AKICILJ: The adventure that's forgotten... (with particular attn: James Nicoll)

[seawasp]

It is a classic trope of fantasy literature, especially kid's lit: The children are caught up in a big adventure or series of adventures, they save the princess/town/world, and afterwards they forget the adventure when they return to the Real World, except maybe for a feeling of more contentment and some level of maturity/improvement.

Oddly, though, I'm pulling a blank on the stories that actually DO this. For instance, Narnia isn't like this; the children remember their Narnia adventures very clearly.

So what ARE the classic examples?

Comments

[kjn]

Fionavar? (I haven't read them.)

Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series, though this only happens after the last book, I think.

Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter

I think Charles de Lint uses this in some books. I know it's explicitly discussed in Widdershins, where one to some degree can chose to remember or forget encounters with the supernatural.

[dana crom (from livejournal.com)]

No, Fionavar doesn't do this one. Some of the this-world protagonists end up back on Earth, but it was a conscious choice on their part and they remember events quite clearly. And the people in Fionavar were college students, some (I think) graduate students, not kids.

I think you're right about The Dark is Rising, but it's been years since I read the books.

Narnia *does* do this, a little bit - the older kids (Peter and Susan) grow away from Narnia and as adults only remember it as a "game we played when we were kids".

Not quite the same thing - the adventures are just meeting people who had previously lived in their part if England - but the kids in Kipling's _Puck of Pook's Hill_ and _Rewards and Fairies_ are enchanted by Puck so that they only remember their previous adventures when they meet him again.

The Judy Garland movie version of _The Wizard of Oz_ has a close variant - she remembers her adventures, but though it's left open there is the strong implication that nothing was real. I much preferred the books where Dorothy knows quite well that it really happened, but adjusts to being back in Kansas (and with people who think she dreamed it) in a very matter of fact way.

Now I'm coming up blank - I'm pretty sure I've seen better examples, but I can't think what they are.

[seawasp]

Actually, in Narnia all of them remember, and only one, Susan, ends up claiming it was a game they played as kids. She's also the only one NOT on the train that crashes and sends the others on a final trip to Narnia. The question is open as to whether Susan will find her way back to Narnia or not. ("The Question of Susan" is one of the hot debate topics among Narnia fans, and often anti-fans)

[groblek.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that part of The Dark is Rising *really* irked me as a kid. I loved the series, and having them forget it all at the end felt like something of a betrayal.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

It's actually only the initial, totally "normal" set of kids who get brainwashed into forgetting the dramatic events they experienced with their honorary great-uncle "Gumerry" (Great-Uncle Merlin) in Susan Cooper's first book, "Over Sea, Under Stone." They get pretty much replaced from the second volume on by Will Stanton(?), the twentieth-century boy who turns out to be the belated last born of the Old Ones/guardian mages of England/whatever they are. (Gumerry, a/k/a the real Merlin, is one of his predecessors and colleagues, and becomes his magical mentor.) And Will gets to remember everything, although I don't recall whether he manages to keep the various magic happenings totally secret from his otherwise nice but ordinary (in terms of magical ability, or the lack of it) family. I also don't recall whether the younger boy in Cooper's "The Grey King" who turns out to be the future High King--essentially because he's the son of the time-displaced Guinevere (and Arthur--or possibly Lancelot)--ever has the situation fully explained to him in the first place, although I'm pretty sure he doesn't get his memory wiped at the end of the book the way Gumerry's nieces and nephews do. If I remember correctly, the whole "only natural-born special snowflakes get to remember magical events, no matter how helpful a role they may have played in saving the realm" aspect is rather irritatingly underscored in one of the final two books of the series, when Gumerry's nieces and nephews briefly show up again, but are either kept totally in the dark about what's going on or are given some minor task to perform without ever finding out what's really at stake, or something like that.

