The Developmental-Play Function of Young Adult Fiction as Seen through Phantastes, The Water Babies, The Chronicles of Narnia, and This Is All

More specifically, I will define the primary function of young adult literature as developmental make-believe or play, and show how this function has from the Victorians to the present a

Stockholm University

Department of English

The Developmental-Play Function

of Young Adult Fiction as Seen through Phantastes,

The Water Babies, The Chronicles of Narnia,

and This Is All

Kevin FratoD-EssaySpring 2008Supervisor: Anna Uddén

The attempt to define literature for young readers has engaged many literary theorists, but one thing their proposed definitions lack, in their

effort to assert what this literature is, is an acknowledgement of what literature for young readers does, ie how it functions Nonetheless these

same theorists, in other contexts, identify the psychological development

of young readers as this literature's primary function Tracing the

genesis of young-adult literature back to its modern-fairy-tale roots in

George MacDonald's 1858 Phantastes and other novels which followed

the pattern devised by MacDonald, and showing how the genre has

recently come full circle with realistic "crossover" novels such as Aidan

Chambers's 2005 This Is All, this essay will seek to redefine literature for

young readers in terms of its developmental or self-actualizing,

play-process functionality More specifically, I will define the primary function

of young adult literature as developmental make-believe or play, and show how this function has (from the Victorians to the present and from fantasy to realism) maintained a similar pattern in inviting young readers

to imagine or mentally simulate crossing the threshold between youth and adulthood

In this essay I avoid the misleading term "children's literature", which

is generally used as a catch-all to include everything from board-books to young-adult novels; instead I choose the more inclusive, reader-address-oriented phrase "literature for young readers", by which I mean literaturewhich effectively acts as such for young readers – actual young readers The address-signifier "for" allows me to sidestep the debate concerning

the necessity of young people themselves which sometimes occurs in discussions of "children's literature", as in this assertion by David Rudd that for writers addressing young readers and imagining their responses,

"The physical response of a child is not necessary The dialogic process

of anticipating answering words must still occur, as authors construct notional readers" (38) These hypothetical, notional readers, including adults connecting with their younger selves when reading literature for young reader, are treated as legitimate audiences by some theorists But literature for young readers loses its adressee without actual young

readers themselves it becomes, as Rudd later concedes , "a generic plaything for adults" (39) Literature for young readers can legitimately provide cathartic, artistic experiences for adults as both authors and readers, but in order to have the effect of literature for young readers upon young readers, it must engage this actual readership

Two other proposed reader effects currently hold sway in the debate concerning the nature of literature for young readers, but these functions art (efferential or easthetic reading) versus pedagogy (didactic reading)(cf Weinreich 123) appear neither in his nor other theorists’ proposed definitions of this body of literature These cannot be the only two

alternatives, though: neither proposed effect matches with what theorists themselves, at other times, identify as this literature's primary purpose for existing

Instead the definition-debate has focused on two central issues,

namely the search for 1)"degree or kind" indicators, ie the measuring of literary or linguistic simplifications, or the search for an indicative

pattern of narrative elements in literature for young readers (Cadden 59) versus 2) a definition based upon authorial address, the process by which adult authors address actual (or even "notional") young readers (Rudd 38-

39) The degree side of the definition-debate is represented by theorists

who assume a structuralist standpoint and therefore place their emphasis

on young readers' ability to decode linguistic and literary structures One prominent degree-theorist is Torben Weinreich who cites evidence showing a slight yet quantifiable pattern of simplification in literature for

young readers, including an increased frequency of verbs as opposed to nouns, decreased lexical diversity, increased use of terms applying to young people's environs, and fewer descriptions or reflective passages in

favor of more dialogue and action (52) Others look at the different kinds

of literary simplifications involved and note a pattern of reduced diversity

or complexity of literary devices: Leila Christenbury notes of young-adult novels, that "the compressed plot, the limited number of characters, and the length of the works themselves distinguish YA lit [young adult

literature] from classic literature and make it more accessible and often more immediately understandable" to young readers (18)

