critiquing calypso: authorial and academic bias in the reading of a young adult novel

ORI GIN AL PA PER

Critiquing Calypso: Authorial and Academic Biasin the Reading of a Young Adult Novel

Catherine Butler

Published online: 25 November 2012

� Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012

Abstract The position of authors of fiction in relation to critical discussion of their

work is an unsettled one. While recognized as having knowledge and expertise

regarding their texts, they are typically regarded as unreliable sources when it comes

to critical analysis, and as partial witnesses whose personal association with the text

is liable to influence their judgement. This article reconsiders that position, not by

arguing that authors lack bias but by showing that bias is the normal condition of all

critical reading and writing, whether by authors of fiction or by academic critics. I

take as a case study my novel Calypso Dreaming (2002), comparing my own

understanding of the text with a recent discussion by four influential critics. I argue

that the rhetorical and methodological framing of critical discussion is a necessarily

procrustean exercise, that may yield insights into texts but is also characterized by

distortion and selectivity. Moreover, the conventional positioning of critics as

‘‘disinterested,’’ in contrast to ‘‘biased’’ authors, disguises the extent to which

academic discussions are subject to the same personal and professional influences as

those of other writers.

Keywords Calypso Dreaming � ‘‘Holiday Work’’ � New World Orders �Critical-creative divide � Bias in reading � Ecofeminist criticism

Catherine Butler is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of the West of England.

Her critical books include Teaching Children’s Fiction (edited, Palgrave, 2006), Four British Fantasists

(Scarecrow/ChLA, 2006), Reading History in Children’s Books (with Hallie O’Donovan; Palgrave,

2012), and Roald Dahl: A New Casebook (co-edited with Ann Alston; Palgrave, 2012). Her critical work

has been honored with a ChLA Article Honor Award, and a Mythopoeic Scholarship Award (for Four

British Fantasists (Scarecrow/ChLA, 2006)). Catherine has so far produced six novels for children and

teenagers, as well as some shorter works. She is an Associate Editor of Children’s Literature in

Education.

C. Butler (&)

University of the West of England, 29 Dirac Rd, Ashley Down, BS7 9LP Bristol, UK

e-mail: [email protected]

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Children’s Literature in Education (2013) 44:264–279

DOI 10.1007/s10583-012-9189-9

Deconstructing the Critical-Creative Divide

Some years ago I wrote an article for Children’s Literature in Education entitled

‘‘Holiday Work: On Writing for Children and for the Academy,’’ in which I argued

against the sharp distinction between critical and creative writing habitually made in

contemporary western culture and education. The people known as creative writers,

I suggested, are typically their own first and severest critics, while writing academic

criticism calls on just the abilities to think laterally and make unexpected

connections that in other contexts are considered creative (Butler, 2007, p. 166).

Both activities, moreover, involve a commitment to the precise and effective use of

language. In short, they have much more in common than distinguishes them, and it

seems more useful to think of academic and fiction writing simply as two genres,

both of them creative and both critical, rather than as fundamentally different kinds

of activity.

In ‘‘Holiday Work’’ I discussed some of the ways in which my own academic

writing and children’s fiction had influenced and sustained each other. I made a case

study of myself not because I was particularly eminent or interesting but simply

because of the privileged access I had to my own memories—although I was

conscious that such access is never wholly reliable, those memories being subject to

internal censorship, fallible recall, and the continual rewriting of personal narrative

to which all human subjects are prone. I noted some of the manifold interconnections

between the two genres in my own experience. The same idea or topic might inspire

activity in both fields, for example, with fiction and academic writing offering

different angles of approach to subjects that attracted me. I argued too that my

experience as a writer of fiction gave me a degree of insight into the technical

problems of writing in that genre: ‘‘an art critic who is also a painter will, other things

being equal, speak with greater authority about Van Gogh’s brushwork than one who

has never held a brush’’ (Butler, 2007, p. 166). I detailed some examples of the kinds

of practical insight I had in mind, and expressed hopes for the development of ‘‘a

mode of academic writing that can integrate the kind of experiential knowledge

writers have to offer, and allow that knowledge to appear without its customary

shabby garb of the anecdotal and the ad hoc’’ (Butler, 2007, p. 171).

That hope remains, but there are many obstacles to this integration of experiential

and academic discourses. From Plato on, scholars have remarked on the inadequacy

of authors of fiction as explicators of their own work (Plato, Apology, 22b), while

fiction writers have sometimes been dismissive of academics as parasitical and

perverse in their readings. The book on which I am currently engaged is in part an

attempt to bridge this gulf of incomprehension and mistrust, but the present article

has a more modest aim: to consider, by way of a direct comparison with academic

criticism, the position of authors of fiction as critics of their own work. It is two

generations since Roland Barthes argued against the right of authors to a

determinative role in deciding the meanings of texts (Barthes, 1967, pp. 142–148).

Do authors of fiction today stand in a place of critical privilege, or of disadvantage?

How, if at all, does the quality of their insights differ from that of academic critics, in

terms either of what they are able to say, or of the authority (or credibility) with

which they are able to speak?

Children’s Literature in Education (2013) 44:264–279 265

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Authors of fiction have traditionally occupied an ambiguous critical position.

They are often assumed to have special expertise regarding their own work, yet their

very intimacy with the text opens their statements to question. They are, of course,

far from being disinterested witnesses. Separating out one’s own strong feelings

about, and identification with, a work from the work itself is not easy, and the

opportunities for self-deception are legion. Moreover, there is a constant rivalry

between the work as published and the ideal work one originally envisaged, to say

nothing of its myriad interim forms, all of which colour one’s sense of the text.

