Deep Structures of Fantasy in Modern British Children's Books

Abstract

Deep Structures of Fantasy in Modern British Children's Books Margaret Rustin (bio) and Michael Rustin (bio) Part One: Imaginary Worlds "To tell a story," says Umberto Eco, "you must first of all construct a world, furnished as much as possible, down to the slightest details." Writers for children in England during this century have made many such worlds, spaces for imaginative exploration, which have resulted from and contributed to the cultural construction of childhood as an enlarged and deepened life-stage in modern societies. Literary theorists have pointed to a crisis in the modern novel arising in part from the differentiation and segmentation of the life experiences of readers in modern complex societies. (See, for example, Raymond Williams.) One reason for these problems of realist writing is the vast increase in the numbers of people who read and write, and who expect their experiences or views of life to be represented in literary forms. The break-up of a common literary culture and the proliferation of sub-cultural differences is in part an unavoidable consequence of cultural democratization. Literary realism, especially, becomes problematic, when readers share little common experience of social worlds, except that mediated to them by mass communications. The radical simplifications of "artificial worlds," such as those created in the genres of science fiction, detective stories, or spy novels like those of Le Carré, come to seem more life-like and believable than "realism" on a broader canvas. "It is necessary to create constraints, in order to invent freely," says Eco. Within the constraints of these more "specialized fictions," it becomes possible to create a complexity which is nevertheless felt to be intelligible—an image of the way modern readers would like to live in their actual world. Or writers can remove themselves from these social issues altogether, limiting themselves as documentarists to a particular area of life, or looking inward to the exploration of subjective mental states. Writers for children may enjoy a paradoxical advantage in this complicated cultural situation, due to the constraints imposed on the writer for children by the nature of her readership. They have become embodied in established literary conventions and expectations familiar to child readers from their earliest age of reading or being read to. [End Page 60] Child readers can be assumed to experience their world mainly from the vantage point of a family (of one sort or another); their other experiences will usually be filtered, in one way or another, through this normal social structure of childhood. They are not yet equipped with the excess of factual information imposed by modern societies on adults as a condition of survival. Like the audiences for epics in oral cultures (fiction for children is often listened to rather than read), child readers like stories that provide familiar plots, landmarks, and motifs. Child readers can also be expected to be curious and exploratory about the world, and interested in the business of making sense of it, while being little encumbered or divided by their factual knowledge about it. They will thus be interested to explore imaginary worlds as acceptable representations of the real thing. Therefore it becomes important to achieve authenticity at the level of deep rather than surface structures. We shall argue that the most important of several deep structures is that of unconscious feeling. Children are likely to be responsive to the surprises and amusement inherent in the use of language, since they are experiencing it with the freshness of first-time learners. For children, the boundary between internal and external reality is more fragile and permeable than it is for most adults. They are ready to make-believe, and to invest imaginary creations with strong feelings and self-identifications. The child reader is thus, potentially at least, unusually open to the pleasures and imaginative power of fiction. These various considerations require that good writing for children be highly condensed in the way it communicates significant experience. Adult writers have to find symbolic vehicles for their understanding of the world (or those aspects of it that they think interesting, relevant, or appropriate for children) which are going to be accessible to children's understanding. These requirements press children's writers in...