How can we know what we have not experienced? What compels us to act on that knowledge? And what implications might those actions have? These questions of epistemology underpin the pedagogical process. It is perhaps unsurprising that there are so many approaches to the nature of pedagogy, since it encompasses questions about the nature of knowledge and the nature of humanity. Amidst such confusion of definitions – is education something given to a student; something a student creates; something more social than individual?1 – it is refreshing to explore George MacDonald’s visions of knowledge and pedagogy in his 1871 novel, At the Back of the North Wind.

In some ways it is uncontentious to search for epistemological theories in a George MacDonald novel, although it is less common to culminate such searches with an analysis of the two-hundred-and-seven-line poem in the thirteenth chapter of his first novel-length children’s fairy-tale-realist narrative, as this essay will. The poem is divisive: Bruce Gardiner, as my Honours undergraduate supervisor, called it “the most marvellous nonsense poem”, while Roderick McGillis, despite exploring its thematic significance, has labelled it “interminable!” and “doggerel”.2 Some critics avoid it – Melody Green, in an article on death, nonsense and poetry in At the Back of the North Wind and Carroll’s Alice books, omits discussion of the poem entirely.3 And yet the context in which the poem addresses itself to readers, its themes and its narrative significance, embody MacDonald’s vision of the individual and social transformation that is possible when knowledge is understood as a relational act, steeped in trust and redolent with doubts. This relational concept of knowledge underpins a nonsensical mode of pedagogy that produces and anticipates what Makoto Fujimura calls “generative thinking” – thinking that enables creativity, enables the performance of and expectation of generosity, and has impacts that extend beyond one’s immediate generation.4 In order to establish what this nonsense mode consists of, this essay examines MacDonald’s sense of the fluid boundaries between knowledge, testimony and gossip, turning to ways in which MacDonald’s alternative vision of pedagogy challenges the scarcity models that so often threaten our ability to think generatively.

It is evident from the beginning of At the Back of the North Wind that MacDonald is interested in types of knowledge and ways of knowing. The novel depicts the adventures of a young boy, Diamond, with the mysterious and supernatural North Wind. These encounters are intimately linked with Diamond’s frail health, and the novel ends with his eventual death. The novel thus invokes questions of faith: are Diamond’s encounters real, or are they the product of a dying boy’s imagination? MacDonald therefore displaces attention from Diamond as a character to foreground the question of knowledge. In his opening paragraph the narrator declares:

As McGillis has noted, this narrative framework is destabilising. Who has asked the narrator to tell us this story, and who is this narrator? McGillis concludes that the narrator has been asked “To share the secret of poetry; to experience language as creativity; to know the certainty of uncertainties”,6 and while these are compelling insights I wish here to focus on the way that MacDonald highlights the interactions between personal story, testimony and second-hand testimony (or gossip) to suggest the relational basis for much of what we consider knowledge. The narrator is seemingly, at this point, an omniscient stand-in for MacDonald himself – the author and editor of Good Words for the Young, the magazine in which this book was first serialised. The conversational tone implies a personal relationship, but this sentence existed in two contexts: a widely-read serialised magazine, and a publicly printed novel. “You” is plural, addressed to a multitude. John Durham Peters’ description of Christ “broadcasting” his parables seems to describe MacDonald’s narrator’s act; the image of the narrator sharing their story with a large group of strangers mimics Christ’s decision to allow recipients of his words to become self-selecting participants in an act of interpreting testimony.7 Of course, there is a sense in which readers (or at least, subscribers and purchasers) of Good Words for the Young were already self-selecting readers who valued the moral strain for which the magazine was occasionally satirised,8 but the nature of public print as a medium suggests a casting out of words without a guarantee of being able to control the responses of every single recipient. The story proceeds, then, based on readers’ responses – if we trust the narrator’s integrity and intention, we will read the story as one containing truth; if we distrust the narrator for whatever reason, we will be sceptical of the story that follows. As Elizabeth Fricker has discussed, whether recipients believe second-hand information depends on how trustworthy they consider the teller to be.9 The risk of the narrator’s stance is implicitly the risk that underlies the act of sharing any testimony – knowledge can only be received as such if it is received in trust.

