Challenging the Canon (MoseyMoo's EPQ essay)
Aug 21, 2014 14:51:10 GMT -5
Christmas Chief, Poe's Coats Host Toast, and 3 more like this
Post by moseymoo on Aug 21, 2014 14:51:10 GMT -5
Okay, so for those of you who don't know, I chose to do my EPQ (Extended Project Qualification -- basically a 5000 word essay with a whole load of self evaluation on the side ) on ASOUE.
What follows is just the main essay (I assumed that you guys wouldn't have any particular interest in reading my abstract, methodology etc., and you certainly don't want to read my project log!!). I also haven't put in the footnotes or bibliography, but if anyone has questions about references, I can put both of those up. Also, you can pretty much ignore the last paragraph, it was tacked on at the end because the exam board require "evidence of self evaluation in the main body of the essay"...
Anyhoo, here it is (excuse any clunky writing/awful ideas):
Challenging the Canon
To what extent can ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ be seen as engaging with the concept of Canon in a subversive manner?
Before one can comment upon a text’s relationship with the mythical beast that is ‘The Western Canon’, one must first establish an adequate definition of it. Many literary commentators have attempted to appraise the importance and -- perhaps more significantly -- the contents of the canon, but none with the near idolatrous zeal of Harold Bloom. In his impassioned defence of the canon, he describes canonical texts as being imbued with “the shock of... audacity... [or] the tang of originality” and claims that, for a text or author to enter the canon they must rise to the “conflict between past genius and present aspiration, in which the prize is literary survival or canonical inclusion” . Yet, despite this assertion that the best writers are those that have the daring to square up to the literary past, he presents the canon as being somewhat untouchable: if a text can pass the indefinable entrance exam it becomes a member not just for life but for eternity. In fact, in Bloom’s hands, it is as though the canon becomes one very long religious doctrine for the secular religion of “the autonomy of the aesthetic” : one can puzzle over one’s relationship to it, and in doing so can reach a deeper level of understanding that can allow one to contribute to it; but to suggest outright that it may not be wholly correct becomes a form of blasphemy.
The mere suggestion, then, that a series of children’s books might have the literary might to reflect upon the reverential glory of the canon might easily be dismissed as entirely unfounded. However, ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ subverts the rather limited expectations of its genre before the first novel even starts. Despite the novels being written by Daniel Handler, the title pages and covers of the books list the author as being “Lemony Snicket”, the fictional narrative voice of the series. This is, by no means, unique within the genre of children’s literature -- another prominent example is the ‘Goosebumps’ series which purports to be written by the fictional character “R. L. Stein” -- yet Handler uses the character of “Lemony Snicket” to create a metafictional conceit which is sustained throughout the series. Patricia Waugh defines metafictional literature as that which “explicitly and overtly lays bare its condition of artifice, and which thereby explores the problematic relationship between life and fiction” and suggests that “[i]t may, often in the form of parody, comment on a specific work or fictional mode” . The manner in which the series demonstrates elements of both of these factors can be seen before the text of the novels even begins. Each novel is dedicated by the fictional author to the equally fictional character of “Beatrice”, whose image is persistently refracted from the fictional past through the events of the novels. This figure of Beatrice, who is described in the dedication of the first novel as “darling, dearest, dead” , acts as the hyperbolically tragic, beloved muse of Snicket in a way which recalls arguably the most famous Beatrice in literary history: Dante’s Beatrice.
In ‘Inferno’, the first book of ‘The Divine Comedy’, Dante describes Beatrice as a paragon of womanly virtue, “for whose sake alone / The breed of men exceeds all things that dwell / Closed in heaven” . The hyperbolic sentiment expressed in this phrase conveys a sense of Beatrice’s immense importance to Dante. She influences him on two distinct levels: firstly, her memory acts as Dante’s real life muse; secondly, as a character within the narrative, she becomes the driving force behind Dante’s journey through the depths of hell to the very heights of heaven. Within the fictional reality perpetuated through the novels, Snicket’s Beatrice acts in much the same way, occupying the position both of “writing subject and… written object” . This dualism is expressed through the eleventh of the thirteen dedications to Beatrice: “Dead women tell no tales. / Sad men write them down”. This phrase parodies Poe’s assertion that “the death… of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the World -- and… the lips… best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover” by expressing much the same sentiment through phrasing that parallels the “Dead men tell no tales” motto of story-book pirates, foreshadowing the nautical tribulations that the Baudelaires must face in the novel.
However, the dedication alludes to a much weightier theme in literature more generally, one that is echoed in Poe’s sentiment above: the literary tradition of a male dominated canon to silence women by writing them. The author has a form of dictatorship over his text that allows him to play God, pulling the strings of his female puppets. Handler explores this ostensible dominance of the writer by illustrating Snicket attempting to regain control over his deceased love by writing about her. Much the same comment can be made about Dante: within the events of the poem, Beatrice is granted a highly significant role as a metonym for theology and is a prime example of female agency within literature; however, despite this, Charles Williams notes in ‘The Figure of Beatrice’ that Beatrice “cannot command [Virgil], though she puts her trust in his fair speech” . Within the conceit of the poem, this serves to illustrate that Theology cannot order around Literature, but also reminds the reader of the ultimate male power within the patriarchal system of the novel: God. Though Beatrice is presented oftentimes as dominant over Dante, one can never forget that, like God, he occupies the sole position of dominance over the events of his poetry.
