school stories
Dec. 14th, 2004 06:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyAs I believe I've mentioned before, I don't trust the representation of boarding school that J. K. Rowling puts forward in the Harry Potter books. It doesn't feel real to me, and I've been looking about, in a haphazard and rather lackidaisical fashion, for books with different perspectives.
I'd read Enid Blyton's Malory Towers and St. Claire's books as a child, and those don't do it for me either. Penelope Farmer's Charlotte Sometimes captures something of what it's like to be miserable and homesick and stuck with people you don't like. Last week at the used bookstore, I found P. G. Wodehouse's The Pothunters and Other School Stories (an omnibus volume of The Pothunters (1902), A Prefect's Uncle (1903), and Tales of St Austin's (1903). Having whipped through those, I'm now rereading Stalky & Co., the stories in which were published in the late 1890s. And the combination of the two has given me some more ideas about where Rowling's rendition simplifies, and by simplifying ... not falsifies exactly, but distorts.
(I'm not making any claims for Wodehouse and Kipling for paragons of the veristic, but their stories are at least carefully observed. I'm also not saying that Rowling is attempting to do these things and failing. She's not interested. But I am.)
Kipling's protagonists (also a threesome: Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetle) could not be more unlike anyone who attends Hogwarts. Frankly, I don't like them very much, and they wouldn't have liked me, either. They live in a state of perpetual warfare, both with the other students and with the teachers, truce allowed only to those who accept them on their own terms, the school chaplain and the boys in one other study. (Studies are another thing Rowling doesn't bother with, but even Blyton's books showed the obsessive grail-like quality a study could be invested with.) They have a vicious gift for satire and imitation, both of the masters and of their school texts and everything else they read (including Eric: or, Little by Little), and may very well be the inspiration for a great many of Wodehouse's characters (and also Peter Wimsey), who float in a sea of half-remembered and cheerfully mangled quotations. Kipling sees boys and masters as very nearly different species and is devastatingly underwhelmed by the efforts of adults to do the "right thing." The right thing, in Kipling's world is corporal punishment when deserved, and otherwise the boys should apparently be left in their form-rooms and dormitories like revolting larvae, in the hopes that they will pupate into men. The early stories, in particular, are cynically and carefully observed meditations on the uselessness of trying to command respect from teenage boys.
Kipling disavows his own cynicism in the later stories, as his jingoistic support of the British Empire and her fighting men becomes the ideological horse to be flogged over the finish line. (Someone, somewhere, has commented scathingly on Stalky's behavior as an officer, and I wish I could remember who.) But in the first few stories, the boys are amoral, unpleasant little beasts, and Kipling doesn't apologize for them.
Wodehouse is different. Wodehouse was writing for a very particular market, and in any event, had a lightness of touch that simply could not be vanquished. His school stories are flimsy things, but one can see the lineaments of Psmith and Ukridge and Bertie Wooster starting to emerge from the primordial ooze.
His characters are not like Stalky & Co. They do not disdain their school and the importance of school spirit. They are, to a man, sports-mad. But they, too, live for ragging their teachers and contravening rules. The general impression from both writers is of boys whose (sometimes phenomenal) intelligence is being blocked and misdirected, and thus breaks out in startling and unexpected ways. And this isn't seen as a problem with the educational system at all. Simply the status quo.
But the sports-madness of Wodehouse's characters emphasizes another way in which Rowling is gesturing at her genre without really inhabiting it. Everyone at St Austin's and Beckford is sports-mad. There are a dozen different cricket-teams: the First Fifteen, the Second Fifteen, and then a team for each house, and while the house teams play each other, the school teams play all sorts of other teams, teams from other schools, but also teams of alumni and apparently anyone else who bothers to write and ask for a match. Unlike quidditch, cricket isn't an isolated phenomenon; it permeates every inch of the boys' lives.
And the thing that this read of Kipling and Wodehouse showed me, the thing that Rowling doesn't even gesture at, is the use of language. Both Wodehouse's and Kipling's protagonists use language as a weapon, as an obfuscation, as a toy. Even leaving aside the quotations, the boys' language is thick with slang. They speak a dense and private language.
