"Now Let Us Put Away Childish Things": Games, Fantasy and the Elided Fantasy of Childhood (Critical Essay‪)‬

* In the book I've recently completed, Rhetorics of Fantasy, I suggested that there is a form of the fantastic which depends on our acceptance of liminality, of a point of equipoise or irony in which the fantastic both does and doesn't exist simultaneously, and which depends on that simultaneity to exist, a Schroedinger's cat of fantasy if you will; attempt to come down on one side or the other, and the text collapses. This notion of the liminal fantastic as moment and as comprised of tension and support between the fantastic and the mundane can work rather well as a metaphor for one way of understanding adolescence. It has drawn my attention to a small number of books that appear to be exploring this very thing, and in doing so twisting the way in which two elements of their books are written, specifically the writing of the children's "narrative game" of imagination, and the metaphorical uses of fantasy to explore the edges of childhood. The "narrative game" is a practice familiar enough to most people that when in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Lucy returns with her tale, it is assumed that this is what she is playing. In children's literature the "narrative game" has high status as a facilitating device, sometimes leading into adventure as with Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons (1930) or Katherine Patterson's Bridge to Terabithia (1977), sometimes into fantasy as in many of Edward Eager's books. What all of these stories have in common is that they envisage a model of play that understands the primary and overwhelming purpose of play as the emulation or negotiation of future adult roles and adult relationships to the world--whether this is conformist as with Ransome's children and their boating holiday or subversive and challenging, as with the two adolescents in Bridge to Terabithia. These books are essentially about children playing in ways that are about negotiating the desired pattern of adulthood. These narrative games are very clear about what is, and what isn't reality, but this means that the games are exposed as "story-telling" and hence ground the characters within the emulatory position of the child. The game is doubly false, both fantasy and the fantastic translation of adulthood. The presence of fantasy in the narrative game confirms the non-adult status of the protagonist (and note that Peter and Susan are cast out of Narnia because fantasy and adulthood are not deemed compatible even by C. S. Lewis). At the other end of the spectrum, in full secondary world fantasies where magic is part of the atmosphere (in, for example, A Wizard of Earthsea or Justine Larbalastier's Magic or Madness) the acquisition of magic and the negotiation of magic lever children firmly across the portal into adolescence and on to adulthood.