July 15, 2004

Children's Literature Literature

Posted by Henry

John Holbo 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.

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, “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, 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.

Posted on July 15, 2004 06:00 PM UTC
Comments

Geoff Ryman’s Was is about the dark social forces behind The Wizard of Oz, kinda, and some other stuff as well. Jacques Roubaud’s The Princess Hoppy is perhaps somewhere in the area (although it’s more of a fake children’s book which is all about the smallest non-cyclic group, or something like that).
Maybe Sylvie and Bruno itself fits into this genre, though I find it hard to untangle its intentions from what it does, and also not worth the effort.
(I think I tried to post this to the now-deleted doppelganger of this post—apologies if it shows up twice.)

Posted by Matt Weiner · July 15, 2004 06:31 PM

Apologies about the doppelganger. I thought about mentioning Was but decided not to, as I haven’t actually read it. I loved Ryman’s The Unconquered Country - I have an edition that he not only signed, but very kindly drew a house-tree on.

Little, Big of course riffs off “Sylvie and Bruno” at several points. Two other pieces that I should have mentioned were Elizabeth Hand’s “The Least Trumps,” and Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol. The former is in the same issue of Conjunctions as Crowley’s story - it’s the lesbian-politics-and-tattoos remix of “Little, Big,” and it’s wonderful. The latter is available on-line - I’m especially fond of it for its portraits of Joey Ramone and my local pub, the Childe Harold (lightly disguised in the story as the Childe Roland). Both stories are in her recent collection, Bibliomancy. Her “Mortal Love” arrived from Amazon yesterday - yum, yum.

Posted by Henry · July 15, 2004 06:43 PM

Was is overstuffed but good (I could have done without the Judy Garland chapters, the epilogue is lame, but the next-to-last chapter—which the book is building up to—is pretty amazing).
I also thought of mentioning Moominvalley in November, on the theory that some people say it doesn’t count as a children’s book at all (and perhaps children’s books aren’t allowed to use the word “surreptitiously”). But that would be cheating. A lot of Toft’s story is about the transition from a naive children’s-book view of the world to something greater, though.

Posted by Matt Weiner · July 15, 2004 07:33 PM

Henry, perhaps you can explain the ending of The Least Trumps?

[rot13 for spoilers]
Vg frrzrq gb whfg raq, naq gung jnf ernyyl naablvat, orpnhfr hagvy
gung cbvag, vg unq orra bar bs gur orfg fgbevrf V unq rire ernq. Jnf
vg vagraq gb zvzvp gur Sbk abiryf (juvpu ner cebonoyl n abq gb
Tbezratunfg, nygubhtu V unira’g ernq gur ynggre)? Be?

Posted by novalis · July 15, 2004 10:18 PM

Thanks for the post, Henry. It occurs to me that in some sense the class of works I’m attempting to carve out is a bit more general: more of an innocence-and-experience thing. The clearest cases of these are children’s literature literature, as you very nicely it. But even the works I explicitly mention - Watchmen and Dark Knight, for example - are not so purely about childhood as they are attempts to invoke a sort of vertiginous ‘Well, how did we get here?’ mood (I invoke that old Talking Heads song). The fact that running around with your underwear on the outside really makes no sense greatly facilitates the generation of this mood.

Posted by jholbo · July 16, 2004 05:32 AM

On Spencers’ “Zod Wallop”.

I preferred “Resume with Monsters”, ‘cos of the twist on the Lovecraftian mythos. And Azathoth phoning the hero at the end and asking how his kids were.

Posted by Tom · July 16, 2004 08:35 PM

My favorite Hans Christian Andersen stories explicitly embed zooms out of story, achieving much the same emotional affect as these later examples in a startlingly small space. In this context, I particularly recommend looking at “The Flying Trunk” (on the crippling effects of writing fairy tales) and “The Pine Tree” (on the crippling effects of reading fairy tales). (Note to self: finish that survey of Andersen metafiction, Davis, or you’re fired!)

Posted by Ray Davis · July 17, 2004 02:58 PM

Oh, and Laura (Riding) Jackson’s Progress of Stories should probably be tossed into the mix, especially the brilliant “A Fairy Tale for Older People,” which I am completely unable to describe. Harry Mathews has a nice essay about Progress in his collection “Immeasurable Distances.” I never did read the essay on Hans Christian Andersen contained within Progress, though.

Posted by Matt Weiner · July 17, 2004 06:03 PM

I couldn’t agree more.

Posted by Ray Davis · July 18, 2004 02:37 PM
Followups

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.