While, viewed from one perspective, authors might seem to be of all people the best

qualified to pronounce on their own work, from another they are the least so—a

paradox that is intriguing and frustrating in equal measure.

In this article, I want to make the argument that these apparent disadvantages are

largely illusory, not because authors of fiction lack bias or a stake in promoting

certain ways of understanding their texts, but because bias is the universal condition

of critical reading. The critical perspective of fiction writers is coloured by their

inevitably agonistic and inflected relationship with the texts they have written, but in

this they are entirely typical. Academics in particular are continually debating which

textual features are significant, the contexts in which it is appropriate to view and

discuss them, and what critical methodologies yield the richest and most

enlightening insights—all of which considerations inform their reading and

subsequent discussion of literary texts. They write moreover within their own

institutional and personal contexts: for admiration, promotion and prestige. Articles,

books and chapters all contribute cumulatively to a wider intellectual and political

position as well as generating analyses of individual works. Even their choice of

publisher or collaborator may make a statement about the way in which they expect

to be read.

In what follows I shall expand on some of these assertions by considering a piece

of academic writing that takes a novel of mine as its subject. My fiction has not

received much extended academic attention, so to find it the subject of critique

(even if for the space of only a few pages, as in this case) is a fairly unaccustomed

experience. In comparing my own sense of the novel, as its author, with that of the

critics who have discussed it, I hope to gain and to convey a clearer perspective on

the rhetorical structure and tropes of criticism itself, and on the particular critical

methodology used in this instance. However, I also expect to be forced to think

about my novel in new and perhaps uncomfortable ways—while being alert to the

inevitable elements of defensiveness in my own reaction to criticism. All these

things are involved in carrying on the conversation begun in ‘‘Holiday Work’’; but I

hope that this exercise may also be of more general interest to those concerned with

the relationship between academic and fictional modes of writing.

Critiquing the Critique

On 18th August 1898, the second-class cruiser HMS Arrogant lay off the island of

Steep Holm in the Bristol Channel. It was taking part in a military exercise to test

the island’s shore defences by a bombardment from the ship’s 6-inch and 4.7-inch

266 Children’s Literature in Education (2013) 44:264–279

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guns. Crowds gathered to watch from the mainland at nearby Brean Down, as the

Arrogant fired on Steep Holm’s westernmost point for several hours, eventually

cracking the three-inch metal shields that were being used to protect the shore

fortifications there. No one was hurt, and it made for a splendid Victorian picnic

party (Bear Essentials, 2009, pp. 13–14). More than a century later, four eminent

Australian academics (Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan, John Stephens and Robyn

McCallum) carried out a similar exercise—firing not on Steep Holm itself but on its

fictionalized equivalent, Sweetholm, the setting of my novel Calypso Dreaming

(2002). Their exercise took place between the covers of New World Orders in

Contemporary Children’s Literature (2008), a book intended to explore (to quote

the jacket) ‘‘how utopian and dystopian tropes are pressed into service to project

possible futures to child readers.’’ New World Orders includes chapters on such

topics as globalisation, ecology, the post-human, and new models of family and

community, and considers the role of children’s literature in reflecting and

intervening in contemporary politics through its modelling of possible worlds.

Bradford et al.’s discussion of Calypso Dreaming appears in a chapter on

ecocriticism. Calypso Dreaming was selected as a suitable text through which to

demonstrate ‘‘the interrogative potential of ecofeminist criticism’’ by exposing the

book’s ‘‘male-biased assumptions in the use of its setting’’ (Bradford et al., 2008,

p. 85). As the authors explain, ecofeminist criticism combines ecological thinking

with feminism through its recognition that the anthropocentric prioritizing of human

culture and desires over nature, against which environmentalists have long

protested, does not occur in isolation. Drawing on deconstructive feminist ideas

derived from such writers as Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, they identify a series

of mutually-reinforcing binaries within western patriarchal thought that hierarchi-

cally place ‘‘mind over body, spirit over matter, male over female, culture over

nature, reason over emotion’’ (p. 85). Thus, within patriarchal ideology, nature’s

characterization as female (for example as ‘‘Mother Nature’’) legitimizes the view

of it as a resource to be mastered and exploited in the service of human culture.

Ecofeminist criticism sets out, amongst other things, to uncouple these binary

pairings and to suggest alternative ways of modelling the relationship of human

beings and the environment as part of a wider reframing of human relations and

understanding.

It will be useful at this point to introduce Calypso Dreaming. The book is set in a

world much like our own, except that magic and the supernatural have begun to

manifest themselves in startling and dangerous ways. Ancient powers have begun to

stir; some people have developed powers of healing, while others have undergone

bodily transformation. Plagues and unknown diseases have broken out. These

developments are not evenly distributed, however: while much of the world appears

largely unaffected, there are certain sites—often with a history as religious

centres—where the changes are particularly intense. Sweetholm, the island in the

Bristol Channel where the book’s action is set, is one of these.