Defining literature for young readers based upon patterns of

simplification in its linguistic and literary structures requires the

assumption that young people are less knowledgable, and therefore less capable of decoding complex structures, than adult readers Some

theorists state this belief in young people’s limited ablilities directly For instance in calling for the adaptation of adult texts to the reading levels ofyoung people, Weinreich voices a belief in what he feels is the

"incomplete" nature of children: "Writers do not primarily adapt because

children have other experiences and knowledge, but because they lack

experiences and knowledge Childhood is a state of incompleteness" (49) Where does this type of reasoning come from? Certainly not all adults read at the same level of linguistic and literary complexity, just as young people themselves enjoy varying degrees of cognitive ability – how can Weinreich make such a categorical assertion concerning young

peoples’ ”lack” of experiences and knowledge? This is the same type of incomplete reasoning given by another well-known structuralist to

explain the existence of value-judgements in adult literature Failing to take into account variables such as personality, developmental stages, and the process by which the brain prunes away unused neural pathways (making some experiences much less accessible, even though we have experienced them) Northrop Frye postulates that

In value-judgement, the context of the work of literature is the

reader's

experience When knowledge is limited, the sense of value is naive; when

knowledge improves, the sense of value improves too, but it must wait upon

knowledge for its improvement When two value-judgements conflict, nothing can

resolve them except greater knowledge (Frye 66)

Frye’s contention sounds reasonable, but understanding its basic fault lays bare the crux of the problem in defining literature for young readers according to the type or complexity of its structures According to Frye, one’s sense of value improves along with one’s level of knowledge, and thus when two readers share the same knowledge, their literary tastes or value-judgements will coincide Thus those with a limited working

knowledge of how to decode linguistic and literary structures should appreciate a simpler literature, while those with a greater working

knowledge ought to appreciate a more complex literature As a practical outcome of this notion, literature for adults ought to be marked with suggested reading levels in the same way as literature for young readers, i.e ”High-school diploma and above” or ”Doctoral-level literature.” But Frye’s idea has not had this effect on adult literature His cause-and-effect relationship is unsupported: he fails to describe the mechanism by which knowledge supposedly translates into judgements of value Yet Frye’s is an attitude which continually crops up in pop-culture debates Can the musically uneducated sense the value of Mozart? Can those who have never studied literary criticism appreciate Virgina Woolf? Can

young readers – who lack education – decode and sense the value of

complex linguistic and literary structures?

In the case of literature for young readers, Weinreich feels the

linguistic and literary structures must be limited or "adapted" in order to compensate for what he views as young readers' incompleteness His definition describes literature for young readers as having been self-

censored by authors (or afterwards by adapting editors) to fit children's

"assumed reading skills and encyclopaedic, intertextual and rhetorical competence different from that of adult literature" (128) This

approach to literature for young readers reaches the shelves of libraries

and bookstores every year in the form of limited-vocabulary adaptations and books with reading ages printed on the cover; as young readers are not the primary purchasers of this literature, these age-suggestions do, inpractise, define what reached the hands of many young readers.

The second theoretical tactic in the effort to define literature for youngreaders involves focusing on authorial address or intent Some theorists also claim that works for young people must be "written for children" (Weinreich 128), or "written with young readers in mind" (Christenbury 19) or written "anticipating that children will participate in its utterance" (Hollindale 23)1 Others steer a course between imagined and real, or

"constructed and constructive" young readers (Rudd 39), allowing for the broadening of this literature's hypothetical readership Still others cite the practise of double or dual address in literature for young readers (examples of which will be discussed later in this essay), which further broadens the range of what literature for young readers might be

(Cadden 59) This attempt to extend the definition of who young readers are, and therefore what literature for young readers might be, has

historical antecedents: as Rudd points out, the tradition of oral narrativestold directly to young audiences allowed for a direct-feedback situation whereas printed books allow for less interaction between author and reader (38), and therefore authors sometimes attempt to address various potetnial audiences at once