MacDonald is not content to leave his readers to sift through his words to determine what is wisdom and what is drivel: the narrator further destabilises the situation by revealing that this story is not even his. He forces us to consider that second-hand knowledge – that is, knowledge gained through any means other than personal experience – is necessarily based on subjective means of trust. In that opening paragraph he dismisses Herodotus and, by implication, institutions of learning that codify knowledge as objective observations and facts, as subjective anecdotes: Herodotus “mentioned” a land and did not “g[e]t the right account”.10 A more reliable source of information, the narrator suggests, is a story received from a third party: “a boy who went there”. For reasons that become apparent by the end of the novel (Diamond is no longer alive to share his story), Diamond’s testimony can only flourish among listeners with no connection to Diamond by the “grace of gossip”.11 That is, using Bruce Gardiner’s differentiation between gossip and testimony based on the importance of the sender, readers only receive Diamond’s story from an (interchangeable) sender: we must evaluate the message and the sender, who is not the origin of the message.

Although the narrator initially seems trustworthy, he invites readers to question his claim to knowledge by revealing that he is a diegetic character in the novel. At first, the narrator seems to be a mouthpiece for MacDonald – the narrator muses that he has not yet seen Fairyland at its best and is “going” to see it, and he later critiques the ineffectiveness of the temperance movement in passages that clearly reflect MacDonald’s attitudes.12 Yet three chapters from the end, the narrator reveals he came to know Diamond in the last months of Diamond’s life, making the narrator a figure who bridges the world of the novel and the world of the readers. In doing so, MacDonald employs a narrative technique associated with female anti-Jacobin authors from the early nineteenth century.13 Like the women writers in Lisa Wood’s study, MacDonald’s narratorial “self” attempts to replicate “an instructional situation in the didactic relationship between narrator and reader”.14 But this instructional situation is fundamentally unstable: in addition to the tenuous nature of testimony-presented-as-gossip, the narrator’s personal association with Diamond transforms the novel into a case of “imitation and commemoration”.15 The idea that knowledge can be a form of personal memory emphasises the affective qualities of knowing. This implicitly asserts the personal and subjective nature of knowledge.

Moreover, the narrator indicates that he has pieced his story together using the testimony of yet another one of Diamond’s confidants, which suggests that knowledge is always partial and incomplete. This unseen third figure is someone with whom Diamond and the narrator have spoken, but we as readers have no contact with this third figure. When recounting Diamond’s time at the back of the North Wind – the very story for which the reader has been primed – the narrator bemoans, “I have now come to the most difficult part of my story. And why? Because I do not know enough about it. […] I could know nothing about the story except Diamond had told it.” He goes on to reveal that “Diamond never told these things to any one but – no, I had better not say who it was; but whoever it was told me”.16 This could be mere posturing, but in Chapter 16, the narrator again comments, “[Diamond] said this much, though not to me.”17 The narrator’s apparent insistence on a mysterious third source emphasises the fact that we as readers cannot verify the identity of this third figure. We must read the account in trust: trusting the reliability and integrity of the narrator, whom we may already be inclined to distrust, as his omniscience has been revealed as partial knowledge based on short conversations with Diamond and an unknown speaker. We must also trust the veracity of this unidentifiable third figure, whom we may presume to be a named figure in the story, though we cannot verify this. Colin Manlove has compellingly discussed the way that doubt is embedded in the concept of faith in the novel, suggesting that Diamond’s very reality depends on his trust in North Wind as a real figure and not a consequence of his illness-related dreams.18 In addition to this, MacDonald indicates that doubt and uncertainty reside within knowledge, as what we know is communicated to us by individuals whom we can never fully know and whom we must respond to with openness and trust. In fact, North Wind explicitly comments so: when Diamond presses her to prove that she is real and not a dream, the only reasoning she can give is that Diamond loves even when she is absent, suggesting that enduring love signals what is real. When he is still uncertain as to the strength of this logic, North Wind replies, “you may be hopeful, and content not to be quite sure.”19 The instability of knowing is left unresolved as something that must be nurtured by those who choose to respond to the teller in trust.