The book brings a number of disparate people to Sweetholm. These include

Tansy and her parents, who are house-sitting for the summer as they try to mend a

marriage recently shaken by her father’s infidelity. There is Sweetholm native Davy

Jones, the island’s warden and general factotum. There are Sal and her son Harper,


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who have moved with a number of others into a commune financed by retired

entrepreneur Gerard Winstanley. There are Sal’s friend Sophie and her young

daughter Calypso, fleeing the unwelcome attention that Calypso’s unusual

appearance and psychic powers have attracted on the mainland. And there is

Sophie’s elder brother Dominic, a healer in the so-called Order of Asklepius (a

religious version of Medecins sans Frontieres) who has worked with victims of

supernatural disease in various parts of the world and fears that Sweetholm may

become the epicentre of a new crisis. That fear is centred on the figure of Brigan,

once a Celtic place goddess and later a Christian saint, who shows signs of waking

from her slumbers and of harnessing Calypso’s powers in order to do so. For the

critics in New World Orders it is Brigan’s appearance as ‘‘a female power that

increases in destructive force as it becomes embodied’’ that, along with the ‘‘male

biased assumptions’’ they find in the novel, exposes it to ecofeminist critique

(p. 85). In their view, Brigan’s portrayal as a threat to the human community, her

femaleness, and her association with the island (and implicitly therefore with

nature) are all significantly linked.

My immediate reaction on reading this interpretation was one of consternation,

not only because it diverged from my own sense of the text but because it seemed to

reach beyond the text to my own values. As a critic who has written on both

ecological and feminist topics, although not in combination (Butler, 2006a,

pp. 125–136; Butler, 2009), I have a good deal of sympathy with the aims of

ecofeminist criticism. That such hierarchical pairings as those listed by Bradford

et al. operate in western culture, and that there has often been an association

between them, are not positions I would dispute, even if, as will become clear, I see

some potential problems with their application as a tool of literary criticism. It was

therefore disconcerting to find Calypso Dreaming selected as an exemplary instance

through which to highlight these patriarchal biases.

At first I found myself appealing to extra-textual considerations. Not only had I

written ecocritical and feminist criticism but I also had produced other novels, such

as Calypso Dreaming’s predecessor, Timon’s Tide (1998), in which the hostile

chthonic power takes a distinctively male form. Surely, many of the claims the

critics make about Calypso Dreaming could be made in reverse about Timon’s Tide?

On the other hand, Timon’s Tide and Calypso Dreaming are stand-alone novels, not

a diptych. Could the example of one, however admirable, make the other a whit less

patriarchal?

Another strategy involved drawing on my knowledge of the sources and

evolution of the book. For example, it is mentioned several times in Calypso

Dreaming that the healer Dominic comes to Sweetholm directly from working with

plague victims at Lasithi in Crete (pp. 43, 47, 135, 162). Readers familiar with

Greek mythology and Cretan geography may recognize Lasithi as the location of the

Diktaean cave, traditional birthplace of that unimpeachably patriarchal god, Zeus.

(A visit to this cave in 1986 had provided some of the details I later used in Calypso

Dreaming.) Implicitly, the Diktaean cave functions as the centre of the disturbances

in Crete just as the cave of Brigan does on Sweetholm, and so stands as evidence

that the disruptive powers in the world of Calypso Dreaming are not peculiarly

female. However, this is not an inference I could reasonably have expected many


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readers to draw from the mere mention of Lasithi, nor is the Diktaean cave itself

named in the text. Indeed, we might ask why I chose not to make more of its

significance in the finished novel. Was I subconsciously repressing the male aspect

of the book’s supernatural disturbances? Private knowledge thus becomes

ambiguous, as well as of doubtful relevance to textual analysis.

Of course, it is not enough for Bradford et al. to point out that Brigan is female.

In order for this fact to have weight in ecofeminist terms it is necessary to show that

Brigan’s femaleness is integral to her symbolic and ideological function and to the

ideology of the text as a whole. Moreover, the text must represent femaleness, along

with associated qualities such as nature and instinct, as inferior to male authority,

human culture and rationality, thus modelling the hierarchical relations that

ecofeminist criticism seeks to deconstruct. A critical approach that sets out to

dismantle binary oppositions requires both that the existence of such oppositions

within the text be demonstrated, and also that they be shown to play a significant

role in reinforcing patriarchal values. An awareness of all this forms part of the

critical position from which the critics approach Calypso Dreaming, as does a

sensitivity to the place of their discussion within their chapter’s (and book’s) larger

argument, where its function is to describe ecofeminist criticism’s aims and briefly

demonstrate its methodology.

As I suggested in the introduction to this essay, while my role as author means

that my account of the book is bound to be a partial one, this does not imply that

discussions by others are (or ever could be) disinterested. Every account of a text

has a context, which inevitably lends it biases of its own. In this case, an obvious

danger is that in the drive to discover and highlight patriarchal binaries in the

service of a wider critical project the novel’s complexities (if any) may be smoothed

away, subtleties of tone and meaning may be lost, and textual features either ignored

or corralled into a misleadingly restricted set of critical categories.

An illustration of the limitations imposed by critical context can be found in a

preliminary remark the critics make, not about Calypso Dreaming but about a far

better-known text, which they cite as an analogue for that book: ‘‘The paradox that

evil is both a social construction and an immanent force that awaits a human agent

to give it form and embodiment underpins Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967)’’

(p. 86). Now, The Owl Service does indeed concern an immanent force latent in the

landscape of a particular Welsh valley, a force that is moreover largely identified

with a female figure, Blodeuwedd from the Welsh mythological cycle, The

Mabinogion. The Mabinogion tells of Blodeuwedd’s creation from flowers as a wife

for the hero Lleu, her subsequent affair and complicity in Lleu’s murder, and

eventually her metamorphosis into an owl as a punishment. Within a patriarchal

medieval reading of the legend it is certainly plausible to describe Blodeuwedd as

evil, or at least as the channel for evil. She is an Eve figure, created for Lleu as Eve

was for Adam, and as with Eve her weakness and lust are punished at the tale’s

conclusion.

