Critical Apertures

Abstract

Critical Apertures Margaret R. Higonnet (bio) Opening Texts: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of the Child (Psychiatry and the Humanities, volume ), edited by Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Narrative Theory and Children's Literature (Studies in the Literary Imagination, volume , no. , Fall1985), edited by Hugh T. Keenan. Atlanta: Georgia State University, 1985. Du jeu, des enfants et des livres, by Jean Perrot. Paris: Editions du Cercle de la Librairie, 1987. Children's literature, so long understood as a closed world because of its archetypes and its narrative structure, now seems increasingly permeable and fluid. Our postmodern era has made children's literature into a touchstone for literary and social reflections and reassessments. The dizzying thought that we are signs using signs for other signs, which unsettles the stomachs of many hardy academics, becomes even more vertiginous if we add into the equation the insight developed by Philippe Aries that the "child" too is a social construct, at once the "father" and the semiotic offspring of another sign. Certainly children's literature as a separate literary institution is a historical construct, much of its interest lying in the makers to whom it points. Mary Douglas's analysis of purity and pollution may help us recognize the multiple social functions of this genre: first, it preserves a realm of purity, dependence, and ignorance; in turn, it also preserves the system of "high" literature by fencing out the presocialized and subversive Other, marked by a subliterary verbal code and polluting didacticism; and it inscribes a myth of origins and integrity whose nostalgic appeal has, if anything, intensified in an age dominated by a philosophy of fragmentation [End Page 143]and alienation. To steal a phrase from A Room of One's Own, the child and children's literature have the magical power of reflecting a narcissistically enhanced image of the spectator—in this case the adult maker, purchaser, and critic. As a genre on the margin of canonical literature, children's literature constantly tests our criteria of aesthetic value, yet its marginal status has obliterated attempts to explore its formal and thematic participation in the literary system from which, again and again, it has been excluded. Opening Texts, a rather loose collection of pieces, attempts closure through a condensed meditation by William Kerrigan on the "formidable array of objects, rituals, and fictions" that we pass on to our young. In his thumbnail sketch of the "second culture," as it has developed through eighteenth-century allegories to twentieth-century realism, he stresses a certain antagonism between child and adult, a rivalry to catch the golden ring of life. Both anthologies repeatedly ponder this proleptic struggle of the present with the future: how do child readers interpret such inscribed tensions? Kerrigan's thesis finds support in Nicholas Tucker's delightful essay on lullabies. Citing Leslie Daiken, Tucker notes that lullabies may not only blandish or bribe a baby but also threaten it. Indeed, his most interesting observation bears on the thematic freedom of the lullaby. Since a very small baby won't understand the words, the text may be anything at all—with the result that lullabies offer an unrivaled record of women's popular culture. The richness of endearments, the delicacy of details or promised treasures, the pathos of ordinary fears: all build an evocative picture of the world women have constructed and its limits. Sam Pickering's informative survey shows how the allegorical mode of the Pilgrim's Progressshifted under the impetus of Lockean ideas and came to transmit the increasingly secular values of the middle classes in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To be sure, animal types for the vices and such personifications as Miss Patient continued to delineate and impose a moral hierarchy. But the goal of these more realistic pilgrimages, as Pickering's numerous examples richly demonstrate, was no longer heaven but happiness, material success, and social promotion, to be reached with the help of the educator, mentor of an ostensibly rationalist bourgeoisie. Scattered throughout the essay are insights into such matters as the importance of the justified fight as a test of moral character in stories for boys, in contrast...