Handler takes this idea of the author as God and turns it on its head by revealing the fallacies and unreliable nature of the “author” of ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’. Snicket uses his narrative to reanimate Beatrice, much as Dante did; however, Handler, the true author, ensures that the reader is fully aware that, in life, Beatrice rejected Snicket’s love, as he has Snicket tell the reader that she wrote “a two-hundred-page book, explaining every single detail of the bad news at great length” . By realigning Beatrice as a female figure who has the necessary agency required to escape the narrow patriarchal norm of the written woman and become a writer in herself, Handler also recasts Snicket as a reader, who admits that “I stayed up all night reading it, and I read it still, over and over, and it is as if my darling Beatrice is bringing me bad news every day and every night of my life” . The shift from past to present tense in this admission is indicative of the length of time that has passed since that event; whilst the repetition of “over” reinforces Snicket’s continued obsession, suggesting the inversion of Dante’s attempt to reify Beatrice by writing her: Snicket can only reclaim his beloved by carrying out the subdominant act of reading. Like any number of literary women who wallow in their mourning and weep over the letters of their lost love, Snicket must reconcile himself to the fact that his writing cannot purge Beatrice of her agency and mould her into a woman who would have loved him. In this manner, Handler subverts the tendency of the male dominated canon to silence women by presenting a narrator that, despite pretences of agency, is lorded over by the image of his dead lover that he can only retrieve through her written work.
However, this allusion to Dante’s Beatrice, which Pugh describes as “the thematic touchstone of the series” , is undermined by its lack of familiarity to the child reader: one can hardly expect the 9-12 year old target audience of the series to be familiar with the sexual politics of ‘The Divine Comedy’. ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ is laden with allusions to works of literature which remain elusive to its ostensible target audience, but which provide revealing glimpses of insight and moments of humour for those who are ‘in the know’, so to speak. Some of the most oblique of these references occur in the eighth book of the series, which documents the Baudelaire orphans’ experiences in ‘The Hostile Hospital’. The book contains a sequence in which the Baudelaires must visit some of the patients. The passage is laden with Handler’s trademark ironic wit: readers familiar with Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’ can chuckle self-contentedly at the image of “Clarissa Dalloway, who did not seem to have anything wrong with her but was staring sadly out the window” ; and those acquainted with Camus can appreciate the irony of seeing “Bernard Rieux in... the Plague Ward” . However, the word ‘appreciate’ is paramount here: to the uninitiated reader, these references are meaningless, and one can hardly imagine a ten year old grasping the wit of an allusion to “Cynthia Vane” , one of Nabokov’s eponymous ‘Vane Sisters’. It seems then that ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ is imbued with a second level of meaning, a sort of coded subtext which allows the novels to express more than would be conventionally thought of as appropriate in a set of children’s books.
Handler often dismisses allusions such as these in the series as “giving a shout-out to a book that I love” -- despite also conceding that “I like to bury as many references as I can” -- and in an instance such as this, in which the meaning of the text and the story arc is not effected by their meaning, one might believe this to be true. However, in other instances, Handler is able to colour the reader’s interpretation of the reference by defining it himself. This is perhaps most prevalent in his definitions of the ‘nonsense’ words uttered by Sunny, the baby. In the last book of the series, she responds to the question “Is that really you?” with the word “Anais” , which Snicket defines as “in the flesh” . The use of the word “Anais” is a reference to Anais Nin, the writer of erotica, an author certainly unknown to Handler’s target audience. A reference to a writer of such adult material within the framework of a children’s novel would usually be deemed inappropriate, however, Handler sidesteps the overt sexuality of Nin’s writing through the definition “in the flesh” : here the desires of the flesh which Nin concerned herself with are transmogrified into a seemingly innocent sentiment expressed by a baby. However, this is not the only instance in which Sunny’s words carry more weight than is alluded to in the text: Snicket defines her exclamation of “Sappho” , addressed to a young female poet, as “I’d be very pleased to hear a poem of yours!” . Of all the female poets which Handler could have chosen to reference, he chooses one which introduces a profound note of homosexual desire into the text, through Sappho’s reputation for writing homoerotic poems about other women. The theme of homoeroticism is something which has become more prevalent in modern Canonical texts; nonetheless, when viewed within the sphere of Children’s Literature, ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ can be seen as incredibly subversive by undermining the heteronormative traditions of Western Culture through this concealed reference to homoerotic desire that would conventionally be thought of as inappropriate for a children’s book.