This is not, however, an approach that can be read across into Garner’s reversion

of the story in The Owl Service. As Stephens and McCallum have pointed out

elsewhere, reversions ‘‘always impose their own cultural presuppositions in the

process of retelling’’ (Stephens and McCallum, 1998, p. 4), and Garner’s


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Blodeuwedd is a post-White Goddess creation who cannot be satisfactorily

assimilated to binary Judeo-Christian notions of good and evil. Like gods and

goddesses in many cultures she has more than one aspect: she can be benevolent

(‘‘flowers’’) as well as cruel (‘‘owls’’); but even her cruel aspect is no more ‘‘evil’’

than, for example, the Hindu goddess Kali is ‘‘evil.’’ Moreover, in writing The Owl

Service Garner rejected what he called ‘‘Manichean oversimplicity’’ of his earliest

work, addressing the interaction of personal autonomy and fate in a manner that

owes more to Oedipus Rex than to the good-versus-evil plots of some children’s

fantasy (Garner, 1997, p. 110). In calling Blodeuwedd ‘‘evil,’’ therefore, the critics

introduce a binary term at odds with the moral universe of The Owl Service. It is of

course an irony of a critical method devoted to ‘‘dismantling […] binarisms’’ (p. 85)

that in order to do so it may first be forced to precipitate them, but this is a pattern

we shall see repeated.

In Bradford et al.’s account of Calypso Dreaming, the goddess Brigan too is

described as an ‘‘evil power’’ and ‘‘evil in a female form’’ (p. 86). Since I had seen

myself as writing a book in the broad tradition of Garner’s work (at least in this

respect), I baulked at these phrases, which contradicted my own sense of Brigan’s

nature, even if, as ‘‘the herder of the dead’’ (Butler, 2002, p. 119), she is a more

unambiguously dark figure than Blodeuwedd. As with the Diktaean cave, however, I

was forced to ask how much of my sense of the book had made it to the page. Both I

and the critics were reading the text in the light of assumptions that largely

determined not only the significance of what we saw there, but even what was

visible in the first place. For their part the critics were primed to read the book in

binary terms, while I saw it as generally resisting binary classifications. Where they

understood Brigan as an ‘‘evil power,’’ to me she was a chthonic place-deity

insusceptible to categorization in terms of good and evil. Where they divided the

book’s characters into ‘‘ordinary people’’ and ‘‘extraordinary people’’ (p. 88) (the

latter being the ones with supernatural power), I felt that I had written the novel in

such a way as to disrupt and blur such neat divisions, with magic interacting

unpredictably with nature, and working through characters such as Tansy, whom the

critics place in the ‘‘ordinary’’ camp, as well as more obviously exceptional figures

such as Calypso. Finally, where they identified as normative for the book the views

of the religious healer Dominic, who indeed sees Brigan as demonic, I felt I had

written a text in which no single perspective was accorded normative status—and

that Dominic’s claims to superior understanding in particular were effectively

undermined by his attempted child-murder towards the end of the book. My

intention, in writing what was (far more than any other book I have authored) an

ensemble piece with no central protagonist, was that no one understanding of the

events depicted should be taken as final—an intention reflected in the novel’s final

lines, where it is pointed out (of a later incident recalling the events on Sweetholm)

that ‘‘the story’s crisis might have many explanations’’ (p. 191).

In short, many of the binaries that the critics saw as being reified in the text were

ones I saw as being deconstructed by it. The most significant of these for the present

purpose, given their project of exposing ‘‘male biases’’ in the book, is Calypso

Dreaming’s alleged valorization of male over female. How might the merits of this

proposition be assessed? One obvious way is to consider the text’s representation of


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its human characters. Of Calypso Dreaming’s five major male figures, one is a

philanderer in the throes of a mid-life crisis; one a businessman with a shady past;

while two might reasonably be described as religious fanatics and would-be (or

actual) homicides. The need some of these men have for domination and control,

along with their other stereotypically ‘‘masculine’’ qualities, is shown to be

dangerous and misguided. By comparison, the female characters, although flawed,

appear far more adequate human beings. The most sympathetic male character is

probably Harper, a teenager who lives in the commune on Sweetholm, but Harper—

who is gentle, empathetic and wishes to train as a nurse—is not an obvious poster

boy for patriarchy.

This is not a sufficient response, however, because male and female aspects of a

text may manifest themselves in a variety of domains, not just in terms of character

but also through imagery, vocabulary, and at all levels of linguistic and literary

organization. Nor are maleness and femaleness isolatable qualities: in ecofeminist

critical terms they operate largely through their association with other hierarchical

binaries such as reason/emotion and culture/nature. A consideration of male and

female characters, while relevant to the text’s ideological orientation, must therefore

be supplemented by an analysis of these more abstract and pervasive forms of

gendering. Here—not least because many readers of this article are likely to be

unfamiliar with the text under discussion—it will be convenient to examine

Bradford et al.’s conclusions through their close reading of a paragraph from near

the beginning of Calypso Dreaming, in which they perform just this kind of

analysis. The paragraph describes the island of Sweetholm itself rather than any of

its human inhabitants:

The Haven was the island’s one harbour. Elsewhere, the land plummeted in

stark cliffs or was skirted with lavish margins of mud. The undredged

quicksands were an asylum for wading birds. The sand and mud squirmed

with life, but had also sucked down sheep, dogs, even (the guidebook said)

occasional unwary humans. A party of Edwardian nuns had made their last

pilgrimage to the site of St Brigan’s ancient chapel and been swallowed, a

hundred years before. (Butler, 2002, p. 13)

After a brief discussion of the island’s place in the plot and the general

symbolism of wetlands (of which more later), the critics provide the following

commentary:

This initial mention of Brigan links her with the wetland and death, not with

the positive qualities of creativity and healing usually associated with Brigan/

Brigid (both as goddess and later saint). Rather than existing as an unmarked

natural environment, the wetland is an uncivilised and hostile space, as

denoted by the extended lexical sequence, ‘‘skirted with lavish margins…undredged quicksands… asylum for wading birds… squirmed with life…sucked down… swallowed.’’ The assumption of culture’s superiority over

nature is especially evident in the negative formulation ‘‘undredged,’’ which

implies that in a proper order of things the wetlands would be drained.

