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  • Figuring Transition:Play, Performance, and Mimicry in Children's Books by Thomas King, Mordecai Richler, and Margaret Atwood
  • Helene Staveley (bio)

In Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, a man who is disillusioned by his Renaissance Spanish homeland equips himself with makeshift armour, weapons, a steed, and a squire, then moves through his world as a knight errant, reading windmills as evil giants, tavern wenches as romantic maidens in need of rescue, and wash basins as magical helmets. Don Quixote chooses to disbelieve in his Renaissance actuality so that his preferred non-actual but fabulous medieval world can flow in instead. The transition is neither a quick nor a simple escape: it requires him to readjust constantly his persona, props, and plans according to the specific reception he meets. Nor is it an isolating endeavour that separates him from reality. It throws him into greater intimacy with the world and people around him as he seeks adventure, rescues victims, and rights wrongs, all while maintaining character.

Don Quixote's mimicry of his chivalric ideal is an excellent platform for Cervantes's satire, just as the mimicry of the transitional characters in their books for children are for the satire of Thomas King, Mordecai Richler, and Margaret Atwood. These ambivalent characters cross multiple boundaries, spawning alternate possible worlds in their wake. In A Coyote Solstice Tale, King's human Child causes disruption by wearing an animal costume and invading a special celebration; in Richler's Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, The Hooded Fang appropriates a bestial persona to protect his inner child; and in Wandering Wenda and the Widow Wallop's Wunderground Washery, Atwood's villain shifts between Wizard and Widow personas to facilitate an enigmatic project of eliminating the oppressive regime of the family. All three of these characters—all of them secondary characters in their respective narratives—interrogate authenticity, deception, invasion, and legitimacy by playing between them.

In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits [End Page 84] of "Sex," Judith Butler advocates understanding "performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she or he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (2). Hegemony perpetuates itself by calling individuals to reiterate its precepts, and subjected individuals must excise whatever defines them but does not conform to hegemonic norms. Although Butler is primarily interested in exploring the spectrum of gender, her theories are also useful in exploring the effects of suppressing other complex aspects of identity, such as animalistic elements in the attainment of human subjectivity or childness in the attainment of adult subjectivity. Child, The Hooded Fang, and the Wizard/ Widow are emblematic of the distortion and even the disfigurement effected by the interpellative process. Moreover, while they may be wounded by their worlds, their lusts for reinvention off-kilter and their alternate identities off-key, all three remain able to invest energy and resources in the development and maintenance of alternate personas. King's, Richler's, and Atwood's transitional figures register as symptoms of a world gone awry even while they evidence the quixotic power of creativity and the productive potential for disruption that art offers.

The transitional figures in these three books work as models of the half-playful and half-perverse clinging to a way of life that pertains to a particular fictional world they endorse. Don Quixote upsets and changes his Renaissance world by moving through it as a medieval knight of chivalric romance; so too Child, The Hooded Fang, and the Wizard/Widow strain reality by behaving as if fictional conditions apply within their actual worlds. For French social philosopher Roger Caillois, "making believe" (19) (or what I would call "behaving as if") is a definitive element of the category of play called mimicry and undergirds play activity in general. In his influential book on the philosophy of play entitled Man, Play and Games, he writes, "All play presupposes the temporary acceptance, if not of an illusion . . . , then at least of a closed, conventional, and, in certain respects, imaginary universe. Play can consist not only of deploying actions or submitting to one's fate in...

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