However, this level of allusion demands the reader to question the reason for its presence: as has been seen, Handler refers to a broad spectrum of writers in a notably indiscriminate fashion. One answer to the question is to view the series as surreptitiously didactic, clandestinely planting seeds of knowledge in its young readers’ minds. This can be seen in the manner that Snicket bisects particularly absurd passages with sudden and comparatively dense divergences into philosophy and literary theory. At the end of ‘The Penultimate Peril’, Handler abruptly cuts across the sinisterly abstract scene of the Baudelaires sailing in a flying boat from the roof of a full hotel that they have set on fire with a discourse that begins “Richard Wright, an American novelist of the realist school asks the famous unfathomable question in his best-known novel, Native Son…” . Here this deliberately impenetrable, technical vocabulary -- augmented by its juxtaposition with the fanciful nature of the events that precede it -- jars the reader out of their complacency with incongruous terminology of “the realist school” and the equally unexplained significance of the novel “Native Son” . Yet from this seemingly opaque introduction, Handler deconstructs the quote from the novel, linking it to the events of his own narrative with a wit and skill that illustrates to his young readers that something perceived to be “unfathomable” can actually carry a great deal of import if you take the time and attention to engage with it.
Indeed, the young reader of Snicket is, in a manner of speaking, ‘trained’ to do just that over the course of the series: Handler confesses that he is “suspicious of anything written specifically for children” , and that manifests itself in the novels. Although the earlier novels in the series tend to allude in rather indirect manner to novelists or works of literature -- this can be seen most prominently through the names of various characters introduced in the earlier books, from the “Baudelaires” (a reference to Charles Baudelaire), to the banker “Mr Poe” (a reference to Edgar Allen Poe), to the sinister “Esme Squalor” (a reference to J. D. Salinger’s ‘For Esme, with love and squalor’) -- as the novels progress, Handler begins to tackle weightier issues and comments upon specific works of literature. The tenth book, for example, begins with a light hearted reference to Frost’s ‘The Road Less Travelled’ as Snicket makes the comically literal suggestion that Frost was “was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less travelled, the other travellers would be on the road more frequently travelled and so couldn’t hear him as he cried for help” , dryly concluding that “sure enough, that poet is now dead” . However, from this initial stance of light-hearted mockery, the book begins to engage more seriously with the issues raised in Frost’s poem, gradually luring the reader into a higher level of engagement than is usually expected of a child: over the course of the narrative, Handler places before the Baudelaires a set of decisions which present no morally unambiguous answer, illustrating the eponymous ‘Slippery Slope’ of moral decline.
As is typical of Handler, the book also contains a witty slippage between the concrete and the abstract: Handler puns upon the icy nature of Frost’s surname through the equally frosty setting of the Mortmain Mountains. Perhaps more significantly, Handler centres arguably the most difficult decision that the Baudelaires make around a literal ‘Slippery Slope’, as the eldest two Baudelaires debate whether to trap the villainous Esme Squalor by digging a pit at the bottom of the frozen waterfall that she is tobogganing down. Yet again, Handler chooses to juxtapose the absurd with some of the most probing discussions of the novel as, against the backdrop of “the sight of a grown woman in an enormous flame-imitating dress tobogganing down” the ‘Slippery Slope’, the elder Baudelaires discuss whether or not it is moral “to fight fire with fire” centred around Nietzsche’s famous adage: “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” Just as above, Handler again represents the abstract “abyss” in concrete form, as Klaus notes that “’Abyss’ is a fancy word for ‘pit’… [they] dug an abyss for Esme to fall into. That’s something a monster might do” . Here however, this slippage between theoretical musings and literal events can be thought of as having a more practical use: by giving a physical example of these otherwise conceptually obscure philosophical concepts, Handler maintains the accessibility of the novel, ensuring that the young reader is not alienated by their inclusion. By breaking down a binary moral code into these explorations into the fallacies of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ decisions, Handler, like Nietzsche, elevates his novels to a position of moral ambiguity ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ that rejects the moral didacticism of certain early canonical texts, yet stands in line with later canonical texts, such as the novels of Dostoyevsky, which explore this ambiguity in a far greater degree of detail.
Beyond this, however, the very inclusion of such a quote is representative of what can be thought of as the ultimate message of the series: knowledge is tantamount to goodness, or as Snicket expresses it, “Well-read people are less likely to be evil” . Just as the books aim to covertly educate their readers, so too are the Baudelaire orphans presented as being educated by their parents; oftentimes, obstacles placed in front of them can only be overcome through knowledge of literature. This is most aptly illustrated through the “Vernacularly Fastened Door” which can only be opened by a knowledge of ‘Anna Karenina’, a novel which the reader is told Klaus “read from his mother’s lap” . However, Handler takes this opportunity to also illustrate the importance of critical reading by illustrating that the central theme of ‘Anna Karenina’, that “a daring life of impulsive passion leads only to tragedy” , is not necessarily true, through Snicket’s comment that in fact “people who lead a daring life on impulsive passion end up doing all sorts of things” . By calling into doubt such a canonical text, Handler refutes the tendency of readers to place such texts on a pedestal, and invites critical discussion, even from his young readership. In this respect, he sets himself against Bloom’s histrionic praise of the Canon in favour of a more critical, balanced approach.
