In Competition No. 2583 you were invited to provide an extract from one of the following chapters which appear in a real work of modern literary criticism: ‘Noddy: Discursive Threads and Intertextuality’; ‘Sexism or Subversion: Querying Gender relations in The Famous Five and Malory Towers’.
I was pulled up by one regular competitor (obviously not a member of the Noddy Club) for setting two challenges, within a relatively short space of time, requiring knowledge of Enid Blyton’s oeuvre. While often panned by adults, Blyton’s books are enormously popular with children. These mock-worthy chapter headings come from an academic volume entitled Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children’s Literature, by David Rudd, which is a much-admired and surprisingly accessible attempt to analyse this magnetic appeal.
On the whole, your entries were convincing, though you parted ways with the genuine practitioner in your ability to get your point across clearly and in fewer than 150 words. Honourable mentions to James Bench-Capon and Timothy Pitt-Payne. The top prize of £30 goes to George Simmers; £25 each to the rest, printed below.
If Mr Plod is at once uber-father yet (in post-Lacanian sense) the Not-Father, then Mrs Tubby Bear is both motherly yet emphatically Noddy’s Not-Mother (fur being wood’s tactile contrary). A heuristic fiction, a character in name only, she serves nonetheless as an instrument of end feeling as potent as its design is recognisably — indeed peculiarly — Blyton’s. Her first function — to dress Noddy — is deeply paradoxical. The purpose of garments is always problematic — they socialise by covering the organs of sex with indexes of gender. Yet here what is covered is precisely Noddy’s (unmentionable) lack of genitalia. Mrs Tubby Bear, her infinitely huggable plushness covered by
frilled apron, gives Noddy garments that define him as ‘boy’, including a hat acting as aural signifier each time he indicates acceptance of Toyland’s hegemonic ideology. He nods; he jingles. His fundamental androgyny manages only a speaking silence, audible, perhaps, only to Big Ears.
George Simmers
The unstable gender paradigms in the Famous Five and Malory Towers series have already generated a quantum of critical theoretical debate, of which the best-known texts are Foucault’s Transgressions et Châtiments Scolaires à l’Univers Pervers d’Enid Blyton, Eagleton’s Holy Knickers: an Underworld of Radical Desire and Germaine Greer’s What’s the Bloody Fuss About?. Inevitably, discussion centres on the ‘George’ and ‘Bill’ characters, whose proto- or crypto-sapphic proclivities are slyly recuperated by their insertion into the supposedly innocent, asexual genre of children’s fiction. We know from Freud that children’s sexuality is polymorphous-perverse and must be fixed as ‘normal’ by the coerced (through schooling and the family structure) sublimation of taboo wishes. The ruling dynamic of Blyton’s fiction draws energy from precisely the moment of aporia when sexual orientation is in flux and defiantly subversive options may become more acceptable — more authentic — than ‘healthy’, socially approved ones.
G.M. Davis
It is at best naive of Gore Blahimi (Fictive Stereotypology p.57) to regard as ‘innocently ludic’ the nominal transgendering of the dominant female in the Famous Five as George — ‘with its gentle nod on one side to Eliot, on the other to Sand’. In truth this was a deadly serious attempt by Blyton to distract the attention of the monitoring adult reader. She knew that what would penetrate more profoundly into the emerging social consciousness of her target audience was the fact that the canine fifth member of the matrix — so often the hero — was designated Timmy. (For the significance of fictional pet names see ‘Down, boy — the Lassie effect’, Niamh Herrigan’s oviferous article in The Journal of Pre- and Post-pubertal Studies p.72ff.) ‘Timmy to the rescue’, ‘Well done, Timmy!’, ‘Thank goodness for Timmy’: the normative impact of such chapter headings on impressionable minds is horrifyingly incalculable.
W.J. Webster
The interwoven, discursive vocabularies of authority, property and morality inform all Blyton’s ‘Noddy’ texts, and constructive/constructing child-readers will inhabit the experience of these vocabularies in many ways. Blyton, as heterodiegetic narrator (‘goodness me, look’), frequently blends her narratives with contemporary textual discourse. For example, in 1957, in ‘Do Look Out, Noddy!’, Noddy is threatened with incarceration by Plod, who alleges mental dysfunction (‘HAVE YOU GONE MAD?’) [Blyton:19]. Within months, Pinter’s The Birthday Party explored the same thread: clear evidence of collusive intertextuality, in which both draw on Kafka and Zamyatin. For Plod, read ‘Monty’, the ‘authority’ with which Goldberg threatens Stanley. Blyton parodies the hermetic institutionality which Pinter satirises more formally, nodding to Kafka where Blyton winks. Latterly, the phenomenologies of authority/morality threads have been re-contextualised by such experimentalists as Rowling — as in Ron Weasley’s ‘HAVE YOU GONE MAD?’ in The Philosopher’s Stone [Rowling:299], reiterated by Hermione in Deathly Hallows.
Bill Greenwell
In searching for the Ur-Noddy, we must first look at the self-reflexivity of literature. Only by examining the tales of Noddy and their relationship to other heroic works is it possible to perceive how Noddy has been defined and constructed. Noddy lives in the shadow of Big Ears — he is Don Quixote, Cervantes’ impractical idealist. More, he is the little man, the ‘hommelet’ or Hamlet of his time. By foregrounding aspects of language use, we undertake a meaningful task. Derrida’s focus on performative utterance considers how the story proceeds; to understand the literary utterance that brings characters and their actions into being. Noddy’s bell is telling here. When Noddy takes the umbrella of Big Ears to bed with him, he fulfils the concept of friendship, which has been created by intertextuality. This is a massive literary creation. Interpreting is a social practice — we ask ourselves what this story is about and our answer rests on intertextuality.
Laura Garratt
No. 2586: Humble pie
There is a mood of contrition — or is there? Not everyone was persuaded by the bankers’ recent words of remorse. You are invited to submit a more convincing apology on their behalf, in verse, for the current financial meltdown (16 lines maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2586’ by 26 February or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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