The horror associated with ‘‘quicksand’’—that is, nature in its destructive


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aspect—is underlined by the contrast between the site as an ‘‘asylum’’ for

birds but a threat to humans, and by the implicit horror of female bodily excess

(‘‘skirted with lavish margins’’). As ecofeminist criticism would argue, the

privileging of nature over culture [sic] instantiates associated hierarchical

dualities: mind over body, spirit over matter, male over female, reason over

emotion. This hierarchy is reinforced by the conventional association of

wetlands with despair, horror and gloom. (Bradford et al., 2008, p. 87).

Having suggested that the goddess Brigan is associated with ‘‘the wetland and

death,’’ the critics begin by noting that the shore around Sweetholm is not

represented as ‘‘an unmarked natural environment,’’ the apparent implication being

that such a representation would have been preferable, or at least possible. However,

to say that the island is not ‘‘an unmarked natural environment’’ is either an

ecological truism, given that no such environment has existed in Britain for many

centuries, or (if we take ‘‘unmarked’’ in the linguistic sense) a tautology. As John

Stephens has pointed out, ‘‘there are no ‘facts’ without interpretations’’ (Stephens,

1992, p. 205) and any use of language is always already implicated in an existing

matrix of values and norms. There is therefore no way of representing Sweetholm

neutrally (or naturally), free from association with values derived from human

culture. The substantive issue, of course, is what values are evinced by the passage.

For the critics it shows us ‘‘an uncivilised and hostile space,’’ and they cite six

phrases drawn from various parts of the passage in order to convey this cumulative

impression. Some of their choices are surprising (it is not immediately clear why

being ‘‘an asylum for wading birds’’ indicates hostility, for example); but what they

have in common is that they concentrate on those aspects of the island that can be

stereotypically gendered female—on the mud and sands that are soft, yielding and

potentially smothering. The passage’s reference to ‘‘stark cliffs,’’ by contrast, is

conspicuously ignored, perhaps because cliffs (although just as lethal as quicksands)

are hard, angular and rocky, and less easily accommodated by a stereotypical female

characterization.

In fact the critics choose, in a significant act of selection, to attend not to the

island as a whole (the various terrains of which are extensively described in the

novel), but only to the ‘‘wetland’’ around its edge. ‘‘Wetland’’ is a striking lexical

choice here, referring as it typically does to fens, swamps, bogs or river estuaries,

rather than to the tidal foreshores of islands. Its use in this context allows the authors

to invoke the wider literary associations of swamps with patriarchal notions of

horror, negativity and the female. A little earlier in their discussion they establish

these associations by quoting Rod Giblett’s Postmodern Wetlands (‘‘Wetlands have

almost invariably been represented in the patriarchal western tradition in metaphors

of despair and despondency’’ [Giblett, 1996, p. 8]) and illustrate the point by citing a

passage from Anne Isaacs and Paul Zelinsky’s picturebook Swamp Angel (1994), in

which a Tennessee wagon train becomes mired in ‘‘Dejection Swamp’’ (Bradford

et al., 2008, p. 86). This is the tradition to which the critics propose to recruit the

description of Sweetholm’s shoreline. In order to strengthen that co-option they

draw particular attention to the word ‘‘undredged,’’ glossing it a ‘‘negative


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formulation […] which implies that in a proper order of things the wetlands would

be drained.’’

At this point it is worth reiterating that the environment being described in

Calypso Dreaming is not in fact a swamp that could be ‘‘drained,’’ but an island

surrounded by the sea: the passage under discussion forms part of a description of a

journey there by ferry. To refer to the intertidal zone of the Bristol Channel (which

has the second largest tidal range in the world) as if it could be drained for human

use, and (relatedly) to confuse draining with dredging, seems careless, even if it is

explicable as the result of an attempt to deploy the rhetorical power of wetland

iconography. It is a striking move, however, in illustrating how the application of a

given critical schema may lead not to an ‘‘interrogative’’ reading that probes the text

for associations and networks of value, but rather to a re-writing that projects such

associations onto the text.

Not that this is, in reality, an either/or choice. Reading, like writing, is both a

critical and a creative act, which always involves a dialogic relation between what

the reader brings to the text in terms of predispositions and expectations, and what

the text offers to the reader. Reading within the terms of a critical methodology may

make us sensitive to aspects of a text that would otherwise escape our notice; but it

may also encourage us to skim, to seek out key phrases that fit a given critical script.

In this case the determination to view Sweetholm’s coast in terms of inland

‘‘wetland’’ tropes has rendered the relationship between text and reader rather one-

sided. A further indication that this reading is to a degree being conducted on

autopilot is the inadvertent reversal of ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘culture’’ in the list of binary

oppositions towards the end of the critics’ discussion. That this error escaped the

notice of all four authors suggests the extent to which formulae of this kind can

serve to dull rather than sharpen critical attention.

