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  • The Spiritual Geography of Domestic and Narrative Spaces in Aidan Chambers’ Dance Sequence
  • Mary Harris Russell (bio)

With the publication of This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn (UK 2005; US 2006), Aidan Chambers completed a six-book set he names the Dance Sequence. Breaktime appeared in 1978; Dance on My Grave in 1982; Now I Know in 1987; The Toll Bridge in 1992; and Postcards from No Man's Land in 1999 (initial UK publication dates). The latest novel continues Chambers' experimentation with narrative form and his assumption of readers who wish to be challenged rather than be primarily entertained.1 This Is All [TIA] is subdivided into six separately numbered and named "pillow books," and the chronologies of the narration and of the events recorded are complicatedly interwoven. In addition to its formal experimentation, TIA also offers a continuation of what Victor Watson sums up as a unifying factor in the first five novels, "a powerful sense of adolescent physicality—an inquisitive fascination with bodies" and with the "difficulty of accurately communicating truth" (Meek and Watson 38).

The final novel appears, however, to stand out from its predecessors in Chambers' casting of his central figure as a female. The central figure of TIA is not a seventeen-year-old male, as in the five previous novels, but an almost twenty-year-old female, Cordelia Kenn, whose spiritual, erotic, and artistic development are at the heart of this eight-hundred page portrait. While Chambers himself has said that it was "quite clear" that the last novel would have to be about a young woman, readers of the previous novels would be startled by discussions of breasts, menstruation, and a young woman's view of men's genitals. Cordelia Kenn is an active practitioner of the female gaze. Before concluding this essay, I will address some reviewers' reactions to Chambers' choice of a female narrator, [End Page 61] but what this essay hopes to demonstrate first is that Cordelia's presence in this novel is not a late and quirky add-on to the sequence, but a culmination of nearly twenty years of exploration of both male and female human beings on a journey out of adolescence.2 By looking back and forth between the earlier volumes and the final one and considering where and by what means significant changes in development and maturity occur in these novels, these patterns of development are shown in relation to both domestic space and narrative space. I have chosen the term spiritual geography as a way of talking about these journeys.

The term spiritual geography is not, as I use it, about house healing or energized diamonds, though all those might appear in a quick Googling of it. What I intend by the term becomes clearer if I describe how I came to see it as useful. At the beginning of my work on TIA and on the sequence, I was fascinated with Cordelia's choice of a deconsecrated chapel for her first sexual encounter. Discussions of sacred space, meditative labyrinths, and pilgrimage sites spring from the works of such critics as Mircea Eliade or Philip Sheldrake and are often evoked at the biannual meetings of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture, where a multi-disciplinary matrix blends both literary and theological theories. Increasingly, I became attentive to the spaces where significant maturing events were happening in all the novels of the sequence and in the positioning of females in those spaces. The difficulties with both physicality and communicating truth, mentioned above by Watson, were often addressed in very particular patterns and spaces. A locational analysis, a mapping if you will, might send readers in a fruitful direction. Particularly in a sequence of novels appearing over almost twenty years and extending over nearly two thousand pages, readers and critics may see more through the lines of a map than in the larger waves of memory alone.

Adolescence has a geography of its own. Adolescents' rooms may be, apart from their I-pods or outfits, the only spaces over which they have any control and in which they can behave as an adult or apart from the eyes of their...

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