But Hogwarts has no slang, and that more than anything else makes the school's world feel thin to me.
I'd read Enid Blyton's Malory Towers and St. Claire's books as a child, and those don't do it for me either. Penelope Farmer's Charlotte Sometimes captures something of what it's like to be miserable and homesick and stuck with people you don't like. Last week at the used bookstore, I found P. G. Wodehouse's The Pothunters and Other School Stories (an omnibus volume of The Pothunters (1902), A Prefect's Uncle (1903), and Tales of St Austin's (1903). Having whipped through those, I'm now rereading Stalky & Co., the stories in which were published in the late 1890s. And the combination of the two has given me some more ideas about where Rowling's rendition simplifies, and by simplifying ... not falsifies exactly, but distorts.
(I'm not making any claims for Wodehouse and Kipling for paragons of the veristic, but their stories are at least carefully observed. I'm also not saying that Rowling is attempting to do these things and failing. She's not interested. But I am.)
Kipling's protagonists (also a threesome: Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetle) could not be more unlike anyone who attends Hogwarts. Frankly, I don't like them very much, and they wouldn't have liked me, either. They live in a state of perpetual warfare, both with the other students and with the teachers, truce allowed only to those who accept them on their own terms, the school chaplain and the boys in one other study. (Studies are another thing Rowling doesn't bother with, but even Blyton's books showed the obsessive grail-like quality a study could be invested with.) They have a vicious gift for satire and imitation, both of the masters and of their school texts and everything else they read (including Eric: or, Little by Little), and may very well be the inspiration for a great many of Wodehouse's characters (and also Peter Wimsey), who float in a sea of half-remembered and cheerfully mangled quotations. Kipling sees boys and masters as very nearly different species and is devastatingly underwhelmed by the efforts of adults to do the "right thing." The right thing, in Kipling's world is corporal punishment when deserved, and otherwise the boys should apparently be left in their form-rooms and dormitories like revolting larvae, in the hopes that they will pupate into men. The early stories, in particular, are cynically and carefully observed meditations on the uselessness of trying to command respect from teenage boys.
Kipling disavows his own cynicism in the later stories, as his jingoistic support of the British Empire and her fighting men becomes the ideological horse to be flogged over the finish line. (Someone, somewhere, has commented scathingly on Stalky's behavior as an officer, and I wish I could remember who.) But in the first few stories, the boys are amoral, unpleasant little beasts, and Kipling doesn't apologize for them.
Wodehouse is different. Wodehouse was writing for a very particular market, and in any event, had a lightness of touch that simply could not be vanquished. His school stories are flimsy things, but one can see the lineaments of Psmith and Ukridge and Bertie Wooster starting to emerge from the primordial ooze.
His characters are not like Stalky & Co. They do not disdain their school and the importance of school spirit. They are, to a man, sports-mad. But they, too, live for ragging their teachers and contravening rules. The general impression from both writers is of boys whose (sometimes phenomenal) intelligence is being blocked and misdirected, and thus breaks out in startling and unexpected ways. And this isn't seen as a problem with the educational system at all. Simply the status quo.
But the sports-madness of Wodehouse's characters emphasizes another way in which Rowling is gesturing at her genre without really inhabiting it. Everyone at St Austin's and Beckford is sports-mad. There are a dozen different cricket-teams: the First Fifteen, the Second Fifteen, and then a team for each house, and while the house teams play each other, the school teams play all sorts of other teams, teams from other schools, but also teams of alumni and apparently anyone else who bothers to write and ask for a match. Unlike quidditch, cricket isn't an isolated phenomenon; it permeates every inch of the boys' lives.
And the thing that this read of Kipling and Wodehouse showed me, the thing that Rowling doesn't even gesture at, is the use of language. Both Wodehouse's and Kipling's protagonists use language as a weapon, as an obfuscation, as a toy. Even leaving aside the quotations, the boys' language is thick with slang. They speak a dense and private language.
But Hogwarts has no slang, and that more than anything else makes the school's world feel thin to me.