However, Handler also expresses this theme of correlation between knowledge and goodness through his presentation of the two sides of the schism of the secret society that operates in the background of the novels. In ‘The Grim Grotto’, the traditionally conceived ‘good’ side wear diving suits with the face of “Herman Melville” on, an author who is lauded by Snicket; yet the ‘bad’ side wear diving suits with “Edgar Guest” , a poet who is, conversely, condemned by Snicket. This binary opposition of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is broken down by the respective fallacies and merits of each author: Melville isn’t perfect, and Guest isn’t entirely awful. Nonetheless, Snicket presents a clear literary hierarchy which consistently favours the morally better characters in the novel. Thus, Handler draws a parallel between ambiguity of morality and that of literary talent: though people’s opinions may differ, some writers or people are generally conceived of as better than others. This is acted out at the end of ‘The Grim Grotto’, in which the Baudelaires choose to get into a car because the driver was reading ‘The Waste Land’; at this point, Snicket comments dryly that “perhaps if [the book] had been Edgar Guest, the children might have turned around and ran” . This presentation of knowledge as almost synonymous with goodness sits uncomfortably with the Canon, in which knowledge is often presented as a corruptive force. This is perhaps most emphatically illustrated in the Bible’s book of Genesis, which depicts the fall of man as being the result of the acquisition of knowledge. In a sense, the Bible is the ultimate Canonical text: it is so engrained in Western Culture that every subsequent work of literature is forced to communicate with it. To challenge its message in this indirect fashion may, thus, rightly be thought of as subversive.
However, Handler goes further than this in the last book of the series, ‘The End’. The final novel places the Baudelaires upon a seemingly Utopian island upon which any form of experience is sacrificed by the residents for a prelaspsarian innocence, in an attempt to remain “far from the treachery of the world” . As the novel progresses, Handler asks the reader to question the relative value of this innocence through a depiction of the island’s “Arboretum” , a rambling ‘dumping-ground’ of all the things that must be forsaken in the pursuit of this innocence; a bare list of items that takes up three pages, and is hyperbolically summarised as “galaxies of stuff and universes of things” . Through the events of the novel, Handler creates scenario which deftly rewrites that of the fall from Eden: after the spores of a poisonous fungus have been released on the island, through the process of reading and research the children discover that the poison’s antidote is to be found in the apples of a tree in the centre of the Arboretum from which a snake descends, “offering the Baudelaires an apple” . In Handler’s version of the book of Genesis, the eating of the fruit, and thus the acquisition of knowledge, is a life-saving necessity; the perpetuation of Innocence becomes a death sentence. Throughout the novel, the phrases “don’t rock the boat” and “don’t succumb to peer pressure” are repeated innumerable times, and become sort of mantras for the advocacy of Innocence and Experience respectively. In the denouement of the novel, despite the urges of the Baudelaires not to “succumb to peer pressure”, the islanders, in an attempt to remain in their contrived Edenic innocence, die by their desire not to “rock the boat”, through refusing to eat of the apple. Through this chilling portrayal of the islanders’ death, Handler presents the ultimate victory of experience over innocence, and also performs what can be thought of as the series’ ultimate act of subversion: the rewriting of the Eden story to emphasise the importance of knowledge.
Thus, we have seen how, over the course of the novels, Handler gradually begins to challenge the moral code that underpins Western Literature, culminating in this great and tragic rebuttal of Original Sin. However, as a concluding point, it is necessary to note that many Canonical works are equally subversive in their approach to ‘traditional’ moral values. Handler’s ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ can undoubtedly be seen as subversive, yet what it subverts is not so much the Canon in its contemporary state, but more the “male constructed literary history” of the Canon. What makes ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ so uniquely remarkable, then, is not the way it daringly attacks the antiquated moral values of its predecessors, but the fact that it does this within the sphere of children’s literature. Handler’s novels introduce quotes and concepts that would be conventionally thought of as too mature for children, yet do so in a manner that does not alienate his target audience. The result is an often political, satirical series of children’s books which encourages independent thought, advocates the importance of knowledge, and is refreshingly modern in its approach to ethics.
Despite the fact that early drafts were slightly hindered by an initial underestimation of workload (see project log for further details), I feel that I adapted very well to the discoveries and difficulties that I faced over the course of the project. I believe that this resultant essay is of a very high standard, and that I fulfilled the initial challenge that I set myself at the beginning of the project. If given the opportunity for further research, I would now be inclined to investigate, in more detail, the place of ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ within the sphere of contemporary thought and literature. Furthermore, the audaciously postmodern narrative techniques of the novels, though marginalised in this essay, are also deserving of an explorative project of this scale in their own right. ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ has garnered little critical examination due to being labelled ‘Children’s Literature’; this project has given me the opportunity to add entirely new analyses to the corpus of critical work on this remarkable series. Additionally, since I had never written an essay of this length before, this experience has taken me on a remarkable learning-curve which has given me a thorough and unique grounding in the skills required to pursue English Literature at degree level.
