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The Lion and the Unicorn 29.1 (2004) 87-101



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World Enough and Time:

The Handmade Literacies of Young Adolescent Writers

I begin autobiographically, with a story and an artifact of handmade literacy. Many years ago, I performed in my senior class play at Rutherford High School, in New Jersey. The play was Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!, his idealized portrait of family life. The tragedian O'Neill called it wishful thinking about the childhood he would have liked to have had. He subtitled it "A nostalgic comedy of the Ancient Days when Youth was Young, and Right was Right, and life was a wicked opportunity."

The cast and crew were exuberant, enjoying the camaraderie that develops in high-school theatre. I played Aunt Lily, a prim spinster who pines for Sid, the charming but alcoholic uncle. (It was O'Neill, after all!) As the performance nights neared, the nostalgic mood of the play itself, and our impending graduation, infected me, and I decided to give presents to all the cast and crew. I turned to what I did best, then and now—I wrote a parody.

My magnum opus, entitled "Nat and Essie and Sid and Lilly: Or, As the Pleasant Beach House Turns," by "Eujill O'Kedersha," was a retelling of the play by way of our production—every cast joke, innuendo, backstage romance, and tic and nagging of our director and technical director were included. I ran off copies for everyone on the ditto machine in the teachers' room. At the after-play party, I presented my gift. Cast and crew fell upon it, and their raucous group reading of the parody was my reward, their gift back to me. I have written many parodies since "Nat and Essie and Sid and Lilly," certainly because of it, but none that so completely captures and recreates for me a particular moment of writing and performance, a time and place and space. This parody, presented and performed for an emotional occasion, recalls a formative moment in my own literate life, a moment of handmade literacy that represents my adolescent identity and self. [End Page 87]

"Nat and Essie and Sid and Lilly" recalls the particular world of 1970 as it was lived by a girl in a small town in the eastern US, just the sort of small town in which Ah, Wilderness! is set. It also recalls the original play it parodied, the production of that play, and, naturally, the teenaged author herself. When I read it now, the parody triggers bursts of long-dormant memories, calling to life that world (in the large and small senses) and that girl. Like a De Beers diamond, the parody is "a gift that keeps on giving."

Chronotopes and "Nat and Essie . . ."

Bakhtin's concept of chronotopes in literature resonates for me both in the experience and in the recollection of my parody. It also helps to shape my understanding of the creations of young writers with whom I have worked. Bakhtin defines chronotope as follows:

(literally, "time space") . . . the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. . . . Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.
(84)

Contexts are shaped by the space and time that operate within them and surround them. A literary work has a particular chronotope, a time and space characteristic of the work and inseparable from it. Likewise, the author writing that work creates it within a particular context in time and space. Michael Holquist notes that the chronotope "provides a means to explore the complex, indirect, and always mediated relation between art and life" (111). He cautions that consideration of chronotopes requires a bifocal lens, and that:

one must be careful to discriminate between its use as a lens for close-up work and its ability to serve as an optic for seeing at a distance. . . . chronotope may also be used as a means for...

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