Reflections (16 page)

A Whirlwind Tour of Australia

 

In 1992, the recently published
Black Maria
hit the bestsellers list in Australia. In association with the British Council, Diana's Australian publishers, Mandarin, arranged a whirlwind tour for her in Australia, fitting in three lectures about writing children's fiction, along with signings and interviews. (See “A Conversation with Diana Wynne Jones” for one incident on her Australian tour.)

 

 

Lecture One: Heroes

 

Diana's first talk in Australia was at a conference in Perth organized by
Magpies Magazine
on the topic of heroes. Diana considered that this lecture was a continuation of the themes she had begun in her 1988 talk in Boston. See “The Heroic Ideal: A Personal Odyssey.”

 

W
hen I started thinking about what I should say here, I was just finishing the final draft of a
very
complicated book. It was so complicated that I had to break my usual rule and make a chapter-by-chapter plan of parts of it. It was a relief to find that the Wimbledon tennis tournament was on and that I could stagger away from time to time and watch a game and listen to the
phut-phut-phut
of the tennis balls. In fact, it wasn't a relief—it was a revelation. It dawned on me that tennis stars were perfect models of heroes—all kinds of heroes—folktale, myth, comic book, and above all, modern fantasy. And I found myself attending closely and thinking very hard indeed.

For a start, they all had that larger-than-life quality. They stood out among other people even if you didn't know that one was the star—and this is very like the way everyone follows the hero of a story, even if he or she is only designated the prince, or the youngest sister. And though they defeated the villain on the opposite side of the net, they didn't save the world, they simply won a tennis match. It is very unidiomatic to consider that a hero saves the world. What gives a hero his/her universality is the fact that the gods, or God, or the Fates, or some other supernatural agency is on their side. And tennis stars have that, too. If one of them is in trouble in a match, their ball is sure to start just flipping the net and rolling down the other side, or they get a lucky call—or it rains.

Of course some of these people don't have much brain, which qualifies them for the Hercules, Superman type of hero, who are mostly notable for deeds of strength. But those with brains do have enormous individuality and a larger-than-life personality—not always a very nice one. They sulk, they stamp, they throw racquets, and they insult the umpire and the linesmen. But then, very few heroes are like Sir Galahad. Achilles sulked worse than a tennis star—he was also vengeful and whined to his mother. Theseus made unscrupulous use of Ariadne (whom he left on an island, where Bacchus later found her—I always think that really meant she took to drink, poor girl), and Jason made similar use of Medea. Then there were those Irish heroes whose main heroic aim was to rustle cattle, the Welsh hero Gwydion who took
pride
in cheating people, and the Brave Little Tailor who started out, at least, as a complete fraud. I think my moment of revelation came when I saw this young man come on court in the most flamboyant clothes. He had a sweet smile and questionably blond hair and a generally chirpy glamour that in fact concealed huge skill. When he was interviewed he confessed to hating to get angry—and it was also said that he slithered out of winning when it came to the big matches. And I thought, My God! This Andre Agassi is the image of Howl in my book
Howl's Moving Castle
!

What I am saying here is not simply that heroes are usually flawed characters, which is true, nor that my books tend to come true on me—which is also a fact—but that the big, heroic things which we respond to are exactly the same nowadays as they always were. This was one of the things I was trying to say in
Eight Days of Luke
. The days of the week are named after the Norse gods and, just as Woden's Day and Thor's Day are part of our everyday lives, so are the big things for which these gods stand. And we respond to them as people always have done.

We respond to heroes, I think, not so much by identifying as by
following
, partly as disciples follow and partly by cheering on from the sidelines. Watching the crowd at Wimbledon, I concluded that people's response to heroes is a muddle of these two things, and it gets more muddled when we talk about a narrative rather than a tennis match. Perhaps this gets easier to see if you think about following the fortunes of a hero who is of the opposite sex from your own. You can never assume this hero is
you
, but you follow him/her just the same.

