Children’s Literature Literature

“John Holbo”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/07/superbeing_and_.html has an interesting post in his ‘John and Belle’ incarnation on superhero comics and nostalgia. His argument, as I understand it is that the classical superhero story is dead – that the ‘straight’ efforts to resurrect it (Michael Chabon’s ‘Escapist’) and the revisionist (Daniel Clowe, Chris Ware) are more closely related than they seem at first sight. They’re exercises in nostalgia, driven by how the “pain of unachieved adulthood contend[s] with hope for redeemed childish innocence.” If we look through the images around which we construct our identities when we are growing up, they provide luminous refractions of our adult complexities.

The tension that John identifies is very useful in understanding another sub-sub-genre – books that are about (but are not contained in) children’s literature, and use childrens’ books to explore the jarring juxtaposition between the world as we see it as a child, full of possibilities, and the disappointments and difficulties of adulthood. The leviathan of this genre has to be John Crowley’s _Little, Big_, which uses childrens’ stories (Lewis Carroll) and indeed comics (“Little Nemo”) to capture the sense of wonder that we remember (or more precisely reconstruct) having as children. Crowley does such a good job of this that one can read _Little, Big_ as a simple bucolic pastoral without any awareness of its underlying themes of melancholy and loss.

bq. Stories last longer: but only by becoming stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there ever was a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.

Crowley’s _Engine Summer_ and his recent short story in “Conjunctions”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0941964558/henryfarrell-20, “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,” speak more openly to this disjuncture. The latter is simply extraordinary – the best thing he’s written in years – but quite savage in its treatment of how teenage dreams are soured in adulthood. William Browning Spencer’s “Zod Wallop”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004SVX9/henryfarrell-20, is cheerier, indeed wildly funny, despite its unpromising subject matter of lunacy, depression, psychoactive drugs, and a successful author of children’s books whose child has drowned. Jonathan Carroll’s _The Land of Laughs_ and _Bones of the Moon_ too are centered on the tension between children’s stories and adulthood, although the former is also about how _unheimlich_ and downright creepy childrens’ stories can be when you look at them too closely.

I’d like to say something more about the relationship between children’s literature, fantasy literature and nostalgia, but my thoughts are too half-formed to be worth committing to pixels. All that I can say is that it seems to me that there’s something important in the way that all of these books provide a kind of anatomy of nostalgia, neither treating the material in an entirely un-self-conscious way, nor using it as kitsch, for ironic effect, but instead using it to get at something important and interesting about our condition.