What follows is just the main essay (I assumed that you guys wouldn't have any particular interest in reading my abstract, methodology etc., and you certainly don't want to read my project log!!). I also haven't put in the footnotes or bibliography, but if anyone has questions about references, I can put both of those up. Also, you can pretty much ignore the last paragraph, it was tacked on at the end because the exam board require "evidence of self evaluation in the main body of the essay"...
Anyhoo, here it is (excuse any clunky writing/awful ideas):
Challenging the Canon
To what extent can ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ be seen as engaging with the concept of Canon in a subversive manner?
Before one can comment upon a text’s relationship with the mythical beast that is ‘The Western Canon’, one must first establish an adequate definition of it. Many literary commentators have attempted to appraise the importance and -- perhaps more significantly -- the contents of the canon, but none with the near idolatrous zeal of Harold Bloom. In his impassioned defence of the canon, he describes canonical texts as being imbued with “the shock of... audacity... [or] the tang of originality” and claims that, for a text or author to enter the canon they must rise to the “conflict between past genius and present aspiration, in which the prize is literary survival or canonical inclusion” . Yet, despite this assertion that the best writers are those that have the daring to square up to the literary past, he presents the canon as being somewhat untouchable: if a text can pass the indefinable entrance exam it becomes a member not just for life but for eternity. In fact, in Bloom’s hands, it is as though the canon becomes one very long religious doctrine for the secular religion of “the autonomy of the aesthetic” : one can puzzle over one’s relationship to it, and in doing so can reach a deeper level of understanding that can allow one to contribute to it; but to suggest outright that it may not be wholly correct becomes a form of blasphemy.
The mere suggestion, then, that a series of children’s books might have the literary might to reflect upon the reverential glory of the canon might easily be dismissed as entirely unfounded. However, ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ subverts the rather limited expectations of its genre before the first novel even starts. Despite the novels being written by Daniel Handler, the title pages and covers of the books list the author as being “Lemony Snicket”, the fictional narrative voice of the series. This is, by no means, unique within the genre of children’s literature -- another prominent example is the ‘Goosebumps’ series which purports to be written by the fictional character “R. L. Stein” -- yet Handler uses the character of “Lemony Snicket” to create a metafictional conceit which is sustained throughout the series. Patricia Waugh defines metafictional literature as that which “explicitly and overtly lays bare its condition of artifice, and which thereby explores the problematic relationship between life and fiction” and suggests that “[i]t may, often in the form of parody, comment on a specific work or fictional mode” . The manner in which the series demonstrates elements of both of these factors can be seen before the text of the novels even begins. Each novel is dedicated by the fictional author to the equally fictional character of “Beatrice”, whose image is persistently refracted from the fictional past through the events of the novels. This figure of Beatrice, who is described in the dedication of the first novel as “darling, dearest, dead” , acts as the hyperbolically tragic, beloved muse of Snicket in a way which recalls arguably the most famous Beatrice in literary history: Dante’s Beatrice.
In ‘Inferno’, the first book of ‘The Divine Comedy’, Dante describes Beatrice as a paragon of womanly virtue, “for whose sake alone / The breed of men exceeds all things that dwell / Closed in heaven” . The hyperbolic sentiment expressed in this phrase conveys a sense of Beatrice’s immense importance to Dante. She influences him on two distinct levels: firstly, her memory acts as Dante’s real life muse; secondly, as a character within the narrative, she becomes the driving force behind Dante’s journey through the depths of hell to the very heights of heaven. Within the fictional reality perpetuated through the novels, Snicket’s Beatrice acts in much the same way, occupying the position both of “writing subject and… written object” . This dualism is expressed through the eleventh of the thirteen dedications to Beatrice: “Dead women tell no tales. / Sad men write them down”. This phrase parodies Poe’s assertion that “the death… of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the World -- and… the lips… best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover” by expressing much the same sentiment through phrasing that parallels the “Dead men tell no tales” motto of story-book pirates, foreshadowing the nautical tribulations that the Baudelaires must face in the novel.
However, the dedication alludes to a much weightier theme in literature more generally, one that is echoed in Poe’s sentiment above: the literary tradition of a male dominated canon to silence women by writing them. The author has a form of dictatorship over his text that allows him to play God, pulling the strings of his female puppets. Handler explores this ostensible dominance of the writer by illustrating Snicket attempting to regain control over his deceased love by writing about her. Much the same comment can be made about Dante: within the events of the poem, Beatrice is granted a highly significant role as a metonym for theology and is a prime example of female agency within literature; however, despite this, Charles Williams notes in ‘The Figure of Beatrice’ that Beatrice “cannot command [Virgil], though she puts her trust in his fair speech” . Within the conceit of the poem, this serves to illustrate that Theology cannot order around Literature, but also reminds the reader of the ultimate male power within the patriarchal system of the novel: God. Though Beatrice is presented oftentimes as dominant over Dante, one can never forget that, like God, he occupies the sole position of dominance over the events of his poetry.
Handler takes this idea of the author as God and turns it on its head by revealing the fallacies and unreliable nature of the “author” of ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’. Snicket uses his narrative to reanimate Beatrice, much as Dante did; however, Handler, the true author, ensures that the reader is fully aware that, in life, Beatrice rejected Snicket’s love, as he has Snicket tell the reader that she wrote “a two-hundred-page book, explaining every single detail of the bad news at great length” . By realigning Beatrice as a female figure who has the necessary agency required to escape the narrow patriarchal norm of the written woman and become a writer in herself, Handler also recasts Snicket as a reader, who admits that “I stayed up all night reading it, and I read it still, over and over, and it is as if my darling Beatrice is bringing me bad news every day and every night of my life” . The shift from past to present tense in this admission is indicative of the length of time that has passed since that event; whilst the repetition of “over” reinforces Snicket’s continued obsession, suggesting the inversion of Dante’s attempt to reify Beatrice by writing her: Snicket can only reclaim his beloved by carrying out the subdominant act of reading. Like any number of literary women who wallow in their mourning and weep over the letters of their lost love, Snicket must reconcile himself to the fact that his writing cannot purge Beatrice of her agency and mould her into a woman who would have loved him. In this manner, Handler subverts the tendency of the male dominated canon to silence women by presenting a narrator that, despite pretences of agency, is lorded over by the image of his dead lover that he can only retrieve through her written work.
However, this allusion to Dante’s Beatrice, which Pugh describes as “the thematic touchstone of the series” , is undermined by its lack of familiarity to the child reader: one can hardly expect the 9-12 year old target audience of the series to be familiar with the sexual politics of ‘The Divine Comedy’. ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ is laden with allusions to works of literature which remain elusive to its ostensible target audience, but which provide revealing glimpses of insight and moments of humour for those who are ‘in the know’, so to speak. Some of the most oblique of these references occur in the eighth book of the series, which documents the Baudelaire orphans’ experiences in ‘The Hostile Hospital’. The book contains a sequence in which the Baudelaires must visit some of the patients. The passage is laden with Handler’s trademark ironic wit: readers familiar with Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’ can chuckle self-contentedly at the image of “Clarissa Dalloway, who did not seem to have anything wrong with her but was staring sadly out the window” ; and those acquainted with Camus can appreciate the irony of seeing “Bernard Rieux in... the Plague Ward” . However, the word ‘appreciate’ is paramount here: to the uninitiated reader, these references are meaningless, and one can hardly imagine a ten year old grasping the wit of an allusion to “Cynthia Vane” , one of Nabokov’s eponymous ‘Vane Sisters’. It seems then that ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ is imbued with a second level of meaning, a sort of coded subtext which allows the novels to express more than would be conventionally thought of as appropriate in a set of children’s books.
Handler often dismisses allusions such as these in the series as “giving a shout-out to a book that I love” -- despite also conceding that “I like to bury as many references as I can” -- and in an instance such as this, in which the meaning of the text and the story arc is not effected by their meaning, one might believe this to be true. However, in other instances, Handler is able to colour the reader’s interpretation of the reference by defining it himself. This is perhaps most prevalent in his definitions of the ‘nonsense’ words uttered by Sunny, the baby. In the last book of the series, she responds to the question “Is that really you?” with the word “Anais” , which Snicket defines as “in the flesh” . The use of the word “Anais” is a reference to Anais Nin, the writer of erotica, an author certainly unknown to Handler’s target audience. A reference to a writer of such adult material within the framework of a children’s novel would usually be deemed inappropriate, however, Handler sidesteps the overt sexuality of Nin’s writing through the definition “in the flesh” : here the desires of the flesh which Nin concerned herself with are transmogrified into a seemingly innocent sentiment expressed by a baby. However, this is not the only instance in which Sunny’s words carry more weight than is alluded to in the text: Snicket defines her exclamation of “Sappho” , addressed to a young female poet, as “I’d be very pleased to hear a poem of yours!” . Of all the female poets which Handler could have chosen to reference, he chooses one which introduces a profound note of homosexual desire into the text, through Sappho’s reputation for writing homoerotic poems about other women. The theme of homoeroticism is something which has become more prevalent in modern Canonical texts; nonetheless, when viewed within the sphere of Children’s Literature, ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ can be seen as incredibly subversive by undermining the heteronormative traditions of Western Culture through this concealed reference to homoerotic desire that would conventionally be thought of as inappropriate for a children’s book.
