Abstract
This chapter explores how teen readers approach sacred or prophetic texts within both realistic and fantasy novels. It can be dangerous to read, these novels suggest, and perhaps especially dangerous to take on the task of interpretation—a task with little economic benefit and some risk. Such reading, however, empowers the young protagonists of these novels and may provide a model for deep reading that, crucially, involves developing a community of readers. These books challenge the common perception of reading as a solitary act, providing a new method for reading both against and within community.
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Notes
- 1.
I use “magic” here to suggest that these are texts that do things for which we have no explanation in consensus reality, whether it is predicting the future, giving guidance for the present, or explaining the past. Sacred texts, divinely inspired, similarly exceed the bounds of consensus reality. English fantasy literature for children dating from at least George MacDonald has used magic as a metaphor for divine intervention. We may think, for example, of the Princess Irene’s grandmother in The Princess and the Goblin or Aslan’s “Deep Magic” in the Chronicles of Narnia. See, for example, Pat Pinsent, “Revisioning Religion” (2006).
- 2.
It’s beyond the scope of this project to explore the history of fundamentalism in the West. Karen Armstrong, however, argues convincingly that the tendency to read sacred texts as expressions of historical truth is a product of, rather than a reaction to, the rise of empiricism (see, e.g., Armstrong 2000, xiii–xv).
- 3.
For a discussion of “extensive” reading, see Stephen Fischer: “As of the late seventeenth century Western European readers began prioritizing extensive over intensive reading. Hitherto, with little access to printed information, readers had read their few available publications (the Bible, a Book of Hours, pedlar’s booklets and pamphlets) slowly, repeating each word over and over gain in purposeful contemplation. That is, they read intensively. But by the late 1600s, when individual readers could purchase several books, their purpose shifted to the widest possible coverage of a given topic, or even to variety itself. They began reading extensively ” (Fischer 2003, 255).
- 4.
The picture book, And Tango Makes Three (2005), is about two male penguins who jointly hatch an egg and raise the chick in Central Park Zoo. It was first or second on the ALA’s Banned and Challenged Books list from 2006 to 2010 (http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10).
- 5.
- 6.
As we saw in Chapter 3, this seems to be a popular takeaway from Jane Eyre .
- 7.
It’s worth noting here that the novel, which has many parallels to Jane Eyre , ends with Joan’s placement in a boarding school where she anticipates a happy ending—a sly revision of the Lowood episode of the original.
- 8.
We learn fragmentarily that Mena’s friends believed that their classmate Denny was gay, and therefore harassed him, acting on Pastor Wells’s preaching on the sin of homosexuality. After Denny attempts suicide, Mena writes him a letter explaining who is responsible and why. This letter becomes the basis for a lawsuit against members of the church, and it is the lawsuit—and the fact that the insurance Mena’s father sold to church members will not cover bullying—that occasions both Mena’s and, later, her family’s shunning.
- 9.
Melody Briggs and Richard Briggs suggest that fantasy literature is uniquely suited to “fill the gap” between scientific and religious modes of interpreting the world, and Mena seems to serve as an example of their claim (Briggs and Briggs 2006, 31).
- 10.
Obviously, this is a contested issue; Ms. Shepherd gets the last word on it in the novel.
- 11.
The reader knows before the characters do that the two plotlines are connected through Cabot Searcy’s failed marriage: his wife Alma is from Cullen’s home town of Lily, Arkansas.
- 12.
Day’s concept applies specifically to novels aimed at girl readers, with female first-person narrators. She helpfully reminds us, however, of Maria Nikolajeva’s rejection of the “identification fallacy” that assumes an affinity between reader and narrator. Cullen’s narration quite openly rejects that fallacy.
- 13.
While Tom Henderson in King Dork ends up seeing a version of himself in Holden Caulfield, we see no evidence that Gabriel does so. The book is a touchstone, but not a prophecy.
- 14.
See Trites for the frequent association of sex with death in, especially, early YA literature. Judy Blume is said to have written Forever to counteract the connection (see Trites 2000, 91).
- 15.
Lyra Belacqua, unlike the other protagonists, is not much of a reader, at least initially—and certainly not of books. Her reading of the alethiometer, however, similarly demonstrates the necessity of interpretation when seeking the truth.
- 16.
Pratchett’s term seems to me to combine the concepts of genre and fate to convey the ways that characters are bound to certain futures, especially in fantasy literature.
- 17.
There’s also a physical danger to Lazlo’s reading: his nose is broken by a “falling volume of fairy-tales his first day on the job” (Taylor 2017, 17).
- 18.
Thyon more closely resembles Kyle, as he reads for a singular purpose; like Kyle as well, he does eventually learn empathy—though in Thyon’s case this comes less from his reading than from his experiences with others, including the reader Lazlo Strange.
- 19.
Strange the Dreamer is the first volume of a two-volume novel. It ends with Lazlo and Sarai’s destinies unfulfilled.
- 20.
The townspeople who uncritically take in the tales and burn down Mrs. Snapperly’s cottage offer the worst-case scenario counter-example to the heroines of the novels I discussed in Chapter 3 who model their lives on fairy-tales. Since Tiffany decides from the beginning that she is shut out from that option, she always reads more critically.
- 21.
- 22.
See the discussion in Chapter 4 of Rudine Sims Bishop’s “Windows, Mirrors, and Sliding-Glass Doors.”
- 23.
To avoid confusion, the Book is capitalized here when referring to the character of the prophetic Book.
- 24.
As Resnick and Resnick suggest, the limitation of interpretation is one of the qualities of a sacred text.
- 25.
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, noting Deeba’s multiliteracy , writes, “Interestingly, young as Deeba is, she may be seen as both a digital native and a critical reader of literature who is capable of interpreting information and using it constructively to reshape the world” (Deszcz-Tryhubczak 2013, 149).
- 26.
Digby is the sidekick to Dan Dare, a British comic hero popular in the 1950s and again in the 1970s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Dare). Ron is of course Ron Weasley of the Harry Potter series, and Robin is Batman’s sidekick. Notably, all of them—like the heroes whom they accompany—are male. Miéville’s quest narrative undoes most of the tropes of a quest, except the quest itself.
- 27.
See Robert Fuller for a more thorough and nuanced description of this issue. Fuller differentiates between a European gap between “the relatively small number of religious persons [and] the nonreligious majority” and, in the US, a “gap between the churched and unchurched” which is not analogous to the European split: “In the United States … only a small percentage of the population can be considered wholly without spiritual interests” (Fuller 2001, 171). Nonetheless, as a recent Pew Foundation survey confirms, many “religious” people are strikingly ignorant of their traditions (Pew Forum 2010).
- 28.
The threat in I Shall Wear Midnight also resembles a fundamentalist Christian objection to witchcraft, unlike any of the other dangers in the series.
- 29.
This is one of the many places where The Golden Compass revises a familiar story: Asriel’s Genesis, while similar in many ways to the book of Genesis in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, includes the dæmons, a central part of Pullman’s mythology. Lyra, taught by Oxford’s dons, has rejected biblical narrative as a “kind of fairy-tale” (GC 372). In an earlier essay, I have explored the way this reading of the story turns it into a metaphor (see Gruner 2011, 292).
- 30.
In an earlier essay, I have further explored the relationship between Pratchett and Pullman’s metaphorical approach to sacred stories and feminist theology (See Gruner 2011).
- 31.
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Gruner, E.R. (2019). Magic, Prophetic, and Sacred Books: Making Communities of Readers. In: Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53924-3_5
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