MacDonald’s visions of the instructional relationship – between narrator and reader; between Diamond and the narrator; between Diamond and North Wind herself – build on a non-rational vision of education in which the process of education, that is, pedagogy, is fundamentally relational rather than rational. This is remarkable for its time, as concepts of pedagogy in the children’s literature tradition into which MacDonald published his novel frequently addressed the learners’ rationality. This often involved an element of condescension where the knowledgeable teacher voluntarily descended to nurture inherent qualities within the learner and close the gap of experience and learning. One of the bestsellers of late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century children’s literature, Anna Letitia Barbauld was praised for “condescending” to the language and cognitive abilities of a young child.20 Barbauld does indicate that knowledge is gained in relational contexts – the opening image of Lessons for Children Aged Two to Three Years (1778) places Charles on Mamma’s lap – but she also insists that rationality is crucial to enable individuals to become wondering, sociable beings.21 Meanwhile, Thomas Hughes, one of MacDonald’s contemporaries, elaborated on the concept of muscular Christianity, asserting, “a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes”.22 Hughes’ focus concerns mastery over the body and the rational application of physical strength in the act of Christian service. By contrast, MacDonald establishes an instructional relationship between North Wind and Diamond that parallels the uncertainty and requirement of trust that underpins the relationship between the reader and the narrator. From their first meeting, North Wind refuses to condescend to Diamond’s levels of experience and cognition (neither of which are particularly developed as Diamond is young and physically frail). She almost antagonistically berates Diamond for “closing up my window” and mocks his name as “a useless thing” without ensuring that Diamond knows that most people understand diamonds as precious stones, and few would know that Diamond is the name of his father’s horse.23 Moreover, she explicitly tells him to distrust his rational interpretation of sensory perceptions. She says Diamond must hold her hand “even when you look at me and can’t see me the least like the North Wind”.24 If we relate this to principles of pragmatics, North Wind is not employing either the Cooperative Principle or even the Politeness Principle; she does not make sure her conversation is relevant and instead allows Diamond to be confused by ambiguities of words. During another encounter, she does not clarify his confusion about the difference between a boat and a poet and simply concludes, “I see it is no use. I wasn’t sent to tell you, and so I can’t tell you.”25 If conversational principles of cooperation and politeness are “regulative factors which ensure that once conversation is underway, it will not follow a fruitless or disruptive path”,26 one can only conclude that North Wind is comfortable with fruitlessness and disruption. To this extent, the conversations reflect the antagonistic word-play conversations that characterise Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.27 Yet, after their first encounter, and in subsequent chapters, Diamond follows, trusts and loves “My own dear North Wind”.28

What enables the relationship between Diamond and North Wind to flourish is Diamond’s obedience, borne out of his irrational, intuitive love for her. As Diamond’s relationship with North Wind indicates, the deepest trust is shown when one is willing to obey another, for that means surrendering one’s rational interpretation of a situation and trusting another’s perception and insights. Such themes are common in MacDonald’s wider oeuvre which features remarks like, “Love aright, and you will come to think aright”, and “Obedience is the grandest thing in the world to begin with”.29 This trust, which facilitates the gaining of non-experiential knowledge, is intuitive and non-rational since it is not based on logical reasoning or causal connections. This is a theme multiple MacDonald scholars discuss: Rebecca Thomas Ankeny explores the role of feeling in knowledge and suggests that meaning in language in MacDonald’s novels is inextricably linked with the dignity of its speakers,30 and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson suggests that in MacDonald’s novels, “academic education means little […] unless this relational truth is apprehended”.31 Notably, such insights correspond with twenty-first century moral psychological studies: Jonathan Haidt, for instance, describes the human inclination to agree or disagree with moral propositions in terms of intuition, suggesting that logical reasoning is largely the handmaiden of affect and emotion.32 If affect and emotion are the seat from which cognition is nurtured, then relationship is the structure enabling education. Pedagogy, in this light, becomes a reclamation of the origin of the paedagogium as a place of hospitality, rather than a place of theoretical knowledge-transfer or skill-training.33