Another problem with defining literature for young readers on the basis of authorial intent is that this provides no indication of how texts do or will in the future function with young readers Some "adult" texts have become de facto literature for young readers whereas other texts, originally intended for young people, have now entered the world of adult

literature For instance "adult" novels such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World, The Catcher in the Rye, Things Fall Apart, The Great Gatsby and Lord of the Flies are so prevalent in

1 One difficulty with authorial-intent was made particularly clear to me recently when a novel

of mine was accepted by a publisher I thought I had written a young adult novel, but the publisher read it as an adult – or perhaps crossover – novel, and explained that she could sell more copies that way Here, literary theory fails to take profit into account

schools and in my experience as a teacher help constitute a de-facto canon for young readers that it is easy to forget these novels were originally written for adults Other times this practise is less successful

or even damaging to young people's future desire to read books, such as the habit of publishers cheaply reissuing "fictional warhorses" such as

The Last of the Mohicans as works for young readers (Tucker 183) And

some young-reader classics themselves were never intended to be

appreciated solely by the young one literary historian writes that Lewis

Carroll's Alice in Wonderland was from the beginning "fully appreciated

only by grown-ups" (Mathews 17) This and other inconsistencies call into question the authorial-intent model

Finally, young readers themselves also create inconsistencies in the authorial-intent-model by reading adult narratives as their own

(Weinreich 17) In the end, an insistence upon authorial intent as a

hallmark of literature for young peple leads to theoretical cul-de-sacs

such as Bodil Kamp's essay justifying Weinreich's inclusion of The

Catcher in the Rye as a canonical work for young adults (Kamp 58)

Kamp aknowledges that the novel has been called "an archetypical

pubertal novel", a cult-book of youth and a standard in schools, as well as having been named " the first young adult novel" in various international encyclopedias (46) But despite presenting such a solid basis for our

present tendency to read The Catcher in the Rye as a young adult novel,

her theoretical defense is necessitated by Weinreich's own insistence upon authorial intent

In addition to defending The Catcher in the Rye as suitable for young

adults, Kamp also shows how it functions as a young adult novel, and here she abandons the search for indicators of "degree or kind" or

authorial intent Kamp shows how The Catcher in the Rye functions as

young adult literature through language, themes and motifs, as well as narrative voice and a vision of "what it means to be young" (47) She alsoshows how young readers are invited into the text through the then-

revolutionary use of contemporary youth slang and a young person's narrative voice (ibid.), giving the narration the feel of a monologue

enacted by the protagonist This narrative technique of adult authors writing in the voice of young people has been criticized as

"schizophrenic" (McCulloch 14), or even "textual paedophilia" hiding behind "the façade of discursive innocence (ibid 6); but a more benign

way to make sense of the dynamics of this process is by viewing The Catcher in the Rye's narrator Holden Caufield as a role author J D

Salinger is acting This theatrical view helps us understand the

functional similarity of written and theatrical literature, and helps explainwhy Salinger's use of slang so effectively invites young readers into the world of the narrator The theater itself, with its plays and players,

functions through make-believe; the idea of all literature as make-believe has been discussed for centuries, for instance through Coleridge's notion

of the "willing suspension of disbelief" required by readers of poetry (Ryan, "Narrative" 105), and more recently and most ambitiously, in the context of adult literature, by Kendall Walton (ibid 106) The theater openly engages in make-believe and the suspension of disbelief, but

literature? Accepting literary make-believe as a form of play, as Ryan elsewhere suggests ("Narrative, Games and Play" 355), feels like a

theoretical curiousity in the context of adult literature, but in terms of literature for young readers it provides us with the means to understand the developmental effect literature potentially has on young readers Viewed in the context of literature for young readers, the notion of literary make-believe as play necessarily has implications beyond what Walton and Ryan suggest, because play itself is for young people a developmental activity In fact literature’s psychological role in the lives

of young people is precisely what some theorists have long hinted at Fairy tales, believes Jack Zipes, help us mature by allowing us to

