Reader response

Try this rewarding reflection by AS Byatt on how she remembers some of the books she read as a child.  For me, she captures some of the ‘childness’ in these books, and what a child may take from them. I’ve pulled out some plums.

On Alices’ Adventures in Wonderland:

The texture of reading Alice is a series of linguistic puzzles, contradictions and jokes… [Alice's] main emotion is trying to make sense against increasing odds.

Peter Pan, Treasure Island (among others):

Children in these books have a kind of emotional and moral autonomy which is new in literature. The child reader feels their problems, decisions and dangers differently from those of either children in real fairy stories (Hansel and Gretel) or children in novels who will grow up – Pip in terror by his parents’ gravestone,  Oliver Twist in the orphanage, David Copperfield tormented by the Murdstones, Jane Eyre in the Red Room, or furious, sulky Maggie Tulliver.

On The Secret Garden:

One of the most moving orphans is Mary in The Secret Garden… My childish responses to Mary’s attempts to make sense of the world were the opposite to my response to Alice. I felt protective towards her and, at the same time, I did see the world from inside her. I was embarrassed with and for her…Yet her own cussedness and capacity for tantrums turn out to be a strength when she meets the cosseted and neglected invalid Colin, another self-centred child- seen by the reader, I think, through Mary’s eyes as she hectors  him into ordinary life.

On The Wizard of Oz:

… Dorothy does not have much character – less than her three companions who nevertheless provide no niche for the reader’s imaginiation to hang on to… What is splendid about Oz is the detail of things – yellow bricks, emerald glasses, oilcans.

On Treasure Island:

[Jim's] is a first-person narrative, which is as often distancing as it is involving. But the smells, the fear, the effort, the attempt to read strange and dangerous faces, or deceptively mild ones, become part of one’s own consciousness…

Fear goes with evil beings, and with dangerous landscapes. Blind Pew, and smiling, treacherous Long John Silver taught me much about fear, about the possibility of real danger.

In particular, as we are currently focusing on illustration, read her comments about Disneyfication, and the one Disney film which for her did not kill the power of the original:

…Snow White.. added considerably to my experience of wonderful fear and terror, even though its heroine was a doll. This, I have been told, was because it was made by German refugees who had a sense of the darkness of the old stories.

Choose your family

Here’s a thought-experiment about ideas of childhood and growing up. If you found yourself wandering lost among children’s literature, orphaned and alone, which literary family would you choose?

Do we all want to be Weasleys? Freedom to be yourself, unconditional love, excitement and fun, with the prospect of growing up into a responsible adult with decent values.

I don’t want to stay with Peter Pan – there’s no growth (though I kind of like the idea of no weight…)  Wendy’s childhood is playful but she has to cope with a lot of nonsense from John about boys being better. I really don’t want to camp out with the Swallows or the Amazons – my imagination wouldn’t take me past the discomforts (yes, I’m a duffer); couldn’t abide Tom and his brother Peter as siblings or their stifling ordinariness (too much like my own); Cassie’s family have it tough and  Mama and Papa dole out punishment too.  Lyra’s guardians allow her an enchanting freedom but she doesn’t seem to be much cared for…

Avatar and Peter Pan – the dark side

The 3D film Avatar is grabbing the headlines – popular success but tired storyline? We can recognise the following criticism as in the same spirit as some of the analysis of classic texts  on our course:

Yeah, it is an impressive piece of visual filmmaking, but that story, that dialog, those stock characters, and so on is lame, lame, lame.  Especially the plot.  I mean, I’d thought and hoped we were mostly beyond the sort of sentiments expressed by Pope in the 18th century.  That is, the objectifying of the “primitive,” the rehashing yet again those 19th century tropes of the vanishing red man, the 70s environmental Indians-are-the-keepers-of-the-earth-and-we-whites-need-to-do-something, and on and on and on that is front and center in this mediocre piece of storytelling.  Lo, the poor Na’vi!

The BBC’s Mark Mardell rehearses (but minimises) a similar argument  in his blog posting :

With a certain accuracy critics have pointed out that all the “human” characters are played by white actors and all the blue, cat-like Na’vi are played by non-whites. With a degree of American insularity they also say that because they use bows and arrows and wear feathers they are “really” native Americans. This ignores tribal indigenous people from New Guinea to Brazil, so deliberately misses a wider point.

The debate in the US is conditioned by the long-running argument among sci-fi writers and fans about the “magical negro“. It is a term coined by black critics who noted white authors often featured non-white characters possessed of a certain sort of natural wisdom, mystic powers, who play sidekick to the white hero and often sacrifice themselves for the central character. They are a variant on the much-older ideal of the “noble savage”.

There’s a certain relevance to Peter Pan, isn’t there?  Mardell goes on to make a political point; but he also suggests that those wretched “critics” (always a pejorative term) miss the point about ‘the way narrative works’.

I’d rather explore the way that narratives can work on various levels at once.  Our course is encouraging us to see both the explicit and the implicit; a narrative is embedded in a worldview that can jar – provocatively, productively – against our own perspective.

