Many Waters (AFTER)

There are a lot of ways to look at this book, obviously, but one of the things that really permeates the entire work is the use of allusions to various things. For instance:

-the Unicorn myth
In Many Waters, Sandy and Dennys's ability to travel across space-time on the backs of "virtual" unicorns is dependent upon 2 things: 1) their belief in the unicorns and 2) their virginity. A fact which reveals the truly malicious nature of Tiglah's temptations: if the boys had succumbed to her charms, they would never have been able to leave the antidiluvian world, even to escape from the flood. In a sense, their story reflects that of Noah and his family; Noah is given an ark because of his righteousness, the boys are given unicorns because of their sexual purity. However, did Madeliene L'Engle come up with the associations between unicorns and purity herself? Actually, she is borrowing it from a very old tradition, which states that a unicorn will come trustingly to a young virgin girl and lay his head in her lap. (For instance, in T.H. White's The Once and Future King, a King Arthur retelling, Gawaine and his brothers use a young kitchen maid [actually named Meg] to attempt to catch a unicorn.) This symbolism has always struck me as odd, because there is definitely something Freudian about the unicorn's single horn, but there you have it.

-the Nephilim
According to the Bible, "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them." (Genesis 6:4)


-The Biblical story of Noah and his family
Many Waters implies a solid plot structure that is used in many fantasy stories about children: the children enter a magical world/dimension, usually by (seemingly) accidental means, experience some initial denial/fright/danger/hardship, eventually accomplish something good for the magical world, grow and improve in some way, and afterwards return to their own dimension to find everything but themselves unchanged, often experiencing a "did it really happen?" moment. (Other stories with this structure or close variants thereof include Knight's Castle by Edward Eager, The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, and several of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia books.) However, the sense of completion this circular structure usually conveys is counterbalanced in Many Waters' case by a deep sense of incompletion; or, more accurately, a sense of a story beyond the story. There's certainly something very metafictional about Sandy and Dennys' frequent discussions of whether or not certain characters, including themselves, are "in the story" (i.e. the Biblical account). The way in which the "virtual unicorns" constantly flicker in and out of being reflects the complex and often shaky position which reality holds in Many Waters. To what extent is anything in the adventure even happening? Did Sandy and Dennys literally get sent back in time? Or is the entire adventure merely a simulation projected by their father's computer program? We aren't told in the story, and Sandy and Dennys may never know.
Another area in which we feel incompletely informed regards the nature of the people in the oasis. According to the Biblical account, God sent a destructive flood on the earth because "The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain" (Genesis 6:5-6). However, the only "wickedness" the twins directly encounter while in the oasis is attempted seduction, stubbornness, kidnapping, and getting thrown in a garbage pit--the last 3 admittedly not much fun for the twins, but hardly enough, it seems, to warrant divine judgment on such a vast scale. How does one explain this apparrent contradiction? In my opinion, the God, or "El," of Many Waters is not a cruel, wanton force acting on a whim--although His ways are undoubtedly mysterious. For instance, El talks closely to characters such as Noah and Lamech, and saves Yalith from the flood by "taking her up", presumably to Heaven, in a manner similar to the story of Enoch. Why then does He send the flood? Was Sandy and Dennys' experience in the oasis merely an exceptionally sheltered one? This is the explanation I like; I think many more nefarious things are taking place in the oasis world of which we are given only glimpses--for instance, how much of a perversion is it for the nephilim to sleep with and marry the humanoid people? The mysterious great sin in the oasis world seems to lie with the nephilim, who have symbolically demonic names and can shape-shift into predatory or traditionally "unclean" animals.