Several authors have commented on what they see as the importance of reworking mythic stories rather than just retelling them, and it is interesting to consider why they hold this view. It shows a level of consciousness to their art, as they are deliberately remoulding one story into another, intentionally recasting an old story for a new generation for some purpose or another. Prior to moving into reworking traditional tales in his Arthur trilogy, Kevin Crossley-Holland had concentrated on straight retelling in many works for both adults and children. He describes his departure from straight retelling into reworking with his Arthur trilogy as ‘the bigger discovery for me’ as he found he ‘could actually relate legends to elements in Arthur’s life’ (Kevin Crossley-Holland, Interview with Write Away! [web page], 2002):
I never visualised it like this. First, I wrote an Arthurian novel
for adults based on the life of Sir Thomas Malory but was unable to complete
it. Then one day I was about to go and have supper with a
publisher friend, Judith Elliott, and explain why I still hadn’t started doing
the retellings of the Arthurian legend for her. And the reason was
that I had realised that the last thing I wanted to do was another set of
retellings. I was sitting at my desk looking dismally at a large
hunk of obsidian and I caught sight of my reflection, and I thought that’s it –
it’s the seeing stone – it’s between worlds – it’s the crossing
place! And at once I knew I had solved the problem in a simple way.
Kevin Crossley-Holland, Interview with Write Away!, 2002
The Arthur trilogy is not a complete reworking however. Rather it combines a retelling of the main events of Arthurian legend with a reflection and reworking of them in the story of the Arthur of the title, a young boy growing up in a medieval manor on the Welsh-English border at the end of the 12th century. However, the additional material brings the retelling into sharp focus for the reader, as the events of Arthurian myth are related to Arthur’s everyday life, and by extension, brought into the life of the reader. Arthur may be living several centuries before the readers, but he is a very real hero, easily identifiable with, and as he learns about his life through watching his namesake’s adventures in the seeing stone, so too can the readers take heed of the lessons the stone portrays. ‘What Arthur is seeing is a series of models, the whole gamut of human experience’ (Kevin Crossley-Holland, Interview with Write Away!, 2002). The reader sees this too, with the extra dimension of Arthur as interpreter and as a second series of models. The books thus retain the clarity of a straight retelling, passing on the Arthurian legend in an unadulterated form, with the complexity of a secondary story filter, bringing the traditional tale to life and relevance, which is the main strength of a good reworking.
Most reworkings are more subtle than the Arthur trilogy. They may make their source material explicit, such as with the frequent references to the Mabinogion and the story of Math ab Mathonwy in Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, or the quotes from Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer heading the chapters in Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock, but this is more in the nature of the writer leaving clues, and the writer seems more concerned to weave the old material into the new seamlessly, absorbing it fully into their story. In this way the traditional story becomes something new and different, as the modern author highlights, pulls out or submerges various aspects to suit their work. In the hands of different authors therefore the same tale can take on entirely different characters. Charles Butler (2001) has discussed this with reference to the ballad of Tam Lin, in particular looking at the unusual way it was handled by Alan Garner in Red Shift in comparison to Catherine Storr’s novel Thursday. I would like to expand on his comments, referring also to Diana Wynne Jones’s treatment of the ballad in Fire and Hemlock, in order to show how reworkings can alter the transmission of traditional material.
Butler (2001) points out that the main way in which Garner’s treatment of the Tam Lin story differs from most other modern interpretations is in its male focus. He puts the Tam character centre stage in the person of his three male protagonists, Macey, Thomas and Tom, with the various Janet characters as supporting roles, in contrast to other authors who have dealt with the tale from a female perspective. This brings out different aspects of the ballad, such as the effect of the ‘possession’ (here cast in terms of fits, epilepsy or going beserk) on the possessed himself, and emphasising the need of the Tam character to have a Janet who will hold on to him, as in the ballad, through all his shape-shifting (usually expressed by modern writers by shifts in character or personality). It is significant that ‘the story of Jan and Tom is the only one of the book’s three narratives to lack the ballad’s happy resolution’ (Butler, 2001, [web page]) as this is the only one where the Janet character stops holding on to her Tam.