"overcome the repressed trauma of childhood without dealing with its consequences in our everyday lives" (222) Spurring development in young people is a function of literature noted by Maria Salvadore: "Books shared with young children stimulate intellectual development" in the ways outlined by psychologists such as Jean Piaget and Arnold Gesell, she

writes (537) And the potential of George MacDonald's novel Phantastes

to assist in young people's transition from puberty to adulthood is

highlighted by Ruth Jenkins (326) These proposed effects are all

developmental, whereas a pedagogical effect would instead involve the transmission of knowledge; and an artistic function would involve a

purely aesthetic role for literature If, as these theorists' statements suggest, the development of the psyche is the primary effect of literature for young readers, then literature viewed as play is especially applicable

to young readers, who by nature develop more rapidly than adult readers

If we study the evolving nature of books for babies on up to young adults, we can view narratives as play-scripts aided by props first

physical, later literary Books for the youngest are often hard to

distinguish from toys, because their props are sensory: they include

tactile, olfactory, musical, and visual features2 picture books themselveswere even referred to as ”toy books” by the Victorians (Klingberg 13) But as books direct themselves to increasingly older readers, these props are internalized into the text bits of fur and sandpaper, scratch-and-sniff patches, squeaky diaphrams and battery-operated speakers, and full-color pop-ups gradually give way to literary texs visually complemented solely by simple line drawings, until finally the only non-literary sensory prop left is the cover illustration Instead narratives rely upon

descriptions and poetic devices to linguistically mime what the theater uses physical objects and sets for As these sensory props become

embedded in the text, young readers themselves are invited to immerse themselves in an increasingly linguistic rather than tactile world – full immersion in fictional worlds, as theorized by Ryan, will be discussed later in this essay

Seen in the context of literature for young readers, then, we can betterunderstand the increasing textualization and thus abstraction from the physical world and its need for tactile props of literary play This

increasing linguistic and literary textualization is the process structuralist

2 See (and play with) for instance the titles Spot’s Marching Band, an “Interactive Sound” book by Eric Hill (London: Frederick Warne, 2004), or Animal Hide and Seek (with flaps), written by Jenny Tyler and illustrated by Stephen Cartwright (London: Usborne,

Play-a-2003)

"degree or kind" thinking like Weinreich's, with his emphasis on writing

or adapting to meet young people's presumed reading levels (48),

attaches the greatest significance to But this is working from an centered view of young people's needs; young people themselves can and

adult-do make whatever narratives suit them into their own (Weinreich 17) This again suggests that the primary attraction of literature for young readers is not reading skills or pedagogy but psychological development

the ingenuity of The Catcher in the Rye, for instance, is not its linguistic

adaptation to the reading levels of young people, but rather its

psychological portrayal of a young person's "desperate" struggle in the face of impending adulthood (Kamp 47), and its successful invitation to readers to play along with Holden as he develops

This invitation, if accepted by the reader, then makes possible other mental shifts in their consciousness In literature, this psychological development occurs through a vicarious system of mental simulation (Ryan, "Narrative" 111), ie through our mentally enacting narratives which place us in Holden Caulfield's and other peoples' shoes This

process of simulation involves a "recentering" of the consciousness of the reader within that of literary characters, during which we emotionally participate in these characters' lives (ibid.) This is at once the

fundamental, though also criticized, attribute of literature: it allows us to project ourselves into other characters to comprehend, for better or

worse, their decision-making processes (ibid.), and it is the same process that is at work in make-believe games of dress-up or cops-and-robbers: it is the process of immersion

