Roads Half-Taken: Travel, Fantasy, and Growing Up

Roads Half-Taken: Travel, Fantasy, and Growing Up by U. C. Knoep f lmache r "The eighth square at last!" shouts Alice in eager anticipation. Her excitement seems justified. Carroll's dream-child has, after all, just freed herself from the clasp of a creature who is older yet also more childish than she is. It seems significant that the White Knight had tried to detain her by reciting a song about his own encounter with a figure bordering on senility-the aged, aged man. Maturity, coveted by Alice, dissolves into a second childhood. No wonder that the girl is anxious to leap over the "last brook." As she bounds across, she feels "something very heavy, that fitted all around her head." It is a golden crown. The "tone of dismay" with which she first greets this unfamiliar object soon gives way to exultation: "Well, this ¿s_ grand!' said Alice. 'I never expected I should be a Queen so soon.'" But Alice's great expectations are about to be subverted. The child who had so dutifully traversed the chess-board and had so attentively listened to the many voices of her ventriloquist creator will be sorely disappointed by the heavy object pressing on her head. The crown will not endow her with the authority she seeks. The crowning of her journey will itself prove to be a dubious closure. For three days we have participated in discussions of journeys in children's literature or in adult books that involve chil d- 1 ra velers . And now that we are approaching the very end of our own collective journey and find ourselves poised, as it were, on the edge of the eighth square, you may well be entitled to expect, like Alice, some crowning synthesis, some magical reward of total mastery. If so, you, too, are bound to be sorely disappointed. For all I can offer at this juncture are, not improperly perhaps, some speculations about endings in the kinds of travel books that we have been discussing. These closures strike me as being inevitably problematic. If the journey so often acts as a metaphor for the childtraveler 's relation to the socialized, adult reality from which she or he has been briefly freed, that journey's climax necessarily reactivates questions about goals and directions, about the very teleology of growth. There is something arresting about the voyages of children or the childlike . Such figures act as agents for both young and old readers because they dramatize the growth process which the adult has passed through and which the child still anticipates. Like these agents, both types of readers are tugged in opposite directions. The adult yearns for the freedom of childhood but knows that freedom to be precarious. The child yearns for the power it attributes to experience yet is fearful of responsibilities it is not yet ready to discharge. Journeys, therefore, provide a gratifying delay. Like our agents, we allow ourselves to be lulled by the variety and novelty of the figures and places we meet. Young and old readers can postpone resolving polarities that come into sharper relief only at the journey's end. The passage from innocence to experience does not yet have to be negotiated or renegotiated . The child's hopefulness and the adult's self-conscious awareness of time and death can somehow still co-exist, however uneasily. Yet we are jolted by each journey's end. Priorities must now be acknowledged. Whether our agents reach a new destination or are transported back to an initial point of origin, we are now made to confront the implied author's stance towards 48 these polarities: the extremes of youth and age, of freedom and compromise, of dream and actuality. Endings thus inevitably compel us to reassess the journey we undertook with our child or child-like agents. Can we continue to avoid the constraints of an adult order of experience--whe ther it be the disspiriting "gray prairie" of Aunt Em's and Uncle Henry's Kansas Farm or the oppressive shore life at the banks of Twain's Mississippi? If the ch il d- voy ager abdicates its powers, as Alice or Dorothy is forced...