Jan’s failure to ‘save’ Tom is usually understood as Garner’s bleak comment on
the spiritual sterility of modern times, and as far as Tom’s own condition is
concerned that is probably right. Jan’s story can be read more
positively, however. She is a young woman with her own ambitions,
and a proper sense of her existence as a person beyond Tom’s clawing emotional
needs. Moreover, in refusing to tolerate Tom’s parasitic and
increasingly violent behaviour indefinitely (“There’s a limit to debasement”
(p.183)), she shows a self-respect that is surely wholly healthy.
Jan’s incipient feminism helps her to survive, even though it is one aspect of
the very modernity that has made life intolerable to Tom. […] Ironically Red
Shift’s tragic reversal of the outcome of the Tam Lin myth may also be its most
striking feminist gesture.
Butler, 2001
It is interesting to consider this and Garner’s use of three time-strands in this novel in the light of his comments about reworking myth in general. In his 1975 lecture ‘Inner Time’, he refers to ‘relevancy’ as ‘the myth [choosing] the form for its clearest expression at any given moment. In doing so, elements may be revealed and materials used that earlier versions obscured or did not need’ (Garner, 1997, p.110). The three ‘expressions’ (to use Garner’s term) of the myth found in Red Shift can be seen as the three ‘relevancies’ for the three different periods of time, and their different emphases and outcomes can be explained in this way. The interpretation about the ‘spiritual sterility of modern times’ and Butler’s feminist interpretation are therefore both applicable to the story of Tom and Jan. A 1970s expression of Tam Lin, according to Garner, cannot end happily if the only way to achieve a happy ending is by the subordination of the female partner’s needs.
According to Butler (2001), ‘it is surely not a coincidence that [most of the writers who have reworked the ballad of Tam Lin] are female, for Tam Lin can easily be seen as a proto-feminist text.’ The character of Janet has proved extremely attractive to modern authors, as so many traditional tales have weak, stereotypical or subordinate female characters. I will not discuss the issue of gender roles in traditional tales and modern interpretations at length here, but it warrants mentioning with reference to Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock, another reworking of Tam Lin.
Jones discusses the creative process of writing Fire and Hemlock in her 1988 essay The heroic ideal – a personal Odyssey, which she begins by describing her life-long search for the female hero. Her desire ‘to have a real female hero’ is what led her to choose Tam Lin as the base for the novel ‘because that had a real female hero, one of the few Britomart-like heroes in folklore’ (Jones, 1988, p.134). Fire and Hemlock is therefore a more traditional ‘expression’ of Tam Lin than Red Shift, focussing as it does on the experience of the Janet character, Polly, whose determination to hold on to her Tam, again called Tom here, is presented as a battle against his possession by the Queen of the Fairies. Jones’s depiction of Tom’s possession is more literal than Garner’s – Tom Lynn is not ‘away with the fairies’ in a metaphorical sense like Garner’s Tams. But this is merely a matter of atmosphere, and masks a more profound similarity. The key to Jones’s intepretation of Tam’s possession is a Frazerian view of the ballad’s tithe to hell – she makes this explicit by having Tom give Polly a copy of The Golden Bough to read at a central point in the narrative, Polly’s nightmarish trip to Bristol where the threat of the Leroys (the ‘fairy folk’) becomes clearest and Polly’s abandonment by her family most stark. Those taken by the Queen of the Fairies must be sacrificed in order that her consort may have immortality (‘Kings killed at the end of a fixed term’, Frazer, p.274), and this is the fate which Polly must save Tom from. The tithe to hell seems at first glance to have been submerged in Garner’s interpretation, although Butler (2001) points out that ‘one way of viewing Tam Lin is […] as a hero who contrives to let someone else suffer the punishment originally intended for him’ and that ‘Red Shift makes the question of infernal substitution explicit’ at the end with Jan’s accusation to Tom that ‘Other people have to go to hell to find words for you!’ (Red Shift, p.187).
