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Popular Culture Review
immortalizing history by paralleling his heroine’s emotional trauma with her
struggle to readjust to life. This seems particularly relevant in today’s world, as
we read about soldiers returning to families and experiencing a detachment and
lack of emotion that their wives are unable to understand.^^ Parents of deceased
soldiers are suing internet email providers for access to their children’s accounts,
digital files and blogs, struggling to gain access to what will be their final
memories and accounts of their lost loved ones’ lives. VA hospitals in America
are losing funding en masse.^® We tend to think of war and war trauma as
something in the past and only experienced by those who fight in foreign lands;
in reality, the complexities of emotional trauma and symptoms of Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder are as relevant today as they were ninety years ago.
Fforde’s series revitalizes long forgotten issues in the novel as a genre and
reminds us of their relevance to our current times.
Equally important, though, are the ways in which Fforde plays with
memory, time, and the potential in the act of revision. Fforde embellishes on the
idea of reader interaction with the text in a fun and wholly fanciful way; in his
world, one can “go visit” the characters in a narrative, converse with them, and
even give them advice on how to play their parts. While not just anyone is
allowed into books, as altering a manuscript does have potentially damaging
effects for all printed copies worldwide. Next herself becomes an instrument of
change in a frightfully creative way. Of her early forages into the original Jane
Eyre manuscript, Edward Rochester tells Thursday: “Your intervention
improved the narrative” {EA 190). These initial and almost accidental alterations
pale in comparison to the dramatic showdown, in which the Jane and Edward
story is irrevocably amended. Thursday’s unavoidable err reshapes the narrative
in an exciting and debatably better way than Bronte herself intended, making
Thursday heir apparent to Miss Havisham’s prestigious career with
Jurisfiction—^but that is another tale.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Heather Lusty
Notes
I
am referring to the immortalization o f the charge by Tennyson in his poem “The
Qiarge o f the Light Brigade” (1870).
2
There are other elements or parallels to the plight o f the returning Great War soldier
which are not addressed here including amputations (Landen), disabilities and post
service neglect and poverty.
3
The Thursday Next series revisits the novels o f the 1920s— for example, the Parade's
End series by Ford Madox Ford, The Return o f the Soldier by Rebecca West, and Mrs.
Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, as w ell as many others— which explored the fragile
emotional states in which soldiers returned after the Great War, and explores the
important ways in which memory fimctions in everyday life.