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[CCBC-Net] The Hidden Adult
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From: Perry Nodelman <perry_nodelman>
Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:42:30 -0500
OK, I've now actually finished writing this, and my apologies again for the earlier incomprehensible draft. I hope this one is a little less incomprehensible.
On 16-Jul-09, at 3:02 PM, Nancy Silverrod wrote:
> A couple of books which pretty completely leave out the adult point
> of view in a totally delightful way are Ruth Krauss and Maurice
> Sendak's A Very Special House, and A Hole is to Dig. Both of these
> books focus completely on children's imaginations as they explore
> their daily worlds.
These are interesting ones. The Krauss books certainly make the claim that they represent children's imaginations--Krauss thanks the children and teachers in some specific schools in A Hole Is to Dig, suggesting that these definitions are actually ones created by real children. And maybe they are--but the copy i have certainly doesn't literally say so, which i find very interesting indeed. Even if they do come originally from real children, i think the claim to represent real childlike thinking is somewhat undermined even by the way these sayings of children are being presented here. They are merchandise for sale--marked as being valued by adults and therefore for the children adults buy books for, and marketed as such. So they are transformed into a sort of commodity, as the sayings of children rarely in real life are. They are even copyrighted, my editions tell me, by Ruth Krauss--so if indeed she did first hear children say these things, she has either stolen their work from them or transformed it into something genuinely her intellectual property (and she certainly never credits any specific child for any one of the sayings--as if some one child's way of phrasing something represents the way all children think?)
(After writing all that, I did some searching and discovered that Krauss's editor, Ursula Nordstrom, says of A Hole is to Dig in one her letters in the Dear Genius collection, "It came from Ruth Krauss' listening to children, getting ideas from them, polishing some of the thoughts, exploring additional 'definitions' of her own. It really grew out of children and what is important to them." So there's are claims both to authorship and to the idea that they do actually represent childlike thinking--an intriguing example of how the childlike imagination represented in children's literature is actually an adult invention, a superimposition of an adult idea of childhood on child characters and child readers.)
Furthermore, Sendak's illustrations are endearingly cute and elvishly mischievous-looking caricatures of children--images that confirm an idea of what children ought to look like when adults most adore or admire them and most find them illustration-worthy. More sober (or more damaged) youngsters might well notice the difference between these apparently careless sprites and themselves, and learn an important lesson about how to get adults on your side: pretend to me more like this, please. We adults want you to be childlike in ways we approve of, kids. We really, really do. Stop not acting like children, right now.
There's also the question of audience. For adults, clearly, books like A Hole Is to Dig are meant to represent a conventional ideal of childhood as a happy, innocent, imaginative utopia. They are meant to make adults love children for their innocence, or even their ignorance--their way of cleverly imagining what they don't actually know, of being without concern for reason or convention. I have to admit to being one of those adults who's a sucker for this kind of thing--the Krauss/Sendak books are delightfully engaging, and represent exactly what I might like to imagine an ideal childhood world to be (if i didn't know the real world better, or actually, worse).
But how do these texts work as books for children, exactly? Why would a child be interested in another's child's cutely off-base attempt to define something? Not, surely, because they find it cute or endearingly childlike, as adults presumably are meant to do? We don't, surely, imagine child readers going, "My, that's adorable! aren't these other kids so very clever and cute?"" Child readers might perhaps recognize these definitions as "true"--the way things are; but only, surely, if we believe that all children imagine the world in the same way, as if all children possess the exact same
"childlike" mind. Is that even possible? Would children living in poverty and without books to teach them how to do it think this way? Or children might, then, respond to A Hole Is to Dig as instruction-- how you are supposed to be cute and childlike if you want adults to approve of you? The "hidden adult" content here is, then, a conventional adult idea and image of childhood imaginations that child readers are being encouraged to accept as a vision of what they ought most to be like. And so the basic situation of writing children's literature: an adult pretending to be childlike in order to impose this particular idea of childlikeness on children.
> The Eloise books have adult characters, who do, at times try to
> impose an adult structure, if not viewpoint on Eloise. However,
> Eloise runs roughshod over adult expectations, and her actions, and
> imagined actions remain in the forefront to delight the reader, with
> fabulous illustrations to pore over again and again.
As for Eloise--well, it's been so long since I've even looked at one of that series that I can't really say much about it. But I'm intrigued by the subtitle of the 1955 edition I see on Google Books:
"a book for precocious grown ups." Is it a children's book at all, then, or another way of pleasing adults with an attractive vision of the childlike? Is the imagination it depicts genuinely childlike, then, or another idealized representation of a way adults like to think about what childhood is--a way that represents what adults feel the loss of (or maybe, if they never actually had it, the absence of) and long for and hope to impose on children--and, the theorist Jacqueline Rose would add, a way of making ourselves as adult comfortable by blotting out our actual adult knowledge and memory of the pain and horror that being a child so often consists of. As Sendak says in the words I quote as the epigraph for The Hidden Adult: "In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It's vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my own childhood vividly ... I knew terrible things ... but I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew ... it would scare them.."
Perry
_____________ Perry Nodelman http://pernodel.wordpress.com/
Book Trailers: The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3t7JAfPQeA The Ghosthunters2: The Curse of the Evening Eye http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qapDE1Kwnis The Ghosthunters I: The Proof that Ghosts Exist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw0ow7oQV7k
Received on Fri 17 Jul 2009 10:42:30 AM CDT
Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:42:30 -0500
OK, I've now actually finished writing this, and my apologies again for the earlier incomprehensible draft. I hope this one is a little less incomprehensible.
