Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Teasing out of Certainties

1987; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.0.0421

1553-1201

Nancy Huse,

Digital Storytelling and Education

Teasing out of Certainties Nancy Huse (bio) Narrative Theory and Children's Literature Studies in the Literary Imagination (Fall, 1985) Virginia Spencer Carr, General Editor; Hugh T. Keenan, Consulting Editor, Georgia State University. One common assumption about children's literature is that we can read the mores of an age by attention to these texts, which are so often overdetermined by the boundaries of bourgeois concern for manners. In fact, children's literature as the "great excluded" (a term borrowed from Francelia Butler) continues to fascinate [End Page 51] critics: is it a world unto itself of circular plots, innocence, and philosophical simplicity? The interesting thing about this debate is that it is itself a mirror of an age in which, according to Walter Ong in Interfaces of the Word, we are growing critical of irony as a strategy for literature (302) and, by extension, for life; a new stage of consciousness, a drive toward the openness of oral discourse, is suggesting to us that what Ong calls "open closure" in our understanding of the "I" is enabling us to revalue mimesis in art. We are, according to Ong, becoming more at home with the close identification of audience, author, and material common to mimesis. Thus, the very things which have separated children's books from other literature may ultimately provide new models for mimesis. But in a paradox Ong would enjoy, adults are realizing the demands and implications of the child audience in new ways. Careful reading by a pantheon of scholars collected in Narrative Theory and Children's Literature supplies some versions of "yes" to what might seem at first an outgrown description of children's books—their association with closed plots, the "happy ending," and conservative ideas. Perry Nodelman finds fewer sets of oppositions, less anxiety of authorship in children's time fantasies than in literature for adults; Virginia Wolf traces the displacement of myth toward irony in island books to conclude that mimesis is the norm for children's novels, irony the bridge to adolescence; and Lois Kuznets examines Mary Norton's alteration of and discarding of narrative frame in the Borrowers, noting the deepening conservatism of the author paralleling her technical change. Despite these essays, the drive in this collection is toward versions of "no" to that well-known description of children's books. That is, the critics struggle with the complexities of literature they find in these texts, with their own reactions, and with the assumptions about childhood which assign limitations to the idea of the "child reader." Discussions range from Jon Stott's reader response approach to Jamake Highwater—Stott shows how his own cultural schemata limited his ability to interpret Highwater—to Peter Hunt's rejection of children's books as unsupported, except in the case of picture books, by the explosion of knowledge in what may be the new field of "childist criticism." Since one intent of the volume is to suggest that the very differences between children's literature and other texts, and the different strategies needed to read them (urged by Nodelman but implied by Anita Moss in her focus on metafiction and the concept of the child author and by Wolf, whose discussion is thoroughly rooted in attention to the child reader, as well as by Susan Gannon's evidence that repetition and doubling prevent closed readings of simple narratives) have the power to inform narrative theory as a whole, it's curious to see how many of the essays place children's books closer to adult books—and thus remove the notion of "difference" which was to provide the cutting edge of theory. And yet, the volume does exactly that in many ways; perhaps most impressively in its consciousness of the child reader and the reality that writers shape their books around the demands—real or imagined—of this reader. While this is not a new idea by any means, it is integrated and validated so skillfully that, finally, it leads to stunning performances such as Rod McGillis's narrative about secrets which accords the reader—the initiated reader—the stature of a god "teased out of certainty." McGillis's discussion of "secrets" in reading is designed...