Girl, Implicated: The Child in the Labyrinth in the Fantastic
2008; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez
Resumo1 Even the odd books--all but the very oddest, the unreal and irrational--converse with other books. They talk with older stories, sing to them, call and response; they argue and allude. What I read as a child has shaped my symbolic language, that pack of archetypes with which I play; later reading has re-echoed and refracted those iconic images, the mythemes of my mother tongue. Bewildered men, brusque women, blundering girls; witches and unearthly children. Scarecrows. All of my iconic figures have their roots in early reading: most of all the goddesses. I love the Snow Queen's mirror shattering, the shards in heart and eye that turn the soul and body into ice; I love the puzzles that she sets. I love Irene's goddess-great-grandmother in her tower, whose lamp is both a withered apple and the stainless moon. And to Hades with Disney--my Mary Poppins is an avatar of Artemis, the Great Bear Mother--Is this a nursery or a bear-pit? (1)--and in P L. Travers's original texts she dances with the sun, moon, and stars. 2 One pattern that draws me is the solitary girl child in a labyrinth: Irene; Eilonwy; Arha. Most often she is parentless--bereaved or sundered from her kindred. Often, she plays Ariadne to a clueless or imprisoned boy or man. She herself is at home in the labyrinth: imprisonment is her nativity. And somewhere in the maze there lurks no rageful and engorging minotaur but a potent female figure, her genius or her nemesis: a deity, enchantress, priestess. In George MacDonald's Princess and the Goblin, Irene's great-grandmother sits spinning her thread of spider silk which always leads back to her. (Webs are a leitmotif in these stories.) Her wheel is in a tower perched atop a maze of worm-eaten corridors and stairs, the final volute in a wider labyrinth of stone, the lair of goblins. She is consolation; she is awe. She gives her charge a ring to which her thread is tied, a ring which both Irene and her nurse remember that the child has always owned. To journey, she must leave it behind. Another child princess, Eilonwy, in Lloyd Alexander's Castle of Llyr, is pupil to the sorceress Achren. Light is her inheritance, a golden bauble which she tosses like a toy: her own daystar. The darkest of these tales is Ursula K. Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan. Arha--who was once Tenar--has nothing. As the Eaten One, the avatar reborn of a dark goddess, she has no self. Her priestesses--her servants that control her, Thar and Kossil--are her jailers. Ritual consumes her days. The dark alone is her dominion: the labyrinth becomes her only self, her privacy, possession, and the narrowest of liberties. Her inscape. It is there she practices a human life, the exercise of memory and curiosity. There she plays god-games with power. The wizard Ged's presence is a violation and a violent rebirth. In Sally Potter's 1992 film of Woolf's Orlando, Tilda Swinton rushes in a fury into a hedge maze on the grounds of her debatable estate, itself in a labyrinth of legal issues. Whisking round a corner, she emerges in another century, in another cage of skirt. The scene is an epitome of women's journeys, a constricted flight. Another element is time. The maze can be a rite of passage; or a holding pattern, a chrysalid, a sleep. Her presiding goddess is Quentin Crisp, who in the cross-dressed guise of Gloriana bids her (as a him), Do not grow old. (2) 3 If the girl in the labyrinth charts her own way out of it, driven by her curiosity and courage, what then of the boy, the man? Archetypally, for me, he's lost. He wanders in a labyrinth in which there are no walls, only endlessly random falling leaves or fireflies or pages of an ever-uncompleted book. It can't be solved. Like Marvell's Mower, in amid the glow-worms, he's astray after foolish fires. (3) Waking wood, in the double sense with which I played in Moonwise: the presiding spirit of his place; but also mad, bewildered. …
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