Beyond these matters of detail lies the more general framing of the analysis. In

Bradford et al.’s account, feelings of negativity and (repeatedly) horror are

associated with the description of Sweetholm, but this reading relies heavily on

extra-textual assumptions about the significance of the passage’s imagery. To read

the sentence ‘‘The undredged quicksands were an asylum for wading birds’’ as a

negative description, let alone one indicative of horror, requires us to posit an

implied author for whom dredging is by default a desirable activity and the welfare

of wading birds at best a matter of indifference. What might lead us to impute such

views? As we have seen, the critics draw attention to the word ‘‘undredged,’’ noting

it as a ‘‘negative formulation.’’ However, although the ‘‘un-’’ prefix is indeed

negative in a linguistic sense, it is equally so in ‘‘unploughed meadow’’ and indeed

‘‘unmarked natural environment,’’ neither of them phrases suggesting regret at a

lack of human intervention. Why might ‘‘undredged’’ not be a positive comment on

the sands as a pristine and abundant source of food for wading birds, as indeed the

word ‘‘asylum’’ implies?

That the possibility of such a reading is not considered may result from the

critics’ approach to the significance of wetlands in ‘‘patriarchal western tradition,’’

in which (to quote their remarks on Swamp Angel) ‘‘negative constructions of

wetlands are accepted as a given’’ (p. 86). However, local culture, geography and

land use are likely to have an important bearing on the ways in which different types


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of terrain are viewed, and it would be a mistake to treat this tradition as invariant

across space and time. The significance of wetlands in the nineteenth-century

American frontier setting of Isaacs and Zelinsky’s story, or in Western Australia

where Rod Giblett is based, is quite different from their significance in the densely-

populated, ecologically-pressured, post-industrial context of twenty-first century

Britain, where they are typically regarded as scarce habitats of great ecological

value. Contemporary British children reading of an ‘‘asylum for wading birds’’ are

more likely to think of the work of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, whose

showpiece conservation site at Slimbridge on the Severn Estuary is just a few miles

from Sweetholm’s fictional location, than to see an implicit call for the land to be

drained or dredged. (Indeed, the island of Steep Holm, on which Sweetholm is

largely based, is in reality a nature reserve.) While there is no reason why any

individual reader should be aware of this local context, thinking in terms of a

homogeneous western tradition that treats the very different ecological situations of

nineteenth-century Tennessee and twenty-first century Britain as culturally identical

militates against the possibility of a more geographically nuanced reading, as well

as (in this case) glossing over the usual meaning of such words as ‘‘asylum.’’

Like their negative interpretation of ‘‘undredged,’’ the critics’ later identification

of the phrase ‘‘skirted with lavish margins of mud’’ with ‘‘an implicit horror of

female bodily excess’’ relies on the rhetorical framing of the discussion as a whole,

which takes the existence of an animus against nature and against the female

(amongst other patriarchal assumptions) as an axiom to be illustrated rather than a

hypothesis to be examined. Particularly striking in this regard is the inclusion of

‘‘squirmed with life’’ amongst the phrases associating the island and its goddess

with ‘‘the wetland and death.’’ At first sight this is virtually an oxymoron: how can

the shoreline’s life-sustaining properties be suggestive of death? The contradiction

is however less conspicuous when read under a critical rubric that assumes disdain

for, and disgust with, nature and its procreative power, and considers the kind of life

that squirms in quicksand (such as the lugworms Harper is later shown harvesting

for bait) as obviously unworthy of positive consideration.

An alternative reading of the paragraph, and one that corresponds with my

intention in writing it, is that it portrays nature as having multiple facets, which from

a human point of view are beneficial in some respects and dangerous in others. For

example, there is a contrast, as the critics note, between the capacity of the

quicksands to kill and their role in providing a habitat for invertebrates and wading

birds. Rather than privilege one of these aspects, however, we might suggest that the

paragraph’s balanced syntax encourages the reader to give due weight to both,

constructing nature as a complex set of forces not primarily calibrated to reflect

human concerns and categories. (If we then wish to imagine a deity who personifies

such multiple attributes, we might do worse than think of the Water Goddess whom

Rod Giblett sees as an aspect of the prehistoric Great Goddess espoused by Marija

Gimbutas, a matriarchal figure ‘‘in whom ‘the aspects of death and life are

inextricably intertwined’’’ [Giblett, 1996, p. 197].1) Such a reading tends to displace

1 A figure of this kind, under the name of Sulis, is a central character in my later novel, Death of a Ghost

(2006b).


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or dismantle binary oppositions, and indeed to de-centre human perspectives

altogether, a common feature of ecological theory and of fictions that draw on it, as I

have discussed elsewhere (Butler, 2006a, pp. 130–133). Bradford et al. also

recognize such de-centring as an important element of ecocritical thinking (pp.

81–82), but being committed to an interpretation of Calypso Dreaming as

antagonistic to the natural environment are obliged to see the capacity of the sands

to nourish life as contributing to rather than counterbalancing the sense of them as

‘‘uncivilized and hostile.’’ Indeed, they view the ‘‘horror’’ of the sands as being

‘‘underlined’’ by that capacity.

The issue of anthropocentrism does however figure in this part of their

discussion, in a slightly different form. By describing the novel as showing the

quicksands to be ‘‘an ‘asylum’ for birds but a threat to humans’’ the critics introduce

a simple binary opposition that implicitly sets human beings on one side and the rest

of nature (here represented synecdochally by the shorebirds) on the other. In the

passage from the novel, however, humans are not the only, nor even the first, species

to be identified as in danger from the sands; in fact they are listed third, after sheep

and dogs, with the implication that human deaths are relatively infrequent. Just as

there is an irony in the quicksands’ power to give life being associated with death,

so there is too in a critique of anthropocentrism that erases mention of non-human

species. In both cases this results from a more complex textual picture being

reduced to the binary categories demanded by the chosen method of analysis.

