Dahling

I'll be Dahling this coming Thursday. There he is, at the head of this post, apparently emerging from a large quantity of cotton-wool, or perhaps leaning comfily back against a quantity of coral. And why am I Dahling? Permit me, dahling, to explain the structure of the Children's Literature course I'm teaching this year. So: it runs over 20 weeks and two terms. The syllabus for the first 15 weeks is set by me, and goes from Romanticism (and Rousseau) through 19th and 20th-century key texts up to Harry Potter. For the final five weeks the syllabus is set by the students themselves: we discuss various options, and arrive at a consensus. The deal is: I agree to lecture on the texts they choose, but they must run all the seminars themselves, with me sitting smiling and nodding and pointedly not butting in, in the corner of the room. It's a structure I've tried on other courses, and it's worked pretty well in the past. For instance, on the SF course I taught last year the brief was that I taught the topic to 1999, and the students then chose five examples of 21st-Century SF for the final five classes. This time round it was agreed to broaden the brief in order to include Dahl, who hadn't made it onto the original syllabus (I'd thought about it, obviously, but figured that to include him I'd have to cut out Blyton which would have reduced the already small number of women studied on the course and left a hole between the Hobbit in the late 30s and picture books in the 60s/70s). That's fine: Dahl certainly makes sense. The other four weeks, since you ask, are: YA Fantasy (students especially mentioned: Hunger Games, Series of Unfortunate Events, Pullman's Dark Materials); Blackman's Noughts and Crosses; YA Romance-Fantasy (Twilight and all those other glittery vampire yarns; I might do Hunger Games here actually); Jacqueline Wilson. All good.

So, yes, this Thursday I'll step into the lecture theatre and bloviate about Dahl for an hour. There's a lot to say about him as a children's writer, and his influence (the Lemony Snicket series I mention above couldn't possible have existed without his prior example, for instance). But I don't intend to go into detail about all that in this blogpost. Instead I mean, here, to mark the personal significance he had for me. I know, I know; it's icky all this personal stuff. I've already posted, over on my other blog, one of the most personal (though obliquely so, as befits me) things I've ever published. I should warn you: if you click the link hoping for salacious intimacies and rollicking stories you won't find them: the post in question is a lengthy, rather dry discussion of the fact that, though personally infidel, I have grown up in and been shaped by a culture that is Protestant. The exposure of it (really: it feels exposing, to me) is not a function of its explicitness. It has, rather, to do with my life as a writer, not as a human being; although part of its point is the extent to which I find it increasingly difficult to separate out those two eminently separable elements. That's not a boast. It's the opposite of a boast.

And Dahl? Well, I have cause to be a tad nervy about lecturing on him. More than Carroll, or Tolkien, more than any other book covered on this course (and notwithstanding how profound an effect many of them have had upon me, growing up) it was reading Dahl that decided me to be a writer. Not his kids' books, though. It was his short story about crashing his plane in Libya during the war, 'Piece of Cake'. I'm going to quote myself from another post, about a seemingly unrelated matter: a collection of sting-in-the-tail crime stories originally published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. That old post reviews the collection, and then indulges in a little bit of speculation on why 'twist in the tail' stories are so perennially popular.

Now it seems to me that this sort of story delivers a very specific sort of pleasure. It is the pleasure of limited surprise, an 'aha!' pleasure ... limited both in intensity and in duration (it doesn't take long for the shine to come off this twist, for instance). Nor is it a pleasure that's especially repeatable. In this respect it has something in common with the punchline of a joke. Yet I don't think describing it as a punchline quite gets it right, either. In a joke the body of the gag exists only to set-up the punchline; where I suppose in a twist-in-the-tale story the reverse is true: the punchline exists rather to cast the world of the story, or the world at large, in a new light. But it's a one-dimensional trick, for all that, and puerile at least in the sense that life is very rarely eucatastrophic, and only slightly less rarely dyscatastrophic. Mostly life runs in predictable grooves, and the things we learn as we go along reinforce, rather than overturn, what we have learned thus far. But here's the thing, and I suppose the appeal of these sorts of stories resides in this: on those occasions when we do experience some sort of perceptual or conceptual about-turn, the experience is weirdly exhilarating. I'm not sure I see why this should be, but I suppose the desire to reproduce that exhilaration, in contained and diluted form, explains the perennial popularity of this sort of story.

That's where I bring in Dahl's own 'Tales of the Unexpected', which I read and re-read as a youngster.

I've a softspot for this sort of tale, which must have something to do with the fact that I so greatly enjoyed Roald Dahl's short fiction when I was a nipper ... specifically: when I graduated from Dahl's children's writing, the reading of which was mandated for all British children in the 1970s by government edict, to his 'adult' shorts. I put adult in inverted commas there because, precious though those stories were, and even are, to me, I have to concede there's something puerile about them; even (or do I mean: especially) his Uncle Oswald sex stories. There's one exception to that, as far as I'm concerned, but it's not exactly relevant here.**

And those two little asterisks direct the reader to the note at the post-bottom, containing the personal bit.

The Dahl story (for adults) that had the greatest impact upon me, and that more than any other written text made me want to be a writer, is not one of his twist ending ones. It is his faintly surreal autobiographical account of flying in wartime, "A Piece of Cake". Something about that story, and more to the point something about the form of that story (not its content, particularly: which is to say, it wasn't that I had a particular interest in WW2 or planes or anything like that) ... something about the way it was written, and structured, or the way it arranged its scenes and images, and the emotional affect it generated, rushed my 13-year-old conscious mind like a sudden tidal bore, and made me want to write things myself. It was, more or less, as simple as that. I didn't want to be a writer before I read that story; I wanted to make animated cartoons. After I read that story, I wanted to be a writer. That I have never written anything like Roald Dahl, and have no desire so to do, flows naturally from this impetus, I think. The force of it upon my mind did not impel a desire to imitate, you see.

I'd read plenty before that moment, most of it SF of course; but it hadn't previously occurred to me that I might want to write it as well. It's still a difficult thing for me to get inside why this particular story had so profound an effect on me.

At any rate, all this 'personal' revelation stuff is making me feel awkward; however bafflingly oblique and unforthcoming it seems to you. I'll stop.