Another "Querelle des ancients et des modernes"?: Some Commonplaces to Remember

Abstract

Another "Querelle des ancients et des modernes"?Some Commonplaces to Remember Dieter Petzold (bio) Peter Hunt's "Passing on the Past" constitutes a challenge that I cannot resist. Assuming that others will feel similarly, I shall try to occupy as little space as possible and consequently restrict my remarks to what I consider the central claims of the article. The following thoughts may well strike some readers as commonplaces. But then, it appears, occasionally we need to remind ourselves of the obvious. Whether history is to be seen as a continuum or as "marked by fractures, chasms" (Hunt 201) is—pace Michel Foucault and company—a matter of perspective. Shakespeare is both an Elizabethan and our contemporary. Differences between eighteenth-century chapbooks and contemporary comics appear striking when seen from one point of view, insignificant when seen from another (for example, a semiotic analysis). Perhaps more importantly, fractures and chasms tend to disappear when we do not look, cross-eyed, at historical endpoints, but rather focus on the historical process itself. Where exactly is the "chasm" to be located that separates "modern childhood" (whatever that may be) from—what? ancient childhood? Where do we place the "fracture" that creates separate compartments for "dead" books and "live" books? At 1950? 1960? 1970? While the first question is probably unanswerable, the answer to the second must be that if there is such a fracture, it can only exist for individual readers; we cannot unilaterally locate this fracture at any particular point in the past. What individual readers consider a "live" book depends on many things, among which the date of publication is probably the least important. Nor is it necessary that the book "address modern childhood." Old or new, a book may describe worlds that are very different from the readers' daily experience, yet these readers may find such worlds profoundly meaningful. (This is true, of course, of adult readers just as much as of child readers.) Literary texts operate on various levels. If readers become engrossed in a book, it means that they have found a level on which the text has become meaningful to them. This is not a difficult feat: any child listening to a fairy tale does it unconsciously. Literary competence [End Page 145] is important in this context, though; but that, as Rod McGillis rightly points out in his introductory remarks to Hunt's article, is a matter of environment and education. Even if the distinction between books that are "dead" and books that are "alive" makes sense (which it may in certain contexts), does it follow that the study of the one should be privileged over the other? It is true that the study of children's literature must not lose sight of the reader, but that does not mean that it should restrict itself to matters that appear to be of immediate concern for contemporary child readers. Apart from the fact that the contemporary child is hardly less elusive than the child of the past, on an academic level literary issues simply cannot be dealt with without a historical perspective. To understand fully how books carry ideological messages (for instance), we need to look at historical examples as well as at contemporary texts. Whether he admits it or not, Hunt's argument is another version of the "book people vs. child people" controversy. Or, if you prefer Karín Lesnik-Oberstein's phrase, the "pluraliste vs. educationalists" controversy. It can also be seen as a version of the "elitists vs. populists" controversy that exists in general literature. One might even look at the "Querelle des anciens et des modernes" in seventeenth-century Europe as another parallel. It is obvious that such controversies cannot really be resolved. Those who complain that the academy has privileged "dead" books (read only by a small minority of professionals) over "live" books (accepted by the "common reader") have a point—but so do those who argue that it is the business of the academy to keep our literary heritage alive and to teach students—and the general public—to appreciate literary excellence. The study of children's literature is special in that it originated in the practical concerns of parents...