THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN

This will be, perhaps, the most difficult of response papers for me. First, I have not had time to reread the book, and therefore I cannot offer a response to something just read. Even had I been able to get the book read for this occasion, however, I would still have to face the troublesome fact that I know the book so very well--or at least that I think I know the book very well. I have written on it more than once before and I have edited it for publication. I find it well nigh impossible to get back to something like a pure response to it. My academic response has focussed on the book's formal aspects, what I called somewhere its structure of opposites. I have written about it as if it were one of the most important children's books of the last century and a half, and I have consciously tried to present it as a book that speaks beyond its Christian sentiments. I have, in all this, assumed that I like the book. But do I really like it? And if so, then why do I like it?

Let me fudge. I think I like it. And I think I like it for precisely those reasons that make its status as a children's book doubtful. What I mean to say is that I like the book because it is difficult; it provides for me the pleasure of teasing me into thought. Let me do something prosaic and list my likes: I like the mystery of the great great grandmother at the top of the stairs who keeps changing identity; I like the comic portrayal of the goblins who act like duffers in the scene where Glump and family (Helfer, Podge, etc.) are moving house; I like the descriptions of the mountainside, the mines, and so on in the book because these descriptions seem to me to function meaningfully in the book (see for example the description of the King's garden in chapter 10); I like the poetic style of the book's language; I also like the way the language changes depending upon who is speaking (for example, the pompous rhetoric of the goblins in their Council); I like the reversal of roles in Irene's rescuing of Curdie; I like the questioning of reality in the book's confusion of dream and reality (see Curdie's dream when he is feverish as a result of his wounded leg); I like the approach to a vision of social equality in the bringing together of a princess and a miner boy; I like the pace of the book as it moves without hurry to its climactic battle between goblins and soldiers; I like the way that the book defers both its beginning and ending to suggest an ongoing story, a story without beginning or end since for MacDonald (as I read him) stories have no beginning or ending, just as life has neither; I like the Romantic conception of imaginative activity as superior to ratiocinative activity which the book presents; I like the vision of childhood constructed within the book, that is, I like MacDonald's Romantic notion of the child as capable of independence in both action and thought; I like the ecological suggestion evident in the book, that is, the suggestion that to undermine nature is to destroy harmony, to threaten the quality of life; I like the value placed on home and family partly shown in the fact that Irene's life is endangered once her family is disunited; I like the brooding atmosphere--great caverns, dark nights, large houses with many unexplored rooms--of the setting beause it suggests so many possibilities for reading: psychological probing, political satire, spiritual allegory; I like the way the book hinges on certain traditional images: sun and moon, mother and father, the great house, water, rocks, the thread, spinning wheel, flowers and others I cannot recall now.

Perhaps this is enough of a list. The important thing is to find out why I should even be compelled to draw up a list such as this. Clearly, this list helps me distance the book; in other words, it helps me keep from answering the question: why do I like this book. Oh, it offers a rationale, but this rationale does not really get at why I like the book. I might say that all of the above indicates that I like the book because I think it is such a good introduction to the literary experience for children. But this implies that the literary experience is entirely cerebral, and we ought to know by now that it isn't. If it were, then we could teach literature without any doubt as to what we are teaching. We could establish the "cerebral" or factual content that we wanted to communicate to novice readers, and then parcel out this content in stages. But none of us can agree on what the "content" of literature really is. We can't even agree on what literature is. This reminds me of something we must not forget: some readers will respond favourably to a specific book and others will respond unfavourably. We cannot dictate which books will work with all readers because no book will. Books speak to individual readers for reasons that are as individual as the readers themselves.

But I drift away from THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN. I suspect that I like this book because I hear in it a voice that calls to me to reevaluate my sense of reality. Clearly, any reader of this book will have to question the nature of reality at least as it is presented in the book itself. There the possibilities for mysterious, non rational forces affecting human life are actual. The existence of a supernatural godmother is something I can accept on an imaginative level, but this book tells me that the imaginative level can have real consequences for the life of common day. Belief in the great great grandmother can transform reality, can have direct affect on the quality of social life. In other words, this book tells me what all the literature I admire tells me: we imagine the life we live in--there is no other. I must put this another way: although I know that MacDonald was a Christian and that his book can be, and most often is, read accordingly, I do not find Christian solace in it. Instead I find that most sobering of thought: we, not another, fashion our world. And we do so out of desire.

Here I must switch into another mode. Desire in this book takes on male and female aspects. The male desire--a function of expulsion, of separation from the warmth and security of a time of innocence (in the book, when the goblins lived above ground among men)--is paternal, and attempts to control that which it thinks it has lost. The goblins' desire is to dominate the human community, and they intend to do this by capturing Irene, the princess. They wish to take her and turn her into one of them (remember how they plan to strip the skin from her toes). The female desire--a function of security and clarity of identity--is maternal, and seeks to give independence and strength of purpose. The world we live in, the world as evidenced by the goblins and their desire for power and control, is the world of false desire. In terms of the book, it is a world based on materialism where things are measured and valued only by how they appear. When we are turned to the law of the father, to the desire for power and control, then we cannot see someone as intangible as the great great grandmother. Only by renouncing the desire for control can we see her. Irene is privileged in that she loses herself near the beginning of the book. Her desire for amusement no longer finds satisfaction in her toys and she begins to explore her house. Her exploration leads to the loss of herself, and paradoxically to the finding of her other self--the mysterious other Irene who lives in the tower rooms of the great house. It is easy to see this Irene as the mother, the Virgin or whatever, and read the paradox of the lost/found self in religious terms. What I am suggesting, however, is that we see this other Irene as Irene herself or Irene in her reordering of desire. Through contact with this motherly Irene, young Irene forms relationships with Curdie, her own father, Curdie's family, and even Lootie--relationships based not on the achievement of selfish desires, but rather on giving freely of the self. Hence the importance of the kiss Irene promises Curdie.