So far the theory of literature as play or make-believe has been

applied to literature for adults, but again, literature for young people presents us with the opportunity to make greater use of this theory The process of projection or mental simulation tends to occur more strongly inyoung people than in adults due to the nature of young people's brains: their "rapid and constant learning is made possible because their brain is different from an adult's; it is more active, more flexible, and more

sensitive It is much more affected by experience" (Duncan and

Lockwood 32) Young people, then have a neurological basis for

experiencing literature and its mental simulation more intensely than adults And this vicarious experience, being a form of play, is by nature developmentally formative: for young people, play is by definition "self-actualization, a holistic exploration of who and what they are and know, and of who and what they might become" (Duncan and Lockwood 1) Thus mental simulation through literature assists young people in

exploring who they are what they might become, and functions as a

catalyst for psychological development

If the primary attraction of literature is to help young people develop

or self-actualize, this explains one of the dilemnas of the young adult novel, in which some young readers abandon books marketed at them

or skip over them altogether Perhaps this is because they find some of these books too static for their developmental needs The genre ”young adult literature” is a misnomer, and might more accurately be called

”pre-adult” or ”youth literature” because here protagonists tend not to cross the threshold into adulthood; ”crossover” titles marketed at both young readers and adults tend to cross the threshold between youth and adulthood, inviting readers to vicariously experience this developmental

achievement alongside characters Phantastes, discussed below, provides

us with an example of a protagonist who crosses over the threshold from youth to adulthood, first falsely and then for real

Viewing the primary effect of literature for young readers as

developmental, it becomes clearer why some young readers choose

instead to read adult narratives which are more likely to give them

insights into (or allow them to play at) what the future and not just the present holds Perhaps young readers quite simply become frustrated with adults directing and limiting their literary play: ”Innocent childhood and and its literary rubric conceal the face of adult puppetry, busily

pulling the strings and directing the play (McCulloch 7) The intent model of literature for young readers is called by McCulloch ”adult-authorised” (ibid.), which further highlights the inherent difficulties in

author-defining what literature for young readers is or should be, and who

should have the authority to make this decision

As a writer, young adult novelist Chambers attempts to address this problem by ignoring traditional genre boundaries: "If a sixteen-year old can read an adult newspaper, they can read anything I can give them Buts it's not my my job to write for people with limited reading abilities" (interview) Chambers' four guiding principles expand the boundaries of young adult literature: "No condescension, no limits on language or form,limitless content any themes that exist in the world of teens may exist

in their literature, and novels should make young people think not just

feel" (ibid.) However apart from the final novel in Chambers's Dance sequence This Is All, there is one young adult novel boundary he does not

cross, and that is the threshold between youth and adulthood But

without novels that cross from adolescence to adulthood, young people cannot participate in the mental simulation of this impending transition that they like Holden Caulfield are faced with

The recent development of crossover titles such as Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now can be seen as a publishing-industry attempt to redress or at

least cash in on this dilemna It can also be seen as a return to the historical roots of the young adult genre in which novels like George

MacDonalds's Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women did not

limit themselves to portrayals of youth, but rather dealt with the theme ofyouth maturating into adulthood The crossing of this threshold is a pattern which never left fantasy for young readers in the same way it did the realistic young adult novel, and this is a subject crucial to later

sections of this essay

Phantastes's subtitle directs itself to adults instead of youths, but

adults are, according to the internal logic of the text, not the intended audience As MacDonald put it in a letter to his father, he created "a sort

of fairy tale for grown people" (Triggs 70), a novel which one literary historian says helped establish "radical, imaginitive, antirealistic modes

of fiction as antitheses to the realistic modes so popular at the time" (Mathews 16) But contrary to its subtitle, and despite having been

analyzed in the context of adult literature, the fairy-tale and radically

imaginitive or fantastic structural elements of Phantastes make it

difficult to classify; and although Mathews considers the novel the

progenitor of all modern anglo-saxon fantasy (ibid.), as proto-fantasy it does not fit neatly into the fantasy category, either