However, this level of allusion demands the reader to question the reason for its presence: as has been seen, Handler refers to a broad spectrum of writers in a notably indiscriminate fashion. One answer to the question is to view the series as surreptitiously didactic, clandestinely planting seeds of knowledge in its young readers’ minds. This can be seen in the manner that Snicket bisects particularly absurd passages with sudden and comparatively dense divergences into philosophy and literary theory. At the end of ‘The Penultimate Peril’, Handler abruptly cuts across the sinisterly abstract scene of the Baudelaires sailing in a flying boat from the roof of a full hotel that they have set on fire with a discourse that begins “Richard Wright, an American novelist of the realist school asks the famous unfathomable question in his best-known novel, Native Son…” . Here this deliberately impenetrable, technical vocabulary -- augmented by its juxtaposition with the fanciful nature of the events that precede it -- jars the reader out of their complacency with incongruous terminology of “the realist school” and the equally unexplained significance of the novel “Native Son” . Yet from this seemingly opaque introduction, Handler deconstructs the quote from the novel, linking it to the events of his own narrative with a wit and skill that illustrates to his young readers that something perceived to be “unfathomable” can actually carry a great deal of import if you take the time and attention to engage with it.
Indeed, the young reader of Snicket is, in a manner of speaking, ‘trained’ to do just that over the course of the series: Handler confesses that he is “suspicious of anything written specifically for children” , and that manifests itself in the novels. Although the earlier novels in the series tend to allude in rather indirect manner to novelists or works of literature -- this can be seen most prominently through the names of various characters introduced in the earlier books, from the “Baudelaires” (a reference to Charles Baudelaire), to the banker “Mr Poe” (a reference to Edgar Allen Poe), to the sinister “Esme Squalor” (a reference to J. D. Salinger’s ‘For Esme, with love and squalor’) -- as the novels progress, Handler begins to tackle weightier issues and comments upon specific works of literature. The tenth book, for example, begins with a light hearted reference to Frost’s ‘The Road Less Travelled’ as Snicket makes the comically literal suggestion that Frost was “was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less travelled, the other travellers would be on the road more frequently travelled and so couldn’t hear him as he cried for help” , dryly concluding that “sure enough, that poet is now dead” . However, from this initial stance of light-hearted mockery, the book begins to engage more seriously with the issues raised in Frost’s poem, gradually luring the reader into a higher level of engagement than is usually expected of a child: over the course of the narrative, Handler places before the Baudelaires a set of decisions which present no morally unambiguous answer, illustrating the eponymous ‘Slippery Slope’ of moral decline.
As is typical of Handler, the book also contains a witty slippage between the concrete and the abstract: Handler puns upon the icy nature of Frost’s surname through the equally frosty setting of the Mortmain Mountains. Perhaps more significantly, Handler centres arguably the most difficult decision that the Baudelaires make around a literal ‘Slippery Slope’, as the eldest two Baudelaires debate whether to trap the villainous Esme Squalor by digging a pit at the bottom of the frozen waterfall that she is tobogganing down. Yet again, Handler chooses to juxtapose the absurd with some of the most probing discussions of the novel as, against the backdrop of “the sight of a grown woman in an enormous flame-imitating dress tobogganing down” the ‘Slippery Slope’, the elder Baudelaires discuss whether or not it is moral “to fight fire with fire” centred around Nietzsche’s famous adage: “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” Just as above, Handler again represents the abstract “abyss” in concrete form, as Klaus notes that “’Abyss’ is a fancy word for ‘pit’… [they] dug an abyss for Esme to fall into. That’s something a monster might do” . Here however, this slippage between theoretical musings and literal events can be thought of as having a more practical use: by giving a physical example of these otherwise conceptually obscure philosophical concepts, Handler maintains the accessibility of the novel, ensuring that the young reader is not alienated by their inclusion. By breaking down a binary moral code into these explorations into the fallacies of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ decisions, Handler, like Nietzsche, elevates his novels to a position of moral ambiguity ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ that rejects the moral didacticism of certain early canonical texts, yet stands in line with later canonical texts, such as the novels of Dostoyevsky, which explore this ambiguity in a far greater degree of detail.
Beyond this, however, the very inclusion of such a quote is representative of what can be thought of as the ultimate message of the series: knowledge is tantamount to goodness, or as Snicket expresses it, “Well-read people are less likely to be evil” . Just as the books aim to covertly educate their readers, so too are the Baudelaire orphans presented as being educated by their parents; oftentimes, obstacles placed in front of them can only be overcome through knowledge of literature. This is most aptly illustrated through the “Vernacularly Fastened Door” which can only be opened by a knowledge of ‘Anna Karenina’, a novel which the reader is told Klaus “read from his mother’s lap” . However, Handler takes this opportunity to also illustrate the importance of critical reading by illustrating that the central theme of ‘Anna Karenina’, that “a daring life of impulsive passion leads only to tragedy” , is not necessarily true, through Snicket’s comment that in fact “people who lead a daring life on impulsive passion end up doing all sorts of things” . By calling into doubt such a canonical text, Handler refutes the tendency of readers to place such texts on a pedestal, and invites critical discussion, even from his young readership. In this respect, he sets himself against Bloom’s histrionic praise of the Canon in favour of a more critical, balanced approach.
However, Handler also expresses this theme of correlation between knowledge and goodness through his presentation of the two sides of the schism of the secret society that operates in the background of the novels. In ‘The Grim Grotto’, the traditionally conceived ‘good’ side wear diving suits with the face of “Herman Melville” on, an author who is lauded by Snicket; yet the ‘bad’ side wear diving suits with “Edgar Guest” , a poet who is, conversely, condemned by Snicket. This binary opposition of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is broken down by the respective fallacies and merits of each author: Melville isn’t perfect, and Guest isn’t entirely awful. Nonetheless, Snicket presents a clear literary hierarchy which consistently favours the morally better characters in the novel. Thus, Handler draws a parallel between ambiguity of morality and that of literary talent: though people’s opinions may differ, some writers or people are generally conceived of as better than others. This is acted out at the end of ‘The Grim Grotto’, in which the Baudelaires choose to get into a car because the driver was reading ‘The Waste Land’; at this point, Snicket comments dryly that “perhaps if [the book] had been Edgar Guest, the children might have turned around and ran” . This presentation of knowledge as almost synonymous with goodness sits uncomfortably with the Canon, in which knowledge is often presented as a corruptive force. This is perhaps most emphatically illustrated in the Bible’s book of Genesis, which depicts the fall of man as being the result of the acquisition of knowledge. In a sense, the Bible is the ultimate Canonical text: it is so engrained in Western Culture that every subsequent work of literature is forced to communicate with it. To challenge its message in this indirect fashion may, thus, rightly be thought of as subversive.
However, Handler goes further than this in the last book of the series, ‘The End’. The final novel places the Baudelaires upon a seemingly Utopian island upon which any form of experience is sacrificed by the residents for a prelaspsarian innocence, in an attempt to remain “far from the treachery of the world” . As the novel progresses, Handler asks the reader to question the relative value of this innocence through a depiction of the island’s “Arboretum” , a rambling ‘dumping-ground’ of all the things that must be forsaken in the pursuit of this innocence; a bare list of items that takes up three pages, and is hyperbolically summarised as “galaxies of stuff and universes of things” . Through the events of the novel, Handler creates scenario which deftly rewrites that of the fall from Eden: after the spores of a poisonous fungus have been released on the island, through the process of reading and research the children discover that the poison’s antidote is to be found in the apples of a tree in the centre of the Arboretum from which a snake descends, “offering the Baudelaires an apple” . In Handler’s version of the book of Genesis, the eating of the fruit, and thus the acquisition of knowledge, is a life-saving necessity; the perpetuation of Innocence becomes a death sentence. Throughout the novel, the phrases “don’t rock the boat” and “don’t succumb to peer pressure” are repeated innumerable times, and become sort of mantras for the advocacy of Innocence and Experience respectively. In the denouement of the novel, despite the urges of the Baudelaires not to “succumb to peer pressure”, the islanders, in an attempt to remain in their contrived Edenic innocence, die by their desire not to “rock the boat”, through refusing to eat of the apple. Through this chilling portrayal of the islanders’ death, Handler presents the ultimate victory of experience over innocence, and also performs what can be thought of as the series’ ultimate act of subversion: the rewriting of the Eden story to emphasise the importance of knowledge.
Thus, we have seen how, over the course of the novels, Handler gradually begins to challenge the moral code that underpins Western Literature, culminating in this great and tragic rebuttal of Original Sin. However, as a concluding point, it is necessary to note that many Canonical works are equally subversive in their approach to ‘traditional’ moral values. Handler’s ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ can undoubtedly be seen as subversive, yet what it subverts is not so much the Canon in its contemporary state, but more the “male constructed literary history” of the Canon. What makes ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ so uniquely remarkable, then, is not the way it daringly attacks the antiquated moral values of its predecessors, but the fact that it does this within the sphere of children’s literature. Handler’s novels introduce quotes and concepts that would be conventionally thought of as too mature for children, yet do so in a manner that does not alienate his target audience. The result is an often political, satirical series of children’s books which encourages independent thought, advocates the importance of knowledge, and is refreshingly modern in its approach to ethics.
Despite the fact that early drafts were slightly hindered by an initial underestimation of workload (see project log for further details), I feel that I adapted very well to the discoveries and difficulties that I faced over the course of the project. I believe that this resultant essay is of a very high standard, and that I fulfilled the initial challenge that I set myself at the beginning of the project. If given the opportunity for further research, I would now be inclined to investigate, in more detail, the place of ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ within the sphere of contemporary thought and literature. Furthermore, the audaciously postmodern narrative techniques of the novels, though marginalised in this essay, are also deserving of an explorative project of this scale in their own right. ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ has garnered little critical examination due to being labelled ‘Children’s Literature’; this project has given me the opportunity to add entirely new analyses to the corpus of critical work on this remarkable series. Additionally, since I had never written an essay of this length before, this experience has taken me on a remarkable learning-curve which has given me a thorough and unique grounding in the skills required to pursue English Literature at degree level.