The greatest similarity between Garner’s and Jones’s reworkings of Tam Lin is however in their treatment of the ‘holding on’ aspect of the ballad. I have already discussed the significance of Jan’s decision to stop holding on to Tom in the contemporary narrative thread of Red Shift, but this is also the choice Jones has her Janet make. In fact, Polly does this twice. Once when her jealous spying gives Laurel (the Queen of the Fairies) the opportunity to make her forget Tom, and then at the end when she marches down to Tom ‘hanging, swaying, […] on the very edge of the trench […] to take everything away, and do it now’ (p.334), to reject him completely, and in this way, to save him. ‘The only way to turn that wild strength of the horse to Tom’s advantage was to deprive him of it completely’ (p.334). In the same way, the only way to turn the strength of Tom and Polly’s love to his advantage was to deprive him of that completely, for Polly to stop holding on to him. In both Fire and Hemlock and Red Shift, the importance of holding on from the original ballad is twisted so that the books’ climaxes come from letting go instead. The only difference is that in Fire and Hemlock, the ‘chilly logic’ of Laurel means that by letting go, Polly does save Tom – for her, holding on would mean losing him.
In looking at these two authors’ treatment of the same traditional material it can be seen that reworkings reinterpret their source material in a very profound way, unique to each author and story. Something entirely new is created each time an author digs up the mythic bones of the past and rebuilds them in the present. This gives a good reworking a life that few other interpretations of traditional material can have; as Garner says: ‘retellings are stuffed trophies on the wall, whereas I have to bring them back alive’ (1997, p.111).
It has to be said, however, that this kind of profound reworking is not easily achieved. Red Shift and Fire and Hemlock are both extraordinarily difficult and complex books, and make demands of their readers above that of almost all other books published for young adults. Various critics have questioned Red Shift’s status as a children’s book – the review in the Times Literary Supplement called it ‘probably the most difficult book ever to be published on a children’s list’ (quoted in Philip, 1981, p.87) and it has to be wondered whether it was published as a children’s book purely because all Alan Garner’s previous books had been so. Nonetheless, it does have adolescent protagonists, at least in the most modern of the three story strands, and deals with the quest for the self which is a feature of so many young adult novels, so that I would classify it as such, as a book, like Fire and Hemlock, which is demanding but satisfying for intelligent adolescent readers. Many reworkings are complex and demanding in this way, at least those that fully assimilate their source material and turn it into something new, rather than a simple allegory or retelling in a different setting, such as C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Diana Wynne Jones’s Eight Days of Luke where she translates the Norse story of Loki into the present day. Simple reworkings such as these (and Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur trilogy, which in its reworking parts is a fairly simple one-to-one correspondence, lifted into another time and place) seem more formulaic, less inspired, more an exercise of the author to see how they can fit the old to the new rather than a creative act producing something entirely new but equally powerful. As Diana Wynne Jones says, ‘the immense and meaningful weight of all myths and most folktales could drag a more fragile, modern story out of shape’ (1997 [web page]). It is a rare thing for an author to achieve a story which is strong enough to carry the weight and retain its own shape, casting its shadow back on the myth as much as the myth casts its shadow over the story. This, I would argue, is the reason for the complexity of the reworkings which have achieved this. They have to be strong, to resist the pull of their traditional shape.
References
Butler, Charles (2001) ‘Alan Garner’s Red Shift and the shifting ballad of Tam Lin’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Summer 2001. Also web page: <http://members.ozemail.com.au/~xenophon/tl.html> Accessed 27th October 2004
Crossley-Holland, Kevin (2001) Arthur: the Seeing Stone, London : Orion
--- (2001) Arthur: at the crossing-places, London : Orion, 2002
--- (2003) Arthur: King of the Middle March, London : Orion, 2004
Frazer, Sir James (1922) The Golden Bough: a study in magic and religion, Ware : Wordsworth, 1993
Garner, Alan (1967) The Owl Service, London : Collins, 1973
--- (1973) Red Shift, London : HarperCollins, 2002
--- (1997) The voice that thunders, London : Harvill
Jones, Diana Wynne (1975) Eight days of Luke, London : HarperCollins, 2000
--- (1985) Fire and Hemlock, London : Mammoth, 1993
--- (1988) ‘The heroic ideal – a personal Odyssey’, The Lion and the Unicorn, v.13:no.1 (June 1989) pp.129-140
--- (1997) ‘The profession of science fiction: answers to some questions’, Foundation, no.70 (Summer 1997), also [web page] <http://www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk/questions.htm> Accessed 7th December 2004
Lewis, C.S. (1950) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, London : Collins, 1987
Philip, Neil (1981) A fine anger: a critical introduction to the work of Alan Garner, London : Collins
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