Peter Pan has a dark side, for sure. Indeed is not clear that it is even suitable for children. See here for a BBC video piece on a production of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens that was not intended for under 5s and whose ‘Hook’ claimed with satisfaction that children had been made to cry by the production and had to be taken out.  It’s worth watching the video not least for shots of the Peter Pan statue, and of another statue that may be thought of as the inspiration for Captain Hook.

And then again, I was fascinated by the article in our Reader 2 about ‘Peter Pan and the pantomime tradition’. That’s yet another level of context for the story. The article is extracted from a text that is available online here, and which reminds us not to be taken in by the Disney version of Peter Pan:

As many readers come to realize, and as Barrie himself tells us, Peter Pan is a tragic tale. Even as children, we know it is not just that “[a]ll children, except one, grow up” … but that all children, except one, want to grow up; and as adults we feel like the grown-up Wendy, “a grown woman smiling at it all, but they were wet smiles” …, feeling his loneliness, his bravado, his loveless life. Peter Pan does not  love us and does not remember us, and that is exactly why we love and remember him, because we  know what he is missing.

Representations of childhood

“Each generation remakes the idea of being young“  At the link* is an overview of ideas about childhood, by Prof Hugh Cunningham of the University of Kent. He writes about the Victorian period:

Children, it came to be thought, should be protected from the adult world of work and responsibility. They should be dependent on adults, and their time divided between home and school. And ideally they should be happy, a state of happiness coming to be particularly associated with childhood. Right at the end of the period Peter Pan wanted never to grow up.

Things have shifted in the 2003 Hogan film version,  where the focus is much more on Wendy’s adolescent drive to grow up.  I quite liked the soppy spiralling to the skies scene to romantic music – brought down to earth with a bump when Peter insists that it is just play.  But really I could hardly wait for the film to end.

I’m with Maurice Sendak – ‘the wish is to get out [of childhood]‘ , as adolescence kicks in anyway.

What about younger generations?  Extended education, financial difficulties keeping young people at home with parents longer, the popularity of games and entertainment: are these signs of different patterns of ‘growing up’?

*Edit – the link wasn’t working. Sorry. It should be ok now.

Peter Pan Covered

Arthur Rackham cover to Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906)

1915 cover illustration by FD Bedford

Mabel Lucy Attwell’s Peter Pan and Wendy (1921)

For lots more, here are the results of a google search for “Peter Pan book cover”.

“Best of 2009″ UK lists

Marking down to a trickle now; but as I’m uninspired for a post I’m grateful to Kate for a nudge. Here are a few links that might inspire you. I’ve not found a round-up of children’s poetry books of 2009, though. What does that say, I wonder?

I haven’t studied the lists yet  but I did notice  Geraldine McCaughrean, one of my favourite children’s authors,  on The Sunday Times list for her The Death Defying Pepper Roux.   This provides a tenuous relevance to our current study block – McCaughrean is author of Peter Pan in Scarlet

Daily Telegraph ‘first readers”

Independent:  best teenage fiction of 2009

Sunday Times best children’s books of 2009

Guardian: children’s and illustrated books

Edit: additions (thanks, Susan! Skip over to Chicken Spaghetti for Susan’s less UKcentric list of lists)

Telegraph: children’s books

Financial Times: Books of the year (start at the end, for children’s books)

Independent: Best children’s books

When Uncles and Aunts were the Wild Things

“Where the Wild Things Are” : book,  animated short, children’s opera, film, video game,  and oh dear  novelisation. Are we in the process of seeing it become a modern fairy tale: scary, weird, and thoroughly commoditised?

To the flurry of discussion about whether the film is suitable for children (see here for instance), the book’s author has given a robust response:

What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?
Sendak: I would tell them to go to hell. That’s a question I will not tolerate.

Because kids can handle it?
Sendak: If they can’t handle it, go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it’s not a question that can be answered.

But in an  interview recorded back in 1986 with America’s National Public Radio, Sendak said of his book:  ‘children are not afraid of them [the monsters] because Max is not afraid of them.’

I thought the interview made fascinating listening. Sendak had a sickly childhood, relatively unprotected by immigrant parents who were themselves vulnerable, but even so he was surely not completely unusual in finding adults ‘awful.. mostly dreadful’ and that ‘being a child was even worse… a creature without power, without pocket money, or escape routes’. He saw Peter Pan and detested it as sentimental – ‘The wish is to get out [of childhood]‘. He denies that his books have morals – he seeks to amuse, entertain, distract.

As a child, he himself was terrified of the vacuum cleaner (the way that bag inflated..) and of the Invisible Man because how could you be reassured that he wasn’t actually there? He recalls his childhood perspective: those Uncles and Aunts, seen with a child’s eye, are potential monsters. They say things like ‘How big you are, how fat you’ve got, we could eat you up.’ And how ugly the relatives are! Children can be ‘monstrously cruel about physical defects.’

And if all this doesn’t scare you,  try taking a look at the Wild Things  fashion collection.