From: Perry Nodelman <nodelman>
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 17:07:58 -0500 (CDT)

At last, a moment or two to respond toKathleen's comments about timelessness. (It's at busy times like this that I can begin to appreciate why we all wish for timelessness so much--and realize once more how utopian those wishes are?) So here goes (at, I warn you, great length):

1. Kathleen asked about which theorists I meant in my last comment on this subject. Sorry for being so vague: I've been working on my keynote speech on theory and children's lit for the IRSCL in Sweden, and had all this stuff on my mind. I was thinking specifically about ideological theorists such as Gramsci and, especially, Louis Althusser. In Terry Eagleton's book on ideology, he discusses dehistoricising as an quality of any thought that tries to ignore the influence of specific cultures and politically powerful groups on individuals.

2. I do personally think that dehistoricising is a bad thing, if it's a deliberate (or even an unconscious) means of blinding people to certain kinds of oppressiveness that gives others power over them. It's instructive that in contemporary North America, it's the right wing groups that tend to hold most of the power that are the ones which want to persuade the rest of us that certain values are timeless--their own values, and values that work to confirm their right to power. It's no wonder that many African Americans or Hispanics or women doubt the timeless validity of many of those values. (Note, as an example, how right wing groups invent an idea of "normal family life" of the sort that might actually have existed, mostly as an ideal, in a very small spectrum of [white, middle class] American society for some decades earlier In this century, then claim that it is timeless--ask us to believe that this has ALWAYS been the way families always ought to be, in a way that marginalizes and oppresses women who want or need to work out of the home, or families in which grandparents care for children. )

3. As for texts of literature being timeless. I become suspicious of such a claim simply because those who seem most determined to make it most often are those who, once more, have a vested interest in maintaining their power. This gets us into a whole discussion of why we should or shouldn't read writers in the literary canon. Like the one Kathleen mentioned, Sophocles. Kathleen asks, why do we still read Sophocles. Well, I can think of a lot answers for that, but a main one has to be, because certain people with power tell us that we ought to, and that we should feel bad or inferior if we haven't. It's their power that makes Sophocles important, and insists on his timelessness. (And they tend to be white men, like Sophocles himself, too--and to read his somewhat insulting portrayals of women characters are representations of the timeless essence of femininity.)

4. And anyway, Sophocles is anything but timeless, on two counts. One, his view of the world and of people is one that is totally alien to my own. I feel safe in saying that I share almost none of Sophocles' ancient Greek values, which, in fact, usually strike me as being incredibly brutal and tyrannical, and which are involved with a system of beliefs that is totally unlike my own or just about anybody else's in the last couple of thousand years. Two, his plays are filled with specific non-timeless references to his own culture. If Sophocles has somehow transcended his own time, it's not because he deliberately TRIED to.

5. In fact, I believe, it's quite the opposite: all the books which might make claims to transcend their own time and seem in some way timeless are actually very much involved with specifics of time and place. Consider Shakespeare. Consider Dickens. Consider Beatrix Potter and E.B. White. You don't become timeless in your writing by deliberately avoiding specifics of one time and place (and books that try to do that rarely survive their time). You do it by capturing those specifics so well that readers in other times find them truly and deeply and convincingly human. What is timeless about the human condition, I think, is that it is always different in different times and places--even in different minds in the same place.

But I haven't dealt with why we still read Sophocles (assuming, of course, that people still do), or think of him as timeless. It seems to me that, like many great writers, his texts are inherently ironic--so deeply self-contradictory that they're capable of being read in a wide variety of different ways. Thus, they can be re-invented again and again as time passes. They're timeless not in describing some timeless (and I believe, non-existent) human essence, but in their ability to seem to express to different people in different times and places their own values. Now, I imagine, most people who find Sophocles' Oedipus timeless do so in terms of its relationship to an article of faith in our own century that Sophocles never even imagined: the Oedipal complex.

So what does all this have to do with Walk Two Moons? Darned if I know. But maybe this: if we can manage to disagree about it deeply (as perhaps we are, Kathleen?) and find grounds in the novel itself to support our vastly different understandings of it, then maybe it has that self-ironizing kind of timelessness that will make it last for future generations of children. But I still find myself wishing that the children in it expressed their beings in terms of the stuff of contemporary life more often than they do. A pox on Sharon's editor who made her take it out!

Yrs., Perry Nodelman At a new address: nodelman at io.UWinnipeg.ca
Received on Thu 27 Jul 1995 05:07:58 PM CDT