The invitation to immerse oneself in another reality is a central

component of the play process, which allows us to vicariously experience other personalities and worlds as our own The readerly invitation to

immerse oneself in a fantasy world is just as central to Phantastes, and is

mirrored by protagonist Anodos himself The novel portrays a fantastical journey within the self from adolescence to adulthood, and one theorist credits its first-person approach as inviting the reader to metally simulateAnodos’s journey alongside him (Triggs 73) But if our mental immersion

in Anodos’s new reality is to be most effective, it probably ought to

address readers faced with the same symbolic journey, as will be shown below

While at least one theorist has been "bewildered" by Phantastes

(McGillis 38), another well-known theorist and author accepted the

invitation to imerse himself in Anodos’s new reality, and as a reader of

Phantastes experienced a sense of self-actualization C S Lewis

famously describes the artistic awakening Phantastes prompted in him as

a young man, which would years later promt him to begin writing fantasy for adults and young people: "I knew I had crossed a great frontier," he writes, and continues, "What it did to me was to convert, even to

baptise my imagination" (xi) Catherine Durie reminds us to take

Lewis's description with a pinch of salt, as he was writing in a

"devotional" sense rather than as a theorist (164); nonetheless, the youngLewis apparently accepted the invitation Triggs mentions, that of

entering the Fairy Land along with protagonist Anodos, and learning alongside him The watershed nature of this type of response is explored

by Jenkins, who uses the language of Julia Kristeva to understand the potential developmental effects of the invitation for immerion in

MacDonald's works: "I would like to suggest that this "precariousness

of subject-position" is key to understanding both MacDonald's vision and the value of his texts for adolescent readers" (326) Furthermore, she writes, "Adolescents, at their own threshold to adulthood, negotiate

various energies and drives verbal, emotional, and physical in their efforts to transition into socially functioning adults" and she suggests

reading Phantastes "in the context of an adolescent audience" (ibid.) Jenkins thus links Phantastes to both young readers and the

developmental function of literature, which is one of the main goals of this essay, as well

Phantastes has been accused of being symbolic or allegorical, and thus

argues Lin Carter "we are not meant to accept [the Fairy Land] as a real place" (Mathews 21) But if fiction is play or make-believe (Ryan,

"Narrative" 356), we are not meant to accept any fictional world as a real place; we are only meant to immerse or recenter ("Narratives" 109)

ourselves within it As we have seen earlier though, young people

experience a stronger sense of imagination than adults, and thus can be understood to more fully immerse and recenter themselves as readers Ryan describes how this narrative make-believe works at any age:

The game of make-believe performed by the reader involves three mutually

dependent operations: (1) imagining himself as a member of this

Phantastes itself operates in accordance with this theory at the level of

the story, in which Anodos undertakes each of the three stages of believe listed above – but above this, the novel also includes meta-

make-fictional segments in which Anodos himself reads books and recenters himself within new narratives the same way we as readers do As a

reader himself, Anodos demonstrates all three of Ryan's functions of narrative make-believe, including recentering himself within other

worlds, pretending to accept fictional truths, and constructing a mental image of these worlds:

If the book was one of travels, I found myself the traveller New

around me, and

finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book (XI:76)

But Phantastes is not realistic fiction it makes use of fantastical

elements, and accordingly, Anodos adds a fantastic fourth function of narrative make-believe As we see above, he not only immerses or

recenters himself in other worlds, he also apparently subverts these

narratives to his own ends Todorov discusses several fantastical themes

of the self, among them metamorphosis and pan-determinism (the sense that our mind controls or is at one with the physical world) which he explains as "the transition from mind to matter" (114) and it is here, in the mind-matter interface, that Anodos's readerly immersion and

recentering himself into narratives appears to literally carry him away

In Phantastes, the narratives Anodos reads serve not only as

opportunities to engage in the make-believe of other worlds, they also serve metamorphically or pan-deterministically, altering Anodos’s reality instead of just his experience of reality Anodos's very journey into Fairy Land is promted a fairy’s adhering to his reader-induced wish to enter such a place Knoepflemacher notes that the fairy "promises to grant him

a wish" (120) which Anodos makes the evening before on his 21st

birthday, when his little sister reads him a fairy tale and he sighs and says of her fairy-country, "If only one could find the way into it" (I:8)