This fact has been very important to me. For a long time I couldn't write a story with a female hero. The identification was too close, and I kept getting caught up in the actual tactile sensations of being a girl—which meant you towered over boys the same age, were forced to wear your hair so that it got in the way, and that your chest flopped embarrassingly—and I knew that in order to
see
my hero as a real person, I had to be slightly more distant than that. There were other factors here, too. First, my own children were all boys, and I knew not only how they felt and behaved but what they needed in a book as well. Second, at that time—twenty years ago—neither my sons, nor any other boy, would be seen dead reading a book with a female hero. It really was absolute. They would not. But girls—partly out of necessity—didn't mind a male hero. But I think the third, hidden factor was the most important. According to the psychologist Carl Jung—and I think he is correct—every person has an open, fully acknowledged personality of the same sex as their own, and a submerged half which has all the characteristics of the opposite sex. Twenty years ago I was still learning how I wanted to do things, and what I wanted to do was to write fantasy that might resonate on all levels, from the deep hidden ones, to the most mundane and everyday. If I chose a male hero, I could go after my own submerged half and so get in touch with all the hidden, mythical, archetypal things that were lurking down there. Over the years I've grown to trust this primordial sludge at the bottom of my mind. I
know
it's there now, and I know I can get in touch with it as soon as I start writing hard enough to forget to eat or go to bed.

But to go back to those flawed heroes playing tennis. It was quite obvious that people in the crowd loved them for their faults. Some of it is, certainly, that the faults make the heroes human, and people can say, “Oh, he/she is not so unlike me.” But when a hero swears at the umpire and the slow handclap starts, you see that the star is also a scapegoat, to be blamed for doing exactly what you would do yourself with that same prig of an umpire—the star carries your sins, in a larger-than-life, jazzed-up way, and you express your disapproval. The fact is, people can think of a hero in both ways simultaneously—that hero is me: that hero is not me, out there, being awful—and this is exactly the way in which people react to a narrative. Reading a story, you can have your cake and eat it too. For instance, while I was writing
The Ogre Downstairs
, I was certain that readers were going to
enjoy
Gwinny baking the gray cake in order to poison her stepfather, even while they utterly condemned it. And I think I got that right—you wouldn't believe how many adults have tiptoed up to me and confessed that when they were children they had baked just such a gray cake for an aunt or child minder or parent that they hated.

There was another kind of double thinking going on at the tennis too, at least among the commentators. If a male player hit the ball into the net when he didn't need to, they went, “Oh, what an appalling shot to play at this stage in the game!” But if a female player did it was, “Oh well, women are expected to make mistakes.” I was pretty indignant about this, until I realized that the women players
didn't
actually make many unforced errors. The commentators' expectations were years out of date. The women's expectations about themselves had changed. It is one of those many fields in which feminism has made an enormous subtle difference. Exactly the same change has come about in children's books. About ten years ago, boys started being prepared to read books with a female hero. I found everything had gone much easier without, then, being able to say how or why. Females weren't expected to behave like wimps and you could make them the center of the story. By that time anyway, I found the tactile sense of being female stopped bothering me—which may have been part of the same revolution—and it was a real release. I wrote
The Spellcoats
, told by a girl, and
The Time of the Ghost
, from the point of view of a female ghost, and then—although this one has only just been published—
Black Maria
, which explores the traditional roles of the sexes. After that, with a feeling that this was the big one,
Fire and Hemlock
.

Fire and Hemlock
follows a girl, Polly, from the age of ten to nineteen. Such was my sense of release at that time, that the book was written at white heat—I had absolutely no trouble in tapping the deepest, most resonating levels and relating them to normal present-day relationships. The heat of writing pulled in poetry, myth, and folktales by the handful. Polly kept flicking from role to role as hero of at least a score of folktales: “Cupid and Psyche” or its dark obverse, “The Wicked Wedding,” “Tam Lin,” “Snow White,” “Thomas the Rhymer,” “Bluebeard,” “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” and many more. It was amazing to me as I wrote to find exactly how many well-known tales have a female protagonist.

Reviewers—who seem to perform the same function as commentators at tennis matches—did not like this. The chief review of
Fire and Hemlock
ran, “This is a girls' book and I don't see why I should try to understand it.” End review. Last year
Black Maria
got much the same treatment. Things have not changed
that
much.