Finally, the question of genre is relevant to the terms in which the critics’

discussion of Calypso Dreaming and its relationship with ecology is conducted.

Although not primarily an environmental novel, Calypso Dreaming establishes a

realistic ecological context, particularly if we consider ecology in what the critics

identify as its most recent form, as a study of ‘‘sustainable life modes’’ (p. 84).

Sweetholm lies close to the mainland (the island is strewn with chicken bones raided

by gulls from the takeaways a few miles away), but is difficult to navigate to, and, as

with many communities around Britain’s coast, this combination of proximity and

isolation makes it vulnerable. The traditional industries of farming and fishing are

suffering an exodus by the young (Butler, 2002, p. 24), the soil is poor and subject to

erosion (pp. 55–56), and tourism—largely based on the island’s bird and seal

populations—has proved an unreliable compensation, with newly-built holiday

chalets standing empty (p. 31). The only substantial new money on the island comes

from a businessman who wishes to play out his messianic-tinged fantasies there, and

whose contact with the indigenous community is minimal.

One might expect an ecocritical reading of the book to address some of these

features, but in fact the critics confine themselves to those aspects of Calypso

Dreaming that can be assimilated to their own focus on utopian and dystopian texts.

Accordingly, they open their discussion by introducing Calypso Dreaming as a

‘‘dystopian fantasy’’ (Bradford et al., 2008, p. 85). While this is a defensible

description it is not one I would adopt, implying as it does a centrality of political

and/or environmental critique that I do not feel characterizes the book. In itself this

is perhaps a quibble, but by claiming the novel as a dystopia the critics are able to

justify reading it in accordance with the hermeneutic strategies conventional to that

genre, which tend to foreground elements of political commentary, satire and moral


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exhortation, and to find it wanting in those terms. Once categorized as dystopian, the

book can even be read as a literal essay in environmental prediction, an

interpretation that would otherwise be highly unlikely. Thus, Bradford et al. give

the final word on the book to a hypothetical ‘‘environmental scientist’’ who ‘‘might

object’’ that Calypso Dreaming’s plagues and supernatural disruptions are less of a

threat in the real world than global warming and the burning of fossil fuels (p. 89).

While this is trivially true, it would qualify as an objection only if Calypso

Dreaming were viewed as an actual prognosis for the planet’s future—a mistake

few environmental scientists would be likely to make. However, since the critics use

this hypothetical remark as a bridge by which to introduce discussion of a different

text (Julia Bertagna’s Exodus), its value as a critique of Calypso Dreaming is never

assessed.

Conclusion: The Author as Critic

It is received wisdom that authors of fiction should never respond to criticism, not

least because such responses are frequently read as intemperate and defensive.

Nevertheless, while the exercise carries obvious risks, it seems perverse to suppose

that the one person disqualified from engaging in critical discussion of a novel

should be its author. Moreover, as this essay has shown, readings grounded within

academic criticism, no less than those emanating from authors of fiction, are shaped

and directed by extra-textual priorities and concerns. The framing of a discussion in

terms of a particular form of enquiry or critical methodology ensures that certain

textual features will be hailed as significant while others will be ignored, and that

the text will be discovered to reproduce or resist pre-existing discourses in which the

critic happens to be interested. Inevitably, any discussion of a text is to a degree an

exercise in procrustean rhetoric.

That authors of fiction have an emotional relationship with their work is a

commonplace, but the institutional settings within which the academic discussion of

texts takes place tend to disguise the extent to which academic authors too may be

invested in their own ideas and writings. For example, in engaging with a critical

discussion of Calypso Dreaming it is almost inevitable, no matter how measured my

tone or how carefully I may address anticipated objections, that as the novel’s

author I will be read—or perhaps diagnosed—as driven by my affective attachment

to the text, and that my arguments will to some extent be seen as discountable on

that ground. By contrast, for an academic to respond to a critique is regarded as a

normal professional activity. Academic discourse is understood to progress in large

part through dialogue and debate, and this process is facilitated by the convention of

treating fellow critics as rational agents and avoiding ad hominem speculation about

their motivations for writing. There is thus a structural inequality in academic

reading practices, which generally allow for statements by authors of fiction to be

interpreted with reference to their presumed emotional commitment to their work,

while inhibiting such interpretations when authors of academic criticism discuss or

defend their work. One aim of the critical project of which this article is a part is to


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make visible this imbalance and the conventions that maintain it, as a prerequisite to

a more productive and equitable dialogue between ‘‘critical’’ and ‘‘creative’’ writers.

Pointing out that bias is no less inevitable amongst academics than amongst

authors of fiction may relieve the latter of one impediment to their critical opinions

about their own work being taken seriously, although the corollary is that both

groups should expect a rigorous and even sceptical hearing. However, we may still

ask what, if anything, distinguishes the position of authors from that of others who

may wish to comment critically on a work of fiction. What have I been able to bring

to the discussion of Calypso Dreaming in my capacity as its author that anyone else

might not have brought as an engaged critical reader? Is my contribution valuable

only insofar as I am able to generalize my thoughts, and divest them of the

insinuation that their authorial origin should in itself make them of significance and

moment to all?

