remarks that the boundedness of the comic frame ‘‘was what always left me feeling a little hollow’’ (2009, p. 319). This boundedness of his real life—the standard familial structures stemming from the imbalance of power between adult and child—is what he learns to resist, with the remarkable conclusion that adulthood can remain for adults; for childhood has its own rights and freedoms, which T. S. learns to accept and uphold with pride. Before his journey, T. S. frequently broods on the confusions and struggles arising from not having the supposed awareness, repertoire, and performative prowess of adults: ‘‘Maybe you just needed to be an adult in order to perform this high-wire act of believing and not-believing at the same time’’ (2009, p. 37). It is not until he meets the train jumper, Two Clouds, that T. S. begins to realise that feeling ‘‘like a kid’’ is valuable and necessary to retain an empowered selfhood in the face of society that will ‘‘do its best to shit on you’’ (2009, p. 132). His journey thus sharpens his acuity such that, finally, T. S. categorises the identifying traits of an adult. The penultimate entry on the list— being ‘‘suspicious of children and their motives’’ (2009, p. 295)—flashes like a beacon signalling that children can certainly hold sway over adults. It is in fear of this sway that adults react as humans are inclined to do: by asserting control over that which they do not understand. T. S. unwittingly uncovers the tension between child and adult, and this helps him finally assert his own judgment upon the latter. We see this when, arguing against an adult’s use of the fabricated word ‘‘mapboy,’’ T. S. thinks, ‘‘I made up words all the time—except: I was a child’’ (2009, p. 353). This realisation comes in a fantastical moment when T. S. attends the Megatherium Club meeting, indicating that, within his fantasy space, T. S. finds the freedom to resist the adult order. Once again, his identity formation relies on the space that fantasy provides; attained through mapping and within this realm, T. S. finds a voice to reclaim power for childhood. Something as innocuous as making up a word represents the broader hypocrisies that the dominating adults engage in (silly when a child does it, legitimate when an adult does) and to which T.S. no longer wants to be subjected; this compels him to become a dissenter against all the constructs that have, until this point, influenced his development, including those particularly powerful constructions, his parents. Larsen’s novel opens with an epigraph quoting Herman Melville: ‘‘It is not down in any map; true places never are’’ (2009, p. vi). The child’s true landscape escapes being drawn because of its trueness—T. S. establishes the legitimacy of his agency and plunges into a new terrain free of adult construction. On the way to reaching this final portal, T. S. manages to dismantle a series of notions continually in debate in scholarly, if not public, society, beginning with the limited, primitive landscape of children’s worlds. T. S.’s maps prove that he does not inhabit his own primitive world, but
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actually tries to make sense of the real one. Speaking to an audience at the Smithsonian in D.C., T. S. says that he makes maps of ‘‘all the people that I meet, all the places I see, everything that I have ever witnessed or read about’’ because ‘‘I don’t want to die without having taken a crack at figuring out how the whole thing fits together’’ (2009, p. 312–3). He tries to deal with the world, but the real world is too violent for the child and pushes him into fantasy. Whether talking to Winnebagos, imagining dead secret societies, or simply dreaming his parents still love each other, T. S.’s rational world gives way, reconfigured by his maps. His fantasy, challenging and precarious though it is, is not built upon the whim of adult nostalgia. Furthermore, he learns to identify the childhood he knew as just a construction, and not something he can return to; there is no home for him, only an imagined place to quell his pains, but T. S. reconciles himself to the loss of the real place. He does not make his journey because he craves the award and the attention; he leaves because his household offers no assistance in curing the pain and confusion of his brother’s death. Larsen deliberately removes the mother in the end, and even hints at the ebbing of the figure of his father. The last sentences embody his father’s encouragement for him to enter the world on his own: ‘‘Then my hands were on the door. I hesitated. My father clucked his tongue and gave me a nod. I pushed open the door and walked into the light’’ (2009, p. 374). T. S. makes that final push into the third, unknown world on his own: he learns how to escape entirely. If contemporary children can break away from failing social or familial constructions and visualise their own spaces, they can eventually leave behind their own maps because, like T. S., they have achieved what resistance was intended for: for T. S., this is fulfilling agency in the face of neglect. Tom McCarthy (2014) argues that maps are never neutral, but that they can ‘‘play a role in the armoury of the oppressed. For every ‘official’ map, there are two, five, twenty possible counter-maps. […] In instances like these, map-making, far from fixing a reality, becomes a wild proliferation of alternative ones.’’ What mapping means for the child, then, is the possibility of rewriting social history, particularly when children are subjected indefinitely to cultural and technological means of false autonomy. Thus, when T. S. asks, ‘‘[d]o you ever get the feeling like you already know the entire contents of the universe somewhere inside your head, as if you were born with a complete map of this world grafted onto the folds of your cerebellum and you are just spending your entire life figuring out how to access this map?’’ (2009, p. 315), we feel contented to know that, while he may be off the map, the map is still in him. His subsequent perceptions of the world will be rendered through his eyes only, and we discover that a life’s narrative can dwell in the (cartographic) margins, or completely outside altogether.
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