Telling Children's Stories: Narrative Theory and Children's Literature

13. “Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know”: Narrative Theory and Diana Wynne Jones’s Hexwood

251 13 { “Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know” Narrative Theory and Diana Wynne Jones’s Hexwood martha hixon Young adults, and the books written for and about them, are keenly interested in growing up or in achieving autonomy through the development of an individual sense of self and how that self connects to the world in which the young adult is expected to function. In other words young adults are very much engaged in the writing of their own adult stories, and the literature produced for this audience provides vicarious experiences of doing so. In fantasy fiction for adolescents, the achievement of such agency typically occurs in connection with the fantasy element: the emergence of magical powers for the child protagonist , for example, or via magical events that the protagonist must navigate and learn to cope with. As fantasy critic Farah Mendlesohn observes, Diana Wynne Jones’s works in particular demonstrate to her adolescent readers that self-realization is an ongoing process rather than a closed set of events (22). Jones’s novel Hexwood does this through mimicking or enacting the process that a novelist himself or herself engages in while creating a fictional story, thus melding the purpose and the process of literature for children and young adults while providing, as 252 } “Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know” Jones says, “a blueprint for dealing with life” (“Profession of Science Fiction” 14). In his essay “Nameless Things and Things Nameless,” postmodern fantasy critic Lance Olsen suggests that contemporary fantasy “is a mode which interrogates all we take for granted about language and experience, giving these no more than shifting and provisional status” (3). Along these same lines, Brian Attebery argues in Strategies of Fantasy that “unlike realist texts, fantasies freely acknowledge their own disjunctions [. . .] but the result is not disorder and disillusionment. Rather than leaving us in a solipsistic void, fantasy invites us to recreate what it has denied” (67). We do so, he argues, by making the fantasy world “real”— as readers we instinctively impose rational order and believable details on the diegetic level of a text, in collusion with the storyteller , in order to produce a narrative that can sustain the willing suspension of disbelief so necessary to successful fantasy. While such an exercise is intuitive when reading a work of mimetic realism, a work of fantasy forces the reader to actively disregard obvious impossibilities in the story at the basic level of plot, character , and setting. In other words, by “forcing a recognition of the arbitrariness of [. . .] narrative conventions” (Attebery 67), fantasy, even more so than realist texts, invites the reader to participate in the creation of the story. As a fantasy writer and critic, Diana Wynne Jones is aware of this innate function of the fantasy genre, and she explores its ramifications in nearly all her novels, often provoking her readers to consider issues such as character, setting, and cause and effect in a new way. Specifically, in her 1993 novel Hexwood the paradigms regarding story structure are at the forefront of critical examination. As Farah Mendlesohn observes, Hexwood “is about writing as editing (or editing as a creative process)” (189). More than this, though, as I hope to illustrate, Hexwood is a metafictional commentary on the process of story making: through its nonlinear plot and the concomitant shifting of identities of the characters involved in that plot, the novel highlights the artificial conventions of narrative and the assumptions that readers bring to a text regarding story structure, Martha Hixon { 253 the creation of character, identity, and self-determination. That such complexities are held within a book marketed for a young adult audience implies that Jones has respect for the acumen of her readers and that such open-endedness in narrative structure is compatible with the open-endedness of adolescence itself. An Oxford graduate in English, Jones is deeply aware of how to construct a narrative, as comments she has made in various venues make clear. One such is her essay “The Shape of the Narrative in The Lord of the Rings,” included in a 1983 collection of critical essays on J. R. R. Tolkien by various scholars. In this essay she theorizes that “the bare plot is to any writer no more than the main theme of a sort of symphony which requires other themes added to it and the whole orchestrated into a narrative. To shape a narrative...