I certainly do not claim the god-like authority to determine the text’s meaning

that Barthes mocked in ‘‘The Death of the Author.’’ True, I have certain kinds of

experience and knowledge that it would be impossible for anyone else to acquire. I

know a good deal about the origins of Calypso Dreaming, and about what places,

images, texts and ideas went into its making. I know about the many dead ends and

sudden fancies that bloomed and died in the drafts. I understand (if imperfectly)

why certain decisions were taken in the course of that process. But how useful or

relevant is that kind of information in a critical discussion of the text as published?

Can it, indeed, be trusted as reliable? These are questions too large to be resolved in

this essay, but I can at least make two observations.

First, for a number of historical, cultural and psychological reasons, the

experiences and opinions of authors are an abiding subject of interest to many

readers, as testified by the abundance of author interviews, tours, and so on, along

with the substantial body of scholarship devoted to the evolution of texts. Second,

thinking about texts is (like writing them) an iterative process, and while my sense

of the text I happened to write cannot be authoritative in the transcendental sense

criticized by Barthes, it constitutes a rich point of reference, inasmuch as I have

devoted unusual amounts of time and energy to considering the book’s form and

meaning. The consequence of these factors, considered in combination, is that my

opinions about the text are potentially influential, especially if I present them in a

rhetorically effective manner. In terms of Stanley Fish’s ‘‘interpretive communi-

ties,’’ I am likely to find myself a community leader (Fish, 1980, pp. 171–174 et

passim).

By the same token, my vivid sense of Calypso Dreaming has given me a motive

to look closely and critically at Bradford et al.’s discussion of that book. (I read and

enjoyed the rest of New World Orders but not, I admit, with the same degree of

concentrated attention.) The fact that, unlike most of their readers, I already had

strong opinions about the novel made me sensitive to those points at which they

seemed to strike a ‘‘wrong note,’’ and spurred me to think about why that might be.

As has become clear, I concluded that much of the difficulty originated in the

critics’ need (itself determined by the role of the discussion within their book as a

whole) to assimilate the text to a number of critical tropes and narratives for which it

was in some respects a poor fit. However, I also acknowledge that their critique


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alerted me to features of the text that, in the light of their discussion, I would now

handle differently. So, although (for the reasons I have given) I do not believe that

the description of Sweetholm discussed above conforms to the patriarchal discourse

to which they assign it, I am now more aware of places where the book’s language

does tend towards that discourse (‘‘the island petered out in dubious marshland’’ [p.

32]). Moreover, the final scenes of the book contain elements of melodrama that I

have long considered unfortunate in disturbing the tonal balance of the book but

previously accepted as necessary in order to achieve a definitive conclusion to the

story. It now seems to me that another consequence was to invite schematic (if not

binary) moral readings of the text’s world and characters. Naturally, I am

considering how I might have done it better.

Finally, although I have made some specific criticisms of Bradford et al.’s

reading of Calypso Dreaming, much of what I have had to say applies far more

generally. In my own academic criticism, too, I have frequently used a work of

fiction in order to illustrate a given point, and in doing so I have done violence to it,

ripping it from its novelistic context and placing it in my academic one. To confess

this is not to make a dreadful admission but to acknowledge an inevitability. Critics

may try as best they can to understand texts in their own terms and to present them

in appropriate contexts; but there are always more terms to be found, and (as

Jacques Derrida pointed out) context is never saturated (Derrida, 1988, pp. 2–3). If,

as in the case of New World Orders, critics are engaged in a book that covers a good

deal of ground and discusses numerous texts along the way,2 then a degree of

misrepresentation may be the inevitable price they pay in exchange for clarity. Such

trade-offs are neither an aberration nor confined to academic writing. Whether they

involve a novelist sacrificing subtlety in order to achieve closure for a novel, or

critics framing contexts and cherry picking examples in order to advance their

argument clearly, they are an integral part of what writers do.

References

Anon. (2009). Two Intriguing Islands—with Amazing Histories. Bear Essentials: The Newsletter of

Cardiff Bay Yacht Club, April, 13–14. Accessed August 24, 2012 from http://www.cbyc.co.uk/club/

documents/be009.pdf.

Barthes, Roland. (1967/1977). The Death of the Author. In Image Music Text (pp. 142–148). London:

Fontana Press.

Bradford, Clare, Mallan, Kelly, Stephens, John and McCallum, Robyn. (2008). New World Orders in

Contemporary Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Butler, Charles. (1998). Timon’s Tide. London: Orion.

Butler, Charles. (2002). Calypso Dreaming. London: Collins Voyager.

Butler, Charles. (2006a). Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of

Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, and Diana Wynne Jones. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow

Press/Children’s Literature Association.

Butler, Charles. (2006b). Death of a Ghost. London: HarperCollins.

2 As a crude measure, there are about 100 primary texts listed in the References section of New World

Orders, for a book of some 200 pages.


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http://www.cbyc.co.uk/club/documents/be009.pdf

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Butler, Charles. (2007). Holiday Work: On Writing for Children and for the Academy. Children’s

Literature in Education, 38(3), 163–172.

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and Marvin Redpost: Is He a Girl? Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 34(1), 3–20.

Derrida, Jacques. (1988). Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Fish, Stanley. (1980). Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Garner, Alan. (1997). The Voice that Thunders: Essays and Lectures. Edinburgh: The Harvill Press.

Giblett, Rod. (1996). Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press.

Isaacs, Anne and Zelinsky, Paul O. (1994). Swamp Angel. New York: Dutton.

Stephens, John. (1992). Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction. London: Longman.

Stephens, John and McCallum, Robyn. (1998). Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and

Metanarratives in Children’s Literature. New York: Garland.


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critiquing calypso: authorial and academic bias in the reading of a young adult novel

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