So Cooper's take on the theme--i.e., that you have to be destined from birth to be a mage or the next High King in order to be allowed continued comprehension of what's really going on--is actually noticeably more elitist than the earlier and in many ways more old-fashioned C.S. Lewis' handling of it. Lewis' Pevensie children didn't get to have all those adventures in Narnia--and, in Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy's cases, become Kings and Queens of that realm--because they were born special. The implication seems to be that they just had the good luck to find out about Narnia by being evacuated to the old house with the magic wardrobe in it, and they got to keep coming back and playing such a crucial role in Narnian history because when events called for it they behaved well and did the right thing--if only after a potentially damning false start, in the case of Edmund and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the Pevensies' bratty cousin Eustace. The Pevensies and Eustace are essentially self-made heroes (becoming so after a prolonged and initially unpromising struggle, in Edmund and Eustace's case), not inherently destined for greatness from birth, like Cooper's Will Stanton and smuggled-forward-in-time boy High-King-to-be. (This democratic approach to kingship and heroism appears to be a long-standing Narnian tradition. If I remember correctly, "The Magician's Nephew" 's depiction of what is basically the origin of Narnia as we know it makes it pretty clear that the human [as opposed to Talking Animal] population of Narnia consists of the descendants of often rather ordinary or even disreputable humans from our world who stumbled into Narnia more or less at random. This apparently includes the long-ago first human king and queen of Narnia, who started out in life as a Cockney cabbie and his wife.)

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

(cont'd from above)

Cooper's initial premise--three or four children sent to stay at the obscure rural home of a learned male (surrogate) relative become involved in important magical events--seems obviously inspired by Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" set-up of the Pevensies being evacuated from wartime London to Professor What's-his-name's house in the country. But, for whatever reason, Cooper decided quite early in the series to more or less ditch Gumerry's Pevensie-analogue nieces and nephews in favor of the more Harry-Potterish-before-Harry-Potter-existed young destined guardian mage Will. Of course, Cooper also beefs up the Professor character's role and makes him special as well by turning him into Merlin in disguise, rather than just a rather mysterious nice old guy who, in Lewis' version, readily believes the Pevensies' story about the magic wardrobe and tsks disapprovingly over how modern schools have failed to teach the visiting children anything about magic.

[melchar.livejournal.com]

The one that immediately springs to mind is HP Lovecraft's 'Dreamquest for the Unknown Kadath' - wherein Randolph Carter goes down the steps into the Dreamlands, has many seems-like-an-adult adventures and then wakes up - back to being the adolescent he was when laying down to sleep. [Considering what happened, later in his life with Warren, it's kind of a shame that he had to wake up.]

[nuranar.livejournal.com]

What comes to mind is Rex Stout's Under the Andes. The narrator remembers and a companion doesn't, leaving it uncertain if the events actually happened. That's not really the trope, though.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember a movie that came out around 2005 or so, built around the theme that a couple of kids had had a Narnia-type adventure, and come home, and got on with their lives, thinking mostly that it was something they had imagined along the time of their unexplained several-days disappearance. I think one of them had turned the fragmentary memories into a series of kids' books, and now the Narnia-ish land was calling for their help again. I have no recollection of what the movie was named, though; I'd seen it on the airplane during a long-haul flight.

[seawasp]

Now THAT would be interesting to me, because I've never seen that done.

[mariness.livejournal.com]

Susan Cooper is the major example. There's also:

1. Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, which is an odd example because it's a girl in a fantasy setting forgetting a fantasy setting within that fantasy setting.

2. Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno/Cont. have some elements of this, though to be fair it's hard to tell since so much of those books make no sense.

3. Speaking of Lewis Carroll, Alice in Through the Looking Glass never mentions Wonderland and seems to have no recollection of it.

4. This also happens with L'Engle's Time Quintet series - no one mentions Mrs. Whatsit in The Wind and the Door, for instance, and in the next three books, no one mentions "Well, Meg had once been to other planets and also spent quality time in a mitochondria" so it's often assumed that L'Engle is another example.

5. The Mary Poppins books do this at least two or three times per book, with the babies forgetting not just the fantasy worlds, but how to talk to animals and the creation of stars and all that.

6. Lloyd Alexander's The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha is technically an example of this, but with a major twist on it that I love.

7. Mary Norton does this in Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

8. There's a chapter in The Wind and The Willows that does this, although the animals just return to their talking animal, fantasy state, so, arguable.

9. Edith Nesbit does this in "House of Arden," with the added touch that the kids aren't sure if their time travel trips are real in the first place, and again in a chapter in

10. And of course a certain Judy Garland movie....

I think there are others; these are just the ones I could quickly look up.

[pedanther]

It's been ages since I read it, but I recall The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O'Shea ends with the protagonists forgetting the whole thing.

For a more recent example, I'm pretty sure I remember hearing somewhere that this is the intended reading of the end of Spirited Away, although most of the fans I know choose to interpret it differently.

[richardboustead.livejournal.com]

Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/693/