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 05:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 06:02 pm (UTC)I meant to mention it, up with Charlotte Sometimes, as being very good about the dysfunctionality possible in a boarding school story, and forgot to. It's also very accurate about the vast gulf between children and adults.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-15 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 06:05 pm (UTC)It certainly doesn't bear any resemblance to my mother's experience of boarding-school, and for more reasons than just that my mother's boarding school was in outback Queensland--but the thing is, I don't believe it's meant to.
I think Rowling's continuing and/or writing back to the traditon of the boarding-school fantasy, as established in books like the Malory Towers series. So it's got nothing to do with what kids actually experience when at a boarding school, and everything to do with the thought-experiment of being away from legitimate authority (teachers are semi-legitimate at best) so that characters can grown and learn through their own, self-directed, interaction with social and authority structures, and other characters.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 07:11 pm (UTC)Um. Can you explain that?
But, yes, it's a very well-worn trope, and while I think it can be made interesting and vital in a fantasy setting, it would require world-building within an inch of its life.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 09:05 pm (UTC)I think so, if I cen remember enough of what I wrote in that paper to be coherent...
The wainscot format is one people know from books like The Borrowers and The Carpet People; it generally articulates a concept or rhetoric of an ideal world or culture (within the wainscot), which is opposed to and under threat from a degraded or wilfully ignorant culture (outside the wainscot). The aim of the protagonists is to preserve the ideal unchanged against the threat of the outside.
Part of what Rowling's doing in the HP series is splice a high fantasy (with its basic theme of the damamged world that has to be healed or made whole through the effort of the hero and orchestrator) into a wainscot world, so that the 'ideal' culture of the wizarding/wainscot world is progressively revealed to be highly problematic, and the possibility of healing is raised. The wizarding world is massively damaged, though it refuses to acknowledge the fact; the narrative is moving further and further toward the suggestion that it can't be preserved unchanged, it will have to be changed to be saved.
I think it's the first time anyone has brought the possibility of genuine change, radical metamorphosis, to a wainscot landscape. Even Michael de Larrabeiti didn't go that far...
I think it can be made interesting and vital in a fantasy setting
Oh, yes, I'm sure it can--just not this one, which as you said earlier, isn't interested in doing it and in fact would end up doing damage to itself if it tried...
no subject
Date: 2004-12-15 07:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-15 04:19 pm (UTC)it explains a great deal of what I find so intensely irritating about JKR's world-building.
There's a lot that is irritating right now, isn't there? But I think--for me at least--that part of that stems from the fact that it's an unfinished text. It's like being back in the middle of the first run of Babylon 5, when people were starting to identify things that JMS had 'got wrong' or done badly...and which later seasons showed to be problems he had built into the world specifically in order to explore them. I have a feeling that Rowling is doing something along those lines here.
The Muggle world does get short-changed, though. In your average wainscot fantasy the line of conflict is between wainscot and dominant reality; HP follows the high fantasy model of having the line of conflict contained within the discrete imaginary world, so the difference between Muggle and wizard culture probably won't get as much attention as it otherwise would...
no subject
Date: 2004-12-15 12:46 pm (UTC)You don't think that's what's going on in Terry Pratchett's Bromeliad trilogy?
no subject
Date: 2004-12-15 04:21 pm (UTC)Off the top of my head
Date: 2004-12-14 06:18 pm (UTC)The misery of boarding school is briefly touched on in one of the Narnia books. The beginning of The Silver Chair, I think, where Jill is trying to escape from a beating.
Burnett's Little Princess is set in an infamous boarding school, but it's not the same class of thing as what you've been looking at and deals more with class issues, really, than school interactions.
Also one of Neil's Sandman stories is set in a rather brutal boys school. You might look at that as well. I think it's collected in the Brief Lives volume.
I think of Steersforth in Great Expectations as being akin to Stalky, FWIW, but Dickens is mostly poor houses, not schools.
Brideshead is college, so that's probably out of your range of observation as well.
