The Secret Grove Pt. 4

Here we go, more Secret Grove stuff. This would have been a college paper, but I graduated and have no other venue. You’re welcome.

Last week we looked at travel buddies, guides, the ultimate evil villain, and prophecies. Today we address allegorical challenges and time discrepancies.

Allegorical Challenges: Allegories are essentially extended metaphors with a philosophical or moral objective. When done right they clarify complicated ideas and moisturize dry reading. The most popular examples are Plato’s cave found in “Republic,” Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” and Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

As a general rule, allegory and entertainment are not natural partners. It’s fine for Plato because no one reads “Republic” expecting to be entertained, but to be educated. The cave helps us understand the philosophical concept we want to learn. However, when we look for entertainment and find a sermon in its place, we become irked. Peeved, even, and we think dirty thoughts at the author for tricking us, and taking our story in the wrong direction. Smart novelists try to avoid allegory.

Not writing allegory, however, isn’t always easy. J.R.R. Tolkien said, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations,” but his seminal work is rife with political and religious symbolism. His friend C.S. Lewis wrote to him concerning “The Lord of the Rings, “The two things that came out clearly were the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of myth being that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should suggest incipient allegories to the reader.” Thus, Lewis advocates flirting with allegory without fully crossing into it. There are times, however, when Lewis steps, and even throws himself, across that line. The second of his space trilogy, “Perelandra,” and many novels in “The Chronicles of Narnia” are arguably allegorical. He isn’t alone. So is “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” “The Phantom Tollbooth,” “The Neverending Story,” as well as the Christian and anti-Christian series that have been written in response to Lewis’s series. Allegory in entertainment is supposedly distasteful, but Secret Grove is lousy with them.

 There are three reasons that allegory and Secret Grove apparently go together like stink and cheese. First, Secret Gove tends toward Fantasy, and Fantasy handily lends itself to allegory. Since Fantasy authors are given more than typical allowance to invent their settings and the personalities that inhabit them, the temptation to make a fantasy world symbolize the author’s pet issue has proven irresistible many times over. Second, kids have less experienced than adults. It’s hard to recognize the sexual symbolism of vampires before puberty, for example, so the symbolism often flies over their heads. Finally, people love to preach but hate to sit in the pew. Reading through a lecture, no matter how imaginative it may be, implies the reader has some sort of deficiency. Adults don’t like to be told they have a deficiency unless they already know it, but kids are used to having their shortcomings listed in detail all of the time. When they do recognize the symbolism they shrug and accept it because everyone else tells them what to do, so it’s no big deal when their books join in the fun.

There is reason to believe, however, that if kids had the choice they’d rather not be preached at, either. When 5 year old Malachai Nicole got the chance to write his own stories with his adult brother illustrating them into graphic novel form we were given Axe Cop, containing narratives that have shown surprising depth with plot twists, foreshadowing and sympathetic villains alongside bizarre physics and copious poop jokes. However, it takes a child psychologist, not a literary analyst, to find the symbolism in the maelstrom of distilled awesome that is Axe Cop. Go ahead, try it. I dare you.

Time Discrepancies: As explained three weeks ago, the end of any given Secret Grove can be predicted fairly easily. If the protagonist’s surviving parent lives in the alternate fantasy world, they will get to stay, leaving their foster family behind. Nobody cares that the foster parents will probably do some prison time for not being able to explain what happened to the child placed under their care, because they were jerks and they had it coming. If the child has one or more loving parent(s) back home, they will return to this world to discover that “time works differently” for the parallel worlds, and nobody will have even noticed they were gone. Exceptions, are early Secret Groves “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and the film version of “Oz” opted for the cheap, “but it was all just a dream” trick that nobody finds clever. Additionally, J.M. Barrie completely ignores this trope and shows real world consequences for children’s adventures. Director Steven Spielberg upholds Barrie’s vision in his 1991 film “Hook.”

Time dilation is used because it solves “the parent problem.” Under normal circumstances, parents will notice if their kids are gone longer than an hour. Heck, they’ll notice if everything is quiet for 15 minutes. There are plausible excuses for allowing the kids to disappear for an hour or two, but after they miss dinner it gets hairy. If they show up any later than two hours tops, parents will demand to know where they were. The kid essentially has only one option: lie. If they initially tell the truth their parents will not believe them and insist on a more plausible answer than “the fairies kidnapped me, I swear.” If the kid persists in telling the truth they will wind up in counseling, either to mend their lying ways, or to uncover the horrific trauma they must have experienced in order to develop such a complex illusion for themselves. That option shuttles us off into dark grown-up territory that is completely out of character with the rest of our lighthearted children’s narrative. Or we could just say, “time works differently” and it just so happens to work differently in our favor, so nobody has to lie in order to avoid getting punished for having an adventure. The unintended consequence is that, like the “it was a dream” trick, the rest of the narrative is cheapened. Narnia leaves no hint of its existence behind save in the memories and imaginations of the children who have been there, but Neverland? Neverland is real.

Next week: a rundown of which tropes I want to keep, which I want to break, how I want to break them and why.