Anodos has legally inherited his father's legacy, but he still acts like a child, letting his sister read fairy-tales to him And so Anodos's resulting other-ness as he becomes a stranger wandering through the Fairy Land is merely a manifestation of his own psyche: not knowing his father's history or feeling comfortable taking over his father's affairs, he is out of place in his own home And so when his room transforms into "a field of grass and daisies" (II:9), this is the result of what Todorov calls pan-

determinism: the narrative device appears to be a simple fairy-tale wish, but it is actually Anodos's immersion in a fairy-tale narrative re-

determining the world around him William Raeper notes the dreaminess

of Anodos's arrival in the Fairy Land: "He is outside Or rather, he is inside, because he has become part of a dream landscape where anythingcan happen" (147) This transformation is, continues Raeper, "in effect the same kind of transformation Anodos must undergo in order to becomefully adult" (ibid.) Thus Anodos chooses to immerse himself within

narratives which have the potential to advance his development, but instead of simply recentering himself, he sometimes also reshapes the world around him according to these narratives

The second occurence of Anodos’s reshaping his surroundings rather than just himself comes in Chapter Three when Anodos reads from a book

of the adventures of Sir Galahad and Sir Percival In Chapter Six he brings this same story to life, meeting Sir Percival himself alongside a stream: "Ere he came up to me, however, I remembered the legend of Sir Percival in his rusty armour, which I had left unfinished in the old book inthe cottage: it was of Sir Percival that he reminded me" (VI:40) Later, the knight himself confirms the literary nature of their meeting, asking Anodos, "Hast thou ever read the story of Sir Percival ?" (VI:41) This pan-deterministic ability of Anodos to recenter his reality around the narratives he encounters becomes more apparent to both him and us as the novel progresses

The clearest example of Anodos’s pan-deterministic reading occurs halfway through the novel Anodos spends time browsing through an abandoned library and during the reading of one story, Anodos enters the

plot and prompts the suicide of a fairy maiden Upon closing the book, Anodos wonders, "But see the power of this book, that, while recounting what I can recall of its contents, I write as if myself had visited the far-off planet" (XII:82) Anodos describes nothing short of an out-of-body

experience through reading, a co-mingling of mind and matter through immersing and recentering himself within the narrative Todorov

identifies four classic narrative devices otherwise used to legitimize this psychic sensation: "Childhood, drugs, schizophrenia, and mysticism" (147) Anodos's mind-over-matter experiences as a reader means that

Phantastes makes use of yet another such narrative device, the

meta-fictional narrative device of pan-deterministic reading

Perhaps Anodos's youth, like that of Lewis's upon reading Phantastes

itself, heightens both his regular readerly experience of immersion and recentering, as well as his out-of-body sense of re-shaping the world around him according to narratives The mental simulation-function of make-believe is a vicarious experience, but it is something we

nonetheless do experience And again, the brain of a young person is

"more active, more flexible, and more sensitive It is much more affected

by experience" than an adult's (Duncan and Lockwood 32) And so this play or make-believe of Anodos's will also prove developmental: the books

he reads are "the tools he must learn to wield if he is to see truth and if

he is to grow spiritually" (Howard 9) And so Anodos's own narrative

make-believe again calls into question the adult subtitle of Phantastes if

he identifies with the character most like himself, the subtitle ought morerightly to identify readers like Anodos, balanced on the threshold

between youth and adulthood According to the inner-logic of the text, Anodos's journey towards a more mature self potentially addresses

youths or younger adults whose psychic state resembles his own

Nowadays Phantastes would be a prime candidate for a crossover novel,

straddling this threshold and set to help readers develop alongside the protagonist

In addition to Anodos's re-shaping of reality according to the

narratives he encounters, his developmental journey also involves a series

of self-metamorphoses which work on both a physical and psychic level, ending with Anodos's own metamorphic and metaphoric death in Chapter

23 This final metamorphosis becomes, in Chapter 24, a series of Ovidianshape-shifts: lying in state in his coffin, Anodos listens to a conversation about himself; then buried, he becomes one with the earth; later he

enters a primrose which is picked by the lady he has been infatuated with; when ker kiss withers the primrose, he enters the sky and lands on

a cloud; after which he flies off and blesses a city This final loss of

physical presence culminating in an act of mature benevolence shows Anodos achieving a psychic union between himself and others, and he is rewarded with a second death, that of rebirth out of the sky and out of Fairy Land, out of his omniscient hyper-consciousness and into his

everyday mind and body, as well as back into his role as the man of his

family estate, in the final chapter While Phantastes makes frequent use

of the narrative device of metamorphosis, Anodos's own series of

metamorphoses mirrors his psychological development, making them meta-level metamorphoses upon which readers can model their own development

Apart from the novel's modelling the developmental benefits of

reading for young people, MacDonald's adult fairy-tale form allows him great structural freedom for the handling of his theme of maturation – and later authors make use of the pattern he introduced, according to

Mathews (16) Phantastes makes structural use of fantastic narrative

devices for the development of the self which continue to appear in young

adult literature to this day: in Phantastes the most prominent of these

devices are shadows and doors or thresholds, each of which functions developmentally at the same time as it provides a further opportunity for recentering3

Anodos's doppelgänger-shadow, his "evil demon" (IX:58) functions most prominently and consistently in his development Howard calls the shadow a "retribution" for Anodos's failure to heed warnings, and

interprets it as "his dark side, the physical manifestation of that part of

3 MacDonald’s fantastical device of crossing thresholds plays a prominent roll in later

authors’ works, as well

him which he would like to deny" (7) This does not account for the

shadow's disappearance in the end of the novel, though Upon his return

to his home in Chapter 25, Anodos is overjoyed at its disappearance But

he has not lost his "dark side" As the penultimate sentence of the novel shows, Anodos has come to peace with both the good and evil sides of himself: "What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good".What then has he lost, which his shadow symbolizes? Anodos has not left behind his dark side, but rather his youth

Instead of Anodos's shadow being a hinder on the way to his

development, it is actually a prerequisite for his maturation – it intrudes upon his immersion in the story, falsely tempting him to believe his youth

is over The shadow is Anodos's failure to completely recenter himself in the Fairy Land and can be seen as a schizophrenia in which Anodos's persona splits into a budding, maturing, almost-adult and a naive,

rather selfish youth The shadow represents a failure to fully accept the make-believe around him: Anodos brags of the shadow he also detests,

He does away with all appearances, and shows me things in their true color and form And I am not one to be fooled with the vanities of the common crowd I will not see beauty where there is none I will dare to behold things as they are And if I live in a waste instead of a paradise, I will live knowing where I live (IX:61)

The shadow functions as an intrusion of realism into the fantasy, almost goading Anodos into believing he has grown up before he has In

withering flowers, blackening skies, and revealing the fantastic to be mundane (IX:59-60), it repeatedly challenges and breaks Anodos's

immersion in the make-believe of the Fairy Land, and in doing so,

challenges and breaks ours, as well The shadow reminds Anodos, as well

as us, that our immersion in the Fairy Land is make-believe

What has spawned this schism within Anodos? The ogre explains his shadow "has found you, as every person's is almost certain to do who looks into that closet, especially after meeting one in the forest, whom I dare say you have met" (VIII:57) The ogre is referring to the lady of the alder, a forest siren who seduces Anodos in Chapter Six The ogre's