The thematics of revolution or rebellion against the reigning powers, and the desire for freedom and change, energy and renewal mark Diana Wynne Jones as in many ways a latter-day Romantic in her work, the Dionysian revels and Prometheus is unbound. Most importantly, it is also associated with the idea of freedom-freedom from personal enslavement, from narrative determinism, from fixed forms. I will also argue that in Diana Wynne Jones's work, renewal is associated with infinite possibility, this last meant not only rhetorically, but also substantially. (We may recall Vivian's attempt at translation that converts a staid historical account into a madcap narrative in which coffins metamorphose into lively old ladies full of electricity ). If she is the Sage of Dissolution, Jones is, however, also Sophie in Howl's Moving Castle, whose gift is to talk life into things, and Vivian Smith of The Tale of Time City-the maker (smith/faber/fabricator) who gives life or revives and endows stories with a new vividness. As this essay argues, Jones's writing not only thematizes renewal, but enacts it, at the level of form, in her innovations with regard to narrative strategy and in the re-energizing of tired tropes from well-known sources in mythology and canonical literatures. Like Yam, Diana Wynne Jones has a "revolutionary brain." Like the Sage of Theare (ref), she preaches Dissolution, but a Dissolution that is aimed at dissolving the various rules and dogmata of fantasy.
If the "song" is to "come alive"-and the "song" is of course at one level a metaphor for fantasy itself-it needs to be renewed, done differently, or, as the robot Yam says in Hexwood (1993), "Adapted. Their observations might be argued to emblematize Diana Wynne Jones's philosophy as it relates to the writing of fantasy: that the "old things" of fantasy are not sacrosanct, and no more than "unbounded truth" should fantasy be constrained, bound to particular formats, narratives, or modes of articulation. A similar point is made by the enchanter Chrestomanci when he contends that a "thing need not be done in the same old way in order to work" (Magicians of Caprona 223). 'I don't like the old style either, and I don't see why old things should be sacred'" (Cart and Cwidder 114). 'I took a leaf out of your book,' Kialan said, rather apologetically. But then he gave Moril a bit of a wink and dropped into the same kind of different fingering Moril had used in Neathdale.
"Kialan," says the narrator, "did that part meticulously in the right old style.
Unbounded truth is not a thing Cramped to time and bound in place. At one point in Diana Wynne Jones' Cart and Cwidder (1975), the refugee lordling, Kialan picks up a cwidder and sings.
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