Re: Off the top of my head
Date: 2004-12-14 06:31 pm (UTC)Are you thinking of the story in Season of Mists where the Old Boys come back from the dead? Cheeseman, Barrow, and Skinner actually remind me rather strongly of Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetle, only without any redeeming features. Also, not surprisingly, that story is much more explicit about what Kipling calls "beastliness" and Wodehouse mentions not at all.
Re: Off the top of my head
Date: 2004-12-14 06:42 pm (UTC)Re: Off the top of my head
Date: 2004-12-14 06:46 pm (UTC)Re: Off the top of my head
Date: 2004-12-14 07:11 pm (UTC)Getting back to Rowling, Mooney, Padfoot, and Prongs seem quite closely related to Stalky & Co. The Weasley twins, too.
I'd suggest that Rowling is trying to indicate that our perpective of Hogwarts is being colored by Harry's experiences, except I doubt she was planning it to that extent.
I'm straying off topic now, but have you read Kafka's short story "In the Penal Colony"? I think Rowling must have, but so few people I know are familiar with that particular Kafka piece that I haven't run across anyone else who thinks so.
Re: Off the top of my head
Date: 2004-12-14 07:17 pm (UTC)What connection do you see to Rowling?
Re: Off the top of my head
Date: 2004-12-14 07:20 pm (UTC)Re: Off the top of my head
Date: 2004-12-14 07:33 pm (UTC)So, yes, I'd tend to agree with you.
Re: Off the top of my head-re CS Lewis
Date: 2004-12-15 02:58 am (UTC)Re: Off the top of my head
Date: 2004-12-15 12:28 am (UTC)Re: Off the top of my head
Date: 2004-12-15 03:55 pm (UTC)Well, it was a boarding school. I know of no school that claims to be entirely free of bullying, and certainly no boarding school that could make that claim.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 06:31 pm (UTC)Hogwarts having no slang
Date: 2004-12-14 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 07:22 pm (UTC)I don't recall The Small Rain having a similar problem, but I think it was a much better book. Another L'Engle boarding school book, though, with lots of similar elements that I believe were taken from L'Engle's own boarding school experience, which was not, I guess, a happy one.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-15 07:53 am (UTC)Still looking for The Small Rain.
Slang
Date: 2004-12-15 12:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-15 06:18 am (UTC).
no subject
Date: 2004-12-15 09:56 am (UTC)L'Engle's And Both Were Young fits well into the Enid Blyton type idealizations, but I find her fiction does tend to smooth over rough edges to create as smooth a narrative arch as possible. I like her work for that, actually.
Boy by Roald Dahl (about his own childhood) and Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves have more biting descriptions of boarding school. Graves talks about the sorts of relationships that develop at some length--including reference to his own quasi-sexual affair with a boy at school.
You've Been Santa'd
Date: 2004-12-15 11:39 pm (UTC)School stories, various
Date: 2004-12-28 11:24 am (UTC)The thing that most took me aback about Hogwarts is how old-fashioned it is - it reads like the school stories which were a generation old when I read them in the fifties and sixties. For example, since no-one seems to have mentioned this one, Elinor Brent-Dyer's Chalet School stories (http://www.rockterrace.demon.co.uk/FOCS/main.html): a girls' boarding school with a very overheated emotional atmosphere, but like Hogwarts, one with an unusual curriculum (languages, in this case). Read it for its own cosy and bizarre charm, but if you enjoy it, you'll do so by suspending all sorts of judgments.
Unlike Antonia Forest (http://www.maulu.demon.co.uk/AF/): adding my name to her nominators. The odd thing here is that her school stories work like real books with real characters and real plots (the "Marlows on holiday" ones less so, at least the earlier ones. Go for the books with "Term" in the title).
And one more name, though I haven't read these for a very long time: in the Bannermere books (http://www.collectingbooksandmagazines.com/treasebp.html) Geoffrey Trease, who is better known for his historical novels, seems to be making a deliberate attempt to write about everyday, normal kids at an everyday normal school. For a start, it's a day school, not a boarding school.
Thanks for a thought-provoking piece.
Jean
jean@shadowgallery.co.uk