But back to the tennis commentators. Another thing that made me very indignant was their way of talking as if a tennis star was playing on his/her own. If the unfortunate opponent was not a star, then from the way they talked you'd think the hero was playing against a wall! In fact, on reflection, I saw the commentators had got this one right. Heroes are like that. Heroes of stories strive, fight, suffer, and maybe conquer. But whom they conquer or the reason for the fight is never so important. You remember the story
for
the hero, as if he or she carries the events of his/her heroism sort of in a cloud round them, like a nimbus. I think this is why there is always such a demand for another story about the same person—look at how many Robin Hood stories there are. These days it's expected you will do more—at least write a trilogy—and this is something I find very hard to do. Except where Chrestomanci is concerned, I usually find that the end of the book is the end of the important things I have to say about the central character. Being that particular sort of person, they require that particular story and no other—that story is their own special nimbus, if you like. As an example of my difficulties, let me tell you that for the last ten years, I have been supposed to be writing the fourth book about Dalemark. And I couldn't do it. That was because my then-publisher insisted that the next book should be about Brid and Moril—particularly Brid—and I knew that
Cart and Cwidder
had said most of what I wanted to say about Brid. It was not until I had changed publisher and been nagged by my agent that I began to think, well, maybe not Brid, but there are people in
The Spellcoats
and
Drowned Ammet
who have only half of their rightful story there. But how do you put into one narrative the other halves of stories that happened several thousand years apart? I had to leave that there for a while—I had other heroes queuing up inside my head for the stories that fitted them—and it was only last year that things clicked around and I did write that fourth book.

I do find, myself, that the hero, the protagonist,
is
the story. This is not to say that the other people in it are of no importance. Before I can write about anyone, I have to consider them as my close personal friends, even the baddies. I often feel acute sympathy for baddies—for instance, for Gwendolen in
Charmed Life
, who never had a chance to be anything else—but then, I'm peculiar that way. There was a time in my life when I had to hurry out of French farces in floods of tears because I was so sorry for the deceived husband.

But of course I feel much more sympathy for the hero, and so does everyone else. The hero has glamour, warts and all, and carries the story
alone
—rather like the tennis star apparently playing against a brick wall. Yes, the opposition
is
there, but at least half the struggle is with the hero's own inner self. A tennis match makes a near-perfect paradigm here. You see the star stepping out confidently at first, sweeping away the other player. Then the other fights back and the star starts to lose. The hero's confidence vanishes. You see the star fighting with himself, muttering, swearing, stamping about, and his face is contorted with agony at his own incompetence. The crowd loves him for this agony. He has to fight his own feelings in order to get into a frame of mind in which he can win. And he does. Somehow he scrapes up, if not confidence, courage, calms himself with a huge, visible effort, and raises his game. Slowly he claws back the advantage, gets on top, and then by the end the other player doesn't know what has hit him.

Watching this agony of tennis stars in action, I recalled an interesting fact. The word “agony” also makes part of the word “protagonist.” And it is the same word in origin as “action.”
¹
It is as if the facts about heroes are built into our language—if you take action of any kind, you are going to suffer. But the whole complex of meanings round these words entails a great deal more than simply “You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.” “Agony,” which means, in origin, a death struggle, is a word for both external pain and internal strife (as in “an agony of indecision”). “Action,” derived from the verb “to act,”
can
mean decisive doings of a physical kind, but it is usually partly in the world of ideas, as when a government
acts
to prevent inflation by raising interest rates, which is a seminotional thing to do, even if it does have physical consequences. And the other main meaning of “act” is, of course, to take part in a stage play—where the actor often enacts the agony of a hero. Interestingly, the actor is said to
play
a part in this
play
. If you think around the implications of this cluster of meanings, you can see that what an audience, or a readership, expects from a hero is a very serious form of a game, in which the hero is expected to struggle on two fronts, externally with an actual evil, and internally with his/her own doubts and shortcomings. The hero, out there as scapegoat, has to do the suffering for everyone.