On 16-Jul-09, at 3:02 PM, Nancy Silverrod wrote:
> A couple of books which pretty completely leave out the adult point
> of view in a totally delightful way are Ruth Krauss and Maurice
> Sendak's A Very Special House, and A Hole is to Dig. Both of these
> books focus completely on children's imaginations as they explore
> their daily worlds.
These are interesting ones. The Krauss books certainly make the claim that they represent children's imaginations--Krauss thanks the children and teachers in some specific schools in A Hole Is to Dig, suggesting that these definitions are actually ones created by real children. And maybe they are--but the copy i have certainly doesn't literally say so, which i find very interesting indeed. Even if they do come originally from real children, i think the claim to represent real childlike thinking is somewhat undermined even by the way these sayings of children are being presented here. They are merchandise for sale--marked as being valued by adults and therefore for the children adults buy books for, and marketed as such. So they are transformed into a sort of commodity, as the sayings of children rarely in real life are. They are even copyrighted, my editions tell me, by Ruth Krauss--so if indeed she did first hear children say these things, she has either stolen their work from them or transformed it into something genuinely her intellectual property (and she certainly never credits any specific child for any one of the sayings--as if some one child's way of phrasing something represents the way all children think?)
(After writing all that, I did some searching and discovered that Krauss's editor, Ursula Nordstrom, says of A Hole is to Dig in one her letters in the Dear Genius collection, "It came from Ruth Krauss' listening to children, getting ideas from them, polishing some of the thoughts, exploring additional 'definitions' of her own. It really grew out of children and what is important to them." So there's are claims both to authorship and to the idea that they do actually represent childlike thinking--an intriguing example of how the childlike imagination represented in children's literature is actually an adult invention, a superimposition of an adult idea of childhood on child characters and child readers.)
Furthermore, Sendak's illustrations are endearingly cute and elvishly mischievous-looking caricatures of children--images that confirm an idea of what children ought to look like when adults most adore or admire them and most find them illustration-worthy. More sober (or more damaged) youngsters might well notice the difference between these apparently careless sprites and themselves, and learn an important lesson about how to get adults on your side: pretend to me more like this, please. We adults want you to be childlike in ways we approve of, kids. We really, really do. Stop not acting like children, right now.
There's also the question of audience. For adults, clearly, books like A Hole Is to Dig are meant to represent a conventional ideal of childhood as a happy, innocent, imaginative utopia. They are meant to make adults love children for their innocence, or even their ignorance--their way of cleverly imagining what they don't actually know, of being without concern for reason or convention. I have to admit to being one of those adults who's a sucker for this kind of thing--the Krauss/Sendak books are delightfully engaging, and represent exactly what I might like to imagine an ideal childhood world to be (if i didn't know the real world better, or actually, worse).
But how do these texts work as books for children, exactly? Why would a child be interested in another's child's cutely off-base attempt to define something? Not, surely, because they find it cute or endearingly childlike, as adults presumably are meant to do? We don't, surely, imagine child readers going, "My, that's adorable! aren't these other kids so very clever and cute?"" Child readers might perhaps recognize these definitions as "true"--the way things are; but only, surely, if we believe that all children imagine the world in the same way, as if all children possess the exact same
"childlike" mind. Is that even possible? Would children living in poverty and without books to teach them how to do it think this way? Or children might, then, respond to A Hole Is to Dig as instruction-- how you are supposed to be cute and childlike if you want adults to approve of you? The "hidden adult" content here is, then, a conventional adult idea and image of childhood imaginations that child readers are being encouraged to accept as a vision of what they ought most to be like. And so the basic situation of writing children's literature: an adult pretending to be childlike in order to impose this particular idea of childlikeness on children.
> The Eloise books have adult characters, who do, at times try to
> impose an adult structure, if not viewpoint on Eloise. However,
> Eloise runs roughshod over adult expectations, and her actions, and
> imagined actions remain in the forefront to delight the reader, with
> fabulous illustrations to pore over again and again.
As for Eloise--well, it's been so long since I've even looked at one of that series that I can't really say much about it. But I'm intrigued by the subtitle of the 1955 edition I see on Google Books:
"a book for precocious grown ups." Is it a children's book at all, then, or another way of pleasing adults with an attractive vision of the childlike? Is the imagination it depicts genuinely childlike, then, or another idealized representation of a way adults like to think about what childhood is--a way that represents what adults feel the loss of (or maybe, if they never actually had it, the absence of) and long for and hope to impose on children--and, the theorist Jacqueline Rose would add, a way of making ourselves as adult comfortable by blotting out our actual adult knowledge and memory of the pain and horror that being a child so often consists of. As Sendak says in the words I quote as the epigraph for The Hidden Adult: "In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It's vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my own childhood vividly ... I knew terrible things ... but I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew ... it would scare them.."
Perry
_____________ Perry Nodelman http://pernodel.wordpress.com/
Book Trailers: The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3t7JAfPQeA The Ghosthunters2: The Curse of the Evening Eye http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qapDE1Kwnis The Ghosthunters I: The Proof that Ghosts Exist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw0ow7oQV7k
Received on Fri 17 Jul 2009 10:42:30 AM CDT