Subsequently, MacDonald’s vision of education and pedagogy explicitly challenges models of knowledge transference or skill-training. His essay “The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture” insists that the purpose of education is more than “the development of this and that faculty, and the depression, if not eradication, of this and that other faculty” and is instead “a noble quest […] a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life”.34 More than this, the delivery of MacDonald’s vision of education is insistently relational; as Jeffrey Johnson notes, MacDonald’s works share two “inextricable” threads: the insistence that identity is formed in relationship, and that individual transformation occurs as a result of relationship.35 At the heart of education, thus, is the question of how communication in hospitable relationships can support such “ceaseless questioning”. As John Durham Peters notes, communication in at least one sense concerns “imparting or partaking” and can be defined as “the project of reconciling self and other”, working concurrently with the truth that “we can never be each other”.36 In this view, communication, the mode by which education occurs, is always incomplete. This incompleteness propels continued communication, humility and unsettledness, and is inherent in a relational pedagogy. David I. Smith, in his exploration of implications of the paedagogium as a place of hospitality, notes that hospitality requires the host to be mindful of their own strangeness in relation to their guests. This stance enables the host to recognise that they require their guests’ hospitality, too.37 In other words, abiding together in a shared space requires a constant interplay of simultaneous, multiple identities. This dynamic model of discernment and being resists trajectories that stultify communication and relationship between individuals, for example locking a student and teacher into fixed identities.

Crucially, the basis for and nature of relationship is non-rational: Diamond trusts North Wind despite her obstructive conversations and her propensity to do things that seem cruel, like sinking a ship, suggesting the pervasiveness of nonsensical paradigms in that inescapable aspect of our lives – relationships.38 This nonsensical paradigm differs from concepts of nonsense-as-genre, in which discussions focus on logic, language and power, and studies cluster around Lear and Carroll.39 Although I do not share the assumption that nonsense (at least in MacDonald’s hands) works quite so straightforwardly as a “mirror that inverts and reverses to subvert the ‘fallen mode of thinking’”,40 critics like Adam Walker rightly note that nonsense as a mode, in the hands of writers who engage with metaphysics, is more about a way of seeing than a framework for highlighting arbitrariness in linguistic or cultural norms. For instance, The Princess and the Goblin lacks the puns which characterise Lewis Carroll’s Alice books; the nonsense lies in the vindication of Princess Irene’s non-rational trust in her great-great-grandmother, a woman invisible to and unknown by nearly every other character in the novel.41 In that novel, as in At the Back of the North Wind, the nonsense lies in the nonsensical nature of placing one’s faith in a figure who is unseen and disbelieved by most of the other characters. MacDonald’s mode of nonsense thus corresponds with and anticipates the views of G.K. Chesterton or Anthony Burgess in which nonsense is a “bizarre way of making sense” of the world in relation to the metaphysical.42 Indeed, Josephine Gabelman’s study of nonsense as a theological mode encapsulates MacDonald’s sense of nonsense as a refusal to follow rational methods and logical sense to anticipate “[an] upside-down kingdom”.43

Nonsense as Pedagogy: The “Wind from Behind”

It is now time to turn to the nonsense poem, which McGillis has helpfully described as the text that facilitates Diamond’s transition into a poet who anticipates and communicates hope and poetry in working-class London.44 The poem structurally transfers the reader from the world of Diamond’s journeys with the mysterious North Wind into a more Dickensian London, replete with child crossing-sweeps, drunken cabmen, and families in financial precarity: yet the book refuses to abandon its fantastical element. During Diamond’s time in London, the novel features an embedded fairytale, a curious episode where a horse claims to be an angel, and both Diamond and Nanny experience evocative North Wind-associated dreams. Such blending of fantasy and realism is typical in MacDonald’s works,45 forcing readers to grapple with the questions: what is real, and how should we respond to our perceived realities? After Diamond returns from his visit to the back of the North Wind, the reader learns that he has been extremely ill. Is North Wind real, then, or are we seeing merely the delusions of a dying boy? If both realities are true, what is the nature of the interaction between them?

At this point, Diamond and his mother, and subsequently, the book’s readers, are solicited by – or subjected to – a poem that Diamond’s mother labels “such nonsense!”, although she goes on to read it at her son’s urging.46 MacDonald’s subsequent presentation of the poem forces the reader to consider that the poem is more than space-filling drivel. Even if one skips the poem, one must flip several pages to get to the end of the chapter, suggesting the poem’s physical and spatial claim to significance. Yet the context of the poem does appear nonsensical at face value, for it presents few ways forward for Diamond’s family who are genuinely in a position of extreme financial insecurity. Diamond’s father’s employer has lost his wealth, forcing Diamond’s family to relocate, and placing pressure on Diamond’s father to find a new job. This context raises the question: how can the kind of relational knowledge that Diamond has gained in his sojourns with North Wind speak to the practical realities of living in a world of unstable jobs and scarce resources? Diamond’s mother is understandably anxious about her family’s financial situation. She laments, “your father has nothing to do, and we shall have nothing to eat by and by”, with legitimate anxiety – her husband enters the gig economy, and the family, effectively living hand to mouth, run out of money when he falls ill, emphasising the practical realities of scarcity in daily life.47

What Diamond offers – and what the poem invites – is a way of seeing the world in terms of generativity and abundance, rather than competitive scarcity. Diamond points out that he and his mother have food in the basket and comments, when his mother likens him to a sparrow that does not consider the winter or frost, “But the birds get through the winter, don’t they?” In response to his mother’s observation that some die, Diamond says (not unreasonably), “They must die some time.”48 In what may seem a callous comment, he reveals an implicit wisdom in recognising that things need not look the same in different temporal stages, and his comments suggest a perception of peace that comes from seeing the world in terms of provision rather than lack. At this point the rustling book catches Diamond’s attention. There is a purposiveness attributed to the poem: the narrator tells us that Diamond “seemed to be of the same mind as the wind”, and in later chapters, when Diamond learns to read, he cannot find the poem, suggesting a supernatural, time-bound revelatory quality to the poem.49 Yet to readers this poem bears the hallmarks of gossip: although the novel implies that North Wind has sent the poem, suggesting a testimonial quality, the reader never knows the sender or source. Moreover, the poem’s dissemination feels like gossip rather than testimony delivered in a setting where receivers are primed to receive first-hand knowledge: the readers, like Diamond’s mother, are plunged into a grammatically overwhelming set of images of plenitude and motion:

The “genesis” moment of this poem is its declaration of personal knowledge. It is not a scientific knowledge of the river based on names, chemical components, or categories; it is a relational knowing based on the river’s interactions with its surroundings. Notably, the river manifests itself differently in different regions, singing in the shallows, silent in the hollows: it actively responds to different settings in specific ways. The river (redolent of the river of life in the Revelation of St John) blesses generations of creatures by its banks:

In some ways, it is hard to characterise this as a nonsense poem when it is possible, by chunking portions, to make sense of the images that layer one another. Grammatically speaking, the chief thing that makes this nonsensical is the extravagant length of the sentence. The entire poem is a sentence, overwhelming logical comprehension. This is, in large part, the poem’s aim; flooding, as it does, the reader with visions of abundance of life to suggest that the logical portioning of experiences detracts from that true educational pursuit of being endlessly unsettled and perpetually seeking unattainable truths. The overflow of superlatives creates a current of words that attempts to divert logical thoughts. We are carried along by the patterns of assonance, the omission of punctuation marks, and the incessant use of “and”, all of which distract readers from parsing the discrete images of the wildlife by the river. We are presented with incessant images of abundance and constant creation that crowd atop each other: because of the river, birds can transform mud into clay and can make nests. These practical acts of creation enable multigenerational blessing: the swallows’ children are the “merriest children”. The inextricable relationships between the river inhabitants and the river, which enable the growth of the swallows, the daisies, and the lambs alike, are reinforced by the way the images cluster in a single sentence. Find a source of relational knowledge, the poem implies, and this enables a generous, multigenerational way of being. This way of being provides a key to perceiving the world in a way that invites abundance and creativity, even if that creativity is as mundane as swallows making nests.

The poem ends not with the river, but with a gesture to a greater life-giving power, suggesting that the conduits for generative thinking – the river in the poem, the poem itself – depend on a practical hope in a goodness that is at work throughout the world:

Almost abruptly, the physical river, with which we have been travelling for nearly two hundred lines, is displaced: the metaphorical river of life is the “wind that blows”. With MacDonald’s vocation as a preacher, it is impossible to read of “wind” without also hearing the Biblical pun on “Spirit” (exemplified with great clarity in the third chapter of the Gospel of John). But because MacDonald avoids Christian language, the identity of this divine, life-giving wind is obscured to include broader ways of thinking about hope in a life-giving source that enables generative patterns of behaviour. This practical hope in an overarching goodness that compels and underpins our behaviours in this world is, the poem concludes, what enables us to respond without submitting with pessimism to paradigms of scarcity.53 Indeed, Diamond, after hearing this poem, responds practically and creatively to situations of great scarcity and anxiety, suggesting the usefulness as well as the beauty of this generative way of thinking. Practically, when his father is ill, he takes on his father’s job as a cab driver, enabling his family to afford their daily needs; creatively, he effects a stronger transformation in an alcoholic cabbie by singing to the cabbie’s infant and showcasing the potential for joy in the stress of poverty.

Crucially, Diamond’s mother also demonstrates a greater openness to actions that do not make sense in a logic of scarcity, suggesting that the poem’s dissemination amongst recipients who initially consider it nonsense can produce transformations within those once-resistant listeners. MacDonald’s narrator tells us with certainty that she “couldn’t find any sense in [the poem]”,54 indicating that Diamond’s mother receives the poem only as a piece of meaningless gossip at the seaside. Yet she later shows an increased openness to act based on trust in the generosity of others. When Diamond’s acquaintance Mr Raymond asks Diamond’s parents to care for an orphaned crossing-sweep, Nanny, and to look after (and sometimes work) Mr Raymond’s horse, Ruby, Diamond’s father sees only the costs incurred by taking on more mouths to feed. Diamond’s mother encourages him to accept the wager as she thinks with compassion on Nanny’s needs.55 When the wager does not seem to work and Diamond’s father is pessimistic about whether Mr Raymond will provide sufficient recompense, labelling Mr Raymond a “hard man”, Diamond’s mother encourages her husband to hope in Mr Raymond’s kindness – a hope justified when Mr Raymond offers Diamond’s father a better-paid, more stable job.56 While Diamond’s mother’s transformation is not as extreme as her son’s – she still laughs at Mr Raymond’s proposition of pairing Diamond-the-horse and Ruby in a double harness57 – her willingness to think in terms of generosity indicates that she has been transformed by her encounter with the poem. Although she first received the poem as a piece of drivel, she increasingly acts in accordance with the poem’s values because she has witnessed and been compelled by her son’s actions and has allowed her perceptions of human nature to shift. Education, as MacDonald reminds us, is a process that unfolds relationally.

Although At the Back of the North Wind features moments of conventional learning (including a two-sentence summary of how Diamond learns to read58), the novel is most interested in pedagogy as a relationship based on trust. Diamond’s trust in North Wind and acceptance that her way of seeing reality holds truth presents a dynamic pedagogy which, like the nonsense poem, trusts in goodness and delights in the generosity of others. This perception of the world as a place of abundance provides an alternative to the anxiety and scepticism that accompanies paradigms of scarcity. However, this requires trust, and the narrator’s subjective sharing of Diamond’s story creates an interpretive space into which we as readers are invited to respond, in trust or with doubt, to the second-hand knowledge encoded in the novel.

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