echoes of myth as they read and absorb the novels’ more subtle messages and
connections.
Similarly, Robert Cormier’s After the First Death (1979), and Jill Paton Walsh’s novels
Goldengrove (1972) and Unleaving (1976), allude to lines from Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘A
refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London’ (After the first death, there is
no other) and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Spring and fall’ (Margaret, are you grieving/
Over Goldengrove unleaving?). In each case, a perfectly coherent reading of the text is
possible without the reader’s knowledge of the intertextual poetic allusions; but the
potential for a metaphoric reading is enhanced by the reader’s previous knowledge of
them. In the case of Paton Walsh’s Goldengrove, for example, the metaphor for
metaphysical transience first mooted by Hopkins in his image of the Goldengrove
unleaving, is employed again by Paton Walsh as the name of the fictional house,
‘Goldengrove’, from which the book takes its title. This is the place of symbolic and literal
change where the two teenage characters spend their (significantly) late-summer
vacation of maturation and realisation. The image is extended in numerous other
references: changing body-shapes, changed sleeping arrangements, changed attitudes to
each other, and not least, in repeated references to the falling leaves of late summer. It
also invokes and parodies the style and content of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse
(1927), with a polyphony which moves effortlessly between several viewpoints, and
positions its readers accordingly. This polyphonic, multilayered structure, which is also
a feature of the Cormier novel, is particularly interesting to an intertextuality of
children’s literature because it breaks the intertextual discursive codes and conventions
of the single viewpoint and linear narrative that are usually typical of the genre.
Young readers who come to these novels by Cooper, Garner, Cormier and Paton Walsh
with an explicit knowledge of their intertexts will have a markedly different experience of
reading. They will experience what Barthes has described as the ‘circular memory of
reading’ (Barthes 1975:36). This describes a reading process where the need consciously
to recall and to refer back to specific, obligatory intertexts now being quoted as
metaphor and/or metonomy in the focused texts, restricts the reader’s opportunity for
free intertextual interplay at the point of reading. The reading experience is, therefore,
simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal as the reader seeks to refer to the ‘borrowing’
and at the same time to integrate it into a new context. It is the essence of this kind of
reading to deny readers an opportunity for linear reading as they move in and out of the
text to make connections between it and the intertext(s).
Another Paton Walsh novel, A Parcel of Patterns (1983), is a fictionalised account of
the bubonic plague’s destruction of the inhabitants of the Derbyshire village of Eyam. It
uses many secondary signals to ground the events in their historic context and to
ensure that readers locate the events in these pretextual happenings by, for example,
the use of paratextual devices such as the words of the publisher’s introduction:
Eyam (pronounced Eem) is a real village in Derbyshire and many of the events in this
evocative novel are based on what actually happened there in the year of the
Plague.
Paton Walsh 1983132 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES