History is a Palimpsest 1

This chapter explores the first set of texts associated with the entailed metaphor HISTORY AS PALIMPSEST through the key narrative of Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), which makes salient a genealogy of works for both children and adults that imagine England’s history proceeding through a series of invasions and the loss and recovery of memory of invasion. Because several of the treatments address both adults and children, the chapter examines three adult fantasies derived from Puck—Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935), Warwick Deeping’s The Man Who Went Back (1940), and C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945)—before moving on to four novels for children/young adults that are connected both to Puck and to its adult interwar/wartime successors: Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising (1973) and Silver on the Tree (1977), Joan Aiken’s The Shadow Guests (1980), and Philip Turner’s Sea Peril (1968). Because the metaphor of the palimpsest emphasizes that the individual’s occupation of time and space is temporary, the dominant affect in all instances is nostalgia and melancholy. Nonetheless, invasion is a complex image that suggests that loss of sovereignty is not necessarily bad or injurious to the nation (or the child reader). Rather, the invasion trope offers a view of the experience of the nation that mirrors the complex layers of the individual psyche, and narratives activating the palimpsest metaphor prize and rehearse individual agency on the part of protagonists.