Questions of Time

Children's literature is rich with diverse, complex temporal structures and interrogations about the nature of time itself, as Tom's questioning of his Uncle Alan in the epigraph above reveals. These are profoundly philosophical questions for a literary genre whose implied readership, children, has arguably little experience of the passing of time. This chapter firstly draws on two British children's fantasy texts: C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, published between 1950 and 1956, and Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (1958). In the latter part of this chapter, I consider Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence, comprising five texts: Over Sea, Under Stone (1965), The Dark Is Rising (1973), Greenwitch (1974), The Grey King (1975) and Silver on the Tree (1977). In these texts, many permutations on time are presented: C. S. Lewis allows his child characters to age in Narnia, but then returns them to their pre-Narnian child bodies at the end of his texts. Philippa Pearce bends and warps linear progressions of time in her extra-temporal midnight garden, whilst Susan Cooper suggests that other times outside normal time are possible.

In this chapter, I read these texts alongside Gilles Deleuze's concepts of Chronos and Aion. In the first part of this chapter, I consider the texts’ initial situations, of a controlled, regulated Chronos: an absorbing present essentially linked to concerns of the body. As these texts progress, so the textual Chronos is disturbed and the child protagonists are able to access a child-time free from corporeal limitations. This child-time allows time to progress in rhizomatic and non-linear ways, and in the second part of this chapter I consider how this can be likened to Deleuze's Aion. It is my contention that a Deleuzian reading of the temporal structures in these texts can help us reconsider one of the major preoccupations for scholars of children's literature: the notion of growing up and ageing in children's fiction. With Aion, we are no longer restricted by a uni-directional movement through time, towards a greater maturity and dominated by a directional preposition. Growing up in these children's texts is surpassed by a notion of incorporeal ageing that heralds the coexistence of the presumed